| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Hirao Rosen is known a representative painter from the Tsunami region ; in this study, however, I wish to examine his achievements as a nativist thinker (kokugakusha) and as a student of folklore. My attempt will to be place Hirao in the landscape of Japanese intellectual history. Beginning with Tsuruya Airyo, there are many disciple of Hirata Kanetane, the successor to Hirata Atsutane, in the Tsugaru region including Imamura Mitane, Iwama Shitataru, Mitsuya Otari, Masuda Kotaro, Ueda Heikichi, Takeda Seijiro, Sasaki Awaji, Ono Wakasa, and Sasaki Kensaku. These people constituted a group of Tsugaku Nativist scholars. Though an examination of his collected letters and other documentary sources, I show that Hirao Rosen was an key member of this group. Moreover, I attempt to clarify biographical details about his life. I analyzied one of his major works, Yufu Shinron which I see to be deeply influenced by Hirata Atsutane's discourse on the supernatural. The work tales note of the extensive ancient and contemporary research done on the supernatural both in China and Japan and presents empirical evidence in an attempt to prove the existence of "spirits, " "demons, " and "souls. " Hirao realized that local religious sentiments had deep roots and he attempted to bring these religious beliefs to the surface and give expression to them in his scholarship and thought. Through Rosen's intellectual endeavors, we can bring fresh light to bear on existing approaches to the study of Hirata Atsutane and his nativism. To date, most scholarship on Hirata has tended to con concentrate on his nationalistic thought or how he contributed to the development of kokutai ideology. However, it can also be shown that Hirata's thought served as a stepping-stone toward the folklore studies of Yanagida Kunio in the Meiji period and that the genealogy of folklore studies has nativist roots.
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