Hon-zatsu Komoku 105 Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History 132 Special Feature: Contemporary Cultural Studies in Folklore

This time, it is the Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History 132, supervised by Tateo Iijima.
ASIN: B0DT4R6NSN
NDC classification is 051.
Prerequisite knowledge required (Folklore): ★★☆☆☆
I'm not sure if I should call this A3-sized book, which is thicker than a regular book, a magazine, but for now, I'll classify it as a magazine. This series is even larger and heavier than the big exhibition catalogs from regular art museums.
And there is a rather long warning this time.

↓ For some reason, issue 132 cannot be viewed at the moment (2025.8.8), but it might be available later.

This is a rough project where I use a random number generator to pick one book from the approximately 6,000 I have on hand to read, and while I'm at it, think about whether it can be used for a novel. Sometimes I choose them arbitrarily.

★ Index by Library Classification

1. Pre-reading impression: Bulletin of the National Museum of Japanese History 132

The National Museum of Japanese History, or 'Rekihaku,' is a treasure trove of folklore materials in Chiba. It is an incredible facility that should never be shut down just because it doesn't make a profit, but since it is in Sakura, it is a bit far, and I have actually never been there. Also, since you can read almost the entire text of this issue in the Rekihaku repository, I honestly don't know if it's necessary to buy it and carry it home while enduring the weight and getting a workout. It was heavy.
Also, the table of contents is printed right on the cover, but I will leave that for the next section. I'll spoil it right away, but they use good paper.
For now, let's open it up.

2. Table of Contents and Preface Check

Yes, the next section.
There is no 'introduction' per se, but the theme of this issue is 'Contemporary Cultural Studies in Folklore,' and there is an overview of the joint research, so I will read that.
In folklore studies, 'Urban Folklore' was proposed in the 1970s, and research was conducted on contemporary society and culture. However, because individual research was carried out within the existing framework of folklore, it failed without being able to be compared well. From the late 1990s, although it did not reach systematization, movements to tackle it within a broad framework under the names of 'Contemporary Folklore' and 'Social Commentary' increased. Based on these research trends, this issue attempts to systematize new 'Contemporary Folklore' research that has broken away from 'Urban Folklore' through concrete examples.
It seems to be an attempt to aim for a cross-sectional framework, but I wonder if things that are dangerous when mixed, like Buraku issues and gender, are mixed well. Hmm.
The table of contents includes: 'Toward a Folklore of <Ways of Living>,' 'Epistemological Alteration of Postwar Folklore and Substratum Culture Theory,' 'Transformation of Ghosts and Changes in Cities,' 'Two Narratives in the Field,' 'PTA as a State Apparatus,' 'Transition of Common Land Use and the Future of Villages,' 'Solving the <Gap>,' 'The Present of the Buraku Liberation Movement and the Folklore of Discriminated Buraku,' 'Images and Sound,' 'Establishment of Posthumous Portraits and Representations of the Dead in the Modern Era,' 'Institutional Changes in Petty Crimes and Strengthening of Social Control in the Meiji and Taisho Eras,' and as lecture records, 'Various Problems Surrounding <Private Culture>' and 'Folklore Movement and School Education.'
I will read 'Transformation of Ghosts and Changes in Cities,' 'Images and Sound,' 'Establishment of Posthumous Portraits and Representations of the Dead in the Modern Era,' and 'Institutional Changes in Petty Crimes and Strengthening of Social Control in the Meiji and Taisho Eras.' That's quite a lot.
As always, the first part is a summary, and the second part is my thoughts and miscellaneous impressions.

3. Contents

Regarding 'Transformation of Ghosts and Changes in Cities'

- Summary
We create an era called 'pre-modern' in our consciousness and compare it with the present, and we look at the shining era of high economic growth like a myth. The 'folklore' that Kunio Yanagita once studied has already disappeared since the high economic growth period. Ghosts have been ignored compared to yokai research, but I want to clarify contemporary feelings of the uncanny and life sensations.

