Yoshihiko Amino

Amino Yoshihiko( _ja. 網野 善彦; January 22, 1928-February 27, 2004) studied under the Marxist historian Ishimoda Shō ( _ja. 石母田 正; 1912-1986), taught for several years at high school level and then served as assistant professor at Nagoya University before taking up a post at at Kanagawa University in 1980. There, with his colleague the anthropologist Miyata Noboru (Japanese: 宮田 登; 1936-2000) he ran an interdisciplinary seminar at the newly founded Institute for the Study of Japanese Folklore (日本常民文化研究所) established in 1982. An extremely prolific historian, whom William Johnston has called ‘one of the most influential historians of late twentieth-century Japan’ [cite web|last=Johnston |first=William|url= http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~rijs/pdfs/johnston.pdf |title="From Feudal Fishing Villagers to an Archipelago's Peoples::The Historiographical Journey of Amino Yoshihiko," |accessdate=April 26 |accessyear=2007 |format=PDF] .

Amino began his career researching the lifestyles of out-of-the way villagers and marginal non-urbanized Japanese. His scrupulous examination of primary sources enabled him to reconstruct the outlooks of a variety of non-agrarian peasant communities that shared little in common with the image of ‘the Japanese’ constructed by scholarship and nationalist historians. He arrived at the conclusion that medieval Japan, certainly, was not a single culturally and socially integrated state, but rather a mosaic of quite distinct societies, some of which knew nothing about the Emperor, for example. From these beginnings, he undertook, especially in the last three decades of his life, an extensive rewriting of the common orthodoxies about Japanese history and Japanese society, which had exercised a powerful hegemony over academics and their national audience since Meiji times. In this sense, he became one of the great academic deconstructors of the premises and mythology of the nihonjinron.

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