The Value of Japanese Monster Culture in Folk Culture Research in the Age of Big Data
Publicado en línea: 17 mar 2025
Recibido: 03 nov 2024
Aceptado: 04 feb 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/amns-2025-0247
Palabras clave
© 2025 Hong Zhang, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Folk culture has an irreplaceable and important role in today’s society [1], and its contemporary value is embodied in multiple dimensions: from the economic level, folk activities can drive the development of tourism economy and promote local economic growth; from the social perspective, folk tourism helps to increase interpersonal exchanges, alleviate the problem of social isolation in the modern society, and to a certain extent, helps to alleviate physical and mental fatigue, release pressure, and It helps to maintain social harmony and stability [2-4]; from the cultural level, the inheritance and development of folk culture is of great significance to the protection of national cultural diversity and the enhancement of national cultural soft power. In addition, people’s participation in folklore activities also helps to strengthen collective memory and national identity [5-6].
The word “monster” seems to have no equivalent in the Western language system, and no Western word is sufficient to accurately represent this Eastern concept. There are many images of Japanese monsters, most of which originated from China, and then gradually evolved into “monsters” with local characteristics through fusion with local culture [7-9]. Until now, the study of Japanese monsters and monsters themed literature and art works not only have not declined, but also out of control, and even formed the monsters consumer culture [10-11]. There are numerous monster-themed books, anime, movies and television works, and monster culture has taken root as a part of Japanese culture [12].
Throughout the history of Japan, the culture of demons and monsters has been deeply rooted in it [13]. In Japan, the legends about monsters are colorful, diverse, and closely related to the lives of Japanese people [14]. In ancient times, the Japanese were in awe of the uncontrollable forces of nature, and this is how monsters were born. The form of the ogre is closely linked to the natural landscape of each region. Ogres are “spirit-like” beings that live in the mountains, forests, fields, and rivers, and cause a variety of incredible phenomena [15-16].
The main reason for the flourishing of monster culture in Japan is that the image of stylized monsters has been reinvented and widely accepted by the public based on the inheritance of inherited monsters through a variety of carriers and through the refinement of the times. Japanese monsters are a reflection of the belief in the spirit of all things, mainly in the form of soul faith as the main expression of folk beliefs, folk beliefs are becoming more and more people’s attention, folk beliefs in the traditional monsters as an important part of the Japanese religious beliefs [17-18].
In this paper, after collecting the information of Japanese audience’s comments on Japanese monster culture in CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms by using web crawlers, the missing values, duplicate values and deactivated words in the comment text are screened and removed. The KL distance between sentiment-specific words and sentiment text classification is calculated by the expected cross-entropy method to realize the feature extraction of preprocessed web comment data, so that the text data is transformed into a structured format that is easy to store. Subsequently, a method for sentiment analysis of comment text was designed based on the semantic sentiment dictionary, and it is used to scan the audience comment text data to preliminarily determine the sentiment words it contains. Based on the degree level words and weight values in front of the sentiment words, specific scores of positive or negative sentiments were calculated to obtain the audience’s emotional attitudes towards Japanese culture. Finally, three Japanese monster culture anime are taken as examples to analyze the tendency of the audience’s emotional attitude towards them. The emotional, cognitive, and behavioral values of Japanese monster culture in folk culture research are then explored by analyzing the emotional values in the comments.
Where there are people, there is culture and folklore, and folklore is alive and well, reflecting everyday life. Therefore, this study targets Japanese audiences and relies on CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms for random sampling. Because CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms have a large number of users and many influential governmental organizations and enterprises have registered official accounts on CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms as one of the important channels for their news release, CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms are selected as the data source in this paper. At the same time, the volume of information on the CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms is large, and the complexity of the data is too high to use traditional manual methods to obtain the data, so this paper adopts the data acquisition method of web crawler to obtain the public data on the CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms by connecting to the open API interfaces of the CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms. Data. The generalized crawler process constructed in this paper is shown in Fig. 1. The whole process of obtaining a web page includes sending an access request to the server that needs to be accessed, the server receives the user’s request, the first request for the validity of the request for verification, after verifying the validity of the request, the content of the response to the server feedback to the user, the client receives the response to the content of the content will be displayed, so that we can get the web page data that can be seen. The web crawler is instead of simulating the process of sending a request, and the response to the data to be analyzed, and finally will be analyzed after the acquisition of data saved in the database or saved as a specific format of the file.
