The discipline of cultural anthropology, which takes as research objects areas throughout the world, has provided universal insights regarding human culture. The discipline has also made broad contributions to society by accumulating individual evidence concerning specific physical locations through regional research into the folk cultures in different locations. This research examines the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, which until this point has been overlooked, so as to supplement available cultural anthropological findings.
Research on northern areas of the Korean Peninsula since the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter North Korea) has made progress in politics, foreign relations and economics, but ethnocultural research, especially by Japanese scholars, has been heretofore lacking. That is because on-site research has not been implemented. However, that does not mean that research concerning the ethnoculture of the northern part of the Korean Peninsula is impossible. There is research material concerning the ethnoculture of this region which predates the establishment of North Korea. A great deal of more recent research concerning life and culture in North Korea has been published in South Korea. These make basic research feasible. In addition, North Korea-affiliated ethnic Koreans are living in northeast China, Central Asia, Japan and elsewhere, and this provides one method for collecting internal information from the periphery.
We hope that through the use of these methods this research will serve as a starting point for research in Japan on the cultural anthropology of the northern part of the Korean Peninsula.