PrefaceThis work of Yanagi ta Kunio (1875-1962), who started the movementto collect folk tales in Japan and led it for more than fiftyyears, has been delayed in coming to the attention of Japanologistsand folklore scholars. It is my purpose in bringing out this edition ofthe Japanese sage's book, The Yanagita Kunio Guide to the JapaneseFolk Tale, to call attention to Yanagita's great work and leadership incollecting Japanese folk tale treasures and in building up an apparatusfor the study of their priceless cultural legacy. By rendering TheYanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale into English and editingthis imposing body of 347 folk tale-types and the distribution oftheir variants in Japan, I have attempted to bring this corpus into conformitywith Japanese folk tale scholarship for the use of scholars inthe West. It was called to the attention of Western scholars first byNaoe Hiroji. In his translated article in 1949, he called it "the largestaccomplishment of Japanese Folklore Science after the war .... Thisscholarly work sums up the result of thirty years of fairy taleresearch." 1Yanagita Kunio should be understood as a prominent figure inmodern Japanese intellectual circles in order to give a perspective tohis approach to the folk tales of Japan and the leadership he providedfor collecting and publishing them. Yanagita was born Matsuoka Kunio,the fourth of seven sons of Matsuoka Misao, a physician and scholar ofConfucian classics. Due to his poor health, Kunio did not continuebeyond the local elementary school. He was sent to his older brotherwho was a doctor and then to another who had literary friends. Kunioread all he could get his hands on in the fields of history, literature,and Japanese classics. He met prominent literary men and began to tryhis hand at writing poetry in his early teens.When Kunio was nineteen, he passed the entrance examinations toFirst Higher School, Tokyo. W hen he completed his study there, hisbrothers pooled their resources to send him to Tokyo Imperial University,from which he graduated in 1900 from the Department of Law,Division of Political Science. In the following year, he was appointedto a post in the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. In the sameyear, he took the name Y anagi ta when he became engaged to Ko, theyoungest daughter of Yanagita Naohei, a Justice of the SupremeCourt.Duties in the Ministry of Agriculture took Yanagita to outlyingregions where he could see at first hand the conditions of farmerstheirantiquated tools, their meager incomes, and the poor educationalopportuni ties for their sons. Although Yanagita belonged to the intellectualelite because of his education and because he was a governviiiPrefacement official, he still had a way of meeting farmers man to man. Hesat by their open hearths to exchange views on their problems, tosample their local foods with a relish, and to listen to their dialectand legends. Yanagita established the habit early in his work of takingdown detailed notes on what he saw and heard and making entries inhis diary. These notes provided the basis for his many lectures andarticles.The young official also had literary talent. He had begun to publishhis poems when he was sixteen years old. He belonged to a groupof young writers who were interested in current literature both athome and in Europe. He had a good reading command of English andFrench and could get along with German and Dutch. In 1907 Yanagitahelped found the Ibsen Society of Japan. It was his interest in poetrywhich led him first to the folk tale. He had noticed some poems ofSasaki Kyoseki (later called Sasaki Kizen), who was a student at WasedaUniversity. Yanagita arranged a meeting with him. Sasaki toldYanagita at that time some tales and legends that had been handed

down in his family in Tono. Yanagita was struck by the unmistakabletraces of old Japanese beliefs in the tales. He resolved to investigatethem further. He took the opportunity when he visited Tono later tohear more tales. The result was Tono monogatari (Tono tales), whichhe published in 1910.2 Yanagi ta then encouraged Sasaki to collectother folk tales in his area and made it possible for him to publishthem.Two of Yanagita's friends, Ishii Kendo and Takagi Toshio, then set

