Jang Joo-geun (1925–2016), a member of the Cultural Heritage Committee in 1967, conceived a nationwide document survey project and proposed it to the Ministry of Culture aimed at clarifying the situation of disappearing village shrines. The Ministry...
Jang Joo-geun (1925–2016), a member of the Cultural Heritage Committee in 1967, conceived a nationwide document survey project and proposed it to the Ministry of Culture aimed at clarifying the situation of disappearing village shrines. The Ministry of Education surprisingly accepted this proposal and subsequently sent an official letter to teachers (religious personnel) working at elementary and secondary schools across the country surveying the status of the "Village Shrine" in their respective areas. As a result, a total of 5,942 copies of the National Village Jedang Survey Questionnaire were collected nationwide, however, these documents remained largely unnoticed until the 1990s when they were eventually published by the National Folk Museum of Korea under the title Korea's Village Jedang from 1995 to 2004. Despite this, researchers studying village shrines, Dongje, and shrines rarely use these data. Obtained through field surveys in the late 1960s, the data provide a significant resource for understanding the past situation through vividly recorded pictures and photos of specific target sites. In this article, we examined the overall nature and composition of the National Village Jedang Survey Questionnaire and analyzed the results of the field surveys in Samcheok, Gangwon-do, to examine the types and aspects of popular faith in Samcheok.