Modern Japan History Lecture Series – Unfinished Business: Experimentation and Social Science at the Attic Museum

The historiography of Japanese native ethnography (民俗学), in both Japanese and English, attributes the central role in the discipline’s formation to Yanagita Kunio (with an honorable mention to Orikuchi Shinobu). Professor Christy’s talk considers the work of a less well-known, yet arguably as influential, group of ethnographic researchers who called themselves the Attic Museum. Headed by Shibusawa Keizô, the grandson of Shibusawa Eiichi, the Attic Museum was best known for pioneering the ethnological study of Japanese material culture, which they dubbed “mingu” (民具). In a discipline devoted to excavating the spiritual core of Japanese culture and the means of its transmission and dissemination, the study of material culture was viewed by many as of secondary value compared to the examination of beliefs and language. Yet in a number of audacious methodological experiments, the Attic Museum challenged core assumptions of the field, including those related to its proper objects, practices, producers and presentations. I will introduce four experiments: 1) the Mingu mondôshû, a collaboratively authored guide to “folk implements”; 2) the Ashinaka Project, a multi-media attempt to reconstruct the breadth of Japanese culture through a particular kind of straw sandal; 3) the Attic Museum film series, approximately 30 films documenting their fieldwork practices and 4) the Ebiki Project, an attempt to create a pictorial dictionary of the Japanese past. While each of these was ultimately abandoned, emerging practices in today’s digital humanities can help us reassess the significance of these experiments. Ultimately, Christy believes that reexamination of their “failures” can provoke us to reconsider the materiality of academic production, then and now.

Alan Christy received his Ph.D. from the History Department at the University of Chicago in 1997, where he studied with Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita and William Sibley. Prior to completing his degree, he worked with Amino Yoshihiko at the Jômin bunka kenkyûjo at Kanagawa University from 1991 to 1995, where he participated in his Tokikuni-ke seminar. In 1995, Professor Christy began teaching in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 2004 to 2006, he was a visiting professor at the Cultural Resources Studies Program (Bunka shigengaku kenkyûshitsu) at the University of Tokyo, where he taught classes on Japanese ethnography and war memory. He currently is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative at UC-Santa Cruz. In 2012, Professor Christy has two books coming out: one is a study of the formation of Japanese minzokugaku (native ethnography) as a discipline to be published by Rowman and Littlefield, and the other is a translation of two books by Amino Yoshihiko, titled Rethinking Japanese History, to be published by the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Christy’s research interests include Japanese ethnography, Okinawa and war memory.