山人譚をめぐってOn the Folk Tales of the Mountain People
Traveling throughout various regions of Japan, one often encounters folk tales specific to this mountainous country known as "tales of mountain folk [山人譚].” The massive archives of these folk tales, which folklorists have spent roughly a century collecting from every corner of the land, have always captivated my heart, and I have continued my own independent inquiry into this point as well. It is a strange sensation, but when I step into the mountainous areas inspired by these tales of mountain folk, I sometimes feel a peculiar disturbance where the experience expands into the total image of contemporary Japan. It is difficult to divine where this sense of incongruity originates, but I will examine its form here as a single deduction. The reason I consider such things is that I constantly view it as a problem that the general view common both domestically and abroad that "Japan is an island nation" is significantly distorted from the truth. Personally, I have realized through my research trips that if we do not think by simultaneously holding the reverse image of "an island nation opened to the sea" rather than speaking of Japan only through the insular image of "an island nation closed by the sea," we cannot grasp the deep layers.
To simplify it most basically, the character of an island nation is such that a one-way perspective is impossible. From the perspective of those with a continental sense or those who have settled on an island for a long time, an island nation separated by the sea is directly linked to being closed. However, in the case of Japan, in the history following the establishment of the Meiji government after the revolution of 1868, a national movement to secure their own legitimacy as an existence bearing a new era took the form of a total negation of the Edo period, and this was developed arbitrarily by the people of the new government. At this time, they cited Western academic thought that had just begun to flow in while completely ignoring the indigenous form of Japan, forming an extremely arbitrary logic. A typical example is the fabrication of a dualistic structure of opposition, contrasting "Edo period equals national isolation and feudalism" against "Meiji period equals opening of the country and liberalism." This structure based on the dualism derived from the Meiji government is in fact still unconsciously deployed within the gaze of people both inside and outside the country who observe Japan.
As a result, the real image of the Edo period was unilaterally excluded and has become greatly distorted. When the premise was created that the form of the Edo period was a system by the evil feudalistic and tyrannical Tokugawa shogunate family and that a closed country called "Sakoku" continued for three hundred years, it was flattened into an easy to understand narrative where the savior who opened this closed world begins with the arrival of the Black Ships. However, we can discuss from multiple angles that this is not the fact. Nevertheless, I will leave that aside for now and focus on the fact that the characteristic of Japan that can be described as "being closed" is occurring with considerable intensity even now. That is the passport possession rate.
It is a known fact that the Japanese passport has world-leading benefits, yet the passport possession rate of Japanese people is strengthening a significant downward trend when viewed over the medium to long term. In materials released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in February last year, it is presented that the cumulative total of valid passports as of the end of 2024 is 21.64 million, and the possession rate is 17.5%. Since the total population in the same year is about 123.8 million, this amounts to roughly 21.66 million people. Looking at this broadly, it means that only one in six citizens has a passport, and this can be interpreted as the current status where the very sense of looking "outside" from Japan is being lost, or as a state of indifference. Actually, even recalling the past year, as far as I remember, there has not been a single movement within Japan that links with the various problems occurring around the world. I feel this appears as an attitude that no matter what happens in Gaza, no matter what happens in Ukraine, or no matter what becomes of the Taiwan issue, events outside of themselves are of no concern. Of course, this does not mean in a short-sighted way that we should hold demonstrations, but it seems to be a fact that this is clearly divergent from and reversed to the movements of Gen Z in Japan compared to the movements of Gen Z who try to participate in the world's various problems in some form.
However, a world that has once passed through globalization, even if it is heading toward a reversing movement as it is now, is no longer in a dimension where problems can be dealt with by a single country alone. This can be called the inconvenient form of the world that the pandemic exposed, but at the very least, as everyone faces, we are forced to live in a compressed space-time where we must think synchronically about problems that have occurred in a certain region. Regarding this problem, everyone living in the world today should have to confront it in their respective lives, but conversely, Japan is excessively strengthening only this closed tendency and is completely isolated from the tides of the world. If Japanese people were to utilize the merit of Japan having a strong passport, they would be granted the opportunity to enter the most countries in the world and gain experiences, and the opportunity to enrich their wisdom and so forth would be unconditionally bestowed upon them. In other words, it is the Japanese who could stand at the forefront of the digital nomads that are rising as a current tide and who should be able to stand at the head of confronting the world's various problems, but the actual trend is reversed, and a strange gap becomes visible where extremely few people are executing this. This phenomenon has been discussed in various ways until now, but I believe that the tales of mountain folk in folklore tradition will serve as a reference as one way of thinking.
