ABSTRACT
It was with the restoration of the Meiji that the four large islands which constitute Japan began the slow process towards modernization and Westernization, and the country was opened up to Europeans in 1868. In 1886 the Englishman B. H. Chamberlain occupied the country’s first chair in linguistics, and in 1896 the Japanese Society of Linguistics was founded. The American S. Morse carried out the first systematic archaeological excavations in 1887, and in 1896 a Society of Archaeology was formed. From 1884–1885 there was increasing contact between Ainu fishermen and European missionaries like John Batchelor, whose published research influenced the Japanese anthropologist Shogoro Tsuboi (1863–1913). Tsuboi introduced evolutionist theory into Japan and in 1884 founded the Anthropological Society of Tokyo, which aimed to study the origins and evolution of races, and which in 1941 was renamed the Japanese Anthropological Society (Nihon Jinrui gakkai). In 1886 the first issue of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Tokyo (Tokyo Jinrui Gakkai Zasshi) appeared, and in 1893 Tokyo University endowed the country’s first anthropology chair and simultaneously opened an anthropology department. After Tsuboi’s death in 1913 his successor Ryuzo Torii restructured the department, whose students were initially drawn from colleges of medicine. The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Tokyo later became the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Japan (Jinruigaku Zasshi), and focused on physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. Ryuzo Torii, who undertook fieldwork among the Aboriginals of Taiwan in 1895 and the Ainu of the Kurile Islands in 1899, was without doubt the most important Japanese anthropologist at the turn of the twentieth century. He carried out research on the Miao of China from 1902, as well as on the Manchu and on Mongolian peoples from 1905. Other pioneering work was done by F. Ifa in Okinawa in 1911. In 1925 Kunio Yanagita defined another discipline, a form of Volkskunde devoted to the study of folklore and crafts, sensibilities and popular national customs, which he called Minzokugaku. Yanagita’s most important disciple was Tsuneichi Miyamoto, and in the years that followed Japanese folklore split between their Minzokugaku, a historical and nationalist study of Japanese traditions, and Nihonjinron, an ethnography and social ethno-anthropology. Having invaded Formosa (Taiwan) in 1895, the Japanese established the Imperial University of Taihoku there in 1928 (the present National Taiwan University at Taipei). The new university contained an Institute of Ethnology mainly devoted to the study of the indigenous islanders. The Institute was directed by Utsurikawa, a former student of Dixon who worked on questions of historical reconstruction. Thus began a line of research on Formosa which culminated in the late 1930s in extensive published research by Japanese scholars, among whom a few stand out: Toichi Mabuchi, who looked at rituals and the clan system and then completed further work using a comparative Radcliffe-Brownian perspective; F. Masuda, a student of matrimonial customs; Y. Okada, who discerned primitive family structures in the aboriginal population; and K. Furuno, who examined aboriginal social structures during the war and then analysed Japanese social life and religion from a Durkheimian point of view. Masoa Oka and Eiichirou Ishida, two former students of Father Wilhelm Schmidt, founded the Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology (Minzoku Kenkyusyo Kiyo). In 1927–1928 the first large-scale archaeological-ethnological survey was directed by the department of sociology and religion of the Imperial University of Keisyo (Seoul University), which was established after the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910. From 1933 to 1938 this department led research on the Orochon, the Goldi and the Dahur, while two of its members, C. Akamatsu and T. Akiba, completed a major study of shamanism published in two volumes in 1938.
