[1] As time passed, Yanagita began growing increasingly critical of the lack of concern for local autonomy allowed by the policies favored by his fellow civil servants.

He gradually began to advocate in support of these groups, pushing for a shift in agricultural focus to center around cooperatives of small farmers rather than wealthy landlords.

[3] It was at this point that his literary friends, including writer Shimazaki Toson, began encouraging him to publish works based on oral traditions and customs of rural villages.

It is a compilation of short stories, practices, beliefs, and anecdotes from Tōno, a small, rural community surrounded by mountains in Iwate.

Yanagita's focus on local traditions was part of a larger effort to insert the lives of commoners into narratives of Japanese history.

Yanagita claimed that these narratives focused on elite-centered historical events and ignored the relative uneventfulness and repetition that characterized the lives of ordinary Japanese people across history.

He is one of the premiere folklorists of Japan, and he helped to create the field of minzokugaku itself, earning him the title of "father of modern Japanese folklore.