I conducted interviews on Edo-period records and contemporary urban legends in Kochi City and created a map. In the pre-modern era, depending on the lifestyle, there were mountain hags and tengu in mountainous areas, and kappa, snakes, crabs, and toads in river areas. In the villages sandwiched between mountains and castle towns, yokai that tanuki and foxes transformed into appeared, and it can be seen that they were visualized according to the natural environment. On the other hand, in the town, there were no yokai, and almost everything was told as ghost stories, including haunted houses.
The difference between ghosts and yokai as told by Kunio Yanagita is not brought about by attributes, but by differences in the environment. Village life is a battle with the natural environment, but in the town, the large number of people themselves becomes the object of fear, and the spirits of the dead were spun as uncanny phenomena based on gruesome incidents caused by people. Many of the town's uncanny tales occur in walled samurai residences or the homes of wealthy merchants, and their lives were unimaginable to commoners, and the sense of secrecy of wanting to expose the inside made them tell these uncanny tales.
The next most common are uncanny tales of the unclaimed dead; many of those who came to the town seeking work became unclaimed dead without anyone to worship them and appeared as ghosts. Third, the city is a place where the desires brought about by the money economy accumulate, and the lingering attachments of those whose desires were not fulfilled appear as ghosts in their former forms. In Kochi, in the early Showa period, yokai stopped appearing in the present world, and uncanny phenomena and ghosts began to appear regardless of the place, and uncanny phenomena were considered to be caused by ghosts rather than yokai.

In urban areas, from around 1900, the modernization of the city began to grow as symbols of capital such as transportation networks and department stores appeared. This modernization of urban areas, which began in earnest around the time of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, spread to the regions. This highlights the progress of non-local urbanization that does not have regional characteristics all over the country.
Current ghosts include 'bridge, mountain pass, and tunnel types' based on the place of appearance, 'building types' such as hospitals and schools, and 'media types' such as PCs and TVs, and in recent years, media types that are not tied to a place have become mainstream.
Among the current ghosts in Kochi, the 'bridge, mountain pass, and tunnel types' appear in developed areas around the city. The inevitability of the uncanny is formed in connection with memories of accidents and past uncanny tales (like there used to be a graveyard there). 'Building types' are places associated with suspicious deaths, such as hospitals with morgues or places that used to be execution grounds or graveyards, and sometimes they are created based on backgrounds different from history. These ghost appearance locations are often places where competition is forced, such as schools and companies, and perhaps they are trying to explain comfort and discomfort with spiritual things to avoid friction in human relationships.
'Media types' are uncanny phenomena created in recent years without being related to a place. This is thought to be because the same landscape has been created nationwide, regardless of whether it is a village or a city, such as convenience stores and supermarkets, and the identity of the place has been lost. A smartphone is not just a means of communication but also contains personal connections, and losing it is synonymous with becoming the unclaimed dead of the past.
We should grasp what we have gained and lost in the modern era from a folkloric perspective.

- Impressions
While I think it is true that the loss of locality, the homogenization of the world, and self-perception have shifted from land to data, my interpretation is a little different. I agree that yokai were completely lost in the Showa period, but I think it's not because the environment became homogenized, but simply because the reality of yokai was lost due to the progress of scientific knowledge. Because the Oboroguruma, Nurarihyon, Ittan-momen, and Kejoro that should exist in the town have also disappeared.
I think the reason for the absence of yokai is simply that they cannot physically exist as living organisms. On the other hand, I think it is a fact that ghosts filled the places where yokai used to be, but even the ghosts that appear in the countryside have the appearance of urbanites in modern times. The reason why samurai ghosts appear is that it is a time close to the era when samurai could exist, and thinking about it that way, I feel that ghosts are things that appear in relation to the group of people living now. Now, maybe only ghosts from around the Pacific War occasionally appear in tunnels.

Well, media types are probably things like the Ring or Chakushin Ari series that were popular a while ago, but what's interesting recently is that 'Inshu-mura' (custom-bound villages) are popular. If ghosts are strictly individuals, I think Inshu-mura is a yokai that has revived in the folklore of the countryside. In other words, the countryside itself has become incomprehensible to current urbanites. Thinking about it that way, it feels like it has come full circle, but no matter how much science develops, just as human error will always occur, I think unknowable existences are things that cannot be wiped from people's minds, and names aside, I think yokai and ghosts are what simulate them.
Thinking about it that way, it becomes a question of what people use as a framework to perceive fear. In the past, if there were dangerous rivers or mountains, they would turn them into yokai to sound an alarm, but in the Showa period, ghosts appeared in places where there might be deaths, such as coal mines and tunnels, or deaths based on deteriorating human relationships (like bullying), and if current life foundations exist not in buildings but in remote Skype or Zoom, I thought that those areas would preemptively become themes of horror.
In that case, I suppose I have to understand what the protagonist's community feels is incomprehensible. And I don't really know what folklore is anymore. Or rather, I think this discipline is a study that explores the tendencies of people who share certain customs and habits called folklore, and if everything is homogenized, I wonder if its significance will gradually decrease.

