Japanese Folk Tale

xx About Folk Tales
strangely enough, wherever the one is preserved there is a deep interest
in the other. I think that we must consider anew the question of
the relationship between these two forms.
Many interesting facts have come to light as time goes on. It was
found that there were already a few people at scattered places in outlying
regions who had a more than ordinary liking for folk tales. Even
though they were not inclined to set them down in writing, such
people in the course of their long lives instructed one or two of what
we might call disciples, and through them the stream of tales continued,
and in some instances even grew. One of the pleasant discoveries
was that on Ikinoshima in the west there had been Yoshino Hidemasa,
a scholar who had made very detailed records of geographical
features of the island, and while his name was known to me and
others, we found among his notations there was a surprising number of
folk tales, a great exception in those days. This furnished the circumstance
through which Yamaguchi Asa taro came to study folk tales.
I was inclined to think there would be still other such instances.
There was the unusual example of a person who went on a trip to
Mika wa and brought back a little picture book which he happened to
find in a secondhand book store, a book copied by hand, in which ten
tales were presented without a single word of explanation, only
pictures, but it showed that at the time they were drawn people could
recall and enjoy tales by only looking at pictures of them. These facts
made us feel we would not leave matters to chance, and we gradually
set up plans to collect tales all over Japan.
Our first step in undertaking this work was the journal Tabi to
densetsu.5 It published two numbers devoted to folk tales, and from
these we could understand for the first time that throughout the land,
no matter which way we turned, there were little centers where
people were interested in folk tales, and we could not fail to see the
similarity in the tales which they recalled. There were no tales especially
of Shikoku, for example, or of Hokuriku. By means of these two
issues of folk tales, our interest was aroused in a country-wide collection
of tales. At the same time we realized we should take up the
study of tales according to their standard forms.
To be sure, among the books that gave us hints were some from
abroad that came to hand a few at a time. The detailed classification
of Aarne and Thompson came out later, but there was the work of
Miss Charlotte Sophia Burne,6 published by the Folk-lore Society of
England, in which she presented seventy-two varieties of forms. Some
of them were not so popular in Japan as in her country, but on the
whole there was a similarity to ours. We were encouraged in our plan
by the fact that if we searched here for tales parallel to ones in distant
lands, we could find them. Even now my estimate does not seem
wrong, for excluding some very short humorous tales, there are a few
more here than in England, making it possible to say that there are
around one hundred types of tales in Japan. Beyond that there are
traces of others, but we cannot vouch absolutely for them.
Encouraged by these unexpected circumstances, we set up two
more plans. The first was the publication of Mukashibanashi saishii.
techo,7 a guide for collecting tales. It was a comparatively small
piece of work, but one with which I took particular pains. I limited the