伝承記録
Folklore record
One telling from one place in one year: the unit this site is built from.
When an article says a thing was “recorded in Kagawa in 1931,” it means a specific document: a few lines printed in a folklore journal, a prefectural history or a dictionary, reporting what someone in a named district said about a named creature, with the year the report was published. The records library gives each of these its own page, with a summary in English, the place, the publication and a link to the catalogue card.
A record is evidence of a telling, not of a creature, and one record says nothing about the next village. That is why the articles describe variation rather than flattening it, and why the map and the prefecture pages count records rather than yokai. The locations on each article page, and the pins behind the map, are records of this kind.
Related yokai
Kappa
河童（かっぱ）
A child-sized water yokai whose strength lives in the water held by the dish on its head.
Azuki-arai
小豆洗い（あずきあらい）
A bean-washing sound repeats beside a dark stream, but the person making it cannot be found.
Yamauba
山姥（やまうば）
A man carries a woven object home from the hills, and that night a woman's voice demands the return of her ashinaka.
Makura-gaeshi
枕返し（まくらがえし）
From Niigata in 1935 to Ibaraki in 1998, people recorded going to sleep facing one way and waking facing the other. The culprit changes from house to house; the reversal never does.