Mountain Folklore and Japanese Insularity

Psychic Taboo of the Outside

Traveling throughout various regions of Japan, one often encounters folk tales specific to this mountainous country known as “tales of mountain folk [山人譚].” The massive archives of these folk tales, which folklorists have spent roughly a century collecting from every corner of the land, have always captivated my heart, and I have continued my own independent inquiry into this point as well. It is a strange sensation, but when I step into the mountainous areas inspired by these tales of mountain folk, I sometimes feel a peculiar disturbance where the experience expands into the total image of contemporary Japan. It is difficult to divine where this sense of incongruity originates, but I will examine its form here as a single deduction. The reason I consider such things is that I constantly view it as a problem that the general view common both domestically and abroad that “Japan is an island nation” is significantly distorted from the truth. Personally, I have realized through my research trips that if we do not think by simultaneously holding the reverse image of “an island nation opened to the sea” rather than speaking of Japan only through the insular image of “an island nation closed by the sea,” we cannot grasp the deep layers.

To simplify it most basically, the character of an island nation is such that a one-way perspective is impossible. From the perspective of those with a continental sense or those who have settled on an island for a long time, an island nation separated by the sea is directly linked to being closed. However, in the case of Japan, in the history following the establishment of the Meiji government after the revolution of 1868, a national movement to secure their own legitimacy as an existence bearing a new era took the form of a total negation of the Edo period, and this was developed arbitrarily by the people of the new government. At this time, they cited Western academic thought that had just begun to flow in while completely ignoring the indigenous form of Japan, forming an extremely arbitrary logic. A typical example is the fabrication of a dualistic structure of opposition, contrasting “Edo period equals national isolation and feudalism” against “Meiji period equals opening of the country and liberalism.” This structure based on the dualism derived from the Meiji government is in fact still unconsciously deployed within the gaze of people both inside and outside the country who observe Japan.

As a result, the real image of the Edo period was unilaterally excluded and has become greatly distorted. When the premise was created that the form of the Edo period was a system by the evil feudalistic and tyrannical Tokugawa shogunate family and that a closed country called “Sakoku” continued for three hundred years, it was flattened into an easy to understand narrative where the savior who opened this closed world begins with the arrival of the Black Ships. However, we can discuss from multiple angles that this is not the fact. Nevertheless, I will leave that aside for now and focus on the fact that the characteristic of Japan that can be described as “being closed” is occurring with considerable intensity even now. That is the passport possession rate.

It is a known fact that the Japanese passport has world-leading benefits, yet the passport possession rate of Japanese people is strengthening a significant downward trend when viewed over the medium to long term. In materials released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in February last year, it is presented that the cumulative total of valid passports as of the end of 2024 is 21.64 million, and the possession rate is 17.5%. Since the total population in the same year is about 123.8 million, this amounts to roughly 21.66 million people. Looking at this broadly, it means that only one in six citizens has a passport, and this can be interpreted as the current status where the very sense of looking “outside” from Japan is being lost, or as a state of indifference. Actually, even recalling the past year, as far as I remember, there has not been a single movement within Japan that links with the various problems occurring around the world. I feel this appears as an attitude that no matter what happens in Gaza, no matter what happens in Ukraine, or no matter what becomes of the Taiwan issue, events outside of themselves are of no concern. Of course, this does not mean in a short-sighted way that we should hold demonstrations, but it seems to be a fact that this is clearly divergent from and reversed to the movements of Gen Z in Japan compared to the movements of Gen Z who try to participate in the world’s various problems in some form.

However, a world that has once passed through globalization, even if it is heading toward a reversing movement as it is now, is no longer in a dimension where problems can be dealt with by a single country alone. This can be called the inconvenient form of the world that the pandemic exposed, but at the very least, as everyone faces, we are forced to live in a compressed space-time where we must think synchronically about problems that have occurred in a certain region. Regarding this problem, everyone living in the world today should have to confront it in their respective lives, but conversely, Japan is excessively strengthening only this closed tendency and is completely isolated from the tides of the world. If Japanese people were to utilize the merit of Japan having a strong passport, they would be granted the opportunity to enter the most countries in the world and gain experiences, and the opportunity to enrich their wisdom and so forth would be unconditionally bestowed upon them. In other words, it is the Japanese who could stand at the forefront of the digital nomads that are rising as a current tide and who should be able to stand at the head of confronting the world’s various problems, but the actual trend is reversed, and a strange gap becomes visible where extremely few people are executing this. This phenomenon has been discussed in various ways until now, but I believe that the tales of mountain folk in folklore tradition will serve as a reference as one way of thinking.