From Point Anchors to Geospatial Support: A Resolution-Aware Representation of Toponymic and Non-Toponymic Place Evidence in a Japanese Yokai Archive

Abstract. Folklore archives often identify a broad administrative region while their summaries mix named places with non-toponymic descriptions of rivers, roads, dwellings, ritual sites, and boundaries. Treating an administrative representative point as an event location can therefore make the mapped evidence appear more precise than the source permits. We present a resolution-aware representation for 33,378 records from the Database of Folktales of Mysterious Phenomena and Yokai. It separates administrative support areas, candidate toponyms, non-toponymic place descriptions, geographic proximity, human-condition terms, derived interfaces, display anchors, and provenance. Rule-based coverage is 28.0% for candidate toponyms and 75.0% for place descriptions; these values are not extraction accuracy because no human gold labels are available. Rule-constrained local matching assigns municipality support to 1,231 records across 452 units. Relative to prefecture support, municipality polygons reduce support area by a median 97.5% and change sampled median coastline distance by 9.2 km. Prefecture-stratified language associations recover expected Kappa–water and Yurei–death constructions, but these are construct checks rather than new folkloristic findings. A separate Kappa distance diagnostic does not support closer physical proximity to mapped major water. The contribution is an evidence-preserving, failure-aware baseline that distinguishes display anchors from the support areas warranted by the archive.