5
Status and State Racism From Kawata to Eta

The animality of man, in man and against man (whence the systematic "bestialization" of racialized individuals and human groups) is the particular method that theoretical racism adopts in thinking about human historicity.
Etienne Balibar

In the preceding chapters, an argument is made for the pervasive functional importance of social and political status in village life throughout the Tokugawa period. High social status, buttressed by bakufu measures as well as village codes, was the single most significant source of local authority and power. Moreover, with the development of a commercial economy in the eighteenth century, political status was not displaced by economic status, even though titles became available for purchase on a restricted village market. Instead, officialized status (originally in part a by-product of the overlords' assignment for tribute responsibilities to local magnates) took on an independent, symbolic value, having the potential to politically offset the loss of material assets. Status, however, retained important links to a material base. Economically successful peasants frequently tried, sometimes effectively, to use recently acquired wealth to secure access to, or even displace, the old village "status aristocracy." Ultimately, economic status, whether past or present, was always at issue in claims of political and social status.

The existence of a "nonstatus" category, however, forced certain people to exist apart from and outside of the status system described above: the outcastes, as we have referred to them thus far, or the so-called eta . These people did not refer to themselves by that derogatory term meaning "plentiful dirt," or polluted. Instead, they called themselves kawata , literally, "leather workers," after their principal occupa-

Epigraph: Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," in Anatomy of Racism , ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 283.

tional profession, a practice I shall follow here. The history of discrimination against the kawata as a function of status in Tokugawa society directs attention to the early modern relationship between sociopolitical status, legislative practice, and a form of racism—a term that may cause surprise but is not used lightly. Like other social groups, for example, the samurai, merchants, and peasants, the kawata were legally restricted to their birth-ascribed status. Registered beggars, or hinin ("nonhumans"), also constituted a "nonstatus" group, but one that was not hereditary: a person could become a hinin, be sentenced to that status, or be allowed to leave it, but once a kawata, one died a kawata.

In his work on systems of social stratification, the anthropologist Gerald Berreman argues that all status systems assign people a "differential intrinsic worth" according to their position in the social hierarchy.^[1] In the case of the kawata this intrinsic worth was negative to the extreme, for they were marked as existentially and unredeemably polluted, defiled, impure. In Japan, where notions of purity and pollution have historically functioned as powerful categories of ritual classification, the kawata suffered the worst consequences of the social application of these values. Even though the status system, with specific regard to the kawata, was legally abolished in 1871, their descendants are the only persons in Japanese society today who continue to suffer discrimination because of their ancestors' status during the Tokugawa period.

Today the kawata's descendants are referred to officially as burakumin , or "hamlet people," after dropping the Meiji era's qualifying prefix tokubetsu , "special." Estimated as numbering as many as 3 million people, the burakumin are Japan's largest "Japanese minority."^[2] There are still some six thousand segregated communities throughout Japan, where most of them live. Many burakumin try to "pass" into Japanese society; some succeed, to the point that their descendants are

[1] Berreman, "Social Inequality," 14.

[2] I have adopted the (perhaps) high figures provided by the Buraku Liberation Movement. For a discussion of these figures, see Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryo^[*]shusei^[*] , vol. 14, Buraku , ed. Harada Tomohiko (San'ichi shobo^[*] , 1971), 1 (hereafter NSSS 14). See also George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Japan's Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 114-18; and Ninomiya Shigeaki, "An Inquiry concerning the Origin, Development, and Present Situation of the Eta in Relation to the History of Social Classes in Japan," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan . 2d ser., 10 (1933): 113.

not aware of their own burakumin background. The 1871 Emancipation Decree did not make private or even public discrimination illegal (although article 14 of the postwar constitution prohibits discrimination by the state). The Emancipation Decree simply repealed the legally sanctioned status distinctions in the realm of occupations and social status: "The appellation eta/hinin shall be abolished; henceforward they shall be treated as common people in social status and occupation." Frank Upham writes that legal emancipation "meant little. The government was at best indifferent to significant change.... In fact, government policy directly contributed to continued discrimination by registering Burakumin as 'new commoners.'"^[3] Their situation is not dissimilar to that of blacks after the abolition of slavery in the United States, which did not eliminate racial inequality and discrimination.

In attempting to account for this discrimination against the kawata/burakumin, we need to address the role of Japanese cultural beliefs about purity and pollution. Undoubtedly, pollution was the idiom of discrimination that turned kawata into eta. Moreover, insofar as they constituted a status group, it may be that they not only shared assigned universal characteristics of status differentiation but revealed in its purest form the function of status as socially sanctioned disrespect for a particular group of people. How the ascriptive logic of status systems works is thus a second question that needs to be considered. Closely related to this question is a third one, that of racism. There are several reasons why this term can be considered appropriate in a discussion of the kawata/burakumin.

Berreman makes a good pedagogical case for using analogical terms—caste and race —that by definition are alike only in certain (but sufficient) respects.^[4] To make the notion of caste and its effect on people's lives understandable to Americans, Berreman encourages speaking of a caste system as a form of racism, because Americans are familiar with that reality. (He would encourage the reverse in attempting to explain racism to Hindus.) He writes that burakumin "comprise a 'race' in the

[3] Frank K. Upham, Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 80. For the text of this brief decree, see Burakushi yogo^[*]jiten , ed. Kobayashi Shigeru et al. (Kashiwa shobo, 1985), S.V. "kaihorei^[*] " (56).

[4] Gerald Berreman, Caste and Other Inequities: Essays on Inequality (Meerut, India: Folklore Institute, 1979), 190.

sociological sense of Western racism, but an 'invisible' (i.e., not genetic or phenotypic) one."^[5]

The kawata/burakumin are more than a sociologically "invisible" race. In the course of his research on caste and race, Berreman found that "all systems of birth-ascribed stratification seem to include a claim that the social distinctions are reflected in biological (i.e. "racial") differences."^[6] This observation, while not true for all status groups in Tokugawa Japan, certainly applies to the kawata. Although the kawata are indistinguishable from other Japanese, explicitly racial theories, which differentiate , and racist theories, which discriminate , have developed since the Tokugawa period to explain the origin of the kawata in order to justify discriminatory practices against them.

The absence of physical properties to distinguish them from "majority" Japanese (hence "invisible" differences) and the construction of a racial theory (hence a different "race") have combined to produce a particular kind of intra-race racism, one based exclusively on descent. Genealogies, however, are known only to those who literally know the record. Without that knowledge, discrimination against burakumin would be impossible. This is where the state plays a crucial role. As mentioned above, the 1871 Emancipation Decree did not outlaw discrimination per se. Indeed, all former kawata were entered on the population registers as "new citizens" (shinshimin ), so that state records perpetuate the kawata's separate identity, making it possible today for anyone sufficiently interested to consult the old population registers to discriminate against burakumin.^[7] Without active complicity by majority Japanese, discrimination would disappear; some, however, still care enough about racialized status to check these records.

Revulsion and defilement, the cultural idiom and social disposition through which discrimination against the kawata is commonly expressed, are often correlated to the high valuation of purity in the Shinto tradi-

[5] Ibid., 188. This invisibility can have peculiar effects; thus, unaware of their own descent, some Japanese may share prejudices against burakumin until the day when their own burakumin background is revealed and they are shocked to discover that they have been discriminating against their own (Sam Jameson, "Japan's 'Untouchables' Suffer Invisible Stain," Los Angeles Times , January 2, 1993, A24).

[6] Berreman, "Social Inequality," 14.

[7] The ineffectiveness of recent restrictions of access to these records is discussed below.

tion. Yet, the first laws to identify categories of Japanese associated with specific occupations as senmin , literally, "despised, mean (iyashii ) people," were laws adopted in toto from China in 645, during the Taika Reform. Scholars often trace the development of discriminatory practice in Japan to that point.^[8] However, the composition of these "despised" social groups, their position in society, and the nature of prejudice against them has changed considerably over time. Legal discrimination decreased greatly during the early Heian period (ninth century) and became insignificant in medieval times. For example, a law of 789 declared children from mixed marriages between "good" (ryomin^[*] ) and "low" people (senmin) to be ryomin^[*] , whereas previously they had been marked as senmin. Moreover, whole subclasses of senmin were simply set free when government offices to which they had been attached as dependents were dismantled and slavery was abolished in 907.^[9] Although many nonagricultural occupations were socially devalued in medieval times, the first reference to some of them as "plentifully polluted" (eta written with the characters still used today) appears only in the 1450s.^[10]

It is often said that the Buddhist reverence for life, as well as Shinto notions of pollution associated with death and blood, played an important role in targeting butchers and tanners as particularly defiled, and indeed a few late texts confirm this. Thus one finds a clear reference in a Buddhist monk's diary of 1446 to "those who carve up dead cattle and horses for consumption" as "the lowest kind of people,"^[11] although the source of abomination seems to be more the eating of meat than the butchering. Nowhere does one find reference to hereditary pollution dissociated from occupational succession.

Medieval concepts of despised occupations and human defilement were social and occupational (hence functional in a sense), loosely defined and applied, and formulated neither by law nor as a hereditary condition. In 1871 a law had to be enacted to abolish the official status "eta-hinin," which points to a legal dimension for discrimination during the Tokugawa period that was missing in medieval times. In Toku-

[8] For one such example in English, see Ninomiya, "Inquiry."

[9] Teraki Nobuaki, Kinsei buraku no seiritsu to tenkai (Osaka: Kaiho^[*] shuppansha, 1986), 22.

[10] Ibid., 26.

