Landscape and the Lonely Traveler: Yanagita Kunio and Sugae Masumi

Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), native ethnologist, is known for his interest in the Tôhoku region, the setting for Tôno monogatari (Tales of Tôno, 1910). A less famous connection with the north, however, is Yanagita's admiration of Sugae Masumi (1754-1829), a kokugaku scholar who spent most of his life traveling the Tohoku region. Yanagita, who ensured that the illustrated notebooks Masumi wrote on his travels (Sugae Masumi yûranki) were republished, thought him a hero: a true ethnologist who had gazed at his subject with the objective eye of the social scientist. Due to Yanagita's advocacy, Masumi's formerly neglected texts were recast as some of the earliest minzokugaku research. Yanagita criticizes traditional literary depictions of landscape, which often take a journey as their context, for their lack of realism. In Sugae Masumi (1929-1931), he describes Masumi as the "correct" kind of traveler, one who privileges the landscape instead of dominating it. Nevertheless, by romanticizing the figure of Masumi, Yanagita still relies on conventional literary modes. Putting Masumi at the center of his own narrative, Yanagita reproduces a subject-oriented description of landscape. By fashioning the ideal ethnologist as the traveler par excellence, he not only inserts minzokugaku into the literary discourse from which he sought to distance it, but reinscribes the landscape as well. In Yukiguni no haru (1928), where Yanagita takes Masumi's place as the "lonely traveler," we will examine how he reimagines the Tôhoku region as "poetic place" and an imaginary repository of Japan's past.