Mita Philosophical Society Lecture: The Modernity of Language and Kunio Yanagita's Practice of "Listening Ears": Ethnology and the Question of <Oral Tradition>

January 16, 2018

Lecture Abstract

This presentation will examine the method and attitude in folklore studies of listening to the of others. It will do so in the context of the trial and error of "listening ears" as a linguistic practice during the modernization of the Japanese language, such as the genbun-itchi (unification of spoken and written language) movement, while also considering the theories of fieldwork that have been accumulating in and around anthropology for the past quarter-century (Japan's "crisis of expression").

From the time he had deep exchanges with naturalist writers in the 1900s (the 30s of the Meiji era), Kunio Yanagita consistently struggled with "literary style." Especially in the process of conceptualizing his "scholarship of travel" from the Taisho period onward, it is considered to have been a pressing issue for Yanagita how to describe in what literary style what he felt and thought after experiencing the lives of others and listening to their .

I would like to trace the cradle and historical development of Japanese folklore studies within Yanagita's trial and error during the modernization of the Japanese language.

Lecturer Profile

Born in Tokyo in 1959. Specializes in folklore studies, oral literature, and modern urban life and culture studies. He graduated from the Department of English and American Literature, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, and withdrew from the Doctoral Programs in History and Anthropology at the Graduate School of the University of Tsukuba after completing the required coursework. After serving as a professor at the University of Kitakyushu and a Guest Professor at the National Museum of Japanese History, among other positions, he is currently a "kokuban wataridori" (itinerant scholar). His major publications include "Taxi/Modern Tokyo Ethnography" (Tokyo: Nihon Editor School, 1999), " and the Modern Family" (Tokyo: Kyuzansha, 2003), and "The Present of Folkloric Representation: From the Perspective of Museum-Based Research Integration" (co-edited with Junichi Koike, Tokyo: Iwata Shoin, 2015), among others.