, also known as , was a

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

ethnologist Ethnology (from the , meaning 'nation') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). Scien ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

folklorist Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in the UK) is the academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the ac ...

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while other ...

, and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

. As a disciple of

Kunio Yanagita was a Japanese author, scholar, and Folklore studies, 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 e ...

, he established an original academic field named , which is a mixture of Japanese folklore, Japanese classics, and

Shintō , also called Shintoism, is a religion originating in Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, it is often regarded by its practitioners as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes ...

. He produced many works in a diversity of fields covering the history of literature, folkloric performing arts, folklore itself,

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

, the classics study, Shintōology, ancient study, and so on.

Yukio Mishima Kimitake Hiraoka ( , ''Hiraoka Kimitake''; 14 January 192525 November 1970), known by his pen name Yukio Mishima ( , ''Mishima Yukio''), was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, Ultranationalism (Japan), ultranationalis ...

once called him the "Japanese

Walter Pater Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, Art critic, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, ''Studies in the History of t ...

Biography

Orikuchi was born in the former Nishinari,

Ōsaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third-most populous city in Japan, following the special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population ...

(now part of

Naniwa-ku, Osaka is one of 24 wards of Japan, wards of Osaka, Japan. It has an area of 4.37 km2, and a population of 51,567. General information Largely a residential area itself, Naniwa-ku is adjacent to and has in recent years blurred into the Namba ...

). After graduating with a degree in

Japanese literature Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or , a Chinese-Japa ...

from

Kokugakuin University Kokugakuin University , abbreviated as ''Kokugakudai'' () or ''Kokudai'' (), is a Shinto-affiliated private research university in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. The university consists of undergraduate departments in humanities and social sciences and ...

in 1910, he started to teach

and Chinese classics at junior high schools. In 1919, he was employed as a part-time instructor in Kokugakuin University. In 1922, he was promoted to professor. In 1924, he was hired as a professor at

Keio University , abbreviated as or , is a private university, private research university located in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It was originally established as a school for Rangaku, Western studies in 1858 in Edo. It was granted university status in 1920, becomi ...

as well; afterward, he taught at two different universities until he died. As a poet, he and Kitahara Hakushu established a

tanka is a genre of classical Japanese poetry and one of the major genres of Japanese literature. Etymology Originally, in the time of the influential poetry anthology (latter half of the eighth century AD), the term ''tanka'' was used to disti ...

magazine called ''Nikkō'' ("Sunshine") in 1924. In 1925, he published , his first tanka book, which is highly esteemed. In 1934, he received a

doctorate A doctorate (from Latin ''doctor'', meaning "teacher") or doctoral degree is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism '' licentia docendi'' ("licence to teach ...

for his study on the ''

Man'yōshū The is the oldest extant collection of Japanese (poetry in Classical Japanese), compiled sometime after AD 759 during the Nara period. The anthology is one of the most revered of Japan's poetic compilations. The compiler, or the last in ...

''. He also established the . As a folklorist, Yanagita was known for rejecting every sexual subject; Orikuchi, in contrast, was very open-minded to these matters. He became a model for the protagonist in Mishima's short story , while his novel ''Shisha no Sho'' was the basis for a

film A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

by Kihachiro Kawamoto.

Personal life

Orikuchi was a homosexual ( nanshokuka). Harumi Orikuchi ( 折口春洋), scholar of Japanese literature and poet, was his de facto partner. Harumi died in

Battle of Iwo Jima The was a major battle in which the United States Marine Corps (USMC) and United States Navy (USN) landed on and eventually captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) during World War II. The American invasion, desi ...

Major works

* – Tanka book * – Tanka book * – Novel, translated into English in 2016 by Jeffrey Angles () * – Treatise on folklore and literature in ancient Japan * –

Kabuki is a classical form of Theatre of Japan, Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with Japanese traditional dance, traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes ...

review

Sources

* 加藤守雄『わが師折口信夫』朝日新聞社(1967) * 諏訪春雄『折口信夫を読み直す』講談社現代新書(1994) * 山折哲雄、穂積生萩『執深くあれ折口信夫のエロス』小学館(1997) * 富岡多恵子『釈迢空ノート』岩波書店(2000) * 安藤礼二『神々の闘争折口信夫論』講談社(2004)

External links

*
Orikuchi Shinobu
in the Encyclopedia of Shinto.

References