Fukagawa's Joint Clan Autumn Festival Draws Inquiries From Other Districts; Kameido's Fox-Line Group Invited for Next Year
Inquiries have come in from neighborhood associations in other districts asking how Fukagawa organized its previously reported joint clan autumn festival — co-hosted on the 3rd by dog-line and bear-line associations and drawing roughly 1,200 visitors — this paper learned on the 8th. Joint organizers Yuto Takinami, 26, and Tamaki Hiiragi, 29, said they plan to invite Kameido's fox-line association to join next year.
As previously reported, Fukagawa's dog-line and bear-line neighborhood associations held their first joint autumn festival on the riverbank on the 3rd. The festival's structure — openly "showing off" differences in drumming styles and food-stall menus rather than hiding them — drew attention not only through its turnout (roughly 1,200 visitors, more than the combined totals of past separate events) but also from other associations watching how it was run. Joint organizer Yuto Takinami, who works for a harbor security company and is a second-generation dog-line Drifter, said, "In the week since, we've gotten four calls from associations in other districts asking how we worked out the logistics. I didn't expect this much of a reaction."
This paper confirmed that most inquiries were practical in nature — how to run festivals for separate clans in a single venue, and how to structure the "showing off" of differences in drumming styles. Tamaki Hiiragi, from a hillside craftsman's family on the bear-line side, said, "We didn't make it a competition between food stalls — we set them side by side instead. That's the part people ask about most."
On the 8th, Takinami and Hiiragi announced plans to invite Kameido's fox-line association to join the joint festival next year. As previously reported, fox-line Drifters are often from merchant families and are known as the bearers of festival stalls and local fairs. "If the fox-line group joins, the stalls alone would get even livelier," Hiiragi said. "We'd like to pay our respects and raise the idea with them before the year is out." A representative of Kameido's fox-line association told this paper, "We haven't received a formal approach yet, but we'd consider it positively if one comes."
The previously reported push-back policy document has called for neighborhood differences in dialect, festivals, burial customs, and cuisine among clans to become a steady pillar of city-desk coverage, which has so far mostly taken the form of profiles of individual clans. A joint event like this one offers a new way to make the interaction between clans itself the center of the story. "It doesn't always have to be a story about conflict," Takinami said, laughing. "Once in a while, write about people getting along, too."
