KOMINKA MOVEMENT

Kominka Movement

Kominka Movement

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the backlash against local Buddhism and the initial enthusiasm for Shinto_ orthodoxy and for Western modernism had begun to subside. However, researchers retained their interest in village customs, inspired now by the disciplinary mission of “salvage anthropology,” and a continued fixation on discovering the true and transcendent essence of Japan in its remote and unsullied countryside. (Wan ya Hou 1998)

These ideas coalesced and matured in the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the scholar most often credited with the foundation of ethnography as an academic discipline in Japan. In government service at ...