Origin Of Ethnography In Japan by Minoru Kawada

Author:Minoru Kawada [Kawada, Minoru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Ethnic Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317726913
Google: sPODDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-04T03:45:12+00:00

5 On the Methodology of Yanagita Ethnography

It is well known that the methodology of Yanagita’s ethnographic research owes much to several academic disciplines that were developed in Europe. On the one hand can be seen the influences of Tylor and Frazer, representing nineteenth-century European anthropology. On the other hand, it is said that Yanagita had a considerable interest in the works of European folkloric scholars such as Kaarle Krohn, George Laurence Gomme and Charlotte Sophia Burne.1 Another influence which cannot be discounted is the more recent field of anthropology and ethnology that emerged in the early twentieth century, chiefly in the 1910s. This field can be divided into four schools: the so-called diffusionist ethnology of Wilhelm Schmidt and William Halse Rivers, the British functionalist anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the anthropological approach advocated by French sociologists such as Durkheim and Mauss, and American anthropology centering around Boas.2

Yanagita seems to have encountered the works of these more recent scholars during his stay in Europe from 1921 to 1923, when he was sent to Geneva to represent Japan as a member of the mandated territories committee of the League of Nations. At the time, he was deeply troubled by the impending social crisis in Japan and was waiting for a methodological breakthrough which would take his research beyond the sphere of agro-politics and studies of particular regions which he had compiled in Kyōlo kenkyū (Local community studies). To assess the influence of these scholars on Yanagita, and to closely examine whether his acquaintance with their work is reflected in the methodological development of his own, is of significance for understanding what was later established as ‘Yanagita Ethnography’. As a first step in such an investigation, this chapter will outline Yanagita’s methodological development, and examine certain aspects of his methodology which bear similarities to the functionalist approach of Malinowski.

Yanagita’s interest in Japan’s folk religion derived from his study of agro-politics, especially from the research he had undertaken on agricultural villages in Japan.4 In 1910, Yanagita joined a group called Kyōdokai, whose founding member was Nitobe Inazō and which included Ishiguro Tadaatsu, Nasu Hiroshi and One Takeo. The group’s main objective was to investigate the social and economic history of Japan’s agricultural villages. Between 1913 and 1917, Yanagita also published a journal, Kyōdo kenkyū.

The object of Kyōdo kenkyū, or ‘Local Community Studies’, was ‘to describe in full the psychological framework of the common people of different regions of Japan, as well as delineating the relationship between different lifestyles and modes of thought’.4 Yanagita further explains that it is ‘a journal on the daily life in farming villages’ which illustrates in detail ‘how the common people live and how the common people have lived’.5 He maintained that such a study would be of benefit in understanding what lay at the root of public opinion of his time, and that unless the most basic factors in the lives of villagers became known, it would be ‘impossible to discuss the politics and economy of the nation and to plan for the future good of mankind’.

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