Regarding 'Images and Sound'

- Summary
As in 'watching a movie,' movies exist primarily as things to be watched. The world on the screen is not the same as the world we live in. Nevertheless, why can we experience it with a sense of presence as if our own bodies are experiencing it directly, even though we know it is a virtual image?
This problem is often discussed from Lacan's mirror stage theory. It is said that for an infant aged 6 to 18 months to be able to recognize that the self reflected in the mirror is themselves, a process of identifying themselves with the mirror image is necessary. This identification is the identification of oneself with someone different from oneself, meaning that an external self different from oneself is necessary at the origin of self-formation. This is superficial, centering on vision.
Not limited to humans, moving creatures have an 'orientation' in their bodies themselves, and the direction the face, as its symbol, faces is the front, and the opposite is the back. The human visual world spreads perspectively forward with the human viewpoint as the axis, and the world unfolds with intentionality (perspective). People feel the intentionality of others as a gaze, and the same is true when the other party is a character on the screen, and they can feel that orientation. When 'I' make eye contact with a person, I feel 'being seen,' that is, I feel the other party's intentionality.

When opposing humans imitate each other's gestures, Hamada states that they do not imitate the other party 'as seen' but 'as done.' In other words, they naturally reset the perspective on the other party's body axis, overlap their own orientation with the other party's orientation, and perform the gesture as the other party does.
When I look at my own figure in the mirror, I feel that left and right are reversed, but optically, it is the front and back that are reversed. Hamada states that different processing is done when the person reflected in the mirror is a person versus an object. In the case of an object, if you place objects A and B from near the mirror surface and reflect them, they look like B, A, A, B across the mirror from the front of me looking at the situation. In other words, the vertical axis is reversed. If you place them in parallel as A and B, A and B are reflected on the other side of the mirror, showing that the mirror itself does not have the function of reversing left and right.
On the other hand, when a person is reflected, for example, when a person eating with chopsticks in their right hand is reflected in a mirror, it is rarely recognized that they appear to be holding them in their left hand. This is because the viewpoint is aligned with the other party, who is the subject, the viewpoint on the other side of the mirror. However, the reason why it does not look left-handed when it is oneself reflected in the mirror is that while the mirror image of another person is an image captured by the vision of the eyes, in the case of one's own body, one captures it with self-reception sensations equipped in muscles and joints, etc., simultaneously with vision. When you perform an action, the mirror image also moves, but at the same time, the sensation from your own body performing the action rises to consciousness, and the right hand is felt as the right hand.
When you see a motorcycle through the rearview mirror, you don't mistake left and right. Yoshimura says that when driving, you perceive your own body axis in the actual space, including the left and right of the car body, and the coordinate axis of the mirror image space reflected in the rearview mirror as the same, so no sense of left-right reversal occurs. The sensation of 'doing' the driving arises in the foreground, and your own orientation in the real space including the car body becomes dominant, making it difficult for front-back and left-right mistakes to occur. In this way, we place a level of 'doing' with the body simultaneously with the level of 'seeing' as a visual object, and respond according to the situation.

In a movie theater, if you immerse yourself in 'seeing' so that 'doing' other than watching the movie does not become the foreground of consciousness, the viewer's body is considered to participate in the world of 'doing' of the characters in the movie.
In other words, by 'seeing' the 'doing' of the characters, you trace what the other party's body experiences as if you are experiencing it yourself. The world of 'seeing' is established as a fictional world, and the body participates through the world of 'doing' placed behind it.
Then, how does vision distinguish between virtual images and real images? Hamada says that the meaning of successfully capturing a mirror image as a virtual image and doubling it with a real image means understanding the correspondence relationship that the mirror image is reflecting the real image, and that a symbolic relationship between what the mirror image means and what the corresponding real image means is established.
When we look at objects, we are mobilizing not only vision but also exteroceptive sensations, and when we consider 'seeing,' we cannot abstract it by separating it from the body of the subject who sees. When drawn into an image, the body pseudo-synchronizes with the character's expressions and gestures, but the body does not act toward the screen. From this, we establish a doubling of real and virtual images, capture the mirror image strictly as a virtual image, and the synchronization of the body is internalized, establishing a non-practical posture.

