民俗作为社会记忆 / Folklore As Social Memory

民俗作为社会记忆 is the frame 115.京极夏彦今昔续百鬼：不研究妖怪，怎么好好做人？ uses when it treats yokai traditions as local memory rather than only superstition. The episode argues that war, industrial development, modern infrastructure, and the loss of documents can erase the conditions that made local stories intelligible.

In this frame, a yokai name or image records how a place once understood water, animals, tools, danger, shame, kinship, property, and moral conduct. [[TataraKatsugoro|多多良胜五郎]]’s fieldwork matters because the stories may disappear before scholars can collect their variants, even if the final mystery explanation remains non-supernatural.

Key Claims

• Folklore can hold practical local knowledge, social anxiety, moral judgment, and memory of ordinary life.
• Modernization can make old stories look irrational while also destroying the contexts needed to interpret them responsibly.
• The source does not oppose science to folklore; it argues that losing folklore can make human experience less legible.
• War can interrupt storytelling because survival leaves little room for ghosts, yokai, or careful preservation.
• Folklore origin claims become dangerous when turned into nationalist proof that one people or nation is more authentic.

Connections

• [[YokaiMystery|妖怪推理]] - literary form that turns folklore memory into mystery structure.
• [[TataraKatsugoro|多多良胜五郎]] and [[NumagamiRenji|沼上蓮次]] - characters whose postwar fieldwork makes the concept concrete.
• Evidence-Bound Folklore Inquiry, Legend As Social History, Story Motif Transmission, and Folklore Trauma Encoding - adjacent folklore method concepts.
• [[AnganKozo|《暗眼小僧》]] - case where local naming, dogs, property, and river danger form the social-memory layer.