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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how local reggae songs about danjiri festivals in Senshu, Osaka, express affective ties of kinship and romance that draw youth into risky participation and reinforce Kishiwada’s central place in the wider danjiri cultural sphere.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary Japan, many local festivals face depopulation and a shortage of successors, yet the danjiri float festivals of the Senshu region in southern Osaka continue to mobilize large numbers of young participants and retain remarkable intensity. Urban festival studies within Japanese cultural anthropology have clarified the institutional and organizational dimensions of such events. Notably, Wazaki’s work on Kyoto’s Hidari-Daimonji fire festival has examined festival organization, spatial configuration, and tourism as key to the anthropology of the city, while Yoneyama’s studies of the Gion festival treat it as a privileged lens on urban social life and civic order. Building on this anthropological tradition, this paper shifts the focus from institutional structure to the affective sensibilities that make risky, time-consuming participation in danjiri festivals experientially desirable for young people.

Specifically, this study analyzes two locally celebrated Japanese reggae tracks that explicitly reference danjiri festivals: BEAR MAN’s “Asekusai oretachi no machi” (“Our Sweaty Town,” 2013) and REKID’s “Matsuri no owari” (“The End of the Festival,” 2023). Treating these songs as narrative condensations of participants’ embodied experience, the paper combines a close reading of lyrics with attention to their circulation through YouTube videos, music videos, and danjiri-related events.

The analysis shows, first, that BEAR MAN’s song articulates a vertically oriented sensibility of kinship and intergenerational transmission, in which “sweaty,” physically exerted male bodies and the cherished danjiri float are embedded in a quasi-extended family spanning fathers and children. Second, REKID’s track foregrounds horizontally oriented affects of romance and intimate partnership, linking the “sportized” danjiri body (tanned skin, happi coats, styled hair) to heterosexual attraction and future family formation. Taken together, these songs reveal a shared “affective commons” that ties vertical (kinship/lineage) and horizontal (romance/peer) relations to the continued reproduction of the danjiri “cultural sphere,” while reinforcing the symbolic centrality of Kishiwada within that sphere. By foregrounding popular music as an ethnographic window onto festival participation, this paper expands anthropological debates on urban festivals, youth culture, and the sensory grounds of communal persistence.