In the wake of the COVID pandemic, tourism is again booming in Japan. July 2024 saw the highest inflow of visitors ever recorded—more than 3 million entries in the month alone. For many, if not most, tourists, the city of Kyoto will rate a very high priority. The spring and autumn are usually regarded as the best times to visit, because of the pleasant temperatures and the cherry blossom or autumn colors, respectively. By contrast, the summer is very hot and humid. However, those July visitors will have had the chance to see one of the highlights of the Kyoto calendar: the Gion festival.
The festival takes place over several weeks in July centered upon Gion, a part of the city center known for its geisha houses, traditional merchant houses, and the neighboring Yasaka Shrine. During the festival, a number of roads are closed to traffic, so that gigantic wooden floats can be built out in the streets themselves. The highlight of the month comes on the 17th and then again on the 24th, when the floats, weighing as much as 10 tons or more, are pulled along a course through the city center.
The Gion festival’s origins lie shortly after Kyoto was founded as the new capital of Japan.
Mark Teeuwen’s “social history” of the Gion festival traces the event from its first emergence in the 10th century, through to the 1950s, by which point it looked more or less as it does today. Rather than stress the timeless nature of the UNESCO recognized event, Teeuwen is keen to stress the times when the festival faltered, and the ways in which it has changed over time, revealing today’s festival as less a historical fixed point and more the accumulation of 1000 years of history.
The Gion festival’s origins lie shortly after Kyoto was founded as the new capital of Japan. At this point, the Yasaka shrine (then known as the Gion shrine) lay on the eastern edge of the city, in an area where the dead were handled and removed. The original festivals occurred when local gods were temporarily relocated from the shrine into the city center in an effort to placate them and prevent the spread of disease during the summer months. While written records are very patchy for that age, Teeuwen traces evidence drawn from aristocrats’ diaries and religious documents, and in later centuries the volume of written (and drawn) evidence expanded.
Gradually the rituals picked up elements which can be seen in today’s festival in one form or other: a procession through the south of the city, the introduction of lances or halberds as symbols of authority (originally carried but now mounted at the top of the floats), and most obviously the floats themselves. At the same time other practices—dancers, horses and riders, for example—were introduced and later fell by the wayside.
The festival was always an expensive business.
Teeuwen is keen to stress that the course of history was more uneven than this description of incremental change might suggest. Indeed, he notes the sheer improbability of the festival’s survival over more than a thousand years (other festivals of a similar age in Kyoto have not survived). At various times the festival ceased to be held for years or even decades. The most obvious cause was fire and war (often connected)—in particular the Onin War of 1467, in which Kyoto itself was almost completely destroyed.
A less predictable threat was the modernization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: progressive officials saw the Gion festival as a superstition that was out of touch with the trends of the age, and yet not sufficiently linked to the Emperor to become a part of the new nationalist manifestation of Shinto. The introduction of trams and their overhead cables even gave them a pretext to prevent the parade of floats, given their height, and it was only saved by a popular outcry.
The festival was always an expensive business and funding it was another potential source of disruption. In later years, the floats required extensive upkeep and irregular repairs or even occasionally complete reconstruction. But from the start, staffing the parades and surrounding activities was another major undertaking. In early years the shrine’s parent body, Enryakuji temple, seems to have used the festival as a means of extorting money from rich merchants by granting them the “honor” of funding it; in the 20th century, the local residents groups who have ownership of the individual floats have successfully appealed to city officials for support in their upkeep.
Still, in the wake of the more major breaks, the festival often had to build back up its scale over time. In 1865 in the midst of the disruption that led to the Meiji Restoration, only two floats were built, and in later years, chests were carried around the course as placeholders indicating the intention that a specific float would be restored when the finances permitted. One such example, the Kikusui Hoko float, only returned in 1953. Similarly, the first post-WW2 festival, in 1947, featured only two floats, and there were only funds available to recruit enough participants to pull one of them along the parade course, the other remaining static.
Even today, change remains the norm.
In each age and in particular after each major disruption, new groups had to find something in the event that served their needs and position in order for them to be willing to take on the burden of supporting the festival. While the association between the floats and the residents of specific streets led some scholars to characterize the festival as a popular, bottom-up event, Teeuwen notes that in reality there has always been major institutional involvement in its running and funding—whether that be the imperial court, the warrior rulers of the medieval era, religious leaders, or the city government in the 20th and 21st centuries.
At each crisis, and indeed even in the stable periods, each of the groups of participants competed and collaborated together to shape and reshape the festival into new and different forms. And even today, events such as COVID impacted festivals in 2020 and 2021, or the 2022 return of the Takayama Hoko float after a 196 year absence, show that change remains the norm.
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