When tengu talk : Hirata Atsutane's ethnography of the other world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
When tengu talk : Hirata Atsutane's ethnography of the other world
University of Hawaiʿi Press, c2008
- : hardcover
Available at 10 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Bibliography: p. [243]-257
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) has been the subject of numerous studies that focus on his importance to nationalist politics and Japanese intellectual and social history. Although well known as an ideologue of Japanese National Learning (Kokugaku), Atsutane's importance as a religious thinker has been largely overlooked. His prolific writings on supernatural subjects have never been thoroughly analyzed in English until now. In ""When Tengu Talk"", Wilburn Hansen focuses on ""Senkyo ibun"" (1822), a voluminous work centering on Atsutane's interviews with a fourteen-year-old Edo street urchin named Tengu Kozo Torakichi who claimed to be an apprentice tengu, a supernatural creature of Japanese folklore.Hansen uncovers in detail how Atsutane employed a deliberate method of ethnographic inquiry that worked to manipulate and stimulate Torakichi's surreal descriptions of everyday existence in a supernatural realm, what Atsutane termed the Other World. Hansen's investigation and analysis of the process begins with the hypothesis that Atsutane's project was an early attempt at ethnographic research, a new methodological approach in nineteenth-century Japan.A rough sketch of the milieu of 1820s Edo Japan and Atsutane's position within it provides the backdrop against which the drama of Senkyo ibun unfolds. There follow chapters explaining the relationship between the implied author and the outside narrator, the Other World that Atsutane helped Torakichi describe, and Atsutane's nativist discourse concerning Torakichi's fantastic claims of a newly discovered Shinto holy man called the sanjin. In the final portion of his book, Hansen addresses Atsutane's contribution to the construction of modern Japanese identity.
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