[11] Watanabe Hiroshi, Mikaiho^[*]buraku no keisei to tenkai (Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1977), 70.

gawa Japan lie the origins of the state's role in the ongoing discrimination against the kawata/burakumin. Some scholars estimate that more than one-third of today's approximately six thousand buraku communities originated in the eighteenth century,^[12] when we begin to find discriminatory and segregationist laws, racist in their effect, being enacted throughout Japan against the kawata.

Today one can see how cultural notions of pollution and racism conspire with bureaucratic practices to perpetuate discrimination against burakumin. But how can the introduction of the new status for kawata in the Tokugawa period, and the new laws, practices, and ideologies that developed along with it, be explained? What role did bakufu legislation play in this?

I shall start by discussing a number of episodic events, legal cases, and incidents involving kawata. The need for such an approach stems from the paucity of microhistorical narratives of the burakumin's Tokugawa past in English. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's symbolic functional analysis posits the kawata ahistorically, as a necessary prop for Japanese culture to construct a counterimage of itself.^[13] Historical and cultural distance easily robs past agents of their subjectivity even for well-intentioned scholars, who nevertheless tend to assume that ideological representations were internalized by those who suffered the most from them. Thus Ian Neary, in his book about the modern liberation struggle of burakumin (to which he is obviously sympathetic), writes quite confidently: "The eta:hinin regarded themselves as impure, not quite human, not deserving equal treatment."^[14] He conflates what Bourdieu calls an objective, socially assigned position and a subjective relation to that position on the part of those who occupy it.^[15] The kawata did not

[12] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 111.

[13] Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

[14] This sentence is preceded by the following imperious passage: "All that existed within the eta:hinin groups was simply a deviant reflection of the majority culture of the locality. With neither leadership nor culture there was no sense of identity. Indeed the development of a set of religious beliefs which supported the regulations systematically imposed from the eighteenth century, effectively prevented the emergence of any kind of self-esteem which would provide a basis from which to challenge superior bodies" (Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Prewar Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989], 26).

[15] Bourdieu, Logic of Practice , 27.

even call themselves eta. When, for instance, a bakufu intendant in Harima province inquired at a certain village whether there were any eta, the answer was that there were some kawata, yes, but no eta.^[16] To my knowledge, the political situation of the kawata during the Tokugawa period has mostly been ignored by Western scholars.^[17] The events to be discussed will expand our understanding of the position, treatment, and self-perception of the kawata first through an analysis of social and political practice. They will supplement the macrocultural or microindividual and ideological explanations that are often invoked in discussions of the kawata/burakumin.

Episodes

"In Service of the Shogun," 1743

The date is 1743/11, the place Kami-Hosoya village in Yokomi-gun of Musashino province (Saitama prefecture).^[18] A few weeks before, a local criminal had been sent to Edo to be executed. Now his head was being returned for a three-day public exposure. To manage the event, the headman called upon the chief of the kawata hamlet attached to Shimo-Wana village.

In many ways the kawata were not under the rule of the regular village headman. Hence, instead of contacting his colleague in Shimo-Wana, Kami-Hosoya's headman communicated directly with the head (etagashira ) of the kawata/hinin community associated with Shimo-Wana village. Moreover, the headman had no authority over the head

[16] Wakita Osamu, Kawaramakimono no sekai (Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 1991), 5. Hatanaka Toshiyuki reports that in Kinai the eta called themselves kawata ("'Kawata' mibun to wa nani ka," MK, 307). In Hozu village, discussed in chapter 4, the kawata, referred to officially as ego^[*] , literally, "polluted district (the e of eta plus go^[*] )," referred to themselves with a homonym, substituting the e of Edo ("inlet," "bay"), perhaps because their community was the "capital" of the five kawata communities in south Tanba (see Igeta, "Mikaiho^[*] buraku," 110; and idem, "Kuchi-Tanba," 95, 111).

[17] One notable exception is Frank Upham, who shows an acute awareness of the various political aspects concerning the kawata as they have been dealt with by Japanese scholars (Law and Social Change , 79-80). Most of the studies of the burakumin deal with the modern liberation movements. De Vos and Wagatsuma (Japan's Invisible Race ) provide no more than a general background for the Tokugawa period.

[18] Tsukada Takashi, "Kinsei no keibatsu," 119-23.

of the kawata and could not give him direct orders; rather the Kami-Hosoya headman invited him to take charge of the situation.

Why Shimo-Wana and not some other kawata community? The headman had no choice in the matter. Kami-Hosoya was part of a specific geographical area that included a number of kawata hamlets operating under their own leadership in Shimo-Wana. These territorial divisions went by various names, the most common being kusaba or dannaba . The kawata performed prescribed duties for the area: skinning and disposing of dead cattle and horses and reworking the hides into leather goods (footgear, drum skins, armor, bow strings, etc.), catching fugitives and lawbreakers, guarding prisoners and executing criminals, patrolling the villages, and policing festivals and markets. Such duties or rights were divided among the kawata/hinin as shares (dannaba kabu ). The Shimo-Wana dannaba comprised twenty-five villages and was one of five such dannaba in Yokomi district.^[19]

After the job was done, the two kawata heads in charge handed the implements used (gokogisama^[*]godogu^[*] , "the honorable tools of the honorable public authority [the shogun]") back to the headman, who drafted a receipt properly addressed to "Mister (dono ) Jin'emon and Mister Genzaemon from Shimo-Wana village." During their three days on duty, all twelve kawata and two hinin were served meals in a room at the headman's, as were a number of kawata heads from other hamlets who had come to take in the scene.

This was a rare occasion for the kawata/hinin to function with pride and authority at an extraordinary event as full-fledged officials. Four of the higher-ranked kawata wore long swords, the eight others short ones. Swords, a professional attitude, polite addresses, and being entertained at the home of the village headman, apparently without much concern about "pollution," were all marks of public respect. Their authority was manifested in other ways as well.

At noon on 11/15 an intendant's representative arrived to prepare for the display of the head he had brought from Edo. That evening he conferred with Jin'emon and two other kawata leaders about, among

[19] Tsukada Takashi, Kinsei Nihon mibunsei no kenkyu^[*] (Kobe^[*] : Hyogo^[*] buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , 1987), 18-20. In the Kanto area, shares were time allotments of certain days to certain households; in the Kinai, the shares were territorial segments that were given to households for their operations (Igeta, "Kuchi-Tanba," 102).

other things, how much to charge onlookers for viewing the spectacle, since it was "the custom in the countryside to charge eight mon for a crucifixion and nine for a beheading." According to the kawata's reconstruction of the event, Jin'emon replied, "We do not take money as executioners; besides, if you charge fees in the countryside, people will not come near but crowd the roads and look from afar and this would be of no service to the shogun." As it turned out, a fee was charged, and forty-six people came from eleven villages and had a jolly, drunken time.

In Edo at least, executions were not grand public spectacles, but took place in the prison courtyard. Perhaps the authorities were aware of the dysfunctional crowd behavior executions provoked, as described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish . However, other aspects of penal practice, such as parading the criminal or exposing the corpse or head, were meant to have a salutary effect. The kawata understood this deterrent effect, for they wanted people to "come near" and see. More people would show up if no fee were charged; they protested that if executions were staged and money paid to view them, dignity and honor would be lost—the shogun's as well as their own.

In their meeting with the intendant's emissary the kawata leaders also argued about protocol. The official announced that it was a "national law" that ten guards be used on an occasion like this. The kawata heads countered that in Edo twelve kawata and a great number of hinin were used for an ambulatory exposure, but if there were to be no ambulation, then two hinin in addition to twelve kawata would suffice; in other words, a total of fourteen guards, and not ten, were needed. Moreover, they said, they had no orders from Danzaemon in Edo to lower the numbers. The official nevertheless ordered them to limit the number of guards to ten. The kawata leaders agreed, with the proviso that they would check with Danzaemon on what to do on such occasions in the future.

Satisfied that all preparations had been made, the official left the next day at noon, having handed over the display item. The three-day event began the following morning with fourteen rather than ten guards on active duty. The official did not get the last word after all. Clearly, the kawata had followed their own professional judgment and the procedures as proscribed by their (semi-)national leader Danzaemon, who received a written report from them a week later.

Almost a hundred years after this event, a crucifixion took place in

the same village. Again local kawata were mobilized to stand guard for the three days the corpse was to be exposed. The crucifixion proper, however, was performed by a team of two of Danzaemon's underlings, whom he had dispatched with fifteen helpers from Edo.

Shimo-Wana's dannaba was located within the territory of one bakufu intendant. This was not always the case, for in practice, if not in principle, dannaba often cut across a number of jurisdictions and even domains. Therefore, the kawata's social and political topography was different from that of the peasants. They lived in their own hamlets under a separate local and regional jurisdiction in fairly close contact with their leader Danzaemon in Edo. They were often required to, or simply did, cross into social and geographical areas generally forbidden to them while performing their duties. This was especially true during the late Tokugawa period, as the following example illustrates.

Catching Thieves, Arresting Vagrants, 1848

In 1848/3 three prisoners escaped from the bakufu intendant's rural office (jinya ) in Mikage-shinden (in the center of the Kita-Saku plain, Shinano).^[20] They headed south but were caught some fourteen kilometers away, at the village of Kutsusawa, just as they were about to disappear into the mountains. They were escorted back to prison by a team of kawata and a lower official from the Mikage-shinden office. The official had difficulties enforcing his authority over the kawata.

First of all, the kawata disobeyed his orders concerning the size of the escort. Because many men from different hamlets had joined the party, their number was well beyond that prescribed for such an occasion. Moreover, when the noisy troupe arrived at the Nakasendo^[*] way station of Shionada at midday, they protested the official's decision to feed them the same riceballs (nigirimeshi ) the prisoners were being fed: while performing official business, they said, they deserved a full meal served on a platter. The group became angry, forced their way into two inns, and proceeded to eat and drink their fill.

