What Japan’s 1,150-year-old Gion Festival can teach us about sustainability

For more than one thousand years, Kyoto has held Japan’s biggest festival, the Gion Festival. In a regular year, throughout July, more than one million people crowd into downtown Kyoto City to experience the street stalls, the towering wooden floats adorned with gorgeous antiquities from the Silk Road, their parade and the constant jangle of ancient music. All this happens amid the oppressive heat and damp of the rainy season.

It began in 869 on the directive of the emperor, with the aim of appeasing the gods at a time when epidemics had ravaged the city three times that decade. Despite centuries of change, the festival continues. We talk with author Catherine Pawasarat about why the festival has lasted so long and what it can teach us about living sustainably.

Pawasarat has studied the festival for decades, since living in the community during the 1990s. Her book, “The Gion Festival: Exploring Its Mysteries,” is the first comprehensive English-language guide to the festival. Much of its content is new even to the Japanese public and is born of the close relationships that she has maintained with festival organizers.

Community pride and commitment

One of the keys to the festival’s sustainability, Pawasarat says, is its connection to the community.

“The neighborhoods are really proud of their floats and their history, and they really want it to continue, and they are really willing to commit themselves to helping it continue.”

There are currently 34 floats, which are assembled, maintained and displayed by the residents of each of the various neighborhoods, as well as some people who work there or have other links to the area. In its heyday, the kimono industry was the backbone of this area and the festival. It was the kimono merchants’ display of wealth and stature that adorned the floats with artworks that include textiles from as far away as Europe. They would close their businesses for the month of July so that their employees could devote themselves to working on the festival instead, Pawasarat says. The decline of the kimono industry has robbed the festival of that reliable patronage and workforce.

Urban flight is also taking a toll. Costly inheritance taxes make it hard to keep local buildings in the family. And as downtown real estate prices skyrocket, it’s more profitable to build a parking lot or an apartment building than to maintain one of the traditional buildings that the communities usually use to house their floats.

“The apartments are being bought by Tokyo people who want to come and spend the weekend in Kyoto, but they don’t necessarily have a link to the Gion Festival. So that’s a big challenge right now that the festival has never experienced before.”

Adaptability and autonomy are crucial to survival

Many of the neighborhoods are staying afloat by adapting to these changes. Pawasarat gives the example of how the Koi-yama float made the opening of a big apartment building work with its needs.

“They did it very skillfully. Every person who moved in was given a packet of information about the Koi-yama float and the Gion Festival, and they were invited to participate. And they managed to do it in such a way that it’s mutually supportive with the traditional residents and is working quite well.”

Modern technology is also being used. Two floats that have been reconstructed to rejoin the festival (Taka-yama and Ofune-boko) have used crowdfunding to do that, Pawasarat says. It enabled them to receive donations from all over Japan. The festival’s “chimaki” talismans are also being sold online now, particularly while the parades and street stalls have been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some communities have created online 3D videos that explain their floats.

Another key to the sustainability of the overall festival is the number of floats. It means, for example, that the loss of the two floats mentioned above, due to a large fire in 1864, didn’t threaten the existence of the event. In modern times, too, as many of the floats struggle with common challenges, they can learn from each other. Within that camaraderie, the independence that each float has is also crucial to the festival’s continuity.

“There are now 34 floats, and they do all have a fair bit of autonomy in terms of self-direction, deciding how they want to do their float, how they want to organize, and so on. I think that really makes for great sustainability.”

That autonomy allows adaptability. While some of the floats stick stoically to the principle of not permitting women to take a hands-on role, some are now including them, particularly as musicians.

“In some cases, it comes down to these little girls who say, ‘Dad, I really want to play music.’ And the Dad says, ‘OK, honey, I’ll ask.’ And if people say ‘yes,’ then it all changes. It’s kind of amazing. That freedom within the structure helps a lot in terms of sustainability.”

The role of the individual within the festival ecosystem

Pawasarat gives other examples, too, of how one person’s idea and commitment have created change. One of the people living in the neighborhood of the Ashikari-yama float happened to be a professional translator, who decided to make a multilingual handout that explains the basics of their float. A number of other floats have followed suit, says Pawasarat, but “they just got lucky that this translator lived there and was keen enough to take that upon himself to do it.”

The story behind the recreation of the Ofune-boko float, which returned to the festival in 2014, is similar. “It’s sort of like a small number of people have a dream, and they are burning with this passion to fulfill their dream,” Pawasarat says.

One of those people told her that ever since he was a boy, his father and grandfather would talk about the float that their neighborhood used to have, and how it was a shame they didn’t have it anymore. The dream of building the float was born in him, and as it spread to his neighbors, they started to discuss the logistics of the idea—where to store the float, where to assemble it. A local resident who was planning to sell his home made the grand gesture of selling it to the community for about a third of what real estate developers were offering him.

“It had become this community dream, so the guy said, ‘I’ll sell it to you for this really good price because I would rather it become this place for the float than get demolished.’ Now, everybody is so proud. They’ve got this building—they saved this building. It’s just become this heart-warming thing.”

Sustainability as a two-way street

In talking about sustainability and the Gion Festival, it is clear that it is not just a discussion of how the event is being sustained by the community, but also one of how it is sustaining the community.

