Furusato: evoluzione di un mito e declinazioni contemporanee
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13135/1825-263X/1668Abstract
Furusato is generally translated into English as “hometown” or “native place” and the term is tightly connected with the image of a quiet, idyllic, rural village nestled in the countryside. Because of the nostalgic, identity-related implica-tions coming along with this term, the notion of furusato has long been argued in the academic discourse as a “landscape of nostalgia” or as an image of an “au-thentic but lost pre-modern Japan”. Many studies point out that this myth has been exploited as a symbolic vehicle of Japanese national identity and tradition in a wide range of cultural productions.
In this paper, a short overview on the evolution of the furusato myth and some contemporary cases (1995 to 2005) are presented. The purpose is to rethink the furusato as a dynamic, polychrome and historically determined ideology over-coming rigid categories such as “tradition” and “national identity”.
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