Japanese Folk Tale

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Preface
he expressed doubts about the results of the little book, the titles
with only a couple of exceptions have become standard names in new
collections as well as in this reference work. The Mukashibanashi
kenkyu was republished by Iwasaki Bijitsusha in 1980, which shows how
highly that effort is regarded today. And Sanseido republished the
Zenkoku editions of folk tales in 1973-1974. One can conclude that the
steps Yanagita took in guiding efforts to collect folk tales were wise
ones.
Yanagita's comments upon approaches to the folk tale were based
upon his background in reading and experience. He was a ware of the
Aarne-Thompson Types'? but it did not contain oriental material and
its comparative approach was different from his. He treated tales as
wholes and looked in them for old cultural and religious themes. That
does not mean that he was not interested in the similarity between
tales in other countries and those in Japan. He wrote before the
modern innovations in methodology-the morphological work of V ladamir
Propp, the categoriest of Levi-Strauss, the motifime-sequence of
Alan Dundes. But he probably would not have been impressed had he
heard of them.
Yanagita's speculation about the interchange of tales in the distant
past now seems to have been warranted by recent etymological
studies. The Japanese language is now regarded as a composite with
strains from other composite languages. In a lecture to KBS Friends in
1953, Seki Keigo pointed to the similarity of a tale in Japan with that
of one told by Altai tribes in the Baikal region of Mongolia, two
regions with no historical contact. This is a tale about a bee and a
dream of treasure. He said the version told in Niigata Prefecture was
closer to the Altaian version than to versions told in other parts of
Japan.
Yanagita's hope that his reference work would encourage others to
report tales has been well fulfilled by the great volume of new collections
which have been published since World War 11. 8
Yanagi ta received a number of honors for his efforts in the field
of 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 collection
of writings, Teihon Yanagita Kunio shu, numbers thirty-one volumes
and five supplemental volumes, each about five hundred pages long. It
is estimated that this represents only about sixty percent of his total
writings.
The only recognition by Westerners of the activity of collecting
and publishing Japanese folk tales before World War II was when
Eugen Diederichs sent Fritz Rumpf to Japan in the mid-1930's to make
translations of folk tales. 9 Rumpf selected thirty-six items from
Yanagita's collection of tales. Cultural exchange was becoming difficult
in the West at that time, and scholars in the United States gave
Rumpf's and Yanagita's work little attention.
A ttempts by Seki Keigo and Hirbko Ikeda to index Japanese folk
tales deserve comment. Seki had access to materials in Yanagita's
hands, but from the start he was interested in the comparative
approach to tales in Europe. He set up his own files according to
Aarne-Thompson-"Animal Tales," "Ordinary Tales," and "Jokes," with