I was lucky to have to read these two books back-to-back for this joint review. Joined in their respective treatment of the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), one of twentieth-century Japan's most important and influential scholars of Japanese culture, they are nonetheless very different books that are ultimately complementary, best read together for a whole that forms more than two halves. Alan Christy's wide-ranging history of minzokugaku (folk studies; native ethnology) takes Yanagita as only one—but a big one—of many people responsible for the founding and flourishing of minzokugaku, while Melek Ortabasi's focus on Yanagita offers close readings that delve deeply into key texts from his massive oeuvre in fresh and provocative ways.

Reading them in their order of publication (which I strongly recommend), I initially presumed that Ortabasi's The Undiscovered Country would be eclipsed by the scope and brilliance of Christy's A Discipline on Foot, but I was pleasantly mistaken. Both books shine like binary stars casting together greater light on Yanagita in particular and minzokugaku in general than previous Anglophone scholarship—my own included—that present minzokugaku in contexts narrower than Christy's or read Yanagita's texts with less literary rigor than Ortabasi's. In short, this pair offers a welcomed broadening and deepening of scholarship on a vital strand of modern theories and practices of Japanese culture.

The thoroughgoing tracing of the biographical and textual networks that Christy meticulously lays out as formative for minzokugaku puts to rest any notion that Yanagita was its sole founder and proprietor. Christy puts Yanagita in his place and time among two other primary figures in minzokugaku, Origuchi Shinobu and Shibusawa Keizō; several under-appreciated secondary figures such as Hayakawa Kōtarō and Miyamoto Tsuneichi; a few affiliated figures such as Minakata Kumagusu, Kon Wajirō, and Yanagi Sōetsu; and many unheralded minzokugaku practitioners and informants. In so doing, Christy renders Yanagita human among humans and demonstrates a multitude of contingencies in the development of minzokugaku.

If this achievement were the lone accomplishment of A Discipline on Foot it would suffice for the accolades the book deserves. Despite their insights into Yanagita's theory and practice of minzokugaku, previous scholars have tended to reduce the whole of minzokugaku to a few of Yanagita's texts, typically the collection of retold folktales, Tōno monogatari (Tales of Tōno, 1910) and the theoretical treatises Minkan denshōron (A study of popular oral transmission, 1934), and Kyōdo seikatsu no kenkyū hō (Methods for researching everyday native place life, 1935). That focus had perpetuated the legend of Yanagita as the solitary founder and driving force of the field. Christy corrects this shortsightedness by detailing how the legend as such was formed and, more importantly, by diving deeply into the personalities, associations, and practical considerations in defining, doing, and promoting a Japanese native ethnology.

While biographies are unfashionable in some quarters these days, the biographical vignettes Christy provides at the onset and then sprinkles throughout the book are crucial as context for the complex and nuanced story he tells. Rather than a set of fully formed and disembodied texts attributed to a single domineering author, minzokugaku comes alive as an ongoing process, full of false starts, competitive personalities, and variations in theory and practice even as Yanagita became enshrined by his followers as the genius founder of the proper minzokugaku upon the celebration of his sixtieth birthday in 1935. The actual history—empirical and intellectual—that Christy relates is as engaging as it is enlightening and complements his deft analyses of minzokugaku’s canonical and not-so-canonical texts. The field, as Christy relates it, is peopled, potholed, and often dirty.

Christy begins this ten-chapter book with Yanagita's biography and ends with an assessment of Yanagita's scholarship, but throughout it is Shibusawa Keizō and his “Attic Museum” for ethnological research that emerges as the soul of and source of everyday support for minzokugaku. Shibusawa's family wealth, wide connections, scholarly aspirations, and philanthropic disposition arguably provided the possibility and the practical means for minzokugaku’s development. Christy's subtitle is Inventing Japanese Native Ethnology, 1910–1945, but perhaps “inventing” is too abstract and “manufacturing” is better suited to suggest the day-to-day handwork that accompanied the footwork—the traveling—that characterized the practice of minzokugaku. The deeply textured sense of minzokugaku’s materiality in its many forms—the exertion of travel, the recording of informants, the indexing of samples, the writing of articles and books, the process of publishing, the gathering of practitioners, and the money needed to sustain it all—comes across clearly in Christy's smoothly written narrative and is one of its many strengths. Relativizing Yanagita's role in the invention and manufacture of minzokugaku comes not from discounting Yanagita, but rather from counting—fully and often for the first time—all of those others who made Yanagita's work possible and durable. Shibusawa counts high in this reckoning for obvious reasons, but lesser-known underdogs and unsung heroes—sometimes employed and sometimes exploited by Yanagita—share due credit in the history of minzokugaku that Christy so diligently excavates.

