Kunio Yanagita

Kunio Yanagita (Japanese: 柳田 國男, Hepburn: Yanagita Kunio; July 31, 1875 – August 8, 1962) was a Japanese author, scholar, ethnographer, and folklorist. He began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions. This led to a change in his career. His pursuit of this led to his eventual establishment of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku, as an academic field in Japan. As a result, he is often considered to be the father of modern Japanese folklore studies.