Afterwards an investigation was launched by the kawata head of Mikage-shinden. Twelve kawata were summoned, but none of them had been part of the escort from Kutsusawa; they had joined later. All in all, seventeen kawata from nine villages (representing a bakufu fief

[20] Saito^[*] Yoichi^[*] , Gorobe-shinden , 251-60.

and three domains—Tanoguchi, Iwamurata, and Komoro—within a radius of some fifteen kilometers) were said to have feasted at the inns. Ultimately, the headmen from the parent villages of the hamlets of the kawata in question wrote a joint request for pardon. One kawata from Gorobe-shinden was finally jailed.

Strictly speaking, the Mikage-shinden kawata head's jurisdiction was limited to kawata in that bakufu territory. However, in an area like Kita-Saku, where the fertile plateau had been carved up by half a dozen overlords, he often found it necessary to coordinate activities, such as the catching of thieves, in regions beyond his jurisdiction. The foregoing investigation concerned two issues: a false initial report of the identity of all participants in the event; and the forced entry into the inns under the rubric of official business. Almost everywhere in eighteenth-century Japan laws were issued forbidding kawata from entering the homes of ordinary commoners "even if it rains." In Kita-Saku such laws suddenly appeared in the domains of Komoro, Iwamurata, Okudono, and Tanoguchi, all in 1738.^[21] The second issue thus involved the breaking of laws ordering segregation between kawata and commoners.

In 1855 four vagrants (mushuku) wearing long swords were reported at an inn at Kodai. Dispatched from Mikage-shinden to apprehend them were two kawata armed with sticks—which was unusual, since they customarily wore one sword when on official business, although some regulations seem to have prohibited swords for kawata (see art. 3 of the regulations for outcastes in Okudono domain, Kita-Saku, in appendix 5). The vagrants resisted arrest, assaulted the two kawata, and escaped, leaving each kawata with deep cuts (some eighteen centimeters long) across the face and forearm. When peasant uprisings escalated to armed confrontations, kawata were mobilized along with samurai retainers to quell the peasants. Such incidents involving kawata police have been documented for Fukuyama domain (1787), Shinano's districts of Aida (1869) and Kita-Saku (1782), and a number of other places.^[22]

[21] Ozaki Yukiya, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku no shiteki kenkyu^[*] (Kashiwa shobo^[*] , 1982), 17.

[22] On Fukuyama and Aida, see Bix, Peasant Protest , 124 and 202; on Kita-Saku, Banba Masatomo, "Mibunsei no teppai e: Shinshu^[*] ni okeru burakushi sobyo^[*] (4)," Shinano 16, no. 12 (1964): 36. For another example from 1755, see Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 63. John B. Cornell mentions kawata being called upon in 1871 to defend the castle of Takasaki (Gunma prefecture) and the mobilization of more than five hundred kawata to garrison a fortress during an uprising of some seventy thousand peasants in northern Kii ("From Caste Patron to Entrepreneur and Political Ideologue: Transformation in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Outcaste Leadership Elites," in Modern Japanese Leadership: Transition and Change , ed. Bernard Silberman and H. Harootunian [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966], 63).

When kawata were used against rioting peasants, they were not looked upon as officials to whom respect was due. For example, when three kawata hamlets were mobilized in the Fukuyama riot of 1787, the peasants apparently voiced their anger and indignation by shouting things like "If you dare insult us by turning the likes of abominable eta on us, we'll kill them and feed them to the dogs!"^[23]

At other times kawata joined in rebellions, apparently without objections from the other peasants.^[24] Such was the case with Oshio^[*] Heihachiro's^[*] uprising in Osaka in 1836. It sometimes happened that kawata communities were split between those who were mobilized to suppress the unrest and those who actively participated in it. In 1823 four kawata were among the twenty-six people punished as ringleaders of a large rebellion in northern Kii.^[25]

When peasants rioted, kawata were mobilized to suppress them, but when kawata rioted, a rare occurrence, peasants, not other kawata, were mobilized to bring them under control. The authorities deployed commoners against commoners to keep the peace, playing off the emotionally loaded status antagonisms between them. The next incident involves villagers who mobilized such hostile sentiments when they discredited a fellow peasant by defaming his pedigree as polluted by low-status elements.

[23] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 64.

[24] Hatanaka ("'Kawata' mibun," 327) lists seven riots between 1748 and 1866 in which kawata participated.

[25] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 64. Some historians have raised the question whether kawata were actually ringleaders in all instances where they were punished as such. They may have been the victims of lower officials' eagerness to demonstrate results of their mopping-up operations (see Kobayashi Shigeru's remarks in Kobayashi Shigeru et al., "Zadankai: Kinsei hisabetsu buraku ni kansuru horei^[*] o megutte," in Kinsei hisabetsu buraku kankei horeishu^[*] : Tenryo^[*]o chushin^[*]to shite , ed. Kobayashi Shigeru [Akashi shoten, 1981], 498). In the Chihara riot of 1782, described and analyzed by Anne Walthall (Social Protest , 21-23, 151-55, esp. 154), the kawata community of Minami-Oji^[*] was singled out for special punishment (see Hatanaka, "'Kawata' mibun," 321-24).

The Bonboku Incident, 1777-1780

In Kita-Saku in 1777/3 a certain Yojiro^[*] was excluded from a young men's dance at the village festival in Ozawa^[*] .^[26] The village officials had concurred with this expulsion, because Yojiro^[*] was someone "with a bad pedigree." This claim did not go unchallenged by Yojiro^[*] and his father Chuemon^[*] , and led to a lawsuit two years later. At issue was whether the officials had slurred Chuemon's^[*] ancestry, and if so, on what grounds.

The intendant in charge tried to take an easy way out. Avoiding the central issue, he cited Chuemon's^[*] violent behavior during the present quarrel and sentenced him to be handcuffed for a time. This triggered a number of personal appeals, not to the intendant, but directly to the domain's investigators in Edo. In 1779/9 one of Chuemon's^[*] relatives went to Edo. Chuemon^[*] himself was joined in an appeal to Edo by two of his sons in the third and sixth months of 1780. Domain authorities were thus forced to address the substance of the dispute and come forth with a decision regarding Chuemon's^[*] status, which is why we know the arguments on both sides.

Chuemon's^[*] rebuttal consisted of several points. First, one of his ancestors had been entered as a titled peasant on the land survey of 1629, one hundred and fifty years earlier. Second, another ancestor had served as a local guide to land surveyors in the 1650s and 1660s. And third, he had commended land to the village shrine. This, in his eyes, entitled him to treatment as a regular community member.

Of these three points, the village officials accepted as valid only the first one, even though they acknowledged Chuemon^[*] as a tribute-paying peasant. Yet ancestry and tax status notwithstanding, the village officials believed that their discriminatory stance was justified. Their reasons were also threefold: Chuemon's^[*] family had not married local people; he acted as if he were on equal terms with the blind; and he did not relate to kawata the way the other peasants did. Through circumstantial evidence and innuendo it was argued that the social behavior of this otherwise legally certified peasant justified discriminatory treatment. The absence of local marriage alliances suggested that Chuemon^[*] had family ties with "others." The blind associates referred to here were

[26] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 101-2, 259-60.

zato^[*] , not just people with impaired vision (mojin^[*] ) but members of an official organization for storytellers, musicians (biwahoshi^[*] ), masseurs, and so on, all of whom were blind individuals who earned an independent living in their occupations.^[27] As such, zato^[*] were a subcategory of senmin, lower people, just as the kawata were. Thus the statement that Chuemon^[*] was on a level with them suggested that he too was of a lower status.

The same suggestion was made with regard to Chuemon's^[*] association with the kawata. He was even accused of not paying the "sheaf" (ichiwa ), which every peasant household was required to pay the kawata for the services they performed for the village. Moreover, it was claimed that one of Chuemon's^[*] ancestors, a certain Saemon, had made his living as a bonboku , a local name for entertainers who performed the lion dance (shishimai ).

Entertainers were yet another category of senmin; they were eventually put under the jurisdiction of the kawata chief Danzaemon in Edo during the eighteenth century. Like other holders of low occupations, they were usually housed in separate quarters. For example, in the land register of Azumi district in Shinano circa 1650, yamabushi yashiki (compounds for mountain ascetics), doshin^[*]yashiki (Buddhist priests without temples), and a yashiki for shishimai performers are listed. In 1687, in a village of the same district, officials had to intervene in a dispute between kawata, Ebisu (Ainu), and shishimai dancers regarding group rank, a dispute that was settled in favor of the kawata.^[28] Throughout the seventeenth century the authorities had often settled disputes among various classes or occupations of "lower people," sometimes by consigning them, as they did the hinin and entertainers, to the jurisdiction of the kawata.^[29]

In the case of Chuemon^[*] the local temple mediated a conciliation. The domain meted out punishments to both parties, differentially but graded according to status, for having caused so much trouble. Chuemon^[*] was

[27] The penal code distinguishes between mojin^[*] and biwahoshi^[*] (see TKKk, 4:234). Internally, the zato^[*] were organized hierarchically into dozens of ranks at a national level under the jurisdiction of Kengyo^[*] in Kyoto (see KDJ 6:406, s.v. "Kengyo^[*] ").

[28] Banba Masatomo, "'Buraku' no seiritsu ni tsuite: Shinshu^[*] ni okeru burakushi sobyo^[*] (2)," Shinano 12, no. 9 (1960): 49, 59.

