Map of Voiceless Voices: Thoughts on Kunio Yanagida (1974)

Map of Voiceless Voices: Thoughts on Kunio Yanagida (1974)

The year 1974 was a time when Japanese society was beginning to realize the "limits to growth" after a lull in the country's rapid economic growth and the first oil crisis. Urbanization was advancing rapidly, rural areas were depopulated, and families and local communities were on the verge of disintegration. In the midst of these social changes, people began to ask fundamental questions such as "Who are we? While folklore and traditions are being forgotten as relics of the past, their loss conversely arouses a desire for a "lost Japan.

At such a cultural turning point, it was natural that Kunio Yanagida's folklore would once again come to be regarded as important. The world of the "common people" as he saw it, that is, the forms of wisdom, stories, and beliefs hidden in everyday life, neither in the state nor in the city, no longer exist in reality, but stimulate the imagination of city dwellers. In one essay, a modern intellectual asks himself, "Can I walk like Yanagita again?" and is already keenly aware of the difficulty of doing so. In other words, Yanagita's method, while still valuable today, stands as an illusion that is no longer practicable.

On the other hand, Yanagita's work is also regarded as a pioneer of "documentary literature. Yanagita's attitude of "going out into the field, listening to people's voices, and writing them down" was positioned as the very starting point of his work in contrast to the reportage literature and private fiction methods that were popular at the time. This is not merely a question of literary technique, but also a question of the politics of memory and documentation: "Whose voice will remain?

Kunio Yanagida (1875-1962) was the founder of Japanese folklore and an intellectual known for his systematic recording and analysis of the daily lives, beliefs, and customs of ordinary people, known as "common people. His scholarly endeavors offered a radically different perspective, turning his attention to the world of experience of the nameless common people, whereas conventional historiography and literature had focused on the aristocracy and the intellectual class. His masterpiece, "Tales of Tono," is a groundbreaking work that unearths the unconscious mentality of the Japanese people through the folklore and yokai tales of the Tono region of Iwate Prefecture.

At the core of Yanagita's thought is his respect for the ordinary people as "storytellers. He recorded such unwritten knowledge as folklore, folktales, and rural lifestyles as "living memory" and made them the subject of his research. This was also a cultural movement that sought to preserve a form of life that was rapidly disappearing with the modernization of Japanese society. Yanagida was also interested in language change and dialects, and attempted to clarify the inseparable relationship between culture and language.

In the postwar period, Yanagita's methodology influenced many fields. From literature, sociology, and the history of ideas to journalism and documentary film, Yanagita's fieldwork attitude of "listening," "writing," and "going to the field" revolutionized the image of the intellectual as a documentation subject. Especially in the 1970s, there was a growing interest in "peripheral culture" that was disappearing due to urbanization, and Yanagita's perspective was reevaluated as a critical device for the times.

Yanagita's references in literary magazines in 1974 can be positioned as a reaffirmation of this ideological and cultural legacy. Yanagita's references in the literary magazines of 1974 are positioned as a reaffirmation of such ideological and cultural legacies. This work, which Kunio Yanagida devoted his life to, was still an effective map of thought in a rapidly changing Japanese society.