The network crawler is full flowchart
Missing value and duplicate value processing.
Due to the excessive amount of data collected, it is easy to cause a large number of missing records. In this regard, this paper adopts the method of referencing the release time of comments to compensate for them. Because the comment release time must be later than the release time of CrowdWorks and YouTube platform, and the earlier the comment is released, the closer it is to the release time of CrowdWorks and YouTube platform, especially the top-ranked comments in terms of the number of likes, in terms of time to be closer to the CrowdWorks and YouTube platform sending time. At the same time, this paper considers the time point for the day dimension, which spans over a large period of time, and thus the comment release time can be used to complement the CrowdWorks and YouTube platform release time. Since the crawling of CrowdWorks and YouTube platform text content and comment content is not on the same page and is a recursive relationship, it will cause a large number of CrowdWorks and YouTube platform text content duplication. So this paper uses excel comes with the delete duplicate columns function to delete duplicate fields with the absolute consistency of the data volume of the amount of likes, comments, retweets as a reference. At the same time, some redundant content that is not part of the statistical word period is deleted. In this paper, most of the special symbols as well as emoticons appear in the comments, in this regard, when reading data, on the one hand, only read the data of the first colon, disregarding the publisher’s nickname, on the other hand, through the substitution of excel and python deletion function to remove the remaining special symbols.
Deactivation.
After the processing mentioned above, the text cannot be used directly, but instead needs to be divided into words and deactivated words. Deactivated words refer to words and useless symbols that appear more frequently but have less information in the text. The presence of these words not only affects the judgment of emotional tendencies, but also creates noise for theme extraction, so they need to be removed. The use of deactivated words is mainly in the data processing to determine whether a word is in the deactivated word list, if it is, it will not be counted in the list of processed words, if not, it can be added to the list of processed words.
The representation of the text and extraction of features of the Japanese monster culture review is a basic problem of text mining and sentiment analysis, because the text itself is unstructured information, in order to mine valuable information from the massive text data it is necessary to first convert the text data into a structured format that is easy to store and process, in this paper, we utilize the expected cross entropy method to extract the features in the text data for the subsequent audience to the Japanese monster culture.
Expected cross-entropy, also known as KL distance, reflects the distance between the probability distribution of the text types of Japanese monster culture and the probability distribution of the text types under the condition that a particular word appears, defined by the formula:
In this paper, the research on sentiment analysis of online comments on Japanese monster culture is realized by Python software based on semantic sentiment dictionary, through the design of optimized sentiment score algorithm as well as repeated Debug optimization of the sentiment dictionary in order to achieve the improvement of the accuracy of the sentiment score algorithm, and to judge the analysis of the audience’s sentiment attitudes towards Japanese monster culture. The process of analyzing the sentiment attitude of Japanese monster culture based on a semantic sentiment dictionary is shown in Fig. 2, First, the cultural comments of the Japanese monster culture were filtered and the emotional characteristics were extracted to analyze the value of their folk culture. which is different from the conventional ROST-based semantic web sentiment analysis, in which the sentiment dictionary used only contains the positive and negative tendency sentiment word dictionary. The NLP-based online text sentiment analysis study of Japanese monster culture in this paper also uses a negative word lexicon as well as a degree-level adverbial lexicon. Meanwhile, the algorithm was designed to recognize the punctuation marks of Japanese monster culture comments, especially “!” were identified to expand the weights of judgments of positive active tendencies, yielding more accurate semantic sentiment analysis results. Sentiment scores were derived from the weight assignments. It is calculated as follows after reading the negative word dictionary, the positive word dictionary, the degree level word dictionary.
