Matsuri Preservation

Recently, the dissolution of the “Folk Cultural Properties Research Council” (民俗文化財研究協議会), an organisation that was managed from within Jinja Honchō, was announced, and the August 10^th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an article explaining what it was, and why it had been dissolved.

It was founded, in 1971, to get legal recognition and support for matsuri as folk cultural properties. It is being dissolved because it has succeeded.

Japanese culture has always placed importance on preserving traditional practices, and that was codified in law early on. Arguably, the law governing Shinto priests issued in the seventeenth century is an early example, but I believe laws explicitly formulated in those terms first appeared in the late nineteenth century, and they were revised immediately after the war.

Because the post-war Japanese state was very careful about the separation of state and religion, legal recognition was not initially offered to cultural practices that were linked to religion. A lot of people, and not just within the Shinto community, thought that was a problem — a lot of Japanese folk culture was (and is) linked to Shinto or Buddhism in some way, and so this seriously limited the reach of the law. Sometimes, a traditional dance would be designated, but not the matsuri that it was a part of, and that meant that the dance was separated from its original context. Obviously, this is a bad thing when you are trying to preserve a tradition.

So, the group’s first goal was getting the law changed so that a whole matsuri could be recognised as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. According to the article, they achieved that within ten years. However, that did not solve the problem, because bureaucrats were still reluctant to recognise a whole practice with connections to religion. Thus, the group continued, researching and recording matsuri, and pushing for events to be registered as a whole.

They have, now, broadly succeeded with that as well. It is not unusual for entire matsuri to be recognised by the national or local governments, and several of Japan’s UNESCO Intangible Heritages have elements from matsuri, or, in some cases, are entirely composed of certain kinds of matsuri.

The leadership of the group is getting old, and because they have done what they set out to do, they have not recruited younger members. And so the committee voted to wind the group up. They did have extensive records of matsuri, including videos, which have been transferred to Jinja Honchō. I hope they will be able to preserve them, and make them accessible, because that is a valuable archive.

The history of this group is a reminder of two things. First, that traditions are only preserved because people decide to work to preserve them, at all levels from the local tradition itself to the global level of creating an environment in which they are valued. Second, that when a group has achieved its goals, it should be closed down. Not everything needs to become a tradition.