ABSTRACT
Yanagita Kunio is widely known as the founder of folklore studies in Japan, and his achievement in presenting a systematic framework for the discipline is highly valued amongst academic writings. Many scholars of intellectual history identify Yanagita as the first intellectual to question the measures taken in the process of Japan’s modernization through the analysis of the innate orientation of Japanese people, and point to him as a critic of the entire system of the Meiji establishment. Yanagita’s theory of agro-politics was largely developed in the early 1900s when he was serving in the Department of Law. Yanagita’s theory of national economy centres on a belief in the parallel development of agriculture, industry and commerce. One may argue that Yanagita’s agro-politics contained an extensive rationalization programme which had the potential to reconstruct the whole economic structure of the Meiji period.
