ABSTRACT
The floats became ever more splendorous as city culture blossomed. The Kyoto City team used the nominations for “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” as a model. This seeks to understand United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) entry into Japanese heritage politics in the context of those decades, including the prewar years. The decade of 1965–1975 was a period of reform within the field of heritage policy for multiple reasons. The inscription of the floats parade in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2009 came at the end of this long process of domestic heritage-making, and took a form that was determined by the solutions that had already been negotiated in preceding decades. UNESCO is primarily associated with inbound tourism, and many actors see excessive tourism as a threat, echoing the 1960s debate on the festival’s decline into a mere “show.”.
