14 Facts About Kunio Yanagita

Kunio Yanagita was a Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist.

Kunio Yanagita began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions.

Kunio Yanagita was born with the name Kunio Matsuoka, but was adopted into the family of a court justice named Naohei Yanagita.

Kunio Yanagita was known from a fairly young age for his interest in literature, particularly that of poetry.

Kunio Yanagita gradually began to advocate in support of these groups, pushing for a shift in agricultural focus to center around cooperatives of small farmers rather than wealthy landlords.

Kunio Yanagita began in-depth analysis, traveling around to record stories of local customs, practices, and beliefs.

Kunio Yanagita's most famous example of this is a book known as The Legends of Tono.

From here, Kunio Yanagita's work developed into the anthropological study of folklore that he is still known for today.

Kunio Yanagita published many other works, including several with folklorist Kizen Sasaki, with whom he collaborated extensively.

Kunio Yanagita's focus on local traditions was part of a larger effort to insert the lives of commoners into narratives of Japanese history.

Kunio Yanagita argued that historical narratives were typically dominated by events pertaining to rulers and high-ranking officials.

Kunio Yanagita claimed that these narratives focused on elite-centered historical events and ignored the relative uneventfulness and repetition that characterized the lives of ordinary Japanese people across history.

Kunio Yanagita emphasized the unique practices of different groups of common people, such as sanka or mountain dwellers, and island dwellers.

Kunio Yanagita focused primarily on what he saw as the three areas of folklore studies: material objects, oral transmission, and mental or emotional phenomenon.