Journal of East Asian Cultures

Vol. 17 No. 2 (2025)
Articles

Folk culture as part of collective identity in Japan

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  • Mária Ildikó Farkas
Mária Ildikó Farkas
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38144/TKT.2025.2.4

Published 2025-07-01

Keywords

  • furusato,
  • kokugaku,
  • Hirata Atsutane,
  • cultural identity,
  • Japanese folk culture

How to Cite

Farkas, M. I. (2025). Folk culture as part of collective identity in Japan. Journal of East Asian Cultures, 17(2), 109–128. https://doi.org/10.38144/TKT.2025.2.4
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The concept of furusato (a nostalgic feeling for an idyllic rural home) is still an important part of modern Japanese cultural identity, even though its image is linked to traditional folk culture. The idea is usually interpreted in the context of the Meiji modernisation period that took place at the end of the 19th century, although the origins of the importance of folk culture go back to the early 19th century formation of collective identity. In the Edo period, the cultural movement of kokugaku aimed at searching for the ‘original culture’ of Japan by studying ancient Japanese language, literature, myths, and history. ‘Culture’ as the common attribute of the community and ‘language’ as the primary bearer of collective identity played important parts in this process. The importance of the language of the common people also emerged; thus folk culture became included in discourses of identity, mainly in Hirata Atsutane’s works. During the period of modernisation in the 19th century, folk culture seemed to embody the original Japanese culture and tradition and became an important part of the Japanese identity, which can also be compared to the modernisation and identity discourses in East Central Europe at that time. The idea that the peasantry was untouched by modernisation was a widespread view in the 19th century; however, it gained a significant role only where modernisation was perceived as a foreign influence and/ or pressure by society. In order to protect their own culture, communities often turned to rural, agricultural traditions when defining their cultural heritage. In addition to the modernisation context, the issue of folk culture as one of the most important foundations of collective identity can be linked to a long-standing theoretical debate on national development and the formation of national consciousness. Besides global modernisation and identity issues, this question can also be examined and interpreted in the context of the ‘cultural concept of nations’. This approach may provide an explanation to the long-standing tradition of folk culture in Japan today, manifested among other things in the idea of furusato.

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