ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a highly traditional festival in modern Japan, where workers are able temporarily to reverse their streamlined roles and achieve once a year a self-identification in a nonregimented work process. Although festivals usually serve as occasions of leisure and joyous transgression, their organization and successful execution requires exhausting work, elaborate organization, synchronization of delicate time schedules, and extraordinary skills. The chapter discusses the role of the traditional craftsmen in Kyoto in constructing and moving the Gion Festival's giant floats, yama and hoko. It examines their relationship to each other and to the community members who employ them once a year, as they utilize their special skills during the festival. The Gion Festival, one of Japan's three biggest and nationally famous festivals, has been celebrated annually by the residents of the Muromachi district of Kyoto since the ninth century.
