大学共同利用機関法人 人間文化研究機構　国立民族学博物館

Objectives

Tsukurimono (cultural artifacts) for the purposes of this research includes those things used in festivals and annual events held in urban areas and temporarily installed or displayed in specific places in towns, or dashi and other floats designed to be pulled as conveyances with people riding on them. Tsukurimono have not previously been considered objects of study for Japanese ethnography. That is because they were not thought to be dependent on the comings and goings of the kami deities during the festivals and annual observances. Even research on private artifacts and material culture did not focus on tsukurimono due to their temporary/provisional character. At present there is a tendency to position tsukurimono within the setting of time and space of private homes and to recognize artifacts that are employed in street festivities or ornamental performances as having that value. Tsukurimono can be divided into two major categories. The first category concerns the form known as isshiki-kazari (one-set adornment). This would include those items conforming to the theme of things used in everyday life, such as kitchenware, chinaware and similar items, or materials such as vegetables and wildflowers, which are used as is, untransformed to compose a theme. One of the current uses would be in plays or other forms of storytelling in which puppets are utilized, with tsukurimono objects being used to reproduce reality, including in the background. The second category, namely special conveyances (dashi), would be in line with Nobuo Origuchi’s theory of portable god seats and like the omikoshi portable shrines are apparatuses used to meet the kami, although thinking on this front has stagnated in the decades since his time. This research will bring together researchers from ethnography, festival history, the history of exhibitions and their performers, the history of puppets, the history of handicrafts, the history of modern art, the history of Buddhism, the history of performing arts, the history of funereal practices, and other aspects of society to implement joint research for interdisciplinary study on tsukurimono.