“Japan cruel stories 1, flock of poor people” Miyamoto Tsuneichi (1959) Review | The history of the majority

★★★★★ Normal, majority of Japanese people were poor. And their lives where cruel to them, yes, but can we just simplify this side of history, the history of the majority. Great Anthropology.

🔽 basic info 🔽
Nihon Zankoku Monogatari 1
(Japan cruel stories 1, Flock of poor people)
Miyamoto Tsuneichi et al, 1959
日本残酷物語1 貧しき人々の群れ
宮本常一 他
Read 2025.02
(Not available in English)


🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Miyamoto is my favourite Japanese anthropologist. 
He focuses on folklores and local traditions, and he firmly believes on going to places on foot to meet the locals to learn about their local customs, of the normal people.

Normal people in Japan were poor. Many foreign travelers from 100 years ago or so all talk about how poor Japan was centuries ago. An English explorer Isabella Bird is a famous one among those.

Just over 100 years ago, majority of people in Japan suffered from poverty, living lives of thefts, killings, selling their bodies, disposing some family members (often their children of elderly) - to survive.
You might have heard of the tradition of getting rid of the elderly in the mountain, or newborns in the river "before they were considered living human of the family" the latter famously being considered incredibly cruel by Western Christians that time.
There are endless examples in this book, examples of how the poorest and weakest of the society had to survive.
In the meantime, today we love to focus on the rich and powerful like samurai, shogun and rich merchants of Edo period, and how Japan was "sophisticated".
That's not the reality, the life was cruel, people were cruel. 
But do we dismiss them only as "cruel"?
Parents who had to select which babies would survive, did they have a choice?
What did the government do while the rich had their sophisticated lives?
The sad history of villages attaching trading ships or another village to eat, were they merely cruel?

In one chapter they specifically talk about female.
Female are always the victim, especially when the time is hard.
Female were considered impure and inferior. They were always fighting, in society, in family, with elder female members. 
How dare they give birth to more mouths to feed, it's the female's responsibility and "fault" how insane.
A chapter on women working in the mining was also great, they carry their family, society, finance on their shoulders, and my god they were strong.

This is the kind of history we should learn at school, this is the real history of Japan.

🔽 Where to buy 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

日本残酷物語〈1〉貧しき人々のむれ (平凡社ライブラリー) Paperback Bunko

Amazon.co.uk (UK)
日本残酷物語〈1〉貧しき人々のむれ (平凡社ライブラリー) Paperback Bunko

Amazon.it (Italy)
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