[29] See Tsukada Takashi, "Kasomin^[*] no sekai: 'Mibunteki shuen^[*] ' no shiten kara," in MK, 225-67.

sentenced to domiciliary confinement (oshikome ) for ten days and was manacled for between fifteen and thirty days. The village officials received a lighter sentence: domiciliary confinement (enryo ) for between ten and thirty days.^[30] The authorities did not settle the question of Chuemon's^[*] status.

As a very peculiar genealogical reckoning, genealogy was invoked as the ultimate proof of Chuemon's^[*] low status. One entertainer ancestor erased his long and venerable peasant lineage. "Genealogical descent," like occupation, language, or skin color (here as in other times and places), becomes the arbitrary, socially defined basis for a particular form of discrimination—one of Tokugawa Japan's unique ("early modern") contributions to Japanese cultural and social practice that is not yet part of the past even today. It did not exist as such in the early Tokugawa period, nor was it a legacy from the Middle Ages; rather, it was a product of eighteenth-century Tokugawa society and culture. Another important point is that the verdict could have been different. Aside from local public opinion, manipulating "genealogy" and association, official legal "world-making" had also to do with whether one was a kawata or not.

The Kidnapping of a Hinin Woman, 1781

Kawata exercised policing functions in numerous villages far from the locale of their residence. They lived together, often only a couple of families, especially in Shinano, which lacked the large kawata communities that were common to the Kinai—not in, but next to, villages,

[30] There were various degrees of domiciliary confinement. For commoners only there was tojime (door closure), which entailed nailing a bar across the door to prevent contact with the outside world; having only some effect in the close quarters of city neighborhoods, it was replaced by reprimands and fines in 1740. Oshikome (shutting up) was not limited to commoners and forbade social intercourse for twenty to one hundred days, but the doors were not locked. For warriors and priests, there were three other kinds of confinement. In heimon (gate closure), the most serious penalty of the three, all gates and windows were closed, though they were not nailed shut, and contact with the outside world was forbidden for a period of fifty to one hundred days. In hissoku (forced closure), the gates were closed for thirty to fifty days, but the prisoner was allowed to sneak discretely through the wicket in the main gate or through a side entrance at night. In enryo (restraint), the lightest form of domiciliary confinement for elites, the gates were closed, but the wicket or side door was left unlatched (hikiyosete oku ), allowing similar goings and comings at night (see TKKk, 4:231-32, and the relevant entries in KDJ).

outside the gates, at the borders, or near the entrances or exits of way stations.^[31] Although they were segregated from the other villagers, they nevertheless were considered part of the village in some ways, especially when it came to confrontations with other villages, as the following example, also from Okudono domain, shows.

This incident, in 1781, involved Mon, the daughter of Kanesuke, a hinin from Kami-Kaize village (Minami-Saku district). Kanesuke had lived there for several decades without having been properly registered: he was an illegal resident. He made a living working for two kawata who had shares in the dannaba where Kami-Kaize was located. One of these, Magoichi, was from the kawata hamlet of Tanoguchi; the other, Tahee, was from Kaetsu (both villages were located seven kilometers north of Kami-Kaize).^[32] Hinin often worked for kawata, but in this area there were no hinin communities. Kanesuke, not registered and without the support of a network of peers, had a client-patron relation with Magoichi and Tahee.

Mon had been involved with a certain Heizo^[*] , a registered peasant from Shiga village (seventeen kilometers to the north, in bakufu territory), for over a year when, on 1781/5/26, she disappeared. Suspicion fell immediately upon Heizo^[*] , who had visited her that day. Kanesuke alerted his patron Magoichi, who notified Yata, the prison guard at Tanoguchi and probably the head of Tanoguchi domain's kawata.

Heizo^[*] was found in Oiwake station on the Nakasendo^[*] , close to Karuizawa (thirty kilometers from Kami-Kaize and eighteen kilometers from Shiga). Yata tied him up and took him into custody in his own house. After learning from Heizo^[*] that he had taken Mon along and entrusted her to an inn in Oiwake, Yata handed him over to Magoichi on the third day of the following month (the intercalary fifth month). The next thing to do was to get Mon back to her father, Kanesuke. Until then they would keep Heizo^[*] with the kawata community in Tanoguchi. The matter became complicated, however.

On the seventh, the village officials of Kami-Kaize became involved and pressed more details from Heizo^[*] . Mon and Heizo^[*] had known each other for one year and had plans to get married. They had eloped (or he

[31] Ozaki, Shishu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 30, 32.

[32] Ozaki Yukiya, "Shinano kuni Saku-gun ni okeru buraku no shiteki kosatsu^[*] ," Buraku mondai kenkyu^[*] 18 (1964): 93-98; a short version of this incident can be found in Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 261-62.

had taken her), but since he could not marry her soon, he had thought of putting her into service for four or five years at an inn at Oiwake. Why did the village officials become involved in a matter of an illegal resident?

The kawata had originally hoped to solve this case by themselves, without recourse to the authorities, in part, no doubt because of Mon's and her father's nonregistered status. Their plan was to quietly arrange an exchange of Heizo^[*] for Mon without much further ado. They had expected Heizo's^[*] village of Shiga to find Mon and bring her home. Shiga village, however, had no intention of looking for Mon, but assumed, nevertheless, that Heizo^[*] would be allowed to return without a problem. On the fifth day of the month, they had even refused to negotiate the matter with the kawata. That was when Yata and Magoichi handed the affair over to the village officials of Kami-Kaize. Heizo^[*] was transferred there on the seventh, and negotiations with Shiga started.

As before, the Shiga officials showed no interest in helping search for Mon. In addition, they were lukewarm about Heizo's^[*] return, because they found it "difficult to accept that Heizo^[*] had been imprisoned by kawata from Tanoguchi." The assumption may have been that it was the kawata's job to catch criminals, but they had no business locking them up, for we know that the representatives from Kami-Kaize objected to this way of putting it. They argued that what they had done to Heizo^[*] was something altogether different from throwing him in jail. Shiga village complained also that "the apprehension and jailing by a kawata would cause Heizo^[*] to lose his status."

Legally speaking, this was nonsense. The mere fact of being caught for a misdemeanor or felony did not automatically result in loss of status. When commoners were sentenced to become hinin, this was the result of a specific verdict. The allegation here, however, is that close contact with a kawata would lower Heizo's^[*] status (the same argument as in the Bonboku Incident), or at least cause the loss of his good name, although the term used was mibun , "status." After learning either that Heizo^[*] had intended to marry a hinin (which toward the end of the eighteenth century would result in loss of commoner status) or that he had kidnapped a woman who had then disappeared, his own villagers thought that perhaps Heizo^[*] had become a liability and therefore already considered him not to be one of them.

In the negotiations on the eleventh between the two headmen, Shiga indeed refused to take Heizo^[*] back and insisted that Kami-Kaize help

with the search for Mon. Kami-Kaize had lost its leverage for forcing Mon's return now that Shiga, for the most spurious and insulting reasons, did not want Heizo^[*] back. The infuriated officials of Kami-kaize decided to lodge a formal suit, risking even more trouble because of Kanesuke's illegal situation. They even threatened to carry their case to Edo if the local intendant's office did not agree that Heizo^[*] should be handed over only after Mon had been returned.

Shiga's insult by way of status pollution pushed the confrontation to new heights by exploiting to the extreme the shared popular notions about kawata. Initially the kawata had aimed for an informal solution, without drawing official attention. As the village authorities became involved, Kami-Kaize identified increasingly with the kawata and hinin that served the village. Local pride took over, and Kami-Kaize declared itself to stand by them all the way.

The respective intendants of each village, notified of the lawsuit, were still eager to settle out of court. They chose new intermediaries, who succeeded in having both sides agree to Heizo's^[*] return to Shiga without any reference to the problem of Mon's return to Kami-Kaize. The reason given was that neither the innkeeper to whom Mon had been entrusted nor Mon herself could be found. It is likely that the officials from Shiga had known this all along and had already abandoned any hope of getting Heizo^[*] back, since they could not offer Mon in exchange. Shiga's professed reasons had driven the Kami-Kaize officials to initiate the suit, but after they found out that Mon's whereabouts were not known they could not comply with the mediators' insistence that Heizo^[*] be allowed to return to his village. This, however, was what the intendants ultimately ordered.

The intendants judged the case closed after Heizo^[*] had returned to the village where he was registered. They do not seem to have further investigated Mon's disappearance or even her alleged service contract. After all, she was a woman, daughter of a hinin, and unregistered, far less valuable than a registered peasant and his return to his village. While the village authorities of Kami-Kaize rallied around one of their subjects, the "law" as represented by the intendants shared the popular discriminatory views. We are left in the dark about Mon's fate.

Anyone who knows anything about Oiwake at that time, however, would probably share Ozaki Yukiya's supposition that Mon was sold into prostitution there and was whisked away as soon as the affair came

to light. Oiwake, with approximately two hundred prostitutes, was one of the largest pleasure stops on the Nakasendo^[*] . Many of these women came from the ranks of kawata and hinin. Therefore, it is likely that the intendants did not think Mon was worth the trouble it would take to find her.

This incident illustrates how the notion of status pollution or illegal residency could be played up or ignored, how values could be strategically modified in a power game in which pollution was not the issue but a weapon. A village (Kami-Kaize) could decide, at some risk, (1) to treat an illegal hinin as one of its own, (2) to back efforts by kawata to right a wrong, and (3) to threaten with a lawsuit even if it meant going to Edo. Or a village (Shiga) could write off one of its own registered peasants under the pretext that his status had been polluted through contact with kawata. The outcome suggests that the authorities beyond the village shared prejudicial views against kawata and hinin, favoring the peasant.

