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Local Culture and Regional Images: The Case of Clay Toys in Okayama Prefecture

2009; The Human Geographical Society of Japan; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4200/jjhg.61.3_249

1883-4086

Noriyuki Okamoto,

Japanese History and Culture

Studies on local culture by geographers and other researchers have focused on the manner in which regional inhabitants have inherited and revived the local “traditions”, while many other local cultures barely survive without active practice of or distinguished involvement in the traditions within the region. In these cultures that have been forgotten at home, the locale’s “gaze” from the outside have played important roles in maintaining cultural continuance and encouraging a small number of local key inhabitants. This paper argues that the urban dilettantes’ projection of regional images onto the traditional local culture has critically influenced the revival of the local cultures and their “traditional” and nostalgic images that have been separated and isolated from real regional lives. This is discussed with special reference to the case of doro-tenjin or a clay toy representative of an ancient nobleman―Sugawara no Michizane (845-903). The disparity between the extinction of the local custom of displaying the doro-tenjin at children’s celebrations and the creation of the nostalgic images that local toy collectors and tourists find in the toys, is observed in the Mimasaka area―the northern region of Okayama Prefecture. Although the local cultures, including those associated with the clay toys, need to be maintained by the townspeople, the clay toys have lost their cultural significance in Mimasaka. However, both the craftsmen and collectors of local toys consciously adhere to the nostalgic regional images of the toys so as to find the significance of the inheritance of the tradition or the cultural value of the doro-tenjin, although their images are not necessarily the same. The case of the doro-tenjin illustrates a typical situation that prevails in Japanese local culture, i. e., the culture is not supported by active practice in the real region but by that in the imagined region.