“Hare and Ke” is one of the traditional Japanese worldviews with a theory of time, discovered by Kunio Yanagida.
In folklore and cultural anthropology, the terms hare and ke are used to refer to the “extraordinary” (hare), such as rituals, festivals, and annual events, while ke (mare) refers to the “ordinary” (mundane), which is everyday life.
In hare, clothing, food, shelter, behavior, and language were clearly distinguished from ke.
Originally, hare was a concept referring to a turning point or milestone. The origin of the word hare is “hare,” and it is used in phrases such as “hare-no-stage” (= an important occasion that occurs only once in a lifetime) and “harekata” (= clothing worn on ceremonial occasions of turning points and milestones). In contrast, everyday clothes were called “kekata,” but the term has not been used since the Meiji period. In modern times, “fine weather” is simply used to describe fine weather, but records dating back to the Edo period indicate that “fine weather” was used only when the weather recovered after a long spell of rain and the day became a milestone, such as when there was a break in the weather.
In the “Vocabulary of Vladivostok” published by the Jesuits in 1603, “Hare” is written as “Fare,” meaning “an outward appearance, or a place where many people gather,” and “Que” is written as “Qe,” meaning “ordinary or daily (things).
On Hare no Hi, rice cakes, sekihan (red rice), white rice, fish with tails, and sake were eaten and consumed, but these were not once part of the daily diet (cereals, soup, and pickles were the daily food for the common people at that time, and animal products such as meat and fish were a feast). The dishes for these foods were also for hare-no-hare, and were not used on a daily basis.
In Japan, it is said that the distinction between hare and ke became blurred (if anything, hare became a continuous state of affairs) as the country became a mass consumer society through rapid economic growth after World War II, and fancy and delicious foods became readily available for consumption.
The way of perceiving the conceptual relationship between hare and ke began when Kunio Yanagida presented the ongoing blurring of the distinction between hare and ke (e.g., special eating and drinking that used to be done only during hare ceremonies are now done on a daily basis) as one argument for pointing out the transformation of folk customs due to modernization. Yanagida compared the way people of several generations ago distinguished “hare and ke” with the way people of Yanagida’s own time distinguished “hare and ke,” and tried to read trends for the future from this comparison.
At first, the “hare to ke” distinction did not seem to attract much attention, but it became widely known within the academic community after Taro Wakamori focused his attention on it. In folklore, however, the focus was not on the diachronic analysis of reading the future from the comparison of the past and present as Yanagida aimed, but on the synchronic analysis of folk structure that regarded the binomial scheme of “Hare and Ke” as an axiom, and paid attention exclusively to “the extraordinary “Hare” = rituals and festivals. In the 1970s, the focus of attention shifted to the “rituals and festivals” of the “hare.
In the 1970s, a new debate, perhaps under the influence of structuralism, arose about “hare to ke. The debate, which began with Mikiharu Ito, reached one peak at a symposium by Emiko Namihira, Tokutaro Sakurai, Kenichi Tanikawa, Noboru Miyata, Hirofumi Tsuboi, and others. There, it was confirmed that the concept of kegare should be newly added to the relationship between hare and ke, and that different commentators have diverse ways of understanding hare, ke, and kegare (or hare and ke) [4].