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Aug 27, 2008 20:33

Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

Really fun book! I'm admittedly tired of reading about Yanigata Kunio, the 'grandfather' of fokelore studies in Japan (at least, that's always how he's presented - but Figal puts him in a historical context where he was not the first), but this was an enjoyable read on fushigi.

It also includes the term monsterology (yōkaigaku). C'mon - monsterology! I was reminded of Sang Ye's interview with one of Mao's Spanish interpreters who became a 'UFOlogist' in his later years.

Monsters, spirits, the supernatural - these become the locus of Figal's study on the pulls of modernity as well as some 'essential' Japan. On the one hand, we have the 'monsterologists' who try and use Western - 'modern' - scientific inquiry to tame those rural, backwards spirits; on the other hand, we have people like Minakata Kumagusu and Yanigata who at once celebrated the fushigi (the fantastic, mysterious, supernatural) while applying some sort of stamp of empirical knowledge.

Minakata himself was a 'real' scientist with an affinity for slime molds; he even has a protozoa named after him (Minakatella longifila Lister (56)). Still, even in referencing his slime molds, the supernatural plays a role - and he offers explanations of what the 'monsterologists' and other devotees of pure science and nothing but would say about his mysterious dream that led him to a type of slime mold he had never seen in nature.

In any case, we clearly see the pull between modernity and those critics who feared the modernization project was removing humanity from the world. The critics lost, of course, and the state seized control of fushigi. At the same time Japan was colonizing foreign places, it was 'colonizing' domestic thought and beliefs, subverting them to the national project:

Throughout the history of modern Japan, control of spirits has meant the control of Spirit. Japanese spirituality was reorganized into the Japanese Spirit, where spirits were relegated to the realm of folklore and superstition in what I call supernatural ideology. (197)

Perhaps most intriguing is Figal's closing comments on the Japanese Spirit (eg, 'exceptionalism' and some sort of 'unique Japaneseness'):

Thus hallowed as the key to understanding anything about Japan, the Japanese Spirit is somehow innately comprehensible to natives by what Peter Dale has called an "epistemology of the blood," while it is mystically cast as a fushigi fundamentally incomprehensible to foreigners. This foreclosure or at least sever devaluation of any foreign (and even heretical "Westernized" Japanese) attempt to study Japan - though no such barrier is said to exist for Japanese studying foreign cultures - is a typical trait of the nihonjinron mystification of Japan and "the Japanese mind." (221)

Would probably be good to read with Ketelaar's Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan.

shōwa, modernity, the folk, folklore, yanigata, science, minor field list, figal, tokugawa, taishō, minor field, rural, meiji, supernatural, japan

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