out to gather tales. Ishii published his Nippon zenkoku kokumin do wa(All-Japan stories for children)3 in 1911, attributing each story tosome old province in the country. Takagi, who was on the staff of thenewspaper Asahi Shinbun, advertised in it for tales and took time toedit what came in. He published his Nihon densetsu shu (Japaneselegends)4 in 1913. Here we see the pattern of Yanagita's ability toenlist others to join his efforts.Yanagita and Takagi started the journal Kyodo kenkyu (Localstudies) in 1912. This publication provided an outlet for informationabout life in all corners of Japan. Many men with whom Yanagita hadmade contacts earlier now provided information about folkloristictopics, including folk tales. The journal had to be suspended after fouryears because the work of the two young editors had changed, butduring that interval it had received items from 200 contributors. Theylived in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka or Hokkaido, and in thirty-eight prefectures,as well as in Korea, China and Formosa.Yanagi ta was appointed Chief Secretary to the House of Peers in1914 and held that position until 1919. He went to Geneva in 1921with the official group of observers from Japan to the League ofNations, serving in that capacity for nearly two years. When hereturned to Japan, he joined the editorial staff of Asahi Shinbun. Inthe meantime, his interest in folklore and folk tales grew. He invited anumber of men, including Sasaki Kizen, to contribute to Rohen sosho(Hearth-side series), some forty little books on folklore and folk talesfrom Hokkaido in the north to the Marianas in the south. By 1930Yanagita was able to select a representative body of folk tales forpublication. His Nihon no mukashibanashi, jo (Japanese Folk Tales, Vol.Preface ix1)5 became the standard item in the field for many years, being listedin bibliographies to the present. It was not simplified for children. Thesecond volume contained tales from Korea, the Ainu, the RyGkyGIslands, and Formosa that had been selected by specialists in thoseareas.Yanagita's work on the Asahi Shinbun involved extensive traveland lecturing. He finally resigned from it in 1932, at the age of fiftyseven,an age when most men would be looking forward to retirement,in order to devote his full time to his cultural studies in folklore. Heraised money for young collectors to go into the field to look fortales, he started publishing houses and journals to publish their findings,wrote introductions for their books, and traveled and lectured tobuild up interest. Groups began to be formed at schools or in localcenters to study their own material, frequently after Yanagita hadgiven a lecture for them. At the gun, or county, level, books werecompiled to record local industries, government, religious sites, andhistory, usually devoting space to folk tales and legends that werebeing preserved. Most of their publications were sent in either manuscriptor printed form to Yanagita, and from these he built up hisextensive files of notes on tales and legends. Because of his paternalinterest, he was in touch with activities in all of his land.If one examines the years to which source material in this referencework of Yanagita belongs, one can to some extent chart thespread of the movement to collect tales. Yanagita used only six itemsthat had appeared before 1910. There are sixteen sources that appearedin the decade 1910-1919, and fifty-three in the following decade.

He drew from 100 sources in the 1930's, after which restrictions andshortages due to World War II brought publishing to a virtual halt.Sasaki Kizen died in 1933, leaving seven collections of tales andmany articles. Among the young men whom Yanagita was encouragingwas Seki Keigo, a teacher from Nagasaki. Yanagita had written anintroduction for Seki's collection of tales from his native Shimabara.Since Seki showed promise, Yanagita opened opportunities in editorialwork to him.Yanagita was quite capable of writing his introduction to thispresent work, but a few comments by the translator may be helpful.His use of the chatty "mashita" endings for verbs was proof that hedid not intend his essay "About Folk Tales" to be a scholarly presentationto this very important reference work.Yanagi ta wrote of the difference between a legend and a folk taleand of Seki's original interest in the legend. When the present work onfolk tales was being compiled, Yanagita invited Seki to take the mainresponsibility in compiling the companion work on Japanese legends.6By comparing the main division in that work with those in this work onfolk tales, one can see clearly how Japanese regard legends. The titlesfor the legend's division are "Trees," "Stones and Cliffs," "Water,""Graves," "Hills and Passes," and "Shrines." Legends give briefaccounts of what was said to have happened at named places and theyare not stories of village life.Yanagita's story of how he used the little handbook, Mukashibanashisaishil tech6, when at the hearthside of a farmhouse shows how hewas able to establish