Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) is considered,
first and foremost, the founder of modern folklore study in Japan. However,
this characterization of Yanagita's career can never hope to describe the
diverse range of his work, which touches upon not only folklore study, but
social concerns ranging from agricultural policy to children's education.
In particular, Yanagita's extensive travel writings are often ignored by those
who study his work from a social sciences point of view as being unproductive
literary wanderings, or else as raw data useful for further fieldwork. Similarly,
travel writing in general has been glossed over by students of "modern"
Japanese literature as a genre that has been left behind by developments in
modern narrative style. However, kikôbun (travel writing), a time-honored genre that has existed
in Japan (in both prose and poetry form) since the early middle ages, preserves
its popularity well into the twentieth century. I argue that Yanagita and
his peers' forays into travel writing offer a revealing commentary on not
only the modernization of a literary genre, but a changing view of subjectivity
that is distilled through a transformed perception of (national) landscape.
European travel writing has recently attracted attention from postcolonial
theorists, who point out that representation of foreign/colonized peoples
perpetuates and strengthens the imperial discourse of power. While there has
been similar work on pre-WW2 Japanese travel writing on China, domestic travel writing such as that by Yanagita has been overlooked.
Though these pieces are, not coincidentally, contemporaneous with Japan's
outward-looking imperial movement, they instead denote a literary and anthropological
turn inward to examine the cultural
identity of the Japanese in a specifically historical and social context.
An examination of Yanagita's representative travel writings will show Japan
itself as an ideologically loaded terrain, where the past battles with the
present, and the principles of cultural unity and diversity are constantly
at war.
There are several major works in
Yanagita's oeuvre that are mainly compendia
of short essays that he submitted to the Asahi newspaper in serial form while en route in various parts
of Japan. Three of his most celebrated works are: Akikaze chô ("Autumn Winds Album"), serialized in 1920,
a record of his travels in the Kansai and Chžgoku areas. Here, he emphasizes
the fact that his readership, unlike the elite who enjoyed travel writings
of days gone by, are the actual people in the areas through which he travels.
Yukiguni no haru ("Spring
in the Snow Country," 1928) is a collection of various essays that were
featured mainly in the Asahi, but also in such other popular publications as Fujin
no tomo, Bungei shunjû and Chûô Kôron, revealing that Yanagita was not mistaken in assuming the popular appeal
of such writings. Kainan shôki ("Record of the South
Seas"), originally published in 1925 but republished in 1940 with some
additions, went through many printings and highlights Yanagita's attraction
to Okinawa and the Ryûkyû Islands.
What emerges from all these travel
writings is a transformed concept of the kikôbun, as well as the process it commemorates: travel. The stated purpose of
Yanagita's travel writings is to portray a populated landscape featuring the
"common people" of Japan living their lives - not to explore a poetically
conceived self, as did more traditional works that featured a solitary and
introspective traveler, such as Bashô's Oku no hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior, 1691). Yanagita,
rather, employs his omniscient pose as narrator to reform the poetic landscape
into a cultural one. His descriptions of nature and people are set in a contemporary
tone, an odd mixture between reportage and reverie, which betrays the presence
of a modern narrating subject who is primarily concerned with Japan's future
success as a nation.