(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Since its establishment in 1951, the concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has been widely recognised in Japanese society. The government supports practitioners of traditional craft techniques, folk customs and performing arts, with highly skilled individuals regarded as ‘Ningen-Kokuho’ (Living National Treasures). These individuals engage in traditional practices in particular locations despite drastic social and cultural changes over the course of the previous century. This paper questions how cultural form becomes recognised as ICH or ‘tradition’ in Japan and how and in what context people have, and continue to collectively practice, ‘tradition’ through their experience of modernity? Cinematic Commons (MArch studio) travelled to Japan on the invitation of Kyushu University to mount our exhibition, A New Infrastructure of Subtraction for Tokyo, and to co-direct a workshop with Kyushu design students in Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture, supported by Yame Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In Yame, Japanese traditional crafts such as Kurume Kasur (cotton cloth), Yame Chochin (paper lanterns), Yame Fukushima Butsudan (Buddhist alter) and Koishiwarayaki are still manufactured and students stayed and worked in local Machiya while they researched and recorded these collective practices. The workshop hoped to uncover new technologies and collaborations that could be employed to access, capture, analyse and propose possible ‘infrastructures’ contributing to the transmission, safeguarding and development of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Using essay film as the primary medium, the gaze and the take lay bare cultural form as tradition with the focus placed on several entities: practitioner, the work, production techniques, the consumer and the space where the form originates, including the people who inhabit the space and their relationship to others. The research not only exposed inter- and infra-stial conditions, but also manifest qualitative factors of life from social behaviours to psychology of identity. As film directors such as Ozu, Yamanaka and Sperry demonstrated, the conscious and reflective gaze of the camera lens opens up a new comprehension and imagination of urban situations and patterns of spatial engagement. Gibson-Graham’s argument contained in their project of re-imagining “the power differential embedded in the binaries of global and local, space and place” is a reformulation of local identities. Within our research we used essay film to question these ideas, focus on the reimagining of spaces and the social dimensions in which people identify themselves. ICH is a time-space practice that contains segmented memories of local people in their space, intersected with moments of exchange and it only appears as a result of a practitioner’s action. The paper proposes a metamorphic character in the craft traditions in Yame, to reconsider possible relationships with new visitors and to demonstrate a social institution of ‘tradition’ in which the people can recognise the value of cultural form together by producing and consuming it.