The world captured by hearing does not feel as objective as the world captured by vision, but it has an intermediate nature that can be self-aware as 'something separated from the self' from sounds outside the self. It has the characteristic of recurrence where if you call out to someone, the voice you emitted also enters your own ears.
Vision allows for the exchange of perspectives with others by leaving one's own body, and hearing spreads both inside and outside one's own body, but these two interact with each other. When a person is shown in a bust shot on a TV screen, even though the sound is coming from speakers at both ends, it feels like the sound is coming from the person's mouth, and the directional localization of sound is influenced by visual information and the angle between sound and image. When a contradiction occurs, a visual priority tendency is seen. Regarding spatial perception, not only vision and hearing, but the orientation of the body that perceives the postural movement sensation of which is facing forward is the coordinate system.
In the world of movies, sounds of things reflected on the screen are called on-screen sounds, and those that are not are called off-screen sounds. In other words, sounds outside of vision also enter the ears and become natural sound as information. In the era of silent films, music accompanied them to hide the noise of the projector, and the role of film music was to erase virtuality from consciousness. It is possible to change the viewpoint, but it is impossible to change the hearing point, and works that are always considered and where off-screen sounds are precisely designed give a sense of presence as if witnessing the story on the screen, making it difficult to objectify things outside.

In summary, film exists primarily as something to be watched. We gain a sense of presence precisely because of a mental structure that perceives the "doing" other behind the "visible" other as a single entity, and perceives the "visible" self behind the "doing" self as a single entity. When drawn into a film, our bodies oscillate between "watching" and "doing," synchronizing with the expressions and gestures of the characters, and "understanding" their emotions through their changes. Essentially, we cannot grasp the inner life of another. While we cannot see our own faces or backs, we can see the entirety of another's body. Both self and other interact while remaining mysteries to one another.
On the other hand, in film, characters do not see themselves, and they are not conscious of their own faces, which are invisible to them. The subject watching a film is a subject that has forgotten the mystery of its own vision. By examining the structure of film and the involvement of our perception, we can enable thinking about the blanks in our own vision and hearing, and perhaps gain new insights.

- Impressions
Well. As a fundamental premise, I don't feel a sense of presence in films, but is that different for the general public? What is a sense of presence, anyway? Come to think of it, I don't empathize with others even outside of film, so maybe that's why. Perhaps I do, but forget immediately.
Anyway, setting that aside, this is a discussion about how people recognize self and other. While it is very interesting to see ways of looking at things I had never considered before, such as how mirrors appear, this metaphysical discussion seems unlikely to be applicable unless I break it down in my head first. As a fundamental premise, there is no way to know what is inside someone else's head. However, one infers the inside of another's head not by visually seeing them, but by replacing their actions (expressed as "doing" in this text) with one's own in one's own head and tracing them.
When recognizing something, it is not just visual information that is involved, but also proprioception, which incorporates it into the self. In other words, it is an attempt to understand the other by moving one's own body in one's head just as the other does. I haven't fully digested it yet, but when writing stories, it might be more physically understandable (with a sense of presence) to drop a large amount of empathetic physical operations into the text rather than talking about emotions. I've started to lose track of what a sense of presence is.

In the end, while it was very interesting as a discussion about the biochemical and cognitive mechanisms of how people usually see things and try to recognize the contents of invisible others, this type of topic is hard to pin down. To verify this as an academic study, I think it requires not just the perspective of whether it applies to one's own perception, but also a statistical perspective and verification of whether it applies statistically to a large number of people. I wonder if there is any significant data on this. I'm very curious. If it goes well, it might lead to arguments like the uncanny valley.
What I found most interesting was the part about hearing. It's about the balance between the sound source, which is premised on what is visible, and other so-called background sounds. In my novels, I focus on describing what is visible, but I've started to feel that I need to think about the balance of descriptions for various other things. By the way, is this a topic of folklore? To begin with.

