Suye Mura: Ninety Years of a Japanese Village, its Residents, and its Researchers
Introduction
Ninety years ago, in the fall of 1935, a young American anthropologist began the first ever extended fieldwork in a Japanese village. Suye Mura was the name of the village and the title of his monograph. Quite unexpectedly, among the 300 or so subsequent ethnographies about Japanese society, this book has had the most complex afterlife, especially in Suye Mura itself. This symposium brings together four scholars of rural Japan to explore why the book has remained so useful and so inspirational, even after academic anthropologists themselves moved on to other topics and themes.
Schedule
| 12:00pm - 1:00pm | Lunch |
| 1:00pm - 1:05pm | Opening Remarks |
| 1:05pm - 1:30pm | “90 Years of Suye Mura—the Village and the Monograph” 須恵村の９０年: その村とエスノグラフィー William W. Kelly, Yale University |
| 1:30pm - 2:00pm | "Cooperation in Suye Mura, from the Embrees to the Present" 須恵村の協同：エンブリー夫妻から現代まで Tanaka Kazuhiko, Journalist and Independent Scholar |
| 2:00pm - 2:30pm | "Book Studies, Field Studies: Lessons in Ethnography from Long-Term Engagements with Sue and Aso, Kumamoto" 資料研究と現地調査：須恵村と阿蘇市の長期追究のエスノグラフィーを学んで Wolfram Manzenreiter, University of Vienna |
| 2:30pm - 3:00pm | Foreigner and Farmer in 1930s Rural Japan: John Embree’s Academic Ethnography and Yoshida Saburō’s Auto-ethnography” 1930s 日本農村社会における外人研究者と現地の生活者：そのエスノグラフィーの比較 Donald C. Wood, Akita University Graduate School of Medicine |
| 3:00pm - 3:30pm | “Why Cooperation? Reimagining Rural Social Life” 協同とは何か？農村社会を再考する William W. Kelly, Yale University |
| 3:30pm - 4:00pm | Responses from Yale Japan Scholars Dani Botsman, Department of History Shoko Yamada, Department of Anthropology |
| 4:00pm - 4:15pm | Coffee Break |
| 4:15pm - 5:15pm | Open Discussion |
| 5:30pm - 7:00pm | Reception |
Suye Mura Collections
To learn more about the lives and afterlives of research on Suye Mura, visit the Yale Japanese History site. This set of pages functions as a location to share unique materials about Suye Mura, a recording of the symposium, and point towards other resources on the research and history of the village.