warm, personal contacts in his travels. Althoughx Prefacehe expressed doubts about the results of the little book, the titleswith only a couple of exceptions have become standard names in newcollections as well as in this reference work. The Mukashibanashikenkyu was republished by Iwasaki Bijitsusha in 1980, which shows howhighly that effort is regarded today. And Sanseido republished theZenkoku editions of folk tales in 1973-1974. One can conclude that thesteps Yanagita took in guiding efforts to collect folk tales were wiseones.Yanagita's comments upon approaches to the folk tale were basedupon his background in reading and experience. He was a ware of theAarne-Thompson Types'? but it did not contain oriental material andits comparative approach was different from his. He treated tales aswholes and looked in them for old cultural and religious themes. Thatdoes not mean that he was not interested in the similarity betweentales in other countries and those in Japan. He wrote before themodern innovations in methodology-the morphological work of V ladamirPropp, the categoriest of Levi-Strauss, the motifime-sequence ofAlan Dundes. But he probably would not have been impressed had heheard of them.Yanagita's speculation about the interchange of tales in the distantpast now seems to have been warranted by recent etymologicalstudies. The Japanese language is now regarded as a composite withstrains from other composite languages. In a lecture to KBS Friends in1953, Seki Keigo pointed to the similarity of a tale in Japan with thatof one told by Altai tribes in the Baikal region of Mongolia, tworegions with no historical contact. This is a tale about a bee and adream of treasure. He said the version told in Niigata Prefecture wascloser to the Altaian version than to versions told in other parts ofJapan.Yanagita's hope that his reference work would encourage others toreport tales has been well fulfilled by the great volume of new collectionswhich have been published since World War 11.8Yanagi ta received a number of honors for his efforts in the fieldof folklore in Japan. He received the Asahi Cultural Award in 1941,was made a member of Japan Art Academy in 1947, and he received

the Order of Cultural Merit in 1951. Yanagita's authorized collectionof writings, Teihon Yanagita Kunio shu, numbers thirty-one volumesand five supplemental volumes, each about five hundred pages long. Itis estimated that this represents only about sixty percent of his totalwritings.The only recognition by Westerners of the activity of collectingand publishing Japanese folk tales before World War II was whenEugen Diederichs sent Fritz Rumpf to Japan in the mid-1930's to maketranslations of folk tales.9 Rumpf selected thirty-six items fromYanagita's collection of tales. Cultural exchange was becoming difficultin the West at that time, and scholars in the United States gaveRumpf's and Yanagita's work little attention.A ttempts by Seki Keigo and Hirbko Ikeda to index Japanese folktales deserve comment. Seki had access to materials in Yanagita'shands, but from the start he was interested in the comparativeapproach to tales in Europe. He set up his own files according toAarne-Thompson-"Animal Tales," "Ordinary Tales," and "Jokes," withPreface xisUbtopics which he felt fitted Japanese tradition. He was not hamperedby paper shortages when he published his Nihon mukashibanashi shiisei,lO so he could give a complete rendition of a normative version ofa tale for each tale-type. He followed it with entries according togeographical distribution, sources, notes and references as Yanagitahad done in his Guide, but with more numerous entries.The only difference, actually, between the presentations of Sekiand Yanagita was that Seki numbered tale-types, thus placing it intothe category of an index. He numbered tale-types to 671 in the text ofhis Shiisei, but at the end of Part Three, he presented a kata (type)index in which he reduced the number of tale-types and changed theirorder. This resulted in a new number for a tale-type. Seki's work"Types of Japanese Folktales,,,11 reduced the number of tale-typesagain and made changes in their order, hence a third number for atale-type. Seki presented themes in this work in the Finnish method ofhandling variants, adding sources and distribution below. The Englishwork has never been produced in Japanese, and cross-reference toSeki's work is by the numbers in the text of his Shu.sei. Seki hasretained that numbering in his Nihon mukashibanashi taisei,12 but hegives new numbers to newly discovered tale-types. It remains to beseen how they will be utilized in subsequent cross-referencing.Hiroko Ikeda, a research