On the nature of tradition: The Japanese notion of furusato and a historical quest for place

ABSTRACT

The notion of ‘tradition' still haunts anthropological discourse as something to be addressed with great scepticism and suspicion. Anthropologists are usually among the first to highlight the supposed impetus for reification that inhabits the idea of tradition, as well as its nationalistic, ideological, or political functions. Taking as a point of departure the Japanese notion of furusato (‘hometown', ‘native place') and its interpretation as an ‘invented tradition’, this paper attempts to look beyond the surface of these kind of functionalist evaluations and invites anthropologists to consider instead the mode of being and coming to be of tradition in human worlds; in other words, not the truth about tradition but the truth of tradition. Our understanding of tradition will be enhanced – this paper proposes – if we see it not as the 'thing' transmitted, but as the horizon of intelligibility disclosed and set in motion by that which is transmitted.

KEYWORDS:

• Tradition
• furusato
• place
• human historicity
• hermeneutics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note that although Hobsbawm and Ranger focus on the idea that an invented tradition’s characteristic is that its “reference to a historic past” draws on a forced or artificial continuity, they also acknowledge that most of the times an invented tradition is constructed from the “elaborate language of symbolic practice and communication” accumulated in the past of any society (1983, 6–7).

2 Keesing’s paper started an intense debate on the “politics of tradition” in the region of Melanesia (see Otto and Pedersen 2006, 16–19).

3 Zukuri is the nominalisation of the verb tsukuru (to construct, to make). When used as a suffix it means ‘the constructing of’ or ‘the making of’. Thus, in this case, furusato-zukuri is usually translated as ‘native place-making’.

4 For a more detailed account of how the affection and nostalgia for a place is usually a consequence of progress as “temporal progression but also [as] spatial expansion”, see Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001).

5 An excellent exception is a compilation of essays dealing with the notion of furusato and its existential dimension as 'home', exploring, within the different domains of history, art, society and the self, the meaningful potentialities of this important notion for Japanese society and culture (Craig, Fongaro, and Tollini 2020).

6 In the history of Western philosophy, the treatment of the symbolic dimension of language and culture, although not formulated exactly in terms of the ‘symbolic’, always tended to collapse into epistemological questions: i.e. the correspondence between 'symbol' and 'reality,' or between 'representation' and 'represented’. Thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, or Locke, notwithstanding their obvious differences, contributed in one way or another to the devaluation of the 'symbolic'. Because they considered common sense, tradition, language or culture as mirrors, or mediators, that humans interpose between themselves and reality, they were tempted to examine and question their ability to deliver that same reality in a trustworthy form. Carl Hamburg (1956, chap. 1) makes a brief but insightful overview of this issue by retrospectively applying Ernst Cassirer’s idea of ‘symbolic forms’ to philosophers of the Western tradition.

7 Despite the different theoretical and methodological perspectives under debate in the early stages of its development, historicism is considered here as a "programme" (Beiser 2007; see also 2011) designed to defend a scientific status for the study of history, allowing it to maintain the same epistemological value as that of the natural sciences, albeit with its own purposes and methods. Common to the various authors that we can associate with the historicist programme is the concern with providing scientific autonomy to the study of history, freeing it from philosophy and from explanatory tenets of a metaphysical or naturalistic character. The debate taking place within the historicist "programme" was also at the origin of another debate over the methodological and scientific criteria in the wider domain of the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften.

8 Odenstedt (2017) develops a detailed summary of Gadamer’s analysis of the connection between historicism, genetic inquiry and the decline of tradition.

9 Famous examples include: the reference to Naniwa Bay to evoke a landscape of reeds; the city of Akashi to evoke the autumn moon; Yoshino and Shiga for the cherry blossoms; or Mount Tatsuta to evoke the atmosphere of autumn leaves.

10 The devising of a “secondary nature” is not only a characteristic of the classical period but also plays an influential role on the understanding of time and space throughout Japanese history at least until the pre-modern period (Shirane 2012, 4, 9).

11 Parallel contemporary examples of this strong connection with places can be found in the notion of satoyama (‘mountain villages’), which carries an affective meaning close to that of furusato but is mostly concerned with the sustainable relationship between humans and the environment (Knight 2010; Takeuchi et al. 2003); and the notion of machi-zukuri (‘community-making’) which designates communitarian initiatives undertaken across all Japan in order to implement small-scale changes in local areas (Sorensen and Funck 2007; Sorensen, Koizumi, and Miyamoto 2009).

12 Although outside of this paper’s scope, one can argue that this concern with place as a ground for being took a more philosophical, figurative dimension in the thought of two of the main philosophers in modern Japan, Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945) and Watsuji Tetsurō (1889-1960). Both give clear topological outlines to their philosophies in order to account for a relationship between ‘self’ and ‘world’ that is not solipsistic or subjective. Nishida grounds that experience in a ‘field’, basho 場所 (literally, ‘place’), which first envelops and unites subject and object (see Kopf 2003; Krummer and Shigenori 2012); Watsuji examines such relationship in terms of that which a given geological and cultural environment, fūdo 風土 (translated as milieu) affords to the individuals inhabiting it (see Berque 2004; Johnson 2016).