Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world
16-20
July 2001 The University of Melbourne, Australia
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Traditions and Transitions folk narrative in the contemporary world |
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The Household Stories (Kinder und Hausmärchen -- KHM) of the Brothers
Grimm were introduced into Japan in 1887 with the specific purpose of being
used in education. This was an unnatural transmission process.
At that time, Japan was making every effort to catch up with the advanced
Western nations after over 200 years of self-imposed isolation. It was
generally thought that Western science and education were essential in this
process. To this end, university professors were invited from countries such as
America, England, France and Germany. From 1881, Germany in particular was
singled out, since the Japanese government believed that Prussia was a suitable
model of a modern monarchy.
In 1887, Professor Hausknecht was invited to the University of Tokyo, where he
lectured using the herbartic text. This text contained only fourteen stories
from the KHM as teaching materials for first graders. The first one was The
Wolf and the Seven Kids, which became the most frequently translated into
Japanese of all the 200 KHM in the following years.
Because of this peculiar circumstance of being imported as pedagogical texts of
the herbartian school, the KHM lost their original character, and were
understood simply as children’s stories. They were freely adapted and
re-arranged as teaching texts. However, because of their status as
representative texts of an advanced nation, the KHM rapidly spread throughout
Japan.
In spite of this distortion whereby the KHM were seen as children’s tales and
as school texts, the Grimm Brothers’ theories about the transmission of the KHM
had a strong influence on the world of Japanese children’s stories and the
research of their transmission. In this paper, I will trace this influence, by
discussing the principal collections of stories which received this influence
and previous research on them
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