There are multiple patterns in the tales of mountain folk, but they are basically structured as stories of hunters who enter the mountains to live, and they are typically characterized by encountering mountain folk in the mountains or by the appearance of a woman who foreshadows the existence of mountain folk. What is particularly important in the tradition is the encounter with a woman who had her origins in the same village community as the hunter who appears as the narrator. This unfolds in a manner where the woman, after marrying into an outside village for some reason, coincidentally reunites with the hunter in the mountains and tells a story speaking of her current situation. What is interesting, however, is that the woman who married into another village tells of the heterogeneity of how terrible her life is and how frightening it is. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single tale stating that life in an outside village community is rich and full of happiness. The reason why such a common pattern is born is not because there was a distributional movement of tale patterns as folklorists generally think, but because that fantasy is shared within a certain communality.
It is premised on the strong impression that Japan is an island nation surrounded by the sea, but the perspective changes completely when viewed effectively from the sea. The true form is an island where countless mountains are connected, and there is importance in viewing the mountains to the same degree as the sea. This is because the era when crossing a single mountain meant entering a different world continued for a very long period. Therefore, what is important is that the communal fantasy common to the people living in the mountains is shared in the dimension of fantasy as the communality of hunters who engage in hunting life in the mountains. This is not, as scholars think, the trace of someone moving who carried the root tales to various places, but rather that the communality of hunters who enter the mountains to conduct their lives is shared in the dimension of fantasy. Therefore, it is not strange that whether it is a hunter in Kyushu in southern Japan or a hunter in Tohoku in the northern part, they possess traditions based on exactly similar tales and similar psychic experiences.
Especially, we must not overlook that a "communality of fear" is symbolized, where those who separated from the village community meet with terrible experiences and inevitably become unhappy. In other words, the taboo against departing from the village community appears as the communality of fear lurking at the root of this type of mountain folk tale. For the villagers living in the village community, the lands and different tribes regarded as the outside of the taboo that solidifies the boundary of the community are identified with an alien space accompanied by the unknown fear of not understanding their existence itself. When viewing this as a psychic experience, it can be said that it was a world equal to the concept of the other world. Regarding the concept of the other world, mythology speaks more highly than folk tales. This is because, compared to folk tales that contain customs and indigenous nature, mythology possesses a highly technical character accompanied by authoritative compilation work.
In fact, the concept of the other world is deployed in an important position in Japanese mythology. There are several instances, but it first appears in the tale of the male god Isanaki [伊耶那岐命] and the female god Isanami [伊耶那美命], the pair of gods who become the matrix that produces the land and gods. While the collaboration of the community by this pair was being carried out, this collaborative relationship is severed by the appearance of a different tribe symbolized by the fire god Kagutsuchi [軻遇突智神], but in the myth, it is told that Isanami burned her genitals with Kagutsuchi's fire, fell ill, and from there departed to the Land of Yomi [黄泉国]. This Land of Yomi is what was installed in the primal position of the other world in Japanese mythology, but the interpretation surrounding this other world constantly transforms while being subject to the regulations of the times.
For instance, the concept of the other world is usually thought of as the land of the dead. However, this interpretation is not the historically universal concept of the other world, but is strongly based on the understanding reinterpreted by Kokugaku scholars who rose to prominence from the middle to the latter half of the Edo period, and originally it was not spoken of as the land of the dead. That we can be convinced by this theory involves the fact that our view of life and death has approached a dimension homogeneous with us today, but originally this concept of the other world was not spoken of as the world of the dead, but the world of the living. This transfer from the world of the living to the world of the dead can be said to have been shocking as a problem of the Japanese mind.
Hattori Nakatsune (1757-1824), a disciple of Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) who led the rise of Kokugaku, is deeply involved in the appearance of the new interpretation relating "the other world equals the land of the dead." To write just the basics, the Kojiki established in 712 and the Nihon Shoki established in 720 are positioned as existing books unique to Japan that broadly contain myths and the like compiled and established in the same period, but for the majority of the historical period, the Nihon Shoki side was placed at the apex and valued, and the Kojiki was not researched, existing hidden in the back as an academic subject. Motoori Norinaga, who viewed this as a problem, completed the "Kojikiden [古事記傳]” which thoroughly interpreted the Kojiki over a period of more than thirty years, and this becomes the departure point of Kojiki research in Japan. In other words, research on the Kojiki finally welcomed a full-scale start after more than one thousand years had passed since its establishment.
