The Executive Committee and the Leaders' Meeting Were Both Added Later

Some time ago I wrote a piece called "Only One Wakamono Objected". In it I said that I did not know whether the place where the talks were held was the executive committee or the leaders' meeting.

It sat badly with me to say I did not know and then leave it there, so I looked into it. And having looked, I will set down how I see these bodies myself.

First, the two organizations whose names everyone knows. For this part I am not going on memory; I am going on the official pages of Semboku City.

I use the city's pages because Kakunodate no Omatsuri (the festival of Kakunodate) has no official site of its own. A festival designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Japan, and listed by UNESCO as well, with no site of its own in this day and age. Am I the only one who finds that strange?

The first is the Executive Committee for the Float Events of the Kakunodate Festival. It runs the festival as a whole, and it is made up of the Kakunodate Festival Preservation Society, the Council of the hariban (the street posts that mediate between the floats), the Float Leaders' Meeting, the Semboku Chamber of Commerce, the city, the city board of education, and the Tazawako-Kakunodate Tourism Association, which serves as the secretariat. Guidance for visitors, temporary toilets, traffic restrictions, safety rules. Think of it as the side that pulls the whole thing together.

The second is the Float Leaders' Meeting. It is one of the bodies that make up the executive committee, and it is a meeting much closer to the ground, where the float leaders of each chonai (neighborhood district) gather.

There is also a record that shows how the two relate. In a notice from one of the years when the epidemic was still running, the Float Leaders' Meeting drew up a set of guidelines on infection and heatstroke over the summer, and the executive committee, meeting later, confirmed the contents. The leaders' meeting drafts; the executive committee confirms. That is the movement the record shows.

But here is where I catch.

You will sometimes see it said that the leaders' meeting is where the order of the shrine visits and offerings is decided. I cannot find any city document that says so. On the contrary, public records state plainly that the route each float takes for its visits is not fixed, which is why, when floats meet along the way and the negotiation does not settle, it turns into yama-buttsuke (the collision of two floats).

That matches what I know. If anything is settled as an order, it is the order of the visit to the Satake residence, and not much else. Nothing else is fixed. Because nothing is fixed, it comes down to negotiating on the spot on the day.

So what does this meeting actually do? What is left is the running rules and the safety arrangements. Once a year it draws up guidelines, and the executive committee confirms them. That is the shape the record shows.

I am not saying that is a bad thing. But even so, it looks like it ends as a formality, as things handed over and nothing more. At the very least, I have never heard anyone say that something was decided at that meeting, or that the room carried any weight.

There is one example that survives in the record. It is the year of the accident I wrote about in the earlier piece. In something written from the executive committee's side, the substance is this: the year before, the finishing time had run far past the schedule, so each district was asked to shorten its running; the result took about as long as the year before; and the items agreed beforehand were hard to carry out on the day.

What was decided is not kept on the day. Knowing that, the next year it is decided the same way again, and again it is not kept. That is not what having a place to decide things looks like.

Let me be honest. I do not really understand what these roles mean. Or rather, the only thing that comes to mind is that they were set up because there was no other way to keep the festival moving.

They are posts for three days a year. By rights they should not be needed at all. And yet without slipping them in between, the festival does not hold together as far as the outside world is concerned. There has to be a window through which the police, the city and the visitors can be dealt with. So they were created. That is how it feels to me.

There is no question that people of leader rank sit in those seats. This is not a slight on them. But these things came later. As for the safety committee, as I wrote in the earlier piece, it came into being after I had stopped taking part. It is certainly not an original post.

And this is where the appeal to tradition already contradicts itself.

If anyone had thought it through seriously, the old posts could have been used properly.

A float already has its roles. The sekininsha, who directs the whole thing, and the kosho-in, who settles matters with the other floats. Both of these wear a sash. Who holds which role can be seen from the outside.

And within the kosho-in there is also the name wakamono-gashira. So the shape of a role inside a role already exists.

To be clear, the post of sekininsha itself is old. What came later is the meeting where those leaders gather across district lines.

If that is so, then instead of adding new meetings and committees on the outside, we could have grown the posts we needed in the form of "the kosho-in for such and such". That is what I think. This is only my own idea, and I may have the fine details wrong.

That is not what happened. New bodies were built on the outside instead. And so, from that point on, the claim that we are keeping the old ways ought not to hold.

I should add that I could not find out when the executive committee and the leaders' meeting were formed. At least, it is not written in anything made public. If they had been there all along, you would think a date of some kind would have survived.

Let me also be plain: I have no intention of doing proper research. By which I mean I am not going to sit in a library working through paper sources. What is in my head, and what can be picked up online. That is all this piece is written from.

The things added later are not only these.

There is a post called shonen-hancho. A third-year junior high school student holds it, and he is the one who keeps the children pulling the float in order. The wakamono that fields a float runs on a strict ladder of age, so this post counts as the step just before a child moves up into the adult wakamono.

This one was not there from the beginning either. It was 1981, the year I entered junior high school. The school had gone bad and the people around it were at a loss. So the wakamono deliberately put the badly behaved students into the shonen-hancho post. Give a boy a role, and at least during the festival he will not misbehave. That is how it started. I believe the wakamono I was in was the first to do it, though I am not confident about that.

I do not think this was a bad thing. If anything, I think it was well judged. Faced with a problem in front of them, they made a post with their own heads and ran it themselves. It was not made because somebody outside told them to.

In other words, a post can be made when one is needed. That is how it has always been done.

Which means the running and the safety could have been handled the same way. The business of the schedule I wrote about in the earlier piece could have been built into our own roles, rather than accepted because it was handed to us from outside.

Adding organizations with new names on the outside is certainly quick. But the quicker it is, the further the reason behind each rule drifts from the people inside.

This piece too is written from a mixture of my memory and what I looked up afterwards. Some of it is surely wrong.

But there is at least one thing I am sure of. The shape the festival has now is not the shape it always had. Somebody thought something was needed, and added it, each time.

If that is so, then what gets added from here can be decided by us, rather than left to the outside.

Finally, a proposal.

If the executive committee and the leaders' meeting are going to end every year as things handed over and nothing more, then in their present form it makes no difference whether they exist. Gather before and after the festival, read out last year's paper, pass it on unchanged. That is just something sitting there.

If they are really needed, they should be rebuilt. This is not about adding yet another body on the outside. It is about giving real authority to what is already there. Not an organization for three days, but a place where things can be talked through at any point in the year. A shape that can be convened on any of the three hundred and sixty-five days, whenever it is needed. And above all, one that does not end in things merely handed over.

A place where things are decided, with people in it who can explain why they were decided. That alone would be enough to get out of a state where all we can do is accept what we are told from outside.

One thing I should admit. More than thirty years have passed since I stopped taking part. So perhaps it is working properly by now. But from what I hear, nothing seems to have changed from the way it was long ago. That is all my proposal rests on.

Well. It is an outsider's thinking now, so perhaps nobody will listen. Even so, I will at least put the proposal down.