The Toro-yama neighborhood has intentionally used its float to train community members in leadership, Pawasarat says.

“It’s great community-fabric building, and then the float stays strong because the community leaders have been trained by the previous leaders and they’re always asking ‘who are the next leaders going to be?’ And then it’s attractive to community members to participate because they learn these skills that are useful to them in their professional lives.”

The greatest threat to the festival

At its heart, the Gion Festival is deeply based in Shinto, the shamanic religion native to Japan. Along with a general shift away from religion in modern societies around the world, history has also played a role in pushing the two apart. After World War II, the occupying forces separated religion from secular affairs, making it illegal for the Japanese government to fund Shinto events. One of the effects of suppressing the spiritual connection has been to make the Gion Festival more touristy. And that has changed the experience—for the worse, says Pawasarat.

“People just don’t know any better, and they think it’s a tourist event. They think it’s like a museum and they expect that level of service and they expect those kinds of facilities. So strangers come in and they say things like ‘where do I put my umbrella,’ or ‘here’s my garbage.’”

What they don’t understand is that all the people involved in putting on the festival are volunteers. The festival doesn’t handle tourists well because it was never designed to—it’s a community event. In some cases, these “tourists” are walking into residents’ homes, in a part of the festival where locals open their front rooms to visitors to display old family treasures, like folding screens.

It’s why Pawasarat says that one of the biggest challenges the festival faces is bad manners. Why would you make the effort to hold the festival if no one is going to thank you for it? Why would you share the beauty of your cherished, old folding screen if people don’t have the common sense not to touch it with fingers sticky from street-vendor food?

“I think we’re all brought up in this consumeristic society, and it really is a game-changer to change our own approach with the festival, or with anything,” Pawasarat explains. “Yes, I might be a consumer because I bought a ticket (to enter a float), but I’m really a guest here and I’m really contributing to the history of this place or the experience of this event by being here, so how do I want to do that.”

She admits that it was the same for her. She just wanted to snap the photos and tick off the experiences, too. In writing her book, she aims to share her new perspective to help other people get where she is now, faster. “I think that’s really key for sustainability everywhere,” she says.

It is also something that is easy for us to incorporate in our daily lives by showing kindness and appreciation to people who are helping us, even if that assistance comes as part of a commercial service. For example, just asking a call-center employee, “How are you today?” can change—for the better—how they experience that day, because they feel appreciated.

A curious dynamic in the ancient capital

There’s a curious dynamic in Kyoto. It is proud of its heritage as an ancient capital and the birthplace of Japan’s modern-day culture, but many residents will describe the Gion Festival and other parades as inconvenient because they mess up traffic and attract crowds. While it’s happy for people to admire it, Kyoto is over itself, already.

(By the way, Pawasarat says that the Gion Festival has never been marketed to overseas tourists, which explains why you may have never heard of Japan’s most famous festival.)

“It’s just human nature to take for granted something that we’ve always had, so I think that Kyoto-ites definitely take the Gion Festival for granted,” Pawasarat says. And although tourism has brought with it one of the greatest immediate threats to the festival, foreign attention may be a key to its longer-term sustainability.

“I feel like there’s 100,000 PhDs waiting to happen in the Gion Festival,” Pawasarat says. There is a lot about it that is under-researched and under-appreciated. Its textiles were an example. They are now recognized worldwide as being valuable because one man had a hunch that they might be important and arranged for international experts to come and examine them.

“I think that kind of interest from other places then helps Japanese people realize that ‘Oh, right, we have something really quite amazing and unique here that’s of international interest. That helps build the pride and the desire to continue.”

Such research itself, is another way in which people from throughout the world can participate in the festival, rather than just consume it. It is true for all festival visitors that the more they learn about the festival, the more they will appreciate it. Pawasarat hopes that more will be done in future to educate people about the festival, its artifacts, and etiquette.

When visitors become participants, rather than consumers, that then questions the definition of community, Pawasarat says.

“Is the community just this one [neighborhood] with only so many people putting up their float and sharing it, or is the community the whole million people who are there? If we think of the community as everyone who is there, a lot more things are possible.”

The search for meaning in our lives

Pawasarat is keen for the Shinto roots of the Gion Festival to be revisited. “I think that will help to maintain the meaning behind the festival, which is really something that helps sustain it,” she says.

The festival’s original goal of appeasing the gods to turn them from bad spirits into good ones is still relevant today, Pawasarat says, especially as the city again finds itself in a pandemic and the proximity of death is closer than usual. It is at these times that we ask ourselves, ‘Have I lived a good life?’ The festival offers a model for how to do that.

“If I’m really negative and pessimistic and upset because my life is not going well, and I don’t get along with my neighbors and those kinds of things, I’m going to have a weaker immune system. So if a pandemic goes around, I’m going to be more likely to succumb to that. And if I’m trying to live a good life and really thinking about what that means and trying to get along with people, then I have better relationships and more joy in my life and we’re supporting each other, so the quality of my life is better, then my immune system is going to be stronger.”

“So you’re not necessarily appeasing the gods, but you’re thinking about what is a good life and how do I create that.”