Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
63
consumption, or even the mere presence of advertisements, is seen as a threat to the
‘sacredness’ of ritual, as if consumption would have the potential to trivialize and somehow
to contaminate the experience (Belk et al. 1989: 24).
I argue that consumption represents a meaningful act within the celebration and that
its presence in the ritual practice has its legitimacy. Accordingly, I propose to view
commercialization together with consumption as two aspects of an interactive process in
which the ritual’s meaning is created between observers-consumers on one end and the
market on the other end. An analysis of this process can clarify some of the pertinent
questions of the role rituals have in highly urbanized modern societies. This can further
elucidate the various aspects of creating the ritual experience in the urban space as well as the
role of consumption practices within this act.
Methodology
While traditional rites of passage in rural settings have a rich literature stemming from
folklore studies in Japan,
7
the subject of contemporary forms of rites of passage is an
understudied theme in the scholarly literature.
8
For the history of the ritual in urban
environments, I undertook an analysis of print media in the form of an extensive survey of
articles of major newspapers in Tokyo covering the period from the end of the 19
th
century to
the present. This section of data proved very useful since virtually no research had been done
on the urban development of the ritual during this particular period.
9
I also examined articles
in periodicals and for more recent data I turned to online sources (newspaper database,
webpages of commercial activities, blogs etc.). In Japan it is principally the media that
produces opinion polls and surveys on popular observances such as Shichigosan. The results
of these surveys are then published and used to inform readers on changing trends and
customs regarding celebration manners. Additionally, I examined publicity material and
7
See among others Yanagida 1935 1949;
Ō
t
ō
1968; Yagi 2001; Miyata 2007a, 2007b.
8
Exceptions to this are represented by studies on weddings and funerals and other works on local
rural versions of rites of passage. In English laguage see for example see Edwards 1989; Goldstein-
Gidoni 1997; Robert Smith’s
Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan
(1974); Hikaru Suzuki’s
The
Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan
(2001).
9
Exceptions to this are represented by the studies of Kenji Ishii and Y
ū
ko Taguchi (Ishii 2009;
Taguchi 2011).
