was a Japanese scholar of folklore.
Biography
He became a
communist
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...
at an early age, and was convicted under the
Peace Preservation Law
The was a Japanese law enacted on April 22, 1925, with the aim of allowing the Special Higher Police to more effectively suppress socialists and communists. In addition to criminalizing forming an association with the aim of altering the '' koku ...
in 1928 and sentenced to five years jail. During his term of incarceration, he read widely, both in the Chinese classics and Western
anthropology
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...
. On his release in 1934, he attended a lecture by the doyen of folklore studies, Yanagita Kunio, where he became acquainted with Masao Oka, Oka Masao, who had just returned from completing a degree in ethnology at Vienna University. Through Oka's offices he was introduced to, and married, a granddaughter of Yanagita's older brother. Vexations were not wholly relieved by this advantageous connection. He remained unemployed, and had to suffer monthly visits by police agents who kept him under surveillance. The impasse in his career was overcome when Oka managed to secure for him a scholarship to study abroad at his own alma mater, Vienna University.
At the late age of 34, Ishida began following lectures there from March 1937. After Adolf Hitler, Hitler's invasion and annexation of Austria, many of his teachers in ethnology, among them Father Wilhelm Schmidt (linguist), Wilhelm Schmidt, the world-famous list of linguists, linguist and anthropologist were forced into exile, and with the outbreak of World War II he himself was repatriated on the last available ship for Japanese nationals sailing from Bordeaux, the ''Kagoshima-maru''.
His expertise in ethnography was quickly turned to profitable uses on his return, and he finally received employment as member of a government organization interested in research on folk minorities in East Asia. In 1941, he surveyed the tribes of southern Sakhalin/Karafuto Prefecture, Karafuto, such as the Gilyak (Nivkh people, Nivkhs), the Ainu people, Ainu and the Oroks.
Sources
*Ishida Eiichirō, ''Momotarō no haha'' (1966), Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, Tokyo 1984 pp. 323–337
External links
''A Culture of Love and Hate''
References
Japanese communists
Japanese ethnologists
1903 births
1968 deaths
Japanese folklorists
Kyoto University alumni
{{Japan-myth-stub