Paper short abstract:

In the era of shrinking peripheries, the continuation of village festivals is a crucial challenge for many local communities. Based on fieldwork, I look at approaches of how to continue such festivals with limited resources that can provide an important factor of hope for declining communities.

Paper long abstract:

The continuation of rural festivals—in most cases shrine festivals (matsuri)—is a crucial challenge for many local communities in Japan. Besides the spiritual and ideological notion of such festivals, which was emphasized by Yanagita Kunio (see Morris-Suzuki 1995), they provide exclusive and representative annual events for villagers to express their (imagined) community. If a festival disappears, the local pride and social bonds might also weaken. Therefore, village festivals are still an important indicator for a local community's "health," as the example of festivals in Tohoku after the triple disaster illustrates (Thompson 2014). In the era of over-aging and shrinking peripheries (Matanle and Rausch 2011), however, the abolition of village festivals is one of many seemingly inevitable symptoms of rural decline, which might also affect the locals' happiness and well-being (Holthus and Manzenreiter 2017).

In this research project, I look at the contemporary challenges of village festivals' continuation and approaches of how to handle them. The data derives from ethnographic fieldwork on a small-scale shrine festival in the Noto Peninsula (Ishikawa Prefecture), which was visited several times over the last decade; in addition, interviews with the local people in charge, such as settlement leaders, were conducted. Against popular presumptions, the village festival in my case study is barely considered an unchanging institution of the past, but the matter of steady negotiations and dynamics. In particular within the last five years, conservative (invented) "traditions" like the prohibition of female participants became loose and so opened up potentials for carrying-over the festival, even if the village population drastically shrinks. The lack of helping hands eventually led to technical solutions on one side and new recruitment strategies for participants on the other, while both together seem to guarantee the festival's continuation in the near future. Thus, this study provides a vivid image of rural Japan, in which hope, creativity, and pragmatism became strong antidotes against the fear and nonchalance of the forecasted sociocultural decline.