Iterate through the loop each Japanese monster culture review text data, firstly, perform the segmentation, scan the position of the words in the sentence and record to judge whether it is a sentiment word or not.
If it is judged to be a positive sentiment word, scan whether there are degree level words before the sentiment word, and if so, multiply by the corresponding weight.
Then scan the number of negatives before the positive emotion word, if there is an odd number of negatives then the score is judged as negative, if there is an even number of negatives then the score is judged as positive (double negatives table affirmative).
Proportional design of the degree level word weight algorithm. For example, “excellent” is judged to have a weight of 4, multiplied by 4 before the positive sentiment word. “Very good” is judged to be weighted by 3, multiplied by 3 before the positive sentiment word. “Better” is judged to have a weight of 2, multiplied by 2 before the positive affective word. If the emotion level is normal, the judgment weight is 0.5, which is multiplied by 0.5 before the positive emotion word.
Determine whether a positive emotion sentence contains an exclamation “!” , scanning the positive emotion words before the exclamation, if one appears then the weight value is added 2, according to the number of emotion words and so on.
Negative emotion sentiment words are judged with the same logic as above.
Calculate the output of the emotional score results in order of positive emotion score value, negative emotion score value, positive emotion score mean, negative emotion score mean, positive emotion score value variance, negative emotion score value variance. Comparison of affective tendencies is mainly based on the first two output data, positive affective score value as well as negative affective score value.
When the final result of the weighted result output, the positive sentiment score of a comment sentence is greater than its negative sentiment score, the output is positive sentiment tendency Pos. When the positive sentiment score of a comment sentence is equal to its negative sentiment score, the output has a neutral affective tendency. When the positive sentiment score of a comment sentence is less than the negative sentiment score, the output is Neg.
The emotional score is based on the semantic emotional dictionary
This paper examines the value of Japanese monster culture in the study of folk culture, including its emotional impact on Japanese monster culture and its relationship to folk culture.
Monster culture has a great influence on Japanese anime culture, and its influence can be seen in many anime works. In Japanese manga some seemingly unrelated to monsters in the anime works will also appear in the shadow of monsters, which is sufficient to prove the subtle influence of monster culture on the Japanese manga culture and Japanese people. In this section, we crawl the reviews of three anime works, Chihiro, Natsume Youjinbou, and Slippery Monster No Sun, which incorporate Japanese monster culture, to serve as the sample data for the analysis of the Japanese public’s sentiment towards Japanese monster culture. On the one hand, these three Japanese anime contain a large number of elements of Japanese monster culture, and their works include a wider range of aspects of Japanese monster culture, enabling a more comprehensive display of Japanese monster culture. On the other hand, these three Japanese anime works belong to the more classic Japanese monster anime, which have a certain amount of fans, and maintain a good dissemination effect, and the number of fans is increasing. Selecting video comments from these three anime works for audience sentiment analysis is representative and can reflect the value of Japanese monster culture in Japanese folk culture.
