Japanese cultural history as literary landscape: Scholarship, authorship and language in Yanagita Kunio's native ethnology

Yanagita Kunio (1875--1962) is often described as having abandoned his youthful interest in literature for the more objective methodology of the social sciences. Many critics see this "transformation" as crucial to Yanagita's development of minzokugaku ("native ethnology"), a discipline generally characterized in the contemporary discourse as a fieldwork-based social science. This dissertation counters this common viewpoint, showing that Yanagita's minzokugaku was deeply influenced by, and in fact based upon, his literary knowledge and poetic sensibility---and continued to be informed by an uneasy relationship between intuition and positivism. An examination of his diverse writings, from his early poetry and travelogues to his work on linguistics and dialect, will demonstrate that Yanagita's study of traditional Japanese society is founded primarily upon an acute consciousness of culture's profound connection with the expressive and creative power of language.; The introductory chapter focuses on the methodological and theoretical kinship of philology and the social sciences, and how this often problematic relationship is manifested in Yanagita's writings. The chapter argues that Yanagita is an author who experiments with various types of writing, pushing language to its limits in an effort to discover---or more accurately, create---a traditional, yet flexible Japanese culture for the modern age. Chapter Two discusses the young Yanagita's involvement with the contemporary literary community. It examines his early efforts in ethnographic writing as a direct response to Japanese Naturalism, a dominant literary trend of the late Meiji (1868--1912) and Taisho (1912--1926) periods that determined the subsequent trajectory of modern Japanese literature. Travel writing is a well-established literary genre in Japan, and Chapter Three explores Yanagita's attempts to reenvision it. Though Yanagita's own travelogues are stylistically distinct from their poetic ancestors, they display a complex use of literary technique that ultimately functions to (re)construct the cultural landscape of modern Japan. The final chapter returns to the cornerstone of Yanagita's work: the study of language. Yanagita's frequent observations on dialect and etymology reveal his belief that language is the formative element in Japanese culture. His project to find meaning in folk culture is, in fact, a proposal for a philosophy of language.