Diary of a Farmer at the Foot of Mt. Kanpū

Living Off the Land in Northern Japan, 1935-1936
On March 13, 1935, in a small village on the craggy Oga Peninsula in northeastern Japan, an industrious vegetable farmer named Yoshida Saburō began writing a one-year chronicle of his life and community, having received the assignment from Tokyo financier Shibusawa Keizō, a passionate folklore enthusiast and ethnological research supporter. In his diary, Yoshida reports meticulous discussions of farming and village life, providing thorough documentation of his family’s meals, daily itemized tallies of income and expenditures, plus crop and household financial data going back seven years. His coverage of folkways, customs, and superstitions give insight into traditions and faith, while illuminating his progressivism that is further highlighted by critiques of other farmers’ methods.

Yoshida reveals a microcosm populated by unsympathetic landlords, destitute tenant farmers, disenfranchised young men, vulnerable young women, and increasingly covetous villagers amidst poverty, all within a contracting economy and a growing imperialist state. Yet it is not an isolated world; the village is strongly connected to the outside at the local and regional levels, and to the state. Yoshida’s chronicle is representative of the living conditions of at least sixty percent of Japan’s population in the 1930s, shedding light on an important period in the country’s modern history—an era that was the culmination of seven decades of political and economic development, with rising rural poverty exacerbated by a clash between feudalism and capitalism. In the historical record, Yoshida himself is a rare and valuable link between the farmer of the early modern period and that of the early postwar era. His diary was published in 1938 by the Attic Museum (which was founded by Shibusawa), complete with 160 illustrations, including photographs taken by the author, before slipping into semilegendary status. This annotated and amended English version, containing more than twenty new photographs, allows the world to vicariously experience a tiny farming village in prewar Japan through Yoshida’s precise documentation.

For his translation of the diary, Donald C. Wood received the 2022–2023 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize, awarded by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University in New York.

Contributor: Donald C. Wood (Edited by)

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