UNTIL THE LATE 1980s the name of Minakata Kumagusu was scarcely known in Japan. His collected works in twelve volumes had always attracted admirers, enthusiasts for the extraordinary erudition displayed there for natural history, folklore, classical learning in a dozen languages, and for the odd, unorthodox passion for human knowledge which had lam behind the erudition. But these enthusiasts were few and specialized. Professor Tsumrni Kazuko's book of 1978, Minakata Kumagusu, with its scholarly assessment of Minakata's peculiar genius, reached only a limited readership. The general public knew nothing of him, and in academic circles he was dismissed as a mere antiquanan, whose random wntmgs were unified by no consistent ‘theory’, and whose lack ot a single disciple to perpetuate his memory proved him to be academically negligible. His odd habits, moreover, forgetting while the furor scribendi was upon him to eat and sleep, or to wear any clothes in summer, or to dry himself after a hot bath, proved him to be a notable outsider, a kyin rather than a senous scholar.

Five or six years ago, however, a remarkable change occurred. A ‘Kumagu-su-boom’ had arrived. Books, magazine articles, videos and films about his life began to appear. His collected works were repnnted; his diary was published in four volumes. The citizens of his home town, Tanabe, on the Kii peninsula, suddenly aware that at the beginning of the century they had harboured a genius in their midst, were quick to publish posters proclaiming him to be one of the Three Great Men of Tanabe.

The boom reached a climax in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death. In that year an exhibition in his honour was held at the Odakyu department store in Shinjuku, featuring memorabilia of every kind. There were photographs, notebooks and dianes filled with his distinctive tiny writing, boxes of dried fungi and insects, and even a ‘nenkin-corner’, where the primitive variety of mycetozoa, nenkin, in which Mmakata had taken a special interest, was fully explained. Here for 200 yen a ‘nenkin-Kit’ could be purchased, enabling anyone to propagate nenkin for themselves just as Mmakata had done.