The Clog Thongs Riot, 1843

The law sometimes was slanted significantly in favor of the peasants. Most famous in this respect is the outcome of a riot of peasants against kawata known as the Clog Thongs Riot.^[33] The production of footgear was one of the common occupations of kawata.^[34] On 1843/7/22 Tatsugoro^[*] , from the kawata hamlet of Nagase village in Iruma district (Musashino province), went to sell thongs (hanao ) for wooden clogs (geta) at the market of Ogoseimaichi village. At the end of the day, Tatsugoro^[*] still had eighteen pairs of thongs, which he tried to sell to a certain Hinoya Kiee, who did not show much interest in them. A number of people gathered to watch the two men haggle over the price. They soon joined in, hurling insults at Tatsugoro^[*] , and eventually forced him to sell his thongs at a price far below what he considered fair.

[33] The four documents concerning this incident, two of which are court records, are available in NSSS 14:569-96. I rely heavily on the introductory summary of the incident (569-70) rather than on the brief sketch, inaccurate in some detail, given in Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 64-65.

[34] Watanabe village in Settsu province employed four hundred people making various kinds of footgear, which they were allowed to sell on fixed dates at nine designated locations in Osaka (Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 51). On the economics of the leather trade in nearby Minami-Oji^[*] , see Hatanaka, "'Kawata' mibun," 308-21.

Angry, he protested vociferously, but the hinin market guard forced him to return home.

That evening Tatsugoro^[*] talked things over with the members of his hamlet, and a fairly large number of them set out for Hinoya Kiee's house in Ogoseimaichi, yelling and shouting. The next day they forced their way into his compound. At that point someone from the neighboring village of Ueno, acting as mediator, quieted the crowd down, listened to both sides, and put the blame squarely on Kiee. The people from Ogoseimaichi, in accord with neighboring villages, filed a suit with the Kanto Bureau of Investigations. The kawata, in turn, filed one with Danzaemon in Edo. Meanwhile, following the incident, Ogoseimaichi decided to bar kawata from their market in the future. The devastating effect this would have on the livelihood of the kawata may help explain the massive response that followed.

Twenty-nine peasants from Ogoseimaichi forced their way into the Nagase kawata community on 8/5 with the intention of capturing Tatsugoro^[*] , allegedly with the approval of the Kanto investigating officer. The kawata, however, were prepared. With the help of some "500 kawata" from the area armed with bamboo spears, they instead rounded up the 29 intruders and locked them in a shed. Two days later, on the seventh, an officer from the Kanto bureau arrived and succeeded in getting the captives released on a promise that both sides would get a fair hearing. Then an investigating officer arrived from Edo, but with quite a different agenda. The two officials conferred on the tenth, and the higher-up from Edo decided on a policy of forceful suppression.

The next day he mobilized over 300 peasants from the surrounding villages, 34 of them armed with rifles, and ordered a roundup that yielded 252 kawata from twenty-three villages in three days. On the fifteenth, yet another officer arrived from Edo to mobilize 830 peasants and 101 riflemen as a show of force and to prevent any retaliation. One week later, on the twenty-fourth, 97 of the kawata arrested were accompanied by over 700 peasant guards on a three-day journey to Edo. The investigations and trial lasted two years, perhaps because of the sheer number of suspects, perhaps because of the bakufu's determination to emphasize the gravity of the case. The long duration was also a form of punishment, since the kawata were being detained during that time at considerable cost to their families, their communities, and their health.

The "verdict" clearly favored the peasants. As is so often the case with "verdicts," the blame and punishment were shared, although very unevenly. The tendency to punish both parties of a dispute seems to have been part of the concept, or facade (tatemae), of "justice" meted out by the authorities. The kawata from Nagase village were severely reprimanded, and 102 received the following sentences: gibbetting of the head after decapitation (1 case); simple beheading (1); major deportation (4); medium deportation after flogging (3, including Tatsugoro^[*] ); banishment from Edo (1); expulsion from the community (1); flogging and banishment beyond ten miles from Edo (1); flogging (1); manacles (85); house confinement (2); and demotion from kawata head, kogashira (2). In addition, Danzaemon was condemned to house arrest (heimon) in Edo. In stark contrast, only a few peasants were found guilty. None of them had been detained, and their punishments were not physical, but limited to manacles (5) and fines: Nagase's headman was fined three kanmon, and the kumi heads were severely reprimanded; in Ogoseimaichi, the headman was fined five kanmon, and the kumi heads three.

The imbalance between the two verdicts becomes staggering when one discovers that in the course of their two-year presentencing detainment, sixteen kawata died from "unspecified illness," including Tatsugoro^[*] and all of those condemned to death and deportation. It appears that the most serious sentences, following rather than preceding the punishment, ratified faits accomplis .

The details of this event are known to us through four documents: two separate court records and two private narratives by the same writer. In the latter are two memorable quotes that reveal kawata sentiments, if not those of the participants then at least those of the narrator. According to Nagayoshi, one of the kawata who was condemned to maximum deportation but who died while still in prison, "This uprising is the first since the beginning of Edo and is unique in Japan (Nihon ichi ). To have come to stand out as those who started the riot is for us, precious instruments, the fulfillment of a divine promise (senryo^[*]dogu^[*]warewaretomo myoga^[*]ni kanashi tokoro nari ); if you die once, you do not have to die again; to sacrifice one's life [for this cause] is our deepest wish." Sadaemon, who shared a similar punishment and fate, threatened revenge after death: "We are wild gods (arakamisama ) even though we are of vulgar and low status (gesugero^[*] no mibun ); if even

an ant's wish rises to Heaven, wouldn't our resentment reach there too?"^[35]

Toward the end of the Tokugawa period, minor incidents could escalate and trigger persecution of kawata by peasants and authorities that popular prejudice alone fails to explain. It is perhaps significant that the so-called Clog Thongs Riot originated at a market. The kawata's policing work in their dannaba and in prisons was a performance of official duties by a minority of the kawata. As vendors, which most of them were, they vied for profit. Official documents often contain complaints that kawata harassed commoners while trying to sell their wares (see arts. 2 and 5 of Komoro domain's regulations for outcastes and art. 3 of those of Netsu village, in appendix 5). Ordinary peasants and merchants may have begun to resent the competition and success of kawata in the market. It is certainly striking that while the local mediator at Hinoya Kiee's house found Tatsugoro^[*] innocent and put the blame squarely on Kiee, Ogoseimaichi village reacted by closing its market to all kawata. Furthermore, the kawata reacted as a group when one of their own was wronged. The discussion that took place after Tatsugoro^[*] returned home points to a shared consciousness of injustice to themselves as a class and a sense of presumed rights that needed defending. After the protest at Kiee's had become a massive and successful resistance against an attacking group of peasants—for it was the peasants who rioted—it was this class action that led to a severe reaction by the authorities, who blamed the victims, the kawata, for defending themselves. Had this been a matter of one peasant village locking up a mob of peasants from elsewhere who were seeking to settle a score, the authorities probably would not have reacted in this way.

Resisting Repression at the Village Level, 1856

Small incidents could lead to sweeping discriminatory measures, but sometimes it was the other way around: sometimes official discrimination triggered resistance. In the following two instances, the kawata confronted the authorities directly and voiced a reasoned critique of discrimination.

[35] NSSS 14:582. The same proverb about an ant's wish rising to Heaven is also applied to the suffering of horses and bulls, in article 13 of the Regulations for the Villages of All Provinces of 1649, as adapted by an intendant m Kita-Saku in 1665 (see appendix 4).

In early 1856/4 five kawata from Mure village (under the intendant of Nakanojo in Shinano) were caught gambling in Naganuma village.^[36] Within days this led not only to a new prohibition against gambling but also to a series of repressive regulations, to which the kawata responded immediately in a carefully argued written plaint. They listed the prohibitions and their responses to them one by one. In particular, the prohibition against the use of regular or high wooden clogs, umbrellas, or parasols even in snow- or rainstorms (only straw coats were allowed) and the wearing of leather-soled clogs and tabi socks was countered with the argument that "even among people of [low] status, there is not one who does not experience the four seasons' hot and cold weather conditions."^[37] In other words, they argued that they were humans too.

This was an appeal for fair treatment based on a human commonality rather than on institutional status divisions. The ultimate victims of status distinctions, the kawata, raised a protest to an unsympathetic audience, reminiscent of Plato's unmasking of ideology in the Gorgias (523e), where he speaks of the same kind of judges who "have placed in front of their souls a veil made of their eyes and ears and their whole bodies.^[38]

Another prohibition made the kawata aliens in their own country, for it forbade certain cultural practices, namely, the use of banners and high lanterns at festivals. The kawata argued that these were "symbols of gratitude for the benevolence of the Great Peace and the radiance of the grace bestowed by the country" and such a policy was alien to "our national tradition." In other words, they argued that they also were Japanese. They continued, "Although the order to slight gods and

[36] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 163-69.

[37] Ibid., 165. Komachi Yuhachi^[*] , a Shingaku teacher, voiced a similar sentiment in 1828 when he advocated empathy for the despised classes by pointing out that when one feels cold or hunger, others will feel the same (see Komachi Yuhachi^[*] , Jishuhen^[*] , in Nihon keizai sosho^[*] , ed. Takimoto Sei'ichi, vol. 19 [Nihon keizai sosho^[*] kankokai^[*] , 1915], 445).

[38] Plato, quoted in The Levinas Reader , ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 2 43. Levinas writes that "Plato sets forth a beyond of institutional justice, like that of the dead judging the dead (Gorgias 523e), as if the justice of the living could not pass beyond the clothing of men, that is could not penetrate the attributes that in others, offer themselves to knowing, to knowledge, as if that justice could not pass beyond the qualities that mask men .... In the social community, the community of clothed beings, the privileges of rank obstruct justice."

