Shōjō is a giant figure that appears in festivals in the south of the Aichi prefecture. The Shōjō runs after children cheering and marching along to the festival music, holding a staff. It represents the connection between everyday life and festivals, the ordinary and extraordinary. If art festivals are to be included in the definition of these festivals, the Shōjō, connecting the festival and the people, can be considered as a symbol of a Learning Programs.

Having been a primary school teacher, I often think about education and the role of fiction and stories in it is a very interesting one. For example, in the prefecture of Akita, there is a creature called Namahage that will kidnap bad children and lazy children on new year’s eve. These stories, with other examples such as the kappa which will take with them children playing in the river and the sandman who puts sand in the children’s eyes if they stay up late, can make the children feel more fear than simple teachings and can be a friend for their imagination as children have a less clear border between fiction and reality.

The Shōjō doesn’t have the same kind of concrete story as the kappa or the sandman. However,it, running after us every year during festivals, holds a strong presence. But to think of it now, what was it? As we don’t really understand it ourselves, we thought the Shōjō would be a suitable Learning Programs and wanted to study it with other people interested in it.

Our main activity as the Shōjō collective was to learn more about the Shōjō which was done in several ways such as visiting temples and shrines where the creature was and asking experts about it We also learnt the traditional way of creating a Shōjō from Mr.Kuno Mitsuhiro at the Kasadera Shōjō Preservation Society and created a Shōjō with primary and secondary school students that came to the 5th children’s house in the prefecture.

The identity of the Shōjō that we were able to find through the various activities of the Shōjō collective was a character that was made to promote the sales of sake in the Narumi area in the south of the Aichi prefecture which had a national scale production of Japanese sake. As it was easier to make compared to floats or mikoshis, it was quick before it was found in many of the festivals in areas near the Toukaidou.

Before, I had seen an indonesian friend wearing a mask very similar to the Shōjō and had hypothesized that the Shōjō originated from southeast asia which unfortunately,was wrong. However, this kind of discovery can also be interpreted as a learning like result.

Leaving out my hypothesis, we were able to learn that the Shōjō is a culture that started on the streets of toukaidou. With the help of preservation groups and other associations, during the latter part of the project period, we were able to organize a Shōjō summit. In the summit, many real Shōjō puppets from different areas gathered in the center of arts and we were able to attract many people to experience the extraordinary in the form of an art festival.

The Shōjō collective had decided to do activities every weekend though we chose to make it a free to come type of participation as we didn’t force the participants to come and those that could come came. We naturally came to be a loose activity group as the collective was started by a discussion with friends on Shōjō with the aim of learning about it with people interested in it.

The creation of the Shōjō wasn’t a very difficult task done with the learning of the traditional techniques and the goal of just getting the main idea. There were communications of techniques within participants of the collective which led to new methods deviated from the original ways in a similar way to the chinese whisper’s game which was also amusing.

I may seem to be repeating myself, however, our goal was not to completely recreate the Shōjō with the traditional methods. The Shōjō itself isn’t a figure that is to be replicated or made in a way that does. I have heard that at the time, a person skilled with their hands created a Shōjō for fun and the methods for creating it spread throughout the region in a matter of a few years. With this in mind, we thought that reproducing the process of an explosive increase of the number of Shōjō puppets in Art Lab Aichi represented better how the Shōjō ought to be.

In a learning programs it is important that both organizers and participants discover and experience something new by erasing the distinction between organizer and participant. We were able to share many of our successes and failures we made not knowing much of the Shōjō ourselves and trying out many things. I think it must have taken a lot of effort from the participants, but I think we were able to make them experience the shifting of the ordinary to the extraordinary and the instant art showed up. Being able to break the ordinary like in the big Shōjō parade where around 40 Shōjō marched in the town was a very enjoying experience for us too.

(Text by Tamada Koushirou)