Latest / It's All Japanese to Me / Ep. 12 — Mingu: the tools of everyday life

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Ep. 12 — Mingu: the tools of everyday life · It's All Japanese to Me

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Rikuto.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: So today's word is mingu.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the last episode, I talked about mingei.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Mingu looks similar, and the first character is actually the same.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Gu is the character for tools or utensils.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: The digital digestion defines mingu as a general term for the tools and utensils
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: that ordinary people have used in daily life since old times.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: According to the Nipponika Encyclopedia,
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: this world was created by Shibusawa Keizo and it was settled in the mid-1930s.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Before that, such things were called minzokuhin, folk objects.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Shibusawa was a banker who later became the governor of the Bank of Japan.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He also ran a private research group called the Attic Museum.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It got this name because it started in an attic at his house.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: In 1936, the Arctic Museum published a guide for collecting and surveying mingu.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Roughly,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: it defines mingu as everyday tools close at hand,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: which people made with their own skills out of the needs of daily life.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: The list in the guide is very wide.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Things for clothing, food or housing, tools for farming, fishing and hunting.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Things for caring for rituals, for beliefs and even toys.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: So how is this different from mingei?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In the encyclopedia entry I mentioned last time,
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yanagi Souetsu wrote that folklore studies is an empirical study,
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: while mingei studies tries to be a study of value.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mingu research grew as a part of folklore studies.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: The Nipponika entry even says that mingu are not highly artistic or rare things made
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: by particular people.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: The same entry describes two basic ways of studying mingu.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: One is to compare the same kind of tool across different regions.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: The other is to record all the tools within one area, one village, or even one house.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia also mentions Senzai mingu, latent mingu.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: These are tools that no longer exist as objects but still remain in people's memory.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is as far as I have learned about Mingu.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, that is it for today's episode.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for listening and see you next time.