If A Discipline on Foot is the first book anyone who is interested in Japanese folk studies should read—and I believe it is—then The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio might be the second. The move from the many-peopled world of minzokugaku that Christy presents to Ortabasi's literary study of several of Yanagita's representative texts came at first as a shock to me. Learning what I had about Yanagita and company from Christy's expansive work and then met with a book focused on a handful of texts by the sole author-figure of Yanagita initially felt retrogressive. Had not Christy forever disabused us of this kind of approach to Yanagita's work? Yes, but not when you have something novel and compelling to say about Yanagita's work, and Ortabasi goes beyond the narrow contexts of minzokugaku. Her smartly conceived thesis and a well-crafted argument centers on the concept of “translation,” the key word in her book's subtitle. She structures the book around a set of mostly canonical texts from Yanagita's oeuvre, each of the five chapters having one as its primary focus.

“Translation” as Ortabasi broadly conceives it serves as the interpretive framework for each chapter's distinct context: literary authorship (“translating orality”), travelogue (“translating landscape”), folk studies (“scholarship as self-translation”), dialect and standard language (“translating everyday experience”), and standardized education (“translating folk studies for children”). This heuristic works more naturally in some contexts (orality, travelogue, and language) than others (folk studies and education), but never feels forced as an organizing principle. It makes sense and yields insights. And it goes beyond being a slick and convenient way to dice up and categorize various modes of Yanagita's writing. It serves to characterize Yanagita's general modus operandi; to refine its characterization as hermeneutical by underscoring the translational nature of his thinking and writing; and to pull his work out of the ruts of previous readings and affiliating them with contemporary social concerns, literary trends, disciplinary debates, and even political issues on which Yanagita is typically regarded as having remained mute.

Outside of the texts Ortabasi uses to examine Yanagita's ideas about children's education, she selects some of the most well-known and well-worn for her analyses. This choice brought me some disappointment (“these again?!”) until I realized that she extends the reach and relevance of these classics in a way that is analogous to how Christy does the same for the history of minzokugaku. Ortabasi's (re)readings are accompanied by carefully considered contexts that underscore the immediate significance of Yanagita's writings and place him in underappreciated engagements with his contemporaries. Her fresh analysis of the affective power of the literary style of Yanagita's retelling of Sasaki Kizen's oral folk tales from Tōno, for example, puts him squarely among serious debates over the nature and goals of modern Japanese literature. Her treatment of Kainan shōki (South Sea notes, 1925), a text often cited as crucial in understanding Yanagita's development of minzokugaku and taken up by Christy in that context, opens up new dimensions by discussing it within the history of Japanese travel writing rather than minzokugaku. In these instances where Ortabasi and Christy take on the same texts, one appreciates fully the complementary relationship between their books. In general, Ortabasi's strengths relative to Christy's derive from her training in literature and appear most clearly in her deeper and more sustained textual analyses, particularly in her treatment of Tōno monogatari, Kainan shōki, and Kagyūkō (Thoughts on snails, 1930), while remaining anchored within meaningful historical contexts. In contrast, Christy's training in history comes through in his rich archival haul and lively, nuanced narrative of the social, cultural, and intellectual worlds surrounding minzokugaku’s formation, while punctuating that narrative with insightful explications of texts by Yanagita and many others.

The one noteworthy gripe that I have with both books is their unreflective use of the word “self” in their similar characterizations of minzokugaku as “ethnography of the self” (Christy, p. 213) and as “self-translation” (Ortabasi, pp. 98–99). I am not comfortable with their usage for three reasons. First, they both apply this slippery term ready-made, without clear definition let alone the theorization it demands in their respective usages. Second, “self”—and especially “the self” in Christy's case—suggests a single, stable psychological entity and yet it is being applied to something larger than a single psychological self and certainly something not stable: kyōdo (native place), minzoku (ethnos), cultural community, and even nation. Third, if their usage is not supposed to denote a psychological sense (mis)applied to a collective, neither adequately explains the logic and mechanism by which “self” or “the self” can be legitimately and meaningfully applied to describe the building of the discipline of minzokugaku as a translation or ethnography of (the) self. In short, this usage risks sounding like a kind of cultural essentialism incognito. Ortabasi arguably has a defensible case to make in this regard, as her treatment of Yanagita's work is more focused on Yanagita's personal thinking and its translation to texts that come to form, at least to some degree, minzokugaku as a scholarly discipline. In Christy's case, although he notes the paradox of an ethnography of the self for a practice that began as a discourse on others, I fail to see the value in risking a misunderstanding of his use of “the self” in characterizing the work of minzokugaku. His masterful presentation of minzokugaku’s historical formation and his interpretation of its aims remain just as strong without it.

There are other quibbles with both of these books that I could mention, but they would be petty in the face of what they each separately and, more impressively, collectively achieve. Christy has written a book that any serious student and teacher of modern Japanese cultural discourse must read, preferably sooner rather than later. Ortabasi's is a more specialized study, but one that ironically renders Yanagita as a less-specialized scholar, as more than the founder of minzokugaku. Taken together, this pair forms a fruitful union of historical and literary studies of shared territory that might best be dubbed “A Discipline on Foot in the Undiscovered Country.” As hawkeyed guides, Christy and Ortabasi lead us to many new discoveries in that country.