Cultural Continuity in Meiji Japan: The Danjiri Festival of Kishiwada City

By looking at the Meiji history of a popular festival with Edo era origins and a dynamic of cultural competition and creativity rooted in fierce neighborhood rivalries, this paper uncovers compelling historical continuities in local culture that withstood the creative destruction of the Meiji Restoration and the myriad ruptures accompanying the creation of the modern nation. The Danjiri Festival of Kishiwada City, a former castle town in southern Osaka, is characterized by extravagant, exuberant, and even violent neighborhood processions featuring ornate hardwood floats known as danjiri. As early as the 1780s local officials sought to control the annual increases in expenditure and extravagance that characterized this local tradition of invention. However, despite increased regulatory oversight and even threats of abolition in the late-Tokugawa and Meiji years, the annual escalation of conspicuous consumption and spectacle could not be arrested by local officials of the Meiji state or their early modern predecessors.

Thus while Meiji policies sought to reform traditional practices seen as wasteful and irrational to create a disciplined and thrifty citizenry that eschewed the “evil customs” of the much maligned yet ever present Tokugawa past—it seems that many Kishiwada locals were not interested in rejecting their traditions and achieving the Western-oriented goal of “civilization and enlightenment” sought by the Meiji state. In the end, the trans-Meiji story of this festival spans and binds numerous scales: scales of culture/civilization as it contrasts the ostensibly universal and modernizing goals of the state with the entrenched power of local festival culture; scales of time as it transcends the modern-early modern historiographical divide; and spatial scales as it brings the story of Meiji culture and history to the local level, where history literally takes place.