Suye Mura: Ninety Years of a Japanese Village, its Residents, and its Researchers
 
In 1935, John and Ella Embree moved into Suye Mura, a village of eight settlements in
southern Kyushu, to begin a year of anthropological fieldwork. This field research was
the basis for John’s 1937 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, which he
revised for publication in 1939 as Suye Mura: A Japanese Village. This was the first
ethnographic monograph in Japan anthropology, an archive that has now grown to over
300 books covering a vast range of topics and locations. Unexpectedly, amongst this
entire corpus, it is the monograph with the longest and most complex afterlife, especially
in the locale of its research.
 
In June of 2021, 85 years after the Embrees finished their fieldwork, Nōbunkyō, the
publishing house of the Rural Culture Association of Japan, published a new and
complete translation of Embree’s book. This translation was done by Tanaka Kazuhiko,
a Kyushu journalist and writer, and it completes an astonishing trio of works that Tanaka
has recently produced about the Embrees and Suye Mura. In 2017, he published a co-
biography of John and Ella Embree, their early lives and their fieldwork in Suye Mura,
based on Tanaka’s own intensive fieldwork in Suye Mura from 2011 to 2014 and a
thorough study of Embree-related documents from archives in Japan and the U.S. The
book won a prestigious national award for the best volume published by a regional
press that year. He followed this in 2018 with a companion volume that focused on the
Embrees’ activities through World War II up to John’s tragic death in 1950. He
completed his decade-long project with an annotated translation of the Embree
monograph.
 
It turns out, though, that Tanaka’s trilogy is not a sudden rediscovery of a forgotten
classic. Suye Mura and the Embrees were never forgotten locally. In the intervening
decades, often under the American scholarly radar, as it were, the book has been an
inspiration to local historians and a potent political force in area and prefectural debates
on municipal amalgamation, local identity, and economic revitalization. Rarely across
the entire discipline of anthropology has a field monograph had so many varied
influences. This symposium aims to revisit the book, its author, his wife (who was invited
back three times to Suye Mura in the postwar and would later co-author her own
monograph on the village), and the village to trace something of this remarkable legacy
over 90 years and to elucidate its relevance to the issues that continue to vex
contemporary regional Japan.
 
We have selected 2025 to commemorate the 90th year since the start of the Embrees’ fieldwork and to highlight recent developments in the village in the last decade of
Tanaka’s publications. We might note a further and rather tragic connection of the
Embrees to Yale. During World War II, the Embrees, like many academics, were drawn
into government service. John directed one of the military language training schools (his
monograph was used in several curriculums), and he also was assigned to assess the
management of several of the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens. When
the war ended, he was asked to go to Japan for the Occupation, but he had become
critical of the camp administration and wary of military-led social programs, so he
refused and instead spent several years working in Southeast Asia. In 1948, he was
appointed a professor here at Yale and initiated Yale’s program in Southeast Asian
Studies. Just two years later, a few days before Christmas, 1950, he and his daughter
were struck and killed by an automobile as they crossed Whitney Avenue to shop for a
Christmas tree. His wife, Ella, in distress, left shortly for Honolulu, where they had
previously worked, and began a long career as a professor at the University of Hawai’i.
She left their professional papers in a neighbor’s attic in Spring Glen, where they
remained for several decades until she retrieved them and worked with Robert J. Smith
at Cornell University, then our most prominent Japan anthropologist, to prepare her own
monograph on Suye Mura. For that reason, the bulk of the Embree papers are held at
Cornell (Yale holds a few journals and papers in Manuscripts & Archives).