Folklore Hears the Wind and the Town Carves the Law: Rediscovering "Environment and Life" during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth (1955-1980)

Folklore Hears the Wind and the Town Carves the Law: Rediscovering "Environment and Life" during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth (1955-1980)
As Japan's postwar recovery gained momentum, folklore took on a new mission: the period of rapid economic growth that began in the late 1950s transformed the quality of life, but was also accompanied by the destruction of nature, pollution, and the collapse of local communities. Folklore, once a discipline that recorded "disappearing landscapes," was soon transformed into a discipline that rediscovered the "wisdom of life.

Minamata disease, officially recognized in 1956, left deep scars on local communities as a victim of modernization. For the first time, people realized that they had become disconnected from nature and their way of life. 14 environment-related laws were passed in the "Diet on Pollution" in 1970, and the following year, the Environment Agency was established. At a time when the state began to treat the environment as a policy issue, folklore began to reevaluate the environmental knowledge that remained in daily life "outside the state.

Kunio Yanagida advocated the "study of the common people," a perspective that viewed coexistence with nature as a culture. This philosophy gained renewed attention from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The customs of rural villages, such as rice paddies, forests, water distribution, mountain tours, and wind festivals, are devices that support local risk management and sustainable livelihoods, and environmental folklore reinterpreted them as "blueprints for regional revitalization.

Environmental folklore" is not mere nostalgia, but has taken on meaning as practical knowledge in contemporary society. In towns shaken by pollution and in depopulated villages, researchers worked with local people to record and revive the "art of negotiating with nature" of the past. Maintaining compound forests, replanting windbreaks, and restoring communal wells are concrete examples of these efforts. These practices, which demonstrate the integration of life and the environment, had already been developed in various parts of Japan before the term "sustainable society" eventually appeared.

In the 1970s, folklorists and civic movements crossed paths, sharing the philosophy that "the environment is not about loving the landscape, but about preserving the order of life. The discipline turned from documentation to design, from observation to action. Thus, folklore, as "another root" of environmental policy, became an ideological pillar supporting regional revitalization and coexistence with nature.