Buddhas may very well happen in some regimes under heaven, such things are [only] typical of foreign, 'ruined' countries."

In addition to asserting their right to be treated fairly as human beings and as Japanese, the kawata argued that, as subjects, they were no different from the rest of the population. When they were accused of disregarding prescribed segregation by "passing" as regular commoners, they retorted that the breach had actually occurred from the other side: "In recent years, peasants have behaved like kawata when eating the meat of cows and horses." To the prohibition against the hanging of signboards, they replied that such a regulation would depress business, making it difficult to feed their families, especially since they received no compensation for their police work. Noting that they performed national corvée (kuniyaku) just as everyone else did, the kawata also protested discriminatory regulations regarding the style of their homes. They concluded with a political critique, redefining as injustice what was being officially represented as a reform (kaikaku ). By arguing that reforms were rare, they implied that this was not a proper occasion for one. Moreover, to institute a "reform" in addition to punishing the gamblers constituted double, and therefore unjust, punishment. They understood the bias of the punishment, for they pointed out that the peasants in the village had heard nothing about an order for a "reform": "only we, kawata, have been targeted for such treatment."

The village officials responded to this written protest the next day (the fifteenth) by initiating an investigation into the kawata involved and by lodging a suit with the intendant because their orders had "met with scorn and were not obeyed." On the sixteenth, three kawata were summoned to appear before the intendant. They set out the next day but got only as far as the village of Nakano, where, after calling upon fellow kawata, they disappeared. On the eighteenth a new summons arrived for other kawata, but when the village officials from Mute went to the kawata hamlet to deliver the summons, there were no men to be found there. Allegedly, they had all left the night before for an unknown destination. Under pressure, however, it came out that two nights earlier they had made plans to disappear with other kawata of the area.

Absconding kawata trying to "pass" as regular commoners came to be defined as a major social problem in the late eighteenth century.^[39]

[39] See, e.g., laws issued in 1778, 1795, 1796, and 1799 (Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 151, 215, 217, 238-39).

Yet, the detailed criminal records of Nagasaki indicate that quite a number of them returned to their original communities. Unable to overcome the numerous obstacles to entering society, such as the need for sponsors (lineages in many villages and individuals in towns), the requirement to present identification certificates when settling in a new locale, and so on, they returned.^[40]A fortiori , this was the case with group exodus such as the one in Mure, for the fugitive males returned a couple of weeks later. Some of them were jailed, others reprimanded, and the local temple petitioned a pardon with unknown (to us) results.

Toward the end of the Tokugawa period some kawata protested and resisted what they explicitly identified as groundless, unjust, and cruel treatment, not just by other Japanese but by officials as well. The kawata argued not only that they were human beings and Japanese but that they were full members of the realm even though the state did not acknowledge their "citizenship." Contrary to what Neary writes, they did not think of themselves as "impure, not quite human, not deserving equal treatment," and they said so, not only among themselves but in an eloquent written protest.

Resisting Repression at the Domain Level, 1856

The most famous instance of defiance took place in Okayama domain in 1856.^[41] The context here also concerns a "reform." As a result of the political and economic repercussions following Commodore Perry's opening of Japan in 1853, Okayama domain in 1855/11 initiated a series of social reforms that included a decree on frugality. The last five of this decree's twenty-nine articles came to be known as a special decree (betsudan ofuregaki ) because they applied only to kawata. Among the stipulations were the following: Clothing must be plain, without designs or crests, and either yellowish-brown, persimmon, or indigo blue in color. Kawata had to remove their wooden clogs whenever they met peasants, and they could not wear them at all when they went to other villages. These regulations were typical of discrim-

[40] See Harada Tomohiko's remarks in Kobayashi Shigeru et al., "Zadankai," 494.

[41] KDJ 11:912, s.v. "Bizen no kuni Okayama hanryo^[*] Ansei sannen shibuzome ikki"; Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 67-69. The current name, Shibuzome ikki (Persimmon Dye Riot), was given at the occasion of its centennial anniversary, in 1956 (see also Cornell, "Caste Patron," 60-62).

inatory laws against kawata, but they also applied to genin and small landholders (in Hozu) and even new titled peasants (in Tanoguchi) (see chapter 3). This "reform" was to be enforced by the beginning of 1856. On 1855/12/27-28 the village headmen informed the respective kawata heads of the new regulations and requested their seals of approval.

Shocked by the stepped-up discrimination, the kawata heads insisted on postponing ratification to allow time for prior discussion in their communities. The hamlet assemblies all opposed ratification, which led to a number of regional meetings of kawata heads. First the leaders of five urban hamlets convened at the Jofukuji^[*] (in Shimo-Ifuku village, Mino district), the head temple for all the kawata of Bizen province, under the pretext of paying the customary New Year's visit to their temple. There they decided to mobilize all the kawata communities of the domain at a general meeting in order to press for the repeal of the discriminatory laws. Seventeen heads of rural hamlets, however, had already agreed at a separate meeting to first ratify the laws and then press for a repeal. On 1856/1/15 the heads of fifty-three communities held a stormy meeting at the Jofukuji^[*] in which the leaders from the countryside resisted the more radical plan of their urban colleagues. After several sessions the radicals prevailed and drafted a formal petition to withdraw the laws.

The kawata's arguments against the discriminatory regulations were clearly spelled out: (1) kawata were cultivators, paid tribute, and were thus "honorable," that is, titled peasants who should be treated like other peasants and not singled out for separate treatment in a time of crisis;^[42] (2) many of their fields were of low quality, increased discrimination would squelch the incentive for young people to work them, and therefore the fields would lie fallow and produce no tribute; and (3)

[42] In other incidents also the kawata expressed their self-image as onbyakusho^[*] , that is, honorable, or titled, peasants (see Mae Kei'ichi, "Kinsei chu-koki^[*] ni okeru 'kawata' no keizai seikatsu," m Burakushi no kenkyu^[*] : Zenkindai-hen , ed. Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] [Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , 1984], 266-70). We saw in chapter z how a whole new community of exclusively peasant kawata was created in Umaji in 1808 (Igeta, "Kuchi-Tanba," 97); Kisaki village, in Tanba, counted twenty landholding kawata, some of them extremely wealthy (owning thirty-six koku, some of it in neighboring villages) (see Igeta Ryoji^[*] , "Iriai sabetsu to buraku mondai," Kindai Kyoto no burakushi , ed. Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , Kyoto no buraku mondai, 2 [Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , 1986], 171).

when they could not meet the tax quota, many kawata obtained the remaining cash by pawning clothes, which would now become impossible if the proposed restrictions on the kinds of clothes they could wear were imposed. This also would negatively affect their ability to pay tribute. It should be noted that this last point implies that peasants were engaged in economic exchange with the kawata and accepted kawata clothing for pawn without much fear of pollution.

The domain denied the petition on 4/6. The intendant (gundai) charged with seeing that the regulations were ratified pressured the village group headmen to secure the signatures of all the kawata heads. One by one the kawata heads capitulated (some under torture) and signed the documents. On 4/15, however, another general assembly (the fifteenth) was convened. In the tense atmosphere something unexpected happened. The kawata leadership had thus far remained within the law by taking the petition route, but now they were criticized by the rank and file, who raised the possibility of making an illegal, direct appeal (goso^[*] ). In subsequent strategy deliberations it was decided not to surprise the domain lord by going to him directly but instead to approach a certain elder who had a "liberal" reputation. The elder headed a rural office in Mushiage, in Oku district (some twenty kilometers from Okayama castle), which geographically was perhaps a safer place to stage a mass protest.

The domain officials, aware of what was brewing, on 6/9 ordered a village group headman to "investigate" the Konoshita^[*] hamlet, which had taken the lead in recommending the direct appeal. This immediately triggered the decision to proceed with the illegal protest. Mobilization instructions were hurried to all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty of all fifty-three kawata communities. In the early morning of 6/13, disregarding pleas and threats from the village group headmen and village headmen, some fifteen hundred to two thousand kawata gathered in a dry riverbed in Yokaichi^[*] village (Oku district). The next afternoon they started their march in the direction of Mushiage. By night they had arrived at Sayama village, where they put up camp and made preparations for the next day's trek to their destination.

The elder, of course, had been informed about this small army on the march and had prepared troops armed with cannon to welcome the protesters. He met them at Sayama the following day, however, and participated in negotiations that ended in a promise that he would forward their petition to the domain's council of elder retainers, who

would then review the discriminatory laws. When they had received this promise, the kawata disbanded. The domain council, while appreciative of the compassion shown to the protesters, felt that the honor and authority of the village headmen were at stake and ordered the immediate ratification by the kawata leadership, which now had no choice but to comply.

Punishments followed betrayal. Twelve of the ringleaders were arrested and jailed; by the time they were sentenced, three years later (in 1859/6), half of them had died. The entire populations of the communities that had participated in the protest were sentenced to one to two weeks' domiciliary confinement. A few of the officials—the village group headmen, the village headmen, and the Oku district commissioner and inspector—were held responsible for the mismanagement of the situation, and they also were punished with domiciliary confinement. This incident of protest, resistance, and reprisal has inspired the struggles of burakumin against continued discrimination in the twentieth century.^[43]

The Tag Incident: Gorobe-shinden, 1978

Today the burakumin conduct their antidiscrimination drive on many fronts: in the workplace, in the courts, in the media, in religious organizations, and throughout the education system. Reclamation of their history is as vital to the burakumin as ethnic studies are to minorities in the United States and elsewhere. An incident in Mimayose, near Gorobe-shinden, led quite unexpectedly to such a historiographical effort.^[44]

On March 10, 1978, a resident of a public housing complex in the village of Mimayose found a small note (7 cm² ) tacked to his front door. On it was scribbled: "In Mimayose [this word is written in katakana] there is not even one tsubo [3.3 square meters] of land occupied by a chorippo [derogatory local slang for burakumin]. Get your face

[43] For examples of discrimination in the twentieth century, see Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 115-25; and Hane Mikiso, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 139-71.

