Diary-Keeping in Modern Agricultural Society: Self-Representation of The Youth in Agricultural Areas

• In Event: The Conformed/Deviated Self in Diaries of Modern Japan: The Diversity and Contradiction of Self-expression

Abstract

In this presentation, the phenomenon in which keeping the diary was deemed exemplary among the youth in various agricultural areas in modern Japan is discussed from the perspective of sociocultural trends and their backgrounds. While young farmers were encouraged to keep a diary primarily because of it’s pragmatic functions in the agricultural reformation during the Taisho and Showa periods, the youth were also expected to express their own “farmerhood” in terms of self-representation. Such expectation was associated with the social background of the Seikatsu-Tsuzurikata movement that advocated manners of diary-keeping to simply describe the author’s ways of life and routines as they are. Therefore, those engaged in agriculture were increasingly expected to describe their “peasant lives”, which in many ways contrasted the modernized urban cultures. This suggests that diary-keeping in agricultural communities during the period played a role in the development of normative and ideal models of young farmers through their routine descriptions and self-representation as farmers. The aims of this presentation are to reveal the manners of their self-representation as farmers by focusing on the act of diary-keeping among the youth in agricultural society of modern Japan, and to discuss the primary function of diary-keeping, which is the self-imposition of norms as ideal farmers.

Author

• Satoko Kawachi, Tohoku University