Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), often considered the founder of Japanese folklore studies, occupied multiple roles of public intellectual, bureaucrat, researcher, teacher, and activist, with work spanning multiple disciplines. However, his work has often been dismissed as a product of his time, rife with imperial colonialism, or at best, never accomplishing his goals. In The Undiscovered Country, Melek Ortabasi draws on translation theory that describes translation as an act of resistance, which demands close readings not only of, but through, Yanagita’s work in order to gain insight into his work’s effect and its relevance to the many disciplines that he touched.
In chapter 1, “Translating Orality, Reinventing Authorship: Tales of T?no,” Ortabasi explores Yanagita’s authorial choices in his first work of oral narratives, published in 1910, by looking not only at what he wrote but also at the style in which he wrote it, challenging contemporary assumptions about literary form as well as their devaluation of rural life. Ortabasi reclaims Tales of T?no from its critiques of being bad ethnography that obscures the informant’s voice (or simply being poor literature), by arguing that Yanagita challenged contemporary literary style by attempting to write realistically using an older style of writing. This style’s connective verb forms and distinctive lack of more modern intrusions into Japanese-like pronouns drew readers in, creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy that broke down distinctions between the reader and the narrator/translator, the self and the community.
In chapter 2, “Translating Landscape, Rewriting the Travelogue,” Ortabasi explores Yanagita’s writings on Okinawa, specifically the travelogue South Sea Notes (Kainan Sh?ki ), which has received substantial criticism for its implied rationalization of Japan’s colonial-style relationship with Okinawa during the early-twentieth century. While Ortabasi does not exonerate Yanagita entirely from this, this chapter describes how his travel writing pushed back against the touristic tendencies of his day and espoused a theory of landscape that urged travelers not to reflect on landscape as personally meaningful, but to see how the landscapes bore traces of cultural history. Thus, the travel writer becomes a type of translator, “(re)connecting past to present, reader to landscape” through the explanations of accreted historical and cultural meaning (81).
A Study of Popular Oral Transmission (Minkan densho ron, 1934), and Methods for Researching Everyday Homeplace Life (Kyodo seikatsu no kenky? ho, 1935), mark Yanagita’s ongoing efforts to shore up and define the discipline of folklore studies as well as to complicate the definition of Japanese identity during this time period. In chapter 3, “Building a Discipline, Building National Identity: Scholarship as Self-Translation,” Ortabasi argues that though Yanagita’s methods were not accepted, “because the texts advocate an authorship of cultural identity that hinges on recognizing the other within the self, however, they ultimately propose folk studies as an autologous decentering, a form of politically aware self-translation,” that made the search for a Japanese national identity difficult to essentialize (99).
Yanagita founded the first scholarly society in Japan for the study of dialect in 1928, and later chaired the Dialect Society of Japan in 1940 (147). Chapter 4, titled “Dialect, Standard Japanese, and Translating Everyday Experience,” focuses on his 1930 work, Thoughts on the Snail ( Kagy?k? ), where he uses an exploration of the regional words for “snail” as a case study in seeing variations of local dialects as evidence of cultural and social historical changes. In an era dominated by national language policy meant to enforce a single national standardized language that privileged standardized written language over the spoken, Yanagita advocated for a national identity forged out of diversity and ongoing change in language, where authentic language usage, creativity, and development belonged with the speakers of the language. While Yanagita also favored an intelligible common language for Japan, he hoped it would emerge gradually out of the speakers of the language working it out together, rather than having a system imposed from the top, a radically different approach from his contemporary context.
In chapter 5, “Translating Folk Studies for Children: Education and Disciplinary Politics Revisited,” Ortabasi draws out Yanagita’s complicated relationship to education and educational policy over the decades of his work bridging World War II. While Yanagita worked postwar as part of the national textbook reform movement and hoped to get folklore into the national social studies curriculum, Ortabasi describes his advocacy of children’s folklore research (he was the first in Japan to publish research on the topic, in Voices of Small Things, 1933), which transitioned gradually to direct intervention, through edited collections of folklore genres like folktales and myths for children, and finally to translating his own research into a family-friendly format, including A Record of Children’s Customs (1942), A History of Fire (1944), and Villages and Schoolchildren (1946). Unlike the authoritative, deterministic, propaganda-like tone of educational books for children, particularly of prewar/wartime, “they explore and celebrate aspects of Japan’s folk history in a non-deterministic, open-ended way,” part of Yanagita’s ongoing goal for his educational work to create students who could think critically and think independently (194). Although Yanagita’s hope to make sweeping changes did not take effect, his extensive work both in front of and behind the scenes offers a substantial and gradual influence.
With insight stemming from close engagement with many of Yanagita’s texts, Ortabasi offers us a renewed appreciation of a complex individual and researcher, whose influence continues to be felt today despite the passing decades and shifts in theoretical models. For the researcher of Japan, whether in folklore, history, education, or linguistics, Ortabasi checks those who would dismiss Yanagita as a product of his time with nothing left to say today. For those academics who work outside of Japan, The Undiscovered Country provides a nuanced, incredibly well-researched look at Yanagita Kunio’s extensive and expansive legacy, most of which remains untranslated into English, and opens up avenues for new conversations and translations as we recognize common ground and divergences in the histories of our regional disciplines.
Reviewed by Katharine Schramm, Indiana University
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[Review length: 992 words • Review posted on March 4, 2016]