assistant on Yanagita's staff who couldspeak English, was sent to the United States to introduce the work ofJapanese folklorists to academic circles there. She contributed entriesto Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature,13 as her firstexper ience in indexing. Although she relied upon Yanagi ta' s Guide andearly volumes of Seki's Shu.sei, she made no reference to them in herentries, and Thompson did not list them in his bibliography. Ikeda's AType and Motif Index of Japanese Folk-Literature ll+ was published in1971. This was her adaptation of the Second Revision of Aarne-Thompson'swork 15 to Japanese material. She also employed the Finnishmethod of treating variants, but with more detailed breakdowns andreferences to sources than Seki had done. Her work, vexingly enough,gave yet a fourth number to a Japanese tale-type. Her numbering isnot used in cross-referencing in Japan.I have omitted a translation of the official N.H.K. (Japan BroadcastingAssociation) preface to Yanagita's work because, as usual,such contributions have little scholarly value. Takanao Iwasaburo,whose name appears as the writer, was president of N.H.K. at the timeYanagita's Guide was puqlished, but plans for the project had been setup in 1941 when the former president, Komori Shinichiro, was living.In spite of Takano's enthusiasm for the results, his Preface does notgive a reliable account of the circumstances. N .H.K. provided a placeto do work, furnished materials, and paid Yanagita's assistants who

worked upon his files under his supervision. N.H.K. also stored thecomplete work outside of Tokyo to protect it from bombing and lentthe support of its name to the project when restrictions uponpublishing by individuals would have made it difficult for Yanagita tocomplete the undertaking alone.The folk tale is now a recognized area for research at severaluniversities in Japan. A major project in the field has been the publicationof Nihon mukashibanashi jiten,16 a dictionary-encyclopedia thatxii Prefaceexplains terms concerning oral literature as well as titles to the folktales and their distribution. It also includes names of scholars in thefield in the several countries of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.More than 150 scholars and collectors have contributed to thevolume. It shows the extent of interest among modern Japanese notonly in their native folk tales, but in the work of scholars in the West.Japanologists have overlooked the folk tales of Japan, perhapsbecause the scope of Japanese studies was established before folktales were being collected in Japan. The entries of Ikeda in Thompson'sMotif-Index failed to open to Western scholars the great work ofYanagita and deprived them of any idea of the great number of collectorsand scholars in Japan and the folk tales which they had madeavailable. Areas in Japanese studies have broadened considerably sinceWorld War II. In the last few years Japanese oral literature such asotogizoshi and Nara-ehon, partly illustrated and partly script, andballads are being studied. This present volume will open the field oforal literature still further to Western scholars.History is usually divided into periods of time marked off byrecords of certain events or great personalities, but cultural history isa continuously flowing stream of human concepts. The contents oftributaries never actually merge into the main trunks of great rivers.They retain their characteristic sediments. In the same way, the strongcurrents of culture seem to affect changes, but old outlooks andpractices are preserved along the margins and in little eddies. Theserelics of the past, still identifiable in Japanese custom and thought,are what Yanagi ta looked for in the tales of his land. This handbookwill point to such relics of Japan's cultural heritage in folk tales forscholars in the West.Fanny Hagin MayerFootnotes1. Naoe Hiroji, "Post-war Folklore Research Work in Japan," FolkloreStudies, VIII (1950), p.281. The use of the term "fairy tale" for"folk tale" by the translator was unfortunate.2. Yanagita Kunio, Tono monogatari, Shuseido, 1910.3. Ishii Kendo, Nippon zenkoku kokumin dowa, Dobunkan, 1911. I haveretained the old reading "Nippon" for Ishii because it sounds like achallenge, which he intended it to be, to the sugary tales forchildren that Iwaya Sazanami had put out.4. Takagi Toshio, Nihon densetsu shu. Musashino Shoin, 1913.

5. Yanagita Kunio, Nihon no mukashibanashi, jo. Ars, 1930.6. Yanagita Kunio, supervision, Nihon Hoso Kyokai, ed., Nihon densetsumeii. Nihon Hoso Shuppan Kyokai, 1950.7. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale, FFCNo. 70. Helsinki, 1928.