On "The Establishment of Posthumous Portraits and Representations of the Dead in the Modern Era"

- Summary
In central Iwate, from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period, large ema-style picture plaques depicting the ideal appearance of the afterlife in vivid colors were frequently dedicated for the memorial service of unfortunate deceased persons.
According to a survey by the Tono City Museum, there are 386 extant picture plaques, most of which are centered around Tono City. The period when these plaques were frequently dedicated was between 1887 and 1907, and the existence of painters who met the demand was significant.
The picture plaques can be classified into "life-depiction type" and "raigo (welcoming descent) type"; the former depicts members of a household who died in the past few years to several decades, while the latter depicts one or two deceased persons heading to the Pure Land.
They are mostly wide wooden plaques with black borders, vividly colored directly on the board or on paper pasted to it. Using Edo-period techniques, they feature ukiyo-e style figures, with flowers and birds painted on the sliding doors in the background. Many are seated in a room with an alcove, in front of luxurious household goods or food. A characteristic is that there are often multiple people, and many are deceased who did not live out their natural lifespan, such as those who died young or in middle age. There is a tendency to depict elderly or middle-aged deceased persons following the death of a young person, and a tendency for the family to be in an unfortunate situation, such as consecutive deaths, other than just the death of a young person. There are few plaques of elderly people over 60 or clearly only elderly people. Except for the fact that the purpose is for memorial services for the dead, the picture plaques are indistinguishable from ema in form. In terms of praying for peace in the afterlife, it can be said that they were drawn as wishes for an ideal image of the afterlife based on motifs of this world.
The content depicted seems to have been patterned to some extent by age and gender rather than the tastes or hobbies of the deceased. Folklorically, they fall into the category of abnormal deaths, and it is thought that they were performed as special memorial services for the many deceased who did not become ancestral spirits. The painters of these plaques decreased after the Taisho period.

From the mid-Meiji period onwards, soldiers and Westernized landscapes began to be depicted, and plaques appeared that mixed the techniques of picture plaques and realistic portraits. In 1904, photographs and portraits appeared simultaneously, and although it was prominent among military personnel, picture plaques changed into posthumous portraits such as portraits and photographs. Portraits included those with shading like monochrome photographs and those painted with oil paints, and it is thought that they were drawn based on photographs, with the deceased in formal attire in upper-body or bust portraits. These realistic portraits are thought to have been established along with photography, and general portraits were also required to resemble photographs.
In the case of Chosen-ji Temple, the picture plaques of soldiers who went to the First Sino-Japanese War are unusual; they are in military uniforms and are figures of Meiji-era statesmen. Portrait photographs of military personnel became popular among samurai and soldiers facing death from the end of the Edo period and the Meiji Restoration, and especially during the First Sino-Japanese War, portrait photographs of the war dead were published in magazines and seen by the general public. The transition from ukiyo-e style figure representation to realistic portraiture extended not only to military personnel but also to the general deceased. The premature death of a soldier is an unfortunate event that should be mourned, but for the state, it is an honorable death in battle and an existence that should be honored (praising achievements), so the misfortune could not be emphasized, and the emphasis shifted to honoring the deceased, that is, to the organizations of this world.
The first appearance of portrait photographs was of a deceased person in 1904, and the next appearance was in the Taisho period, increasing gradually thereafter. Initially, they were enlargements of daily photographs, and it was much later that they became formal attire.
Until the 1945s, charcoal drawings accounted for the majority, and many of the deceased were people who died young, from children to middle-aged, but those who lived out their natural lifespan also began to be seen sporadically. After 1931, posthumous photographs in military uniforms increased, and from the 1950s onwards, almost all of the deceased dedicated were over 60, and photographs of those who died young decreased. Following the tradition of picture plaques, there are also some that line up photographs of multiple deceased persons on one plaque.

