Competing Festivals: The Joint Deity-Welcoming Festival
This year, the three deities began their perambulations in Takasago Park, moved north and east to visit all three temples, tracing a route that encompassed the core of the historic settlement in the process. After visiting the Dianji Temple last, the parade then continued north across the canal, into the heart of the Japanese neighborhood, passing beneath the Jilong Shrine and in front of major Japanese Buddhist temples, as well as the buildings housing the municipal government (opened in 1932) and the military police (kenpeitai), before returning to the Taiwanese part of town and ending at the Qing'an Temple. Photographic evidence suggests that this year was not the first time that one or more of these deities had visited the predominantly Japanese part of town, but this was the first year in which the main newspaper considered the route to be newsworthy. The timing magnified the significance of the act: right after the second iteration of an expanded shrine festival, these three deities demarcated areas that impinged upon Japanese sacred spaces as lying within the boundaries of their territorial cults.
This map shows all of the institutions, sacred and secular, that were implicated in the competition between the festivals, and highlights how sacred and physical terrain overlapped.
