Kunio Yanagita (柳田 國男, Yanagita Kunio, July 31, 1875 – August 8, 1962) was a Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist. He began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions. This led to a change in his career. His pursuit of this led to his eventual establishment of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku, as an academic field in Japan. As a result, he is often considered to be the father of modern Japanese folklore studies. Early life Yanagita was born as the fifth child of the Matsuoka family in the town of Fukusaki, located in Hyōgo Prefecture. He was born with the name Kunio Matsuoka (or Matsuoka Kunio in the Japanese manner of naming), but was adopted into the family of a court justice named Naohei Yanagita. At the time, it was fairly common practice for families without a son to adopt a young boy or man into the family to inherit the family’s property. This would often occur through marriage, with the adopting family marrying a daughter of the family off to their chosen heir as a way of binding him to the family. In this particular case, a match was made between the future folklorist and Naohei’s daughter, Taka. The two were wed in 1901, and his name was changed to Kunio Yanagita. Yanagita was known from a fairly young age for his interest in literature, particularly that of poetry. He also was a fan of Western literature. As he began to take an interest in folklore, Yanagita began reading ethnologies by Western anthropologists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor, shaping his later work. Career After graduating with a degree in law from Tokyo Imperial University, Yanagita began a career as a civil servant, working for the Department of Agricultural Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, that would last for about 20 years. Over the course of his time in bureaucracy, duties, Yanagita traveled around the countrysides of Honshū, the mainland of Japan. During these business trips, Yanagita became increasingly focused on the affairs of rural villages and their agricultural economic policy. As time passed, Yanagita began growing increasingly critical of the lack of concern for local autonomy allowed by the policies favored by his fellow civil servants. He gradually began to advocate in support of these groups, pushing for a shift in agricultural focus to center around cooperatives