The decisive difference between the picture plaques up to the Meiji period and the posthumous portraits or photographs is that the image of the deceased changed from the afterlife to the appearance of the deceased while alive, as the posthumous portrait is the embodiment of the deceased while alive. In the picture plaques, the deceased were placed in the time of the afterlife, but in the posthumous portraits, they changed to this world of memories of the past while alive. The increase in posthumous portraits of the elderly among those who died young until the 1950s is because the perspective of honoring was added. From the 1950s onwards, while the number of people who died young decreased due to the development of medicine, it came to be seen as an honoring device for people who lived out their lives and contributed socially, and high-ranking posthumous Buddhist names increased. On the other hand, because photographs are directly linked to memories of the deceased while alive, they became effective not only for honoring but also for deepening remembrance. In other words, the dead are here, now.

- Impressions
Although I cut it from this summary, the original text contains the classification, gender, age, clothing, etc., of 214 picture plaques, portraits, and photographs, which is interesting as data.
Although the content goes back and forth in many places, simply put, it is an attempt to explore the background and meaning of how pictures for worshipping the dead changed into current posthumous portraits. It is culturally very interesting that prayers for happiness in the afterlife changed to honoring in this world, but I think it is due to the fact that the afterlife became harder to see due to the progress of science, and also due to changes in the perception of time. What "the future" refers to in terms of time has changed significantly since the modern era. For people today, the future means what is to come, but for people in the past, the future meant the past. Phrases like "the previous war" or "the previous battle" were used until recently, and they remain in words like "last month" or "last week" today. The word "saki" (previous/future) likely refers to a point in time that is a little distance from the present.

By the way, there is a saying that fools learn from experience and the wise learn from history. In short, a change in the direction of this learning is occurring. In the past, the elucidation (generalization) of the principles of the world had not progressed, and future predictions based on advanced computational processing were not possible. Therefore, in order to predict the future, people looked back at the past that led to the present and unearthed the teachings of predecessors and similar events from old books. However, nowadays, due to the progress of science, technology, and statistics, we can calculate the future while facing the future without having to unravel individual cases one by one, that is, without looking back.
By the way, the afterlife can be called another world in a sense, but it is not in the future. Therefore, the living and the dead walk in parallel worlds on different routes. In the era when people looked backward, if you looked ahead, there were ancestors, and joining them was connected to the word "memorial service," but when people started looking at the present and the future, they ended up not looking at the past, that is, the ancestors. Human eyes can usually only see in one direction. Therefore, rather than mourning the dead, people began to praise the present after death for the sake of honoring. Recently, grave closing and simple funerals have become popular, but I think this is not because of faith or economic reasons, but because people stopped looking at the past, although I am not a folklorist, so I don't know for sure.
By the way, when I hear "ema" in Tohoku, I imagine the Musakari Ema of Yamagata, but since the oldest extant material of Musakari Ema is from the end of the Edo period, I thought it might be similar to the feeling of wanting to leave a proper family for the life in the afterlife for a man who died young (misfortune) when I read this item again.

On "Institutional Changes in Petty Crimes and Strengthening of Social Control in the Meiji and Taisho Periods"

- Summary
As a result of investigating the relationship between legal regulations, changes in police social control, and the number of crimes targeting petty crimes in the Meiji and Taisho periods, it was found that serious crimes such as murder and injury were not significantly affected by postwar poverty or social chaos, and that fluctuations in petty crimes, whose scope varies depending on the values of the times and changes in the legal system, were observed.

Until the early modern period, crimes with unknown causes were explained as being caused by spirits or fox possession, exempting individuals from personal responsibility, and mental disorders in particular were considered fox possession and were not recognized as people who committed crimes. Since the modern era, the cause of crime has been sought in individual character, etc., through the Penal Code, and a person called a "criminal" was discovered.
Psychiatrists equated "madness" with crime after 1897, calling for the confinement of the mentally disabled in mental hospitals to protect society. While traditional folklore positions "folklore" as something that disappears with modernization and tries to make it a "finished problem," Yanagita Kunio's folklore studies posit that folklore is knowledge necessary to solve current social problems, and by showing the reality of historical changes, it denies public opinion formation that tries to justify itself conveniently based on tradition, and pursues the causes of social problems by correctly learning the historical facts of each region.