However, we must also consider the opposite aspect of this epoch-making moment. This is because there remained abundant room for the interpretation of the Kojiki, which had not been properly researched for more than a thousand years, to be performed freely at the discretion of scholars. Therefore, although it was true for Motoori Norinaga himself as well, interpretation is performed by intervening with one's own ideology. The disciple Hattori Nakatsune, who inherited this flow of Kojiki research, also uniquely developed his master's interpretation and expanded the worldview of the Kojiki. The document symbolizing that is "Sandaiko [三大考].” This book became the cause of fierce controversy among the Kokugaku scholars of the time, and that is because Hattori interpreted it from the perspective of Western astronomy. In other words, Hattori recaptured the Kojiki as ancient wisdom telling the origin of the universe, brought in Western scientific considerations that had been partially imported there, and developed it as a cosmology based on that. Above all, it was his master Motoori Norinaga who was most impressed by the presentation of this worldview.
This is because the disciple Hattori Nakatsune showed the origin of the universe and furthermore the derivation where things are born, which Motoori Norinaga could not understand by himself, and therefore Sandaiko was published accompanying the Kojikiden, was read by many readers, and formed the foundation of an era. At this time, under Hattori's thinking, the worldview of the Kojiki is set with dimensions into [天・地・泉] “Heaven, Earth, Underworld," which become "Heaven equals Celestial World," "Earth equals Terrestrial World," and "Underworld equals Land of Yomi." To put it simply, the three-layer structure of “Celestial World - Terrestrial World - Underground World” was regarded as the truth of the universe, and based on the logic that the other world exists underground, the other world depicted by the Kojiki was understood as the underground world where the dead reside. Care is required regarding the fact that this three-layer structure was assembled from new values born in an era that was almost approaching modern times and is not something that leads to the eras prior to that.
Premising this, what we can at least grasp is that what was most important in the taboo in the village community where villagers lived was that the taboo against departing from the village community to which they belonged had been formed over a vast length of time as a communality of fear in a considerably strong sense. The character of the village community, which is this taboo against departure having a vector toward the outside, becomes a homogeneous thing as a fantasy reached within communality even without specific persons holding such a way of thinking propagating it, in an era when there were countless villages throughout the Japanese archipelago. And what is important is next. Compared to the years of history during which the taboos of the village community persisted, the years of history of modern Japan, which intends to have excluded that taboo regarding it as an abominable old custom, are nothing but extremely immature things that do not leave the realm of a newborn baby. Even taking the Meiji Restoration of 1868 as a trigger, the modernization of Japan possesses a history of only about 160 years after all. In other words, although the present of Japan looks as if it is welcoming an aging era after the modern system generally called industrialization or capitalism has been completed to a high degree, it seems to me that the actual problem is rather that we must not be disturbed by that.
Rather, if we look honestly at the problems and historical experiences inside the minds of the individual bodies of the approximately 120 million Japanese people, we should have to consider that the psychic problems and experiences formed over a scale of thousands to tens of thousands of years nurtured before modern times are still flowing into Japanese people in various forms. However, we continue to think while completely ignoring this problem. This originates firstly in the fact that we, who still live in the modern world which could not have developed without believing in the linear world of evolutionary theory rising to the right, inevitably cannot admit the pre-modern. Furthermore, it originates in the attitude itself that has ignored the absolute truth that it is impossible to know the pre-modern by the scale of the modern in the first place. The reason why the discourse on Japan and the Japanese produced from this displaced context seems off the mark to me is that every consideration is developed by excluding psychic problems. Or, even if they focus on psychic problems, they do not understand that the scale of the modern does not apply to the pre-modern. If we look at human history macroscopically, perhaps for nearly 99% of the period, we were rather in the stage I have stated so far. However, from this viewpoint, it can be said that the taboo against departing from the village community certainly tends to be stronger for people living in an island nation surrounded by the sea when viewed from the natural environment. At this time, when compared with the continental history where different ethnic groups mix, the problem surfaces that we probably cannot understand each other in the same phase.
If we tentatively make a broad contrast between the East and the West premising this viewpoint, it would be appropriate to consider the United Kingdom, an island nation surrounded by the sea in the West, against Japan, an island nation surrounded by the sea in the East. However, the conditions are different. Certainly, from the impression that Japanese and British people are said to have similar personalities, one can say there is a character common to island nations. However, as I actually felt when I stayed there, I felt that the surrounding situation surrounding the UK and the surrounding situation surrounding Japan were completely different. This is because the continental side that the UK neighbors is a region that has a complex history formed by many ethnic groups jumbled together like Europe, but Japan's neighbor is China, which has strongly developed a history by the rule of the Han people. Of course, if we look at its interior in detail, it is self-evident that it had a complex ethnic composition similar to Europe, but it can be said that the major difference between Europe and China is that those were buffered to some extent as a massive rule nationally. In that sense, Japan and the UK are approximate in their character as island nations, but the influence given by neighboring countries seems to have been quite different things. Also, the UK does not have the image of Japanese mountains.
