On 19 March 1911 the Founder of Modern
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introduCtion Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritan- ism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly perverse. foucault, The hisTory of sexualiTy, vol. 1 On 19 March 1911 the founder of modern Japanese nativism, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), wrote to the prominent natural historian and bota- nist Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941) asking for folklore samples from his home in Wakayama in western Japan, where Minakata had settled after returning from fifteen years abroad. Yanagita was especially inter- ested in examples documenting the existence of strange mountain people ( yamabito), goblins (tengu), and humanoid giants. He thought these were all living descendants of a non- Ainu aboriginal race of Japa- nese who were long ago forced into the mountains by the arrival of plains- inhabiting settlers from Northeast Asia—Asians widely recog- nized as the biological ancestors of nearly all Japanese. Yanagita prom- ised to include any of Minakata’s samples supporting his hypothesis in his new journal, Researching Native Place. With this journal Yanagita was attempting to build on the popularity of his collection of Japanese folk- lore The Legends of Tōno, published in 1910, to jump-sta rt a discipline he called minzokugaku, the study of native customs. Addressing Minakata honorifically as sensei, Yanagita somewhat pompously proclaimed, “At long last, a complete change in Japanese popular understanding [koku- ron] regarding our customs is upon us. We here at the journal are com- mitted to fundamentally transforming the conventional view of Japa- nese customs from something defensive, into something positive and future- oriented” (quoted in Minakata 1985, 6). The year 1911 was also the last full year of the Meiji emperor’s reign (1868–1912) and only six years after Japan’s victory in a bloody cam- paign against Russia that made Japan an irrevocable imperial presence Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646727/9780822392880-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 IntroductIon in Korea and Northeast China. In his brief return letter of 21 March Mina- kata, a critical follower of Darwinian evolution, refuses to document the timeless existence of make- believe Japanese aboriginals. Instead, he submits that such folklore myths aren’t specific to Japan at all but can be found in places as different as Ireland and South Asia. Furthermore, Minakata complains that the paucity of any surviving myths in his area has much to do with the way the centralizing Japanese state and pre- fectural development policies have been destroying human and natu- ral life in Wakayama, from the “reckless deforestation” (ranbatsu) to the oppressive “shrine consolidation” which was imposing Japan’s state religion, Shinto, onto local, non- Shinto sites of worship: “Whether one’s concern is scholarly or nationalistic [kokutai], we should all be worried about these policies” (1951–52, vol. 10, 2). Five days later Minakata posted his full response to Yanagita, begin- ning again with complaints about Tokyo’s ongoing privatization and centralization. He updates Yanagita on the protest activities he and the Diet representative from Wakayama, Nakamura Keijirō, have been orga- nizing and announces that he will appeal to his British colleagues for help in stopping the modernizing bulldozers unleashed by the “Japanese emperor’s country” (kōkoku). The body of the letter responds to Yana- gita’s request for myths of giants and goblins. With this second letter, it’s evident how different Minakata’s scientific understanding of human life, evolution, and transformation is from Yanagita’s mythological, static, and creationist understanding. In drawing Yanagita’s attention to this difference, Minakata opens his response by discussing some data he came across in the religious section of the Museum of Natural History in London, including ancient Greek myths about genitalia. He explains that stories of superhuman body parts, such as the enormous nose of the tengu goblin or the long legs of giants, are normally understood as sym- bols for genitalia. He wonders if Yanagita’s giants and goblins might not be better understood as sacred and erotic objects, the sort people invest with socioreligious meaning. In other words, Minakata lectures, they don’t refer to actual entities but function as substitutes, “what scholars refer to as fetishes” (1951–52, vol. 10, 12–13). Yanagita was not convinced. He claims in his return post on 30 April that he has “proof” of his actually existing Japanese aboriginals in the form of similar myths collected from different areas of Japan; they all depict the Ur- Japanese communicating with the locution “Ho! Ho! Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646727/9780822392880-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 IntroductIon 3 Ho!” Minakata’s response was sent in two installments, the first on 18 May and the second a week later. Although he didn’t realize it at first, Minakata quickly figured out that Yanagita didn’t consider the contents of folk myths to be fictional. In what couldn’t have been an auspicious opening for the hopeful Yanagita, Minakata begins by denying the pres- ence of similar myths in Wakayama. After dismissing Yanagita’s claim, Minakata tries to prod him into a consideration of modern, Darwinian theories of evolution. Wouldn’t it make more sense to assume, he rea- sons, that when these folk myths refer to supernatural creatures the referents are the monkeys and baboons that were the ancestors of all humans? Going over the various sources, he deduces, “All these narra- tives are evidently talking about big monkeys” (1951–52, vol. 10, 24–25). Finally, Minakata directly addresses the Ho! Ho! Ho! phonemes that Yanagita has been averring are the linguistic signature of indigenous Japanese giants: “People who aren’t well- educated lack correct informa- tion. Let me just note one more thing about the issue of human giants. Here where I live there’s a shrine where a bird makes the Ho! Ho! Ho! sound. A friend went to investigate for himself and it turned out to be a horned owl [mimizuku]. The stuff that’s been left there is unmistak- ably horned owl shit” (1951–52, vol. 10, 32–33). He seems hopeful that the brute facticity of the owl shit will brake Yanagita’s desire to ground Japaneseness in the mountain folk and giants of an ethnoracially pure Japan, severed from the Asian mainland. But the thin-ski nned Yanagita senses Minakata’s condescension and responds defensively by question- ing his patriotism. On 13 October Yanagita denounces him: “Although you’ve shown us a proper patriotic attitude with your work on the shrine issue, with everything else you’re much too cosmopolitan. Elitists like you turn your back on all Japanese scholarship” (quoted in Minakata 1985, 130–31). Because Minakata relished the exposure that he got from publishing in Yanagita’s journal, he learned to soften his critiques. However, after five years of their marriage of convenience it became clear to him that Yanagita would yield no ground on his antiscientific creationist take, and so Minakata took to ridiculing him. A well-kn own instance of this (Tsurumi K. 1978; Figal 1999) appears in their final correspondence. At his wit’s end with Yanagita, he attempts one last dismissal of the absurd giant and goblin theory of a pure Japanese ethnogenesis, and with it Japan- centered nativism. In his last known letter to Yanagita, dated Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646727/9780822392880-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 IntroductIon midnight, 23 December 1916, Minakata recalls a specimen- collecting outing with a colleague in the summer of 1908. Half naked, the two botanists found themselves screeching out while hurtling down a steep mountain slope waving their mosquito nets, unable to stop themselves from the momentum. Here’s Minakata telling the story: “There was a group of twenty or so village wives tending the fields at the bottom of the mountain. They shrieked out ‘Strange entities have come down from the Heavens!’ when they saw us and took off. Only when we reached the bottom did we realize why they were terrified: they thought we were superhuman demons” (1951–52, vol. 11, 290–91). In his parting slap down to Yanagita he declares, “I am your mountain giant and goblin.” I’ve set up Yanagita’s and Minakata’s disputes carried out on the cusp of Japan’s colonial empire because they represent continuing attempts to configure subjectivity and system creation. This book breaks from a model of scholarship still present in East Asian studies that emphasizes a more or less homogeneous Japanese cultural nationalism severed from Asia. Marginalizing the canonical Yanagita and the paranoid cultural particularism for which he has served as privileged synecdoche, I fol- low Minakata’s itinerant cosmopolitan along with Japanese postcolo- nial scholarship by Yonetani Masafumi (2006) and others that track the historicopolitical relation between Japan and its East Asian ethnoracial and symbolic donors. Although there’s no doubt that many Japanese elites in the mid-ninet eenth century recognized the need to adopt select elements of European technoscience, they acknowledged this not out of admiration for an assumed European superiority. Rather, Japanese leaders understood that defending themselves in the inner circle and East Asian others in the outer circle against the Euro- American agents of advanced technology threatening their sovereignty—gunboat im- perialists, drug runners, and rampaging free traders intent on forcefully “opening up” the region that had been the center of world trade for a millennium—meant that they had to inject themselves with certain im- munities. The reform leader Fukuzawa Yukichi explicitly recommended in the 1880s that Japan needed to “catch measles” from Euro- America (1960, 231).