Yoshihiko Amino: Difference between revisions

{{short description|Japanese Marxist historian and public intellectual}}

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| name = Yoshihiko Amino

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| native_name = 網野 善彦

| birth_date = {{birth date|1928|1|22}}

| birth_place = [[Yamanashi Prefecture]], Japan

| death_date = {{death date and age|2004|2|27|1928|1|22}}

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| occupation = Japanese history, folklore

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{{nihongo|'''Yoshihiko Amino'''|網野 善彦|Amino Yoshihiko|January 22, 1928 – February 27, 2004}} was a Japanese [[Marxism|Marxist]] historian and [[public intellectual]], perhaps most singularly known for his novel examination of medieval Japanese history.<ref name = "Johnston">{{cite web|last=Johnston |first=William|url= http://rijs.fas.harvard.edu/pdfs/johnston.pdf |title=From Feudal Fishing Villagers to an Archipelago's Peoples: The Historiographical Journey of Amino Yoshihiko |access-date=June 8, 2014 }}</ref> Although little of Amino's work has been published in the West, Japanese writers and historians of Japan regard Amino as one of the most important Japanese historians of the twentieth century.<ref name="Johnston"/><ref name= "Sakurai">Sakurai, Eiji. "Foreword to 'Medieval Japanese Constructions of Peace and Liberty: ''Muen'', ''Kugai'', and ''Raku''". ''International Journal of Asian Studies'' 4 (1). 2007</ref><ref name = "Souyri">Souyri, Pierre F. "Yoshihiko Amino" ''Le Monde''. Mar. 4, 2004. ''LeMonde.fr''. Retrieved Mar. 30, 2009. http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=842817&clef=ARC-TRK-NC_01 (French)</ref> Some of Amino's findings are now available in English, in a very lively and personal account of how he came to reverse many conventional ideas about Japanese history.<ref>Amino Yoshihiko, Rethinking Japanese History, translated by Alan S. Christy (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2012)</ref>

Born in [[Yamanashi Prefecture]] in 1928, Amino received a high school education in Tokyo.<ref name="Johnston"/> Amino studied under the Marxist historian [[Ishimoda Shō]] (1912–1986) at the [[University of Tokyo]], where he first became involved in both [[Marxist historiography]] and the student movement during the early postwar period.<ref name="Johnston"/> Following graduation, Amino taught for several years at the high school level, beginning his career as a university professor at [[Nagoya University]] in 1956 as an assistant professor before taking up a post at [[Kanagawa University]] in 1980 as a professor of the university's Junior College and a Kanagawa Research Fellow, exchanging a more prestigious teaching position at a national university for the opportunity to devote more energy to research and publication. There, with his colleague, the anthropologist [[Miyata Noboru]] (1936–2000), he ran an interdisciplinary seminar at the newly founded Institute for the Study of Japanese Folklore ([[:ja:日本常民文化研究所|日本常民文化研究所]]) established in 1982. Although Amino continued in his capacity as a writer until his death, he retired from both institutional teaching and research in 1998.

Amino began his career researching the lifestyles of out-of-the way villagers and marginalized non-urbanized Japanese. His scrupulous examination of primary sources enabled him to reconstruct the outlooks of a variety of non-agrarian peasant communities that shared little in common with the image of "the Japanese" constructed by scholarship and nationalist historians. He arrived at the conclusion that medieval Japan was neither a single culturally nor socially integrated state, but rather a mosaic of quite distinct societies, some of which knew nothing, for example, about the Japanese emperor. From these beginnings he undertook, especially in the last three decades of his life, an extensive rewriting of the common orthodoxies about Japanese history and Japanese society, which had exercised a powerful hegemony over academics and their national audience since the [[Meiji period]]. In this sense, he became one of the great academic deconstructors of the premises and mythology of the [[nihonjinron]].

==Legacy and influence==

<blockquote>Despite his prolific output and stature in Japan, only a handful of papers and only one book (although even that remains unpublished) by Amino have been translated in the

English language. As a leading scholar of early modern Japan once told me, everybody talks about ''Muen, kugai, raku,'' one of Amino’s most important books, but few have read it. For the most part, one could say the same about much of his work.At least two reasons for this arise from Amino’s work itself. One is that much of it has a highly specialized focus on medieval Japan, and another is the context in which his work is read. Many of his essays and monographs focus like a micro laser on the minutiae of landholding patterns, forms of taxation, local power relations, changes in legal codes, the reading and interpretation of documents, and similar specialized topics, and as a consequence even in Japan only specialists find them compelling reading. And while much of his later work is compelling to a large segment of the Japanese reading public, it is less so to a general audience outside Japan. This is especially true for his work on issues concerning Japanese ethnic origins, the tennø, rice cultivation and consumption, geography, and other topics... Finally, although much of his work would certainly be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese history outside Japan, the shortage of translations remains an obstacle.</blockquote>

As mentioned above, a very readable account of some of Amino's major findings is now available in English.

*2001: "Commerce and finance in the Middle Ages: The beginnings of ‘capitalism’". ''Acta Asiatica'' 81: 1–19.

*1996: "Emperor, Rice, and Commoners". In Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds. ''Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern''. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 235–245

*1992: "Deconstructing 'Japan'". ''East Asian History'' 3: 121–142. Translated by Gavan McCormack, [http://www.eastasianhistory.net/sites/default/files/article-content/03/EAH03_05.pdf pdf available]

*1983: "Some problems concerning the history of popular life in medieval Japan". ''Acta Asiatica'' 44: 77–97.

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[[Category:1928 births]]

[[Category:20th-century Japanese historians]]

[[Category:Deaths from lung cancer in Japan]]

[[Category:Japanese ethnologists]]

[[Category:Japanese Marxists]]

[[Category:Japanese medievalists]]

[[Category:Academic staff of Kanagawa University]]

[[Category:Academic staff of Nagoya University]]