Kunio Yanagita

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Kunio Yanagita's parents' home

Yanagita Kunio (柳田國男 July 31, 1875 - August 8, 1962) is a scholar who is often known as "the father of Japanese native ethnology."

He was born in Fukusaki, Hyogo Prefecture. After graduating with a degree in law from Tokyo Imperial University, he became employed as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. In the course of his bureaucratic duties, Yanagita had the opportunity to travel throughout mainland Japan. During these business trips, Yanagita became increasingly interested in observing and recording details pertaining to local village customs. Under the influence of literary friends such as the writer Shimazaki Toson, Yanagita published works supposedly based on local oral traditions such as Tales of Tono (1912).

Yanagita's focus on local traditions was part of a larger effort to insert the lives of commoners into narratives of Japanese History. He argued that historical narratives were typically dominated by events pertaining to rulers and high-ranking officials. Yanagita claimed that these narratives focused on elite-centered historical events and ignored the relative uneventfulness and repetition that characterized the lives of ordinary Japanese people across history. Critics of Yanagita's work assert that his conception of "the common people" is overly homogenous, eliding most local difference and conflict in favor of an organic conception of the Japanese nation-state.

He was also interested in Esperanto.

[edit] Major works

Tōno Monogatari (遠野物語)

a record of folk tales gathered in Tono, Iwate Prefecture. Famous imps in the stories include kappa and zashikiwarashi.

Kagyūkō (蝸牛考)

Yanagita revealed that the distribution of dialects for the word snail forms concentric circles on the Japanese archipelago.

Momotarō no Tanjō (桃太郎の誕生)

He depicted some facets of the Japanese society by analyzing the famous folk tale Momotaro. His methodology was followed by many ethnologists and anthropologists.

Kaijō no Michi (海上の道)

He sought the origin of the Japanese culture in Okinawa, though many of his speculations were denied by later researchers. He was inspired by picking up a palm nut borne by the Kuroshio when he was wandering in a beach in Iragomisaki, Aichi Prefecture.