I looked at it quite roughly, but from this perspective, it is conceivable that the communality of fear in Japan becomes a property considerably different from the communality of fear in the UK. This is because the outside of the UK has a higher tendency to be composed of a wide variety of different tribes when compared to Japan. This can be said especially for different tribes who crossed the sea, but in the case of Japan, the majority of different tribes crossing the sea also have a high possibility of becoming existences whose appearance is approximate to themselves if compared with the UK. Therefore, in the case of Japan, it can be said that there is a high possibility that in the ancient layer where this notion of different tribes was nurtured, it occurred inside the same island nation more than with immigrants who came across the sea from the side of China or Korea. The representative existence of that is the Jomon people. It is already a known fact that the Jomon people were quite different in appearance from modern general Japanese people, but the people in the regions that still strongly inherit the genes of these Jomon people strongly retain the traces of this ancient layer. This becomes the entrance to the pluralistic world of Japan, but one more thing that must not be forgotten is that although the majority of immigrants crossing the sea were certainly people originating from China or Korea, some were not so. Rather, while groups with similar appearances overall flowed in as immigrants, if the appearance of some was clearly different, naturally it must have been suitable as a heterogeneous image of a different tribe for the groups residing on the Japanese archipelago side.
Considering these viewpoints comprehensively, it becomes visible that the "consciousness of the common" (not the individual) regarding the taboo of departing from the village community is a virtual image formed over a period of more than 100 years, triggered by the fact that the village community was abstracted and recovered unitarily into the state by the Meiji government. Especially when the abstracted psychic experience of "village society" was generalized in modern history, a new consciousness intervenes at the same time that the old-fashioned feudalistic village community should be abandoned by Japanese people living in the modern age. This appears as a phenomenon of concentrated influx into urban areas, but what is important at this time is that even if one lived in the modern and Western atmosphere of the urban area which is a non-village community after abandoning the village community as an individual body, that is nothing more than a story of the individual after all. In other words, as I argue in this article, no matter how much the individual performed modernization, the dimension of communal fantasy formed by a vast length of time has not lost its validity, and in fact, at the bottom of the primal experience of the minds of the majority of the current Japanese nationals, this memory remains as a vividly new thing. And since that is a phase of communal fantasy, as long as one is Japanese, it becomes a psychic problem that absolutely cannot be ignored.
In fact, I see that this psychic communality is explicitly expressed in many situations even in current Japanese people. Among them, it appears notably when Japanese people living overseas tell of their experiences. In my assessment, that appears explicitly when the parties concerned premise without doubt that the dimension of the village community has been arbitrarily expanded to the national dimension of "Japan." This is because here, "the taboo against departing from the village community" transfers directly to "the taboo against departing from Japan," and therein it appears as a great rupture between the Japanese who try to live abroad and the Japanese who try to live domestically. What is interesting to me about this problem is that when Japanese people living abroad speak about Japan, they are always based on this taboo. In other words, the communality of fear, where it was believed that those who violated the taboo of heading to the outside would inevitably meet with terrible experiences and become unhappy, has escaped the dimension where it was shared only in the former village dimension and is being captured as the taboo against departing from the nation, Japan.
The important point is that the attitude of speaking based on this taboo manifests with a psychically stronger intensity on the side of Japanese people living abroad than on the side of Japanese people living domestically. And it is important that the good or bad regarding the taboo of departing abroad is being discussed with this communality of fear as the axis. Therefore, the way in which Japanese people residing abroad or Japanese people who have gone abroad and gained experience speak to the multitude of Japanese people remaining domestically becomes heterogeneous. This is because they are largely divided into a group asserting "that is not so" and a group asserting "that is exactly so," premising the communality of fear that if one goes abroad, one will inevitably meet with terrible experiences and become unhappy.
To put it extremely, in the psychology of Japanese people living abroad, even if they feel happy in their life at the individual dimension, or even if they are acting out happiness, a psychic problem lurks that they have not escaped at all from the phase of this communal fantasy called the communality of fear. And regarding this, it can be said that people are too unaware. If there is a hint to assume a closed character around here, where on earth does it lurk? I do not know that yet either, but if we look at the surrounding Japanese people from this angle, we might grasp the grounds for their heterogeneity.