Let’s review what the Higashi-kujo Madang offers toKyoto’s public sphere. Since 1993 when the Madang was first performed,Kyoto residents have had the rare opportunity of seeing (orparticipating) in the performance of democracy. It is just such aperformance that can tactically appropriate a public space for acounter-public event. After openly recruiting an all-volunteer staff,and after months of democratic public meetings, the Higashi-Kujo Madangassembled the efforts of many local groups to bring food, music, dance,song, contests, and, finally, drama, into a common cultural venue. “West’s blackprophetic framework includes the oppositional moment of the externallydesignated “we.” This reminds us that the importance of the “exclusionof exclusion” appears at the level of sexuality, ethnicity, andinterest more strongly than at any other: identity politics has beenmotivated in part by a struggle against those persons and practices excluding us because of our differences, a motivation which has calledinto question those exclusions operating within identity groupsthemselves. When differences are self-affirmed rather than results oflabeling or traditional spatial and cultural boundaries, they provide“a standpoint from which to criticize prevailing institutions andnorms,” helping to anchor a sense of involvement with the plurality ofothers in our communities, societies, and the world. Unlike ascribedidentities, achieved identities provide us with a critical strength”(Dean 1996, 42).
At the center of this production is the madang geki,the street drama. In this drama, local volunteer actors use aself-scripted play to explore the predicaments of their everyday lives.The end of the drama signals the beginning of a final dance in whicheveryone joins in. As twilight deepens, the dance twirls to a finaldrum beat, and the madang collapses into itself, returning the schoolyard to its normalized state.
By design, this Madang is anevent where the internal boundaries within the community areconspicuously ignored. It is a therapeutic space, a place of communalhealing, a zone where conversation is possible between adversaries (andKyoto’s Korean and burakuJapanese neighborhoods house several adversarial social groups).Standing in the crowd at the first madang, one of the Madang organizersdirected my attention to two elderly men holding an animatedconversation. “Seethose men. They live close to one another, but I’ve never seen themtalk before. I thought I never would. It’s incredible (shinjirareinai)!”The Madang opens up an internal arena of active, discursive socialnegotiation and collective embodied experience, which creates importantmemories for the entire neighborhood.
The visibly inclusive aspect of the Higashi-kujo Madang festival and the generalizable notion of heterogeneity (“ishitsusei”)translates the community demand for inclusion into a demand for apublic sphere open to all people residing in Kyoto, regardless ofgender, origin, occupation or physical ability. At this moment, theKorean community establishes the right of its members for inclusion inthe public sphere, by articulating a message that is already acceptedas part of the self definition of the public sphere in “democratic”Kyoto. The tactic points to the discontinuity between legal guaranteesof access and common practices of exclusion.