[44] In Tokugawa times, Mimayose (which was located five kilometers east of Ken's Makibuse and was the place where Ken lived with her first husband) was a small village. It bordered on the Nakasendo^[*] and the fields of Gorobe-shinden, which we have come across several times already (see map 2; see also Saito^[*] Yoichi^[*] , Gorobe-shinden , 16 ff., 151-58).

out of here. [Signed:] The people of the community (chorippo no sumu tochi wa, Mimayose ni wa hito tsubo mo nai; hayaku dete ike. Kumin ichido^[*] )." The victim was not a burakumin, but his older sister, it seems, had married one, a genealogical pollution of the sort in the Bonboku Incident two hundred years earlier in Ozawa^[*] village, less than ten kilometers to the southeast. Although Mimayose had no buraku, there were three in the administrative village of Asashina, of which Mimayose was a part. When the burakumin heard of this incident—the fifth in five years—they decided to take action. The burakumin in Asashina collected garbage, disposed of hazardous materials, and emptied latrines. When they went on a strike lasting twenty-nine days, the community was forced to publicly address the problem of discrimination in a number of meetings with the burakumin's representatives, while its garbage went uncollected.

The burakumin, incensed by the allegation that "there is not a single burakumin in this community," decided to reclaim their past, which brought them into confrontation with the elite Gakushuin^[*] University in Tokyo. During the Tokugawa period, the three buraku of what is today Asashina village were part of Gorobe-shinden, a village whose history has been studied by a number of scholars, among them Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] ,^[45] because of the extraordinary technology involved in the building of the irrigation system when Gorobe-shinden was developed in the 1620s. Some twenty thousand documents preserved in the Yanagisawa house of Gorobe-shinden's hereditary headman had been transferred to Gakushuin^[*] University; an additional ten thousand had remained at various locations in the area.^[46]

Now the garbage collectors of Asashina started a drive for the return of these documents, which was complicated by legal issues of ownership and custody. They eventually won their battle, and all thirty thousand documents are now in a memorial building, the Gorobe Kinenkan, in Asashina. The reclamation of their past has just begun.^[47]

[45] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku , chap. 3.

[46] For a photo of the successor to the Yanagisawa house standing next to a small stone shrine built by his ancestor in 1643, as well as a photo of the wooden water duct (part of a canal that was twenty kilometers long) crossing a river, see ibid., frontispiece.

[47] Saito^[*] Yoichi's^[*]Gorobe-shinden is an early product of this research.

Dimensions and Developments

These episodes provide a sense of the complexity of the status question surrounding the Tokugawa ancestors of today's burakumin. The kawata were part of the administrative apparatus: they were state functionaries, but polluted ones. Pollution, however, was not only discriminatory and prejudicial but also discriminating and selective: in certain areas of daily intercourse, in certain circumstances, it was suspended in practice; in others, it could be activated. And there is clear evidence that the kawata's self-perception diverged from the perceptions others had of them, that they related to their position differently than the non-kawata did. Let us now attempt a more systematic analysis of some dimensions of this notion of pollution as a basis for a status racism and its evolution during the Tokugawa period.

Pollution, the Elastic Idiom of Discrimination

Demographic evidence of contemporary burakumin communities, such as the Ministry of Welfare's survey of 1935, shows a strikingly uneven geographic distribution. Although population figures may be too low, by 100 to 150 percent, the data on the number and location of burakumin communities , harder to overlook, are considered to be fairly accurate.

It is immediately evident from table 21 that the western half of Japan's main island, Honshu^[*] (the Kinki and Chugoku^[*] regions in the table), accounts for a disproportionately high percentage of buraku, with the highest concentration in the relatively small region around Kyoto. The eastern half, settled later, counts far fewer buraku, and in the northeast region there are virtually none. We shall return to this question of historical diffusion later. Also, in the Kinki area (another name for Kinai) buraku tend to be rather large, while in the east they are tiny and scattered.

This demographic variation, which goes back to the Tokugawa period, puts into question a theory that links discrimination against kawata directly to Shinto and Buddhist religious notions of pollution and indirectly to occupations involving the butchering and skinning of animals. This is not to deny that religious formulations and taboos played a part, representational or justificatory, in discriminatory practice against kawata. However, the almost total absence of kawata

communities in northeastern Japan, a region not particularly less Shinto and Buddhist than the rest of the country, points to the inadequacy of such an explanation. Some people there must have disposed of dead animals and manufactured leather goods as well. Those who did may have been despised, as were many others, as senmin and subject to temporary pollutions, but as far as we know, they were not assigned a special social status on the basis of this pollution or subjected to discriminatory practices and laws.^[48] In other words, the northeast may have been without eta, but it was not without kawata.^[49]

It is important to note that during the Tokugawa period the linkage between certain occupations and kawata status was far from uniform

48. Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*]buraku , 128.

[49] In several of his publications, the medievalist Amino Yoshihiko has argued for marked cultural differences between eastern and western Japan, one of them being the absence of a taboo against the consumption of horse meat and a weaker sense of pollution in eastern Japan (associated with the early prehistoric Jomon^[*] period) than in western Japan (linked to the later prehistoric culture of Yayoi). See, e.g., his Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu (Chikuma shobo^[*] , 1991), 140-43.

or consistent. In some towns there were leather workers who were not categorized as kawata;^[50] and other occupations that were considered polluted were not attached to kawata communities.^[51] Certain provinces—Tosa, Iyo, Aki, Bingo, Awa, and Sanuki—had kawata fishermen.^[52] Often the decision concerning which groups were to be legally stigmatized as kawata, that is, specifically categorized as "polluted," rested with the authorities and was reached in court.

That legal pronouncements played such a prominent role in identifying rather arbitrarily the grounds on which certain groups would be the object of hereditary discriminatory treatment may at first make this kind of discrimination seem quite different from that resulting from Western racism, based on skin color. But in the West also legal decrees often played a decisive role in deciding who belonged to one "race" or another, and membership sometimes could be purchased. Thus, in 1783 some blacks in Spanish America could become "white men" by fiat of the king of Spain; after 1795, legal white status was for sale, which only sharpened whites' sensitivity about race.^[53]

Thus, the notion of pollution was not only used to separate certain occupations based on the belief that pollution was inherent in those occupations; it was also wielded as a weapon in intraoccupational disputes, where its strategic manipulation was harder to hide, since these disputes were settled by administrative fiat. In 1768, for example, the village group headmen from a district in Harima were given instructions about categories of polluted carpenters (yogore daiku ), which included kawata carpenters working as cremators or as fabricators of instruments of torture and others such as basket makers or builders of houses of prostitution.^[54] This taxonomic clarification appears to have

[50] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*]buraku , 100. Thus a decree of 1794, possibly as a response to an inquiry into a dispute, stipulated that although the making of bamboo hats and bamboo sandals was a kawata prerogative, hamayumi (exorcising bows used in ridge-pole-raising ceremonies; toy bows and arrows) could also be made by town artisans (Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 208).

[51] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 189.

[52] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 88.

[53] Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America , 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 156; John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions , 1808-1826 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 20-21. I thank Igarashi Yoshikuni for calling these references to my attention.

[54] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 139.

been the result of an intratrade dispute in which certain groups of carpenters felt threatened by others and is, coincidentally, closely related to an advanced stage in the division of labor. Peasants in Hozu (discussed in chapter 4), frustrated over the course of a lawsuit by the kawata, obtained a ruling ordering the kawata to deliver their tribute rice on a different day from the day the peasants delivered theirs, allegedly to avoid creating occasions for trouble.

The notion of pollution was flexible to a certain extent. Activated and propelled by social, economic, or political forces, it was appropriated and applied in some situations but not others. From the existence of a general notion of pollution and its application at certain sites, one cannot deduce or predict where else it would also appear: its application could be customary (but custom is flexible), institutional (but institutions change), or situational (and therefore contestable). In the case of Mon, the kidnapped hinin woman, the introduction of the notion of pollution changed the tenor of the confrontation between the two villages. In the Bonboku Incident, the attempt to discredit a villager through association with the world of the kawata and other lowly occupations failed. Some Tokugawa Japanese raised the question why hunting, skinning, and eating wild boar was not considered polluting but the kawata were most concretely stigmatized for the skinning and slaughtering of cattle. Hunters (matagi ), it seems, had succeeded by means of a lawsuit in 1694 to officially differentiate themselves from the polluted kawata.^[55] As Pierre Bourdieu has pointedly remarked, "Practice has a logic that is not that of the logician."^[56] One cannot essentialize pollution and grant it final explanatory value. Rather, one should historicize its functions and examine how and when it was used and not used.

Logic would lead one to expect that rice grown by kawata was considered polluted. And, indeed, there exists a decree to that effect, but it was enforced for only a short time. In 1720 the bakufu Office of Finance (Gokanjosho) issued an edict requiring kawata, who, like peasants, had paid part of their tribute in rice and part in cash, to now pay the total amount in cash and to store their bags of cash separately, marked eta osame ("eta tax"). The reason for this measure was revealed two years later, when the law was rescinded, for then it was ruled that

[55] Mase Kumiko, "Ishiki no naka no mibunsei," MK: 274.

[56] Bourdieu, Logic of Practice , 86.

