Yanagita Kunio and the Folklore Movement

This Routledge Library Editions reissue, dated 2015, republishes Ronald A. Morse's study of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the Japanese scholar widely regarded as the founder of minzokugaku, or native Japanese folklore studies. Open Library catalogs the book among works on folklorists and Japanese social life and customs. Yanagita began his career as a government agricultural bureaucrat before turning to the systematic collection and study of Japanese rural folk tales, customs, and oral tradition, most famously compiling "The Legends of Tono" (Tono Monogatari, 1910), a landmark collection of folk legends from the Tono region that helped establish folklore as a serious field of Japanese scholarship rather than mere antiquarian curiosity. Morse's study traces how Yanagita built an entire academic movement around preserving Japan's vanishing rural oral tradition during a period of rapid modernization, and situates his influence on how later Japanese folklorists, including scholars building on his methods, approached the collection of yōkai tales and regional legends still referenced by folklore scholarship today.