Folklore from Space

Abstract

A profound understanding of the temporal change of the relationship between landscape and people under climate and societal changes is urgently required. To historically comprehend the characteristics of temporal change of people’s living and culture for a target landscape, we tried to integrate a folklore approach, which clarifies characteristics of people’s emotion and culture obtained by performing conventional field work, with satellite observation, which clarifies the characteristics of spatio-temporal variability of landscape. Here, we call this challenge “folklore from space”，which follows from the previous idea of “folklore from the sky” published by the distinguished Japanese folklorist Tsuneichi Miyamoto. In this paper, to concretely explain the idea of folklore from space, we evaluated a landscape in northern Fukui, Japan as an example and then discuss the utility and perspective of this approach.