In the discourse on online videos, grabbing attention is the key to increasing the number of plays, and highly played videos are a reflection of high attention. The comments are fragmented and fine-grained, but the popular comments, as the audience’s expression in the natural state and obtaining a certain number of likes, indicate that these comments hit the psychology of a larger number of viewers and resonate with them, which can reflect the audience’s understanding of the Japanese monster culture to a certain extent. Therefore, in this paper, the comments under three popular Japanese monster culture anime videos on CrowdWorks and YouTube are selected as the correlation that triggers the repercussions of Japanese folk culture. 4,589 comments were obtained on the CrowdWorks platform and 3,875 on the YouTube platform. Texts such as content unrelated to Japanese demon culture anime videos, Japanese stop words, and emoticons were manually removed from the comments on both platforms, and Japanese plural forms, gerund forms, and so on were changed to their original forms. Finally, 7,485 valid comments were obtained, and the number of valid comments for Chihayafuru, Natsume Youjinbou, and Slider No Sun were 2,954, 3,087, and 1,444, respectively. Through the sentiment analysis method proposed in this paper to analyze the positive and negative sentiments in the reviews of the three Japanese monster culture anime, the results of the analysis of the Japanese public’s sentimental tendency towards Japanese monster culture are shown in Fig. 3, with (a)-(c) being the results of the sentiment analysis of the reviews of Chihiro, Natsume Tomono no Tento, and Slippery Ghosts and Grandsons, respectively. Overall, it seems that the Japanese public has similar sentiment tendencies towards the three Japanese monster culture anime, all of which are mainly positive, and the trend of concern is generally consistent. Calculating the sentiment values of the three Japanese monster culture anime works, it is found that the average sentiment value of the reviews of Slider’s Sun is 0.46, which has the highest public sentiment value among the three Japanese monster culture anime. The second one is Natsume Tomono no Tent, with an average value of 0.43. The one with less positive emotional tendency is Chihiro, with an emotional value of 0.3. Throughout the Japanese anime works, it is easy to find that the monster culture has already constituted a part of the original landscape in the hearts of many creators, which is why it is expressed in a variety of works with different themes. This is why it is expressed in a variety of works with different themes. If only a small portion of Japanese people are interested or even obsessed with monster themes, it does not prove the influence of monster culture on Japanese folk culture. However, in fact, the shadow of monster culture can be seen in countless Japanese anime works, and almost every year there are new works with monster themes, which are able to arouse a more positive affective attitude from the audience.
Japanese monster culture animation reviews emotional analysis
The perceived (emotional, cognitive, and behavioral) value of Japanese monster culture in the process of communication is an important factor in promoting the formation of Japanese folk culture and values. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to understand the extent to which Japanese monster culture enhances the emotional and cognitive values of Japanese audiences, so as to understand the role of Japanese monster culture in the development of Japanese folk culture.
This section analyzes the comments related to emotional value in the Japanese monster culture network and finds that the emotional value of Japanese monster culture is mainly reflected in five aspects. They are “Japanese monster culture enhances love for Japanese folk culture” (A1), “Japanese monster culture triggers emotional resonance for folk culture” (A2), “Watching anime related to Japanese monster culture increased recognition and self-confidence in Japanese folk culture” (A3), “Strongly agree with the cultural values in Japanese monster culture” (A4), and “Feel proud and honored by Japanese monster culture” (A5). Sentiment analysis was performed on the public comment data, and values (1-5 points) were assigned to the five aspects of sentiment value. The results of the analysis of emotional value are shown in the average score of Japanese monster culture in emotional value is 4.14 points. It shows that Japanese audiences have enhanced their personal love for Japanese traditional culture and folk culture through Japanese monster culture, and gained an emotional resonance and a sense of cultural belonging. Among them, the sentiment analysis mean of “feeling proud and honored by Japanese monster culture” is the highest at 4.48 points, and the standard deviation is the lowest at 0.32 points, which indicates that Japanese monster culture enhances the cultural self-confidence and sense of cultural pride of Japanese audiences. Emotional resonance (3.87 points) is the audience’s recognition and approval of the feelings conveyed by Japanese monster culture, which requires a common cultural background and shared cultural cognition. Japanese monster culture has a positive communication effect that also increases the audience’s favorable feelings towards Japanese folk culture. Culture is the inner force that unites a nation, and Japanese monster culture uses various forms of expression to construct an imaginary community, trigger the audience’s attention to folk culture, and stimulate the audience’s emotion of common cultural memory.
