Boundaries as taboo: a cultural-psychological model of human-nature relations in Japanese heterogeneous marriage narratives.

Human cognition of the relationship among individuals, nature and culture is influenced not only by material conditions but also by culturally inherited ways of perceiving and interpreting the world. Among the many ways in which such orientations are passed on, narrative traditions have persisted for an extended period. However, in the past folklore researches, the way that such narrative structures encode shared psychological orientations towards nature has seldom been explored. This study was based on Japanese Heterogeneous Marriage Narratives and explains the recurring taboo motifs in them as cultural means of marking the boundaries between humans and nature. In light of the ideas from narrative psychology and cultural psychology, it will be explored how such stories regulate emotional orientation toward nature. Through qualitative comparison of representative narratives from classical texts and folktales, attention was paid to prohibitions such as "do not look" and "do not open," and these taboos are not regarded merely as plot devices, but rather as ways of regulating how people approach, fear, or distance themselves from the non-human world, thus shaping perception and behavior. The results reflect the recurring features of the construction and perception of boundaries in multiple narrative contexts. Based on this, the article puts forward a three-stage cultural-psychological model -Intimate, Transitional, and Defensive-which reflects different modes of boundary cognition, ranging from relatively close coexistence with nature to increasing separation and exclusion. Through the combined application of literary-anthropological materials and psychological theories, this study shows that traditional narratives carry lasting natural common concepts and continue to influence contemporary people's environmental cognition. These narratives provide an important cultural and psychological form for understanding, sorting out and explaining the collective experience of human beings in dealing with the changes of the earth's system and related human collective trauma. Therefore, its value in future sustainable development research and environmental education cannot be ignored.