A Postcolonial Study of Comparative Culture on the Humans and Environments in the Pacific World

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02461
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Literature in general
• Research Institution: Ritsumeikan University
• Principal Investigator: Sudo Naoto 立命館大学, 文学部, 教授 (60411138)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 先住民 / ポストコロニアル / ポストヒューマン / 山人 / 海民 / 孤島 / キリスト教

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio argued that under the widespread impacts of rice farming, Buddhism, and the Yamato Imperial Government, there ought to have been some indigenous people who hid themselves deep in the mountains. These yamahito people were created in the “isolated-island suffering” of the Pacific Archipelagoes (including the Japanese chain of islands), where the seas forcibly prevent people from getting out. The yamahito people, Yanagita conjectured, had been still alive. Actually they could not be found out, but we can find them in contemporary Japanese literary and cultural texts, even in the forms of non-human entities such as gods, monsters, spirits, animals, and plants, as well as those of genetic human minds and souls. I delved into novels by Mori Ogai, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Miyazawa Kenji, Sakaguchi Ango, Nakajima Atsushi, Niimi Nankichi, and Endo Shusaku; manga by Mizuki Shigeru and Tezuka Osamu; and anime by Masaoka Kenzo and Miyazaki Hayao.

Free Research Field

比較文学比較文化

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

稲作・仏教・大和政権以前の「先住民」は従来歴史学で扱われ、近年の縄文文化への注目や「縄文人と弥生人」といった形で一般的に関心が持たれてきた問題である。本研究はこの問題を近現代文学・文化研究に取り込み、文学研究と柳田国男（民俗学）を接続して新しいテクスト解釈を試みた。本研究が諸テクストから抽出した、逃亡が難しい孤島の先住民が外来の政治・宗教・テクノロジーに対して取る態度―恭順・帰順・面従腹背・殉死―や、人間以外の存在―自然・動植物・霊・神・妖怪―との協同関係は、ポストコロニアル論・ポストヒューマン論の重要な論点であり、環境・AI問題における現代人の想像力の問題と繋がる。