When creating new social norms and laws, politicians, bureaucrats, and mass media create the need. They create backing with data such as the Statistical Yearbook of the Empire of Japan and the Ministry of Home Affairs Statistical Report. This paper refers to the relevant data to correctly examine the reality of crime. The subject is Japan in the Meiji and Taisho periods, and the focus is on the legislation regarding petty crimes and changes in the perception of crime.
After the opening of the country, old customs such as showing skin, which were viewed with curiosity by foreigners, were symbols of delayed civilization for those in power and were things that should be excluded as evil. However, the addition of crime categories to the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance on Offenses (hereinafter "this Ordinance"), which is said to be the predecessor of the Petty Crimes Act, which aims to crack down on these, intentionally avoided listing articles to crack down on barbaric acts, and due to the tug-of-war between the Legislation Bureau and the Ministry of Education, which was promoting the strengthening of social control, it was limited to items that were considered particularly problematic.
This Ordinance is a miscellaneous law that deals with new problems, public nuisances, and personal troubles caused by modernization to which the New Penal Code (various laws and regulations) cannot be applied due to the changes of the times. Because it is miscellaneous, the boundary between crime and non-crime is difficult to understand, and many people are arrested without knowing it is a crime, and people feared being arrested under the pretext of this Ordinance. When applied to local areas, it was added or deleted according to the situation, and it can be said that it inherited the norms of village life as they were. The reason for the increase in arrests in 1881 was that the poor cut down forests without permission due to the drop in rice prices caused by the Matsukata Deflation.

In 1880, this Ordinance was incorporated into the Penal Code. With the expansion of the Penal Code's crime framework, it took on an administrative color, but the Penal Code as a whole had lighter penalties than before. The Penal Code also targeted administrative incidents without victims, and prisoners for incidents without victims, including gambling and disrespect to gods and Buddhas, accounted for 25% of the total, and if violations of prefectural regulations are included, it reaches 50%. The increase in crime categories and the expansion of the scope of crackdown led to the strengthening of the police management system. The strengthening of social control by the police and the judiciary progressed, the number of police stations increased rapidly, and the population under the jurisdiction of one police station decreased rapidly from 24,995 in 1882 to 3,135 in 1891.
As a result, the number of arrests increased, and while the number of criminals increased rapidly after the mid-1880s, the number of arrests for murder decreased significantly, showing that Japan transformed into a safe society rapidly.
In 1885, the top offenses for police arrests were violations of health protection and infectious disease prevention rules (hygiene), prostitution, illegal business (industry and commerce), and moral violations such as drunkenness, while wandering by vagrants and road obstruction due to poor infrastructure increased rapidly. The decrease in serious crimes can be evaluated as an improvement in the morals of the common people due to the revision of the Penal Code and social control by the police, but the number of arrests of people in poverty increased, and due to the increase in the number of arrests, the police offense law permeated as a social norm.

At the same time as the establishment of the police offense categories, the summary judgment ordinance for police offenses was established, and the police became able to impose penalties themselves without going through a trial. The defendant's right to a trial was significantly impaired, and it became easy to conceal the reality of unjust arrests. At the same time, the total number of criminals increased, not because society became rough, but because the use of the summary judgment ordinance increased.
The objection within 3 days to move to a trial in the summary judgment ordinance was difficult for citizens, and it became a bad law that accepted the police's claims as they were. In particular, for crimes like "publicly insulting or mocking a person," there was no physical evidence and the boundary with non-crime was ambiguous, and the common people's distrust of the police increased. In 1909, the abuse of the summary judgment ordinance was seen as a problem, and an opinion was expressed in the Imperial Diet that 70-80% of police offenses were unjust arrests. Its use for separate arrests was also rampant.
The 1880 Penal Code classified crime names by the severity of the crime and the type of act, and the court did not have much discretion, and the defendant's crime and the severity of the penalty were decided at the time of arrest by the police. In the 1907 Penal Code, police offenses were abolished and integrated into the Penal Code, and minor violence (assault) that had been punished as a police offense until then also came to be tried in court. This meant a change in the subjects judged by the Penal Code, and it increased the number of arrests and the types of serious crimes under the Penal Code without any change in reality. As a result, the crime of injury increased rapidly. Even if the number does not change statistically, it is sometimes used by the media as an indication of increased brutality. Before the Penal Code revision, fights were welcomed with charm as the "flowers of Edo," but it is thought that the view of society changed due to stricter penalties. Since the summary judgment ordinance itself remained, the police's authority was not reduced.
The increase in injuries after 1906 was due to social chaos after the Russo-Japanese War, and the rapid increase after 1909 was caused by the Penal Code revision.

