Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS describes the oriental customs of the Oki Islands.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908.2009)

Autograph letter signed to his ethnologist friend Isac Chiva.

Two large octavo pages on letterhead from the Okura Hotel in Tokyo (crossed out).

Oki Islands [Japan]. November 16, 1977.

“I received your letter of the 10th to the island of Oki, in the Sea of ​​Japan. »  

The anthropologist describes the oriental customs of the Oki Islands located in the Sea of ​​Japan.

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“My dear friend, I received your letter of the 10th to the island of Oki, in the Sea of ​​Japan , where I replied to you with this word inconveniently scribbled in a Japanese inn where, as you know, there are not many -something to sit on or to write, otherwise with a brush. For Menset's thesis, it's obviously ^a bit tight as a date, but I read the text during the summer and took some notes. This left me with little memory, and I will have to refresh my memory before the 5th; I will do it by myself. So you can confirm my agreement for the 5th or 6th, and thank you for what you have done.

As we arrived last night in Oki, I don't have anything to say about it yet. The main town, Saigo, seems like a small town and, seen from the plane, the landscape is very beautiful. People live mainly from fishing and, to a lesser extent, from agriculture. They are, it seems, bullfighting fanatics. Each well-off family, I was told last night, has its own, fed on pounded rice, wheat, beans and eggs, and each animal has its marked place in a hierarchy of wrestlers. He arrives at the fight superbly prepared. Too bad there is no opportunity during the 4 days we spend here. Then, from Saturday evening, it will be Tokyo for a week, and return to Paris on the 26th.

Tell Evelyne that I received her letter and that I thank her. I will try to obtain the recommended book on Yamaguchi in Tokyo, the title of which she gives me. Despite everything beautiful and interesting that we see here, we will have been so drawn in from here and there that Paris will appear to me like a haven of peace! I hope that the lab has not given you too much trouble and that we will manage over the next few years despite the renewal without an increase in the budget. You will obviously ^have to restrict yourself. Very affectionately. Claude Lévi-Strauss. »

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Isac CHIVA (1925-2012), ethnologist of Romanian origin, arrived in 1948 in France where he studied, worked at the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, became head of work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (director, at from 1994), and deputy director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory alongside Lévi-Strauss.