Yoshihiko Amino - Biography

Biography

Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1928, Amino received a high school education in Tokyo. Amino studied under the Marxist historian Ishimoda Shō (Japanese: 石母田 正; 1912–1986) at the University of Tokyo, where he first became involved in both Marxist historiography and the student movement during the early postwar period. Following graduation, Amino taught for several years at the high school level, beginning his career as a university professor at Nagoya University in 1956 as an assistant professor before taking up a post at Kanagawa University in 1980 as a professor of the university's Junior College and a Kanagawa Research Fellow, exchanging a more prestigious teaching position at a national university for the opportunity to devote more energy to research and publication. There, with his colleague, the anthropologist Miyata Noboru (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. Although Amino continued in his capacity as a writer until his death, he retired from both institutional teaching and research in 1998.

Amino began his career researching the lifestyles of out-of-the way villagers and marginalized 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 was neither a single culturally- and socially-integrated state, but rather a mosaic of quite distinct societies, some of which knew nothing, for example, about the Japanese emperor. 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 the Meiji period. In this sense, he became one of the great academic deconstructors of the premises and mythology of the nihonjinron.

He died of lung cancer on February 27, 2004, aged 76.