This paper investigates the ways in which contemporary urban festivals can achieve sustainability. Previous studies of urban festivals have exhibited an interest in the actions of the participants and audiences, and they have found that festivals can help to develop social connection and integration through engagement with local communities. However, the siting of urban festivals must allow not only for the performance of dances and festival music but also the display of a wide range of objects. This paper focuses on organizers’ choice and display of objects, such as the fox mask in The Fox Parade that is held in Oji, Tokyo. My observations indicate that to maintain contemporary urban festivals, both the aspect of embellishing people and objects that appeal to audiences and the narrative Sense must be maintained.

This paper investigates the local community as a unit in which people form cooperative relationships in their daily lives. In this case study, five isekohs located in Megawa, Ritto City, Shiga Prefecture, are investigated. The paper uses 122 years of account books for these isekohs, from 1893 to 2015 as data. Generally, isekohs are groups of people of faith who self-organize on a voluntary basis. In the subject area, the isekohs were integrated with the community, managing property held in common and organizing other functional groups. Over time, its community character gradually shifted to that of a neighborhood organization. The three-tier structure of an isekoh, characterizing it as a community, a fundamental association, and a specific-purpose association in the case of this report is seen to have shifted from the subregional level within the village to the village level. However, in some areas, the three-tier structure itself is overlaid with multiple layers, and such differences in structure represent regional characteristics. To identify these differences, a comparative study of materials from continuously adjacent micro community units that incorporates them in a mutually complementary manner, which is adopted in this study, is useful.

Shōmei Tōmatsu was a photographer who was well-known for his ability to capture postwar Japan, following his fateful encounters with US bases in Japan after the defeat. He focused on the intricacies of social change extending from the postwar years of recovery to the rapid-growth era, characterized by Americanization. He confronted the harsh realities of the American presence on his first visit to Okinawa in 1969. This shattering experience impelled him to continue to capture the lives there for decades. Earlier studies have generally focused on Tōmatsu’s journey from the remote islands in Okinawa to Southeast Asia, following the reversion. However, little was known of how decisive his first visit was for the shape his subsequent works took. Thus, the aim of this paper is to describe individuals’ lives before the reversion to clarify what shocked him, based on our original methodology of “photography in practice” (shashin-jissen). Our analysis revealed that Tōmatsu came to realize the long and convoluted history of discrimination on the part of mainlanders against Okinawa while he was also a victim of the never-ending occupation. For this reason, he reported the precarious lives he witnessed to mainland Japan from a sense of his own historical responsibility.