Community Life: Folklores Customs and Japanese Culture

community life: It is not surprising that this nationalism would find a new home in a rapidly industrializing Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to The Japan Times. Folklorists and scholars like Lafcadio Hearn and Kunio Yanagita helped popularize the idea of an authentic Japanese culture grounded in its regional communities, folklores and customs. As industrialization upended community life and social relations, the romantics popularized the ideal that the true, authentic character of a people as a nation lay in the old, endangered ways of life in its regional communities. ; Yet it fell to cosmopolitan scholars and antiquarians to do what inarticulate rustics could not do curate and repackage their folk customs and lores, marketing them to readers eager to participate as consumers in this authentic, nostalgic ideal of nationhood. Still, there has always been a certain political ambivalence in this ideal of nostalgic national belonging. It can also be manifested harmlessly in a cultural nationalism that creates a refuge from the deracinating effects of globalization and individualization, through the preservation and promotion of regional lifestyles, cultures and cuisines. In the wrong hands it can be co-opted into ideologies of nationhood that are anti-liberal, racist and militarist and that is what eventually happened in Germany and Japan in the 1930s. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.