Along with the Penal Code revision, police offenses disappeared, but the summary judgment ordinance remained along with a notification prohibiting abuse. From 1910 to 1913, it was relatively quiet and summary judgment cases decreased, but they doubled thereafter, and the summary judgment ordinance, which was originally intended to simplify the sentencing of penalties for petty crimes, expanded its scope of application from police offenses to special laws and prefectural ordinances, and was increasingly abused.
From 1916 to 1919, prices increased 2.2 times, and during this period, the number of arrests increased by 66,000. Murder and injury remained flat, but theft and gambling increased, reaching more than 70% of the increase in arrests during this period. World War I advanced heavy and chemical industrialization and caused a large number of migrants from rural areas to urban areas, but those who could not find work used gambling as one of the few entertainments. The postwar police played the role of arresting and isolating people in economic distress. The increase in arrests during this period was not due to decadence or the influence of foreign ideas, but due to economic difficulties caused by rising prices and the police management system that socially concealed this. The sharp decrease in arrests from 1919 to 1921, and the turn to an increase after 1922, were due to the increase and calming of labor disputes.
Thus, if you look at the statistical data at a glance, the content of the phenomenon where crimes seemed to occur frequently from the late Meiji period to the Taisho period also looks different, and the problem lay in the system of seeking the causes of crime in individuals and managing them.

This Ordinance has been considered to prohibit barbaric acts seen from abroad, but the reality is that it is a miscellaneous law to deal with new problems to which new laws cannot be applied, and because it is miscellaneous, the boundary between whether it is a crime or not is unclear to the general public, so people are often arrested for unintentional incidents, and the common people harbored the danger of arrest and distrust of the police.
After World War I, real wages fell due to rising prices, so arrests for theft and gambling increased rapidly, but gun crimes such as murder and petty crimes related to morals did not increase, which shows that even if theft and gambling increase due to economic difficulties or unemployment, this does not mean that the brutality or moral decline of society as a whole progresses.

- Impressions
I'm sorry that this feels a bit strange because I forcibly summarized the parts where the story went back and forth.
In the first place, this is a story about the fallacy of statistics where the statistical results at a glance do not actually reflect the reality, but I feel that you can only understand half of the meaning unless you have some knowledge of the Penal Code.
The great principle of modern penal law is the principle of legality, which states that crimes must be clear by law. Therefore, in the first place, the phenomenon that it is ambiguous whether it falls under this crime is a defect as a penal code. As written here, it cannot be called a modern rule-of-law state if you are arrested at the discretion of the police. However, that is a facade, and in reality, there is the fact that separate arrests were rampant until very recently even after police offenses disappeared, and although the recording of all crimes above a certain level is now done and the crackdown is visualized, it is troublesome whether there are human resources to actually check all crackdown images.
Well, I certainly had the image that the crime rate increased in the Taisho era. Although I cannot fully agree with the argument that the increase in gambling and theft does not lead to a decline in social morals, the image like a hotbed of grotesque murders created by Edogawa Ranpo and others seems to deviate from reality. Regarding whether abnormal murders increased, as touched upon at the beginning of this paper, I feel that the sense of punishment is fundamentally different between the Edo period and the Westernized Meiji period. This paper is only a spot-check from the Meiji to Taisho periods, and there is a major cultural shift from the Edo period before that, so that is a point of concern.

Summary

Overall, it was very interesting in terms of individual arguments. I would like to read other parts as well. It has the feel of the National Museum of Japanese History, as expected. I am ignorant about how to write papers in this field, so I feel that there is a lot of repetition in the arguments, but well, it's a paper, so I thought it might be like that, but it was a pity that there were some parts where the essential points were not well understood. By the way, I don't think the story of film vision has anything to do with folklore, but what about it?
As for whether it can be used in novels, although there are parts that can be used as concepts, it feels quite troublesome to use this in a novel in an easy-to-understand way.

4. Conclusion

Since this is a summary of a summary, I failed to find a way to make it a bit shorter. However, even if I only introduce the conclusion, what is needed is what led to those results, so it is quite troublesome. The way of summarizing is definitely something that needs to be reconsidered.
Next time, I will cover Jitsuzo Kuwabara's 'The Way of Filial Piety in China'.
See you tomorrow! Probably!

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