Emotional value analysis results
| Dimension | Emotional mean | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 4.12 | 0.52 |
| A2 | 3.87 | 0.68 |
| A3 | 4.26 | 0.97 |
| A4 | 3.99 | 0.41 |
| A5 | 4.48 | 0.32 |
| Overall emotional value | 4.14 | 0.28 |
The cognitive value of Japanese yokai culture is as follows: “Japanese yokai culture helps people understand the history of Japanese folk culture” (B1), “I am familiar with the cultural connotation of Japanese folk culture from Japanese yokai culture” (B2), “Japanese yokai culture enhances the understanding of Japanese folk culture” (B3), “Japanese yokai culture has increased people’s interest, attention and understanding of Japanese folk knowledge” (B4), and “the values promoted by Japanese yokai culture strengthen the recognition of Japanese folk culture” (B5). Table 2 shows the results of the sentiment value analysis of each dimension of the cognitive value of Japanese yokai culture, and the average sentiment analysis value of each dimension of cognitive value is 4.13 points, indicating that the Japanese audience has improved their understanding and cognition of Japanese folk culture through Japanese yokai culture. Among them, “I became familiar with the cultural connotation of Japanese folk culture from Japanese yokai culture” (4.58 points) and “The values promoted by Japanese yokai culture strengthened the identification with Japanese folk culture” The average value of sentiment analysis (4.48 points) was above 4 points, indicating that Japanese yokai culture, as the carrier of Japanese folk culture, changed the audience’s cognition and concept of folk culture, not only promoted the growth of their knowledge of Japanese folk culture, improved their understanding of Japanese traditional culture, but also strengthened their recognition of Japanese folk culture values.
Cognitive value analysis results
| Dimension | Emotional mean | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|
| B1 | 3.71 | 0.98 |
| B2 | 4.58 | 0.26 |
| B3 | 3.95 | 0.57 |
| B4 | 3.94 | 0.66 |
| B5 | 4.48 | 0.28 |
| General cognitive value | 4.13 | 0.37 |
Behavioral effect refers to the audience’s attention and interaction with Japanese yokai culture, which stimulates active behaviors in learning folk culture. This section analyzes and sorts out the behavioral value of Japanese yokai culture reflected in audience comments, and mainly analyzes the behavioral value of Japanese yokai culture in Japanese folk culture from four aspects, namely, “Follow, forward, like and comment on information related to Japanese yokai culture, and actively spread cultural knowledge” (C1), “Participated in interactive activities of Japanese yokai culture and actively promote cultural inheritance” (C2), “After contacting Japanese yokai culture, you will further find and learn Japanese folk culture” (C3), “ The desire to go to the Japan Folk Culture Center was inspired by the contact with Japanese yokai culture” (C4). Table 3 shows the results of sentiment value analysis for each dimension of behavior value. The audience had a high emotional value of 4.18 points for “having participated in interactive activities of Japanese yokai culture and actively promoting cultural inheritance”, but the average score of “following, retweeting, liking and commenting on information related to Japanese yokai culture and actively spreading cultural knowledge” (3.59 points) and “the desire to go to the Japanese folk culture center was stimulated by contact with Japanese yokai culture” (3.16 points) were lower than the average score of 3.69 points. On the whole, the audience showed more positive emotions about actively disseminating information about Japanese yokai culture and actively learning Japanese folk culture.
Analysis of cultural behavior value of Japanese monsters
| Dimension | Emotional mean | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|
| C1 | 3.59 | 0.58 |
| C2 | 4.18 | 0.47 |
| C3 | 3.84 | 0.33 |
| C4 | 3.16 | 0.84 |
| General behavior value | 3.69 | 0.51 |
This paper collects the audience’s comment information in CrowdWorks and YouTube platforms, mines the audience’s emotional attitudes towards Japanese monster culture through the established sentiment analysis method, and analyzes the value of Japanese monster culture in Japanese folk culture in terms of emotional, cognitive and behavioral values.
Calculating the affective values of three Japanese monster culture anime works, it is found that the public’s affective tendencies towards the three Japanese monster culture anime are similar, all of which are positively oriented, and the trend of concern is generally the same. Among them, the average sentiment value of the comments on “Slider’s Sun” is 0.46, which has the highest public sentiment value among the three Japanese monster culture anime.
The average sentiment value of the dimensions of the emotional value of Japanese monster culture in folk culture is 4.14, indicating that Japanese audiences have strengthened their personal love for Japanese traditional culture and folk culture through Japanese monster culture and have gained an emotional resonance and a sense of cultural belonging. The average score for “participated in interactive activities of Japanese monster culture and actively promoted cultural inheritance” is 4.18 points.
On the whole, the audience showed a more positive emotional attitude towards Japanese monster culture, and Japanese monster culture was valued higher in folk culture research.