大正期、自身の民俗学の組織化に乗り出した柳田国男の仕事は、各地の郷土史家と連絡を取り合い、民俗事象・語彙の収集、登録に重点が置かれるようになる。その基盤が整うにつれて、柳田の関心は、それらの背後にある論理、それも生活の中から紡ぎ出される論理に比重が置かれ始める。この思想は、戦時下に氾濫した時局用語によって思考の統一をはかろうとする動静とは明確に異なるものであり、組織化の際にも重要な了解事項のひとつとなった。戦時中の柳田民俗学が組織と研究の両面にわたって、堅実な手法を維持できた理由として、その両者が緊密に結び付いていたことが挙げられる。

During the Taisho period, the work of Kunio Yanagida who had embarked on his organization of folklore, kept in touch with the local historians of various regions, collected folk events and vocabulary, the process which led him to place his emphasis on the register. As the foundation was being completed, Yanagida's interest led him to place the relative importance on the logic behind the folklore he had collected, the logic that had been spun by life itself. Being clearly different from the movements that had tried to unify the thinking by the terms of the current affairs that inundated the war years, this idea became one of the important items of understanding for organizing folklore. During the war years, Yanagida folklore maintained its solid techniques for both organization and research. It is the intimate bond between his organization and research that has been cited as the reason why such techniques came to be maintained.