"eta, hinin, and cremators could again, as before, contribute their polluted rice (kegaretaru mono ni tsuki kome ) as tax."^[57]

Here, then, the logic of pollution drained a precious and pure commodity of all exchange value. Analogously, a different commodity (one that was by nature polluted, one might say), namely, samurai excrement, took on a surplus valorization as a result of the high social status of its "producers": in the night soil market, samurai excrement fetched the highest prices.^[58] One would expect the daimyo variety to have been even more valuable, but that does not seem to have been the case, perhaps because it was not for sale. These examples show that the logic of status valorization or devalorization is a contingent rather than an absolute one.

In 1558, Suwa shrine in Shinano recorded its taboos (monoimi no ki ), which stipulated very circumscribed periods for bloodshed and contact with death: killing a person polluted the killer for one day, as did the removal of an animal carcass, and skinning an animal polluted a person for five days. This hierarchy of pollution, perfectly adapted to a country torn by warfare, suggests that there may not yet have been kawata in the region and that others may have handled dead animals at that time.^[59] Nor was pollution a permanent, existential condition for certain classes of people: it was a temporary and removable stain.

Reference to Shinto's concern with pollution as an explanation for the kawata/burakumin's imputed state of inherent pollution misses the point that much of Shinto ritual focuses on the purification of individuals and their environment. No pollution was considered unremovable. Even Deguchi Nao (1837-1918), who founded the new religion Omotokyo^[*] in the late nineteenth century believing that humanity had lapsed into a fallen and therefore polluted condition, did not view this predicament as permanent or inalterable. Her millenarian vision predicted an imminent restoration of the world.^[60] Thus, we need to address

[57] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 111, 115.

[58] Walthall, "Village Networks," 295.

[59] Banba Masatomo, "'Buraku' no keisei ni kansuru kosatsu^[*] : Shinshu^[*] ni okeru burakushi sobyo^[*] (1)," Shinano 12, no. 5 (1960): 18. In Amino's new interpretation (see above, n. 49), the Suwa taboos would constitute an argument for his thesis that pollution associated with killing was less developed in eastern Japan than in western Japan.

[60] Emily Groszos Ooms, Women and Millenarian Protest in Meiji Japan: Deguchi Nao and Omotokyo^[*] , Cornell East Asia Series (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, East Asia Program, 1993).

not only the question why kawata/burakumin were associated with pollution but also what the permanent character of that association was.

As mentioned above, kawata joined peasants in some uprisings. They also cosigned with peasants oaths attached to lawsuits (Kashii village, Izumi, 1708).^[61] Yet peasants were also particularly insulted when kawata were mobilized against them. In a confrontation between peasant and kawata youth in 1772 the peasants apparently shouted: "We can kill five or six eta without being struck by a curse (tatari ) from anywhere!"^[62] Later in the Tokugawa period, a similar devaluation of kawata lives was expressed by an official. In a well-known incident in 1859, a kawata visiting a Shinto shrine in Edo was killed by a gang of young men because he was "polluted." When Danzaemon requested the death penalty, the magistrate apparently responded that a townsman's life was worth that of seven kawata and that therefore the quota to justify the execution of a townsman had not been reached.^[63] This ratio, it should be noted, was also applied to samurai and peasants, at least in rhetoric.^[64]

In the seventeenth century, kawata not only served in villages as guards and champêtres but also worked in peasant households or as day laborers, perhaps replacing the bond servants who had been set free.^[65] Yet, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, we find numerous prohibitions against kawatas' entering commoners' homes. That the segregationist laws were not an empty letter is shown by the ways they were circumvented and the punishments that followed discovery. Mixed marriages between majority Japanese and kawata occasionally functioned as channels for smuggling a number of kawata into peasant and merchant houses, sometimes over distances as far as seventy kilometers, to perform labor as servants. If discovered, the gobetweens, especially when they profited from the scheme, were punished more severely than the "illegal aliens" themselves were.^[66] The

[61] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 152.

[62] Ibid., 61.

[63] Inoue Kiyoshi, (Kaihan ) Buraku mondai no kenkyu^[*] : sono rekishi to kaiho^[*]riron (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , 1959), 32-33; Saito^[*] Yoichi^[*] , Gorobe-shinden , 243; Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 98.

[64] Bix, Peasant Protest , 94.

[65] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 96, 107, 122, 132-33 (service); 125 (day laborers).

[66] Hatanaka, "'Kawata' mibun," 333; Igeta Ryoji^[*] , "Kon'in sabetsu no rekishiteki shoso^[*] : Edo bakufu no hanketsu o tsujite^[*] ," in Kindai tennosei^[*]kokka no shakai togo^[*] , ed. Mahara Tetsuo and Kakeya Saihei (Kyoto: Bunrikaku, 1991), 12-18 passim.

mixed marriages, Ozaki Yukiya notes, were not unknown in Kita-Saku before the 1690s, and as a rule they were unproblematic for the authorities.^[67] Gradually, however, increased administrative pressure for segregation, starting in earnest in the 1770s, led to severe sanctions against mixed marriages, now categorized with adultery; for commoners the punishment was status demotion to hinin underling (tega ).^[68]

Occupations—Degraded and Polluted

The term senmin ("despised people") was associated with certain occupations and has existed since the beginning of recorded history in Japan. Generally speaking, in all societies, past and present, certain occupations seem to be perceived socially as low and undesirable. Medieval Japan counted dozens of them. Danzaemon, the "national" head of the kawata/hinin since the 1720s, had fabricated his genealogy (at least in one version) through Heian warrior houses all the way back to China and listed no fewer than twenty-eight lowly occupations among his ancestors as an argument for his rightful dominant position among senmin.^[69] Many of these occupations were still viable throughout the Tokugawa period, although this does not necessarily imply that they were hereditary. As mentioned above, Tokugawa Japan counted many more lowly and polluted occupations than those specifically held by kawata. Conversely, only some of the occupations, communities, and lineages of the kawata can be traced to late medieval times.

The term eta , first mentioned in texts of the thirteenth century, was written with the characters for "plentiful pollution" only some two centuries later, referring then to a subgroup of the kawaramono , or "riverbed people." The kawaramono lived on the riverbanks in Kyoto. They were ranked among the lowest of the many senmin categories.

[67] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 177.

[68] Igeta, "Kon'in sabetsu," 15. Satsuma domain, for one, in 1784 forbade intermarriage between peasants and "eta, kengo [?], etc."; made "eta and the like" live separately from peasants; and shifted its idiom for discriminated people from death to pollution when it changed the term from shiku (literally, "death pangs") to eta (Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 46).

[69] These genealogies can be found in Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 27-49; and NSSS 14:427-38.

Riverbanks were not taxed, and their occupants—cleaners, plasterers, dyers, well diggers, gardeners, transporters of goods, and so on, and many highly skilled laborers—worked for the noble and warrior establishment or were attached to temples as jobbers. Kawaramono who earned their living cleaning estates, slaughtering animals, or working leather were specified as eta.^[70]

During the wars that engulfed Japan throughout the sixteenth century, leather was in great demand for the manufacture of saddles, arms, and protective gear to equip the armies. Thus, some of the warlords (like the Imagawa in 1526 and the Hojo^[*] in 1538) concentrated leather workers around their castles, subjected them to their immediate authority by cutting their ties with whoever might have claimed them as dependents, organized them under one head, exacted levies in leather from them, and forbade the export of leather goods to other domains. Later in the century other warlord houses, like the Maeda, the Ueda, and the Takeda, followed the same practice.^[71]

These changes in the social organization of leather production were part of the gradually developing efforts by daimyo to mobilize all the sectors of society. Other artisans were similarly concentrated, organized, and forced, as the peasants were, to provide yaku (service that included materiel as well as corvée) to the new lords. Among those in the "low" occupations, the leather workers were most in demand. A number of them were moved from the countryside to castle towns, and when none were in the area, they were imported from the provinces around Kyoto. In Kaga, Noto, and Etchu^[*] leather workers were brought in from Omi^[*] and Tanba. The castle towns in Shinano were probably provided with kawata communities by Takeda Shingen (1521-73). As Banba Masatomo points out, leather workers in these towns may have suffered not only the prejudice associated with their "polluted occupation" but also that directed against outsiders and newcomers.^[72]

Documents drawn up on the occasion of transfers of lords in Shinano in the 1580s and 1590s refer to already existing service relations between kawaya sogashira^[*] or kawata toryo^[*] (heads or leaders of leather workers) and lords whom they provided with leather goods and for whom they also performed policing duties such as guarding prisons,

[70] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 25-26.

[71] Banba, "'Buraku' no keisei," 9-11.

[72] Ibid., 21-23.

performing executions, cleaning castle grounds, checking the entering and exiting travelers at way stations, and so on.^[73] These leaders were probably chosen from among the more prominent leather workers in the area. In order to perform the function of their occupation, these leaders had been moved to the castle towns and been put in charge of other kawaya or kawata. They were granted the privilege of wearing swords, received tax-free land (sometimes even called chigyo^[*] "fiefs"), and at times received stipends or collected "one sheaf" (monnami hitomasu, momiko, hitowa ine ) per household from the villages they served. Their names became hereditary occupational names, like Danzaemon in Edo; Magoroku in Matsushiro, controlling four districts for a stipend of sixty bales; Hikodayu^[*] in Matsumoto, in charge of two districts; Kojuro^[*] in Ueda. They formed the elite corps of the kawata, married into one another's lineages (Hikodayu^[*] was related through marriage to Danzaemon), lived in larger houses than their subjects, and enjoyed respect as officials. For instance, when Magoroku traveled on business to Edo he stayed in the daimyo's nagaya , the long house where samurai were lodged.^[74]

Within kawata communities status divisions and concomitant tensions and power struggles developed along the same lines as in peasant villages. By the nineteenth century leadership positions had become hereditary, the number of main families