Chair’s Greeting

Every day, I take the Kyoto City Bus to work. Kyoto’s buses have recently become crowded and many residents have probably sworn off using them. A bicycle is faster, they say, or they want to stay away from the busy bus stops in the sightseeing areas of the city. I too thought this way until a little time ago.

But in fact, riding on the Kyoto City Bus is lately a very interesting experience. At times, it feels like a theater space in another dimension where multiculturalism is advanced and randomly selected people from different backgrounds congregate. A space where people of all nationalities and ages just happen to be riding the bus together. The little exchanges that arise from differences of habit or custom. Irritable and tired people. The consideration passengers show for each other. The personality of the driver. The situation on the bus exudes all manner of things. It is, so to speak, a proving ground for testing how that site’s sense of collective efficacy cultivates in a space where unofficial social controls operate and alleviate stress; a space where the public and private coexist. Being able to participate in, observe, and ignore this has become one of my recent pleasures.

The ingenuity and ways in which people attempting to maintain order in a community reach a compromise after coming into conflict with one another. The balance between consideration and assertion. Culture, I have come to think, is perhaps what appears in such conditions. It stands at the frontline of a process of complex adjustments, as it were. In terms of efficiency and rationalization, it is better to make rules and control a situation through authority. But why do we not do that? The key point here is that this is not an official form of control, but a foundation of private insights and compassion.

When I heard that ētto ētto was the core concept for this year’s festival, I thought of it as a phrase that serves as a buffer while your mind adjusts. Indeed, when we face doubts or things that make us feel uneasy, instead of reacting reflexively, the act of pausing to think attains greater importance the more complex our society becomes. Many, many things remain possible for our festival that professes in its name to be Kyoto’s experiment. Through the artists’ highly inspirational works and the nature of the city that is Kyoto, I hope we can together consider what we should convey to our audiences—and how.

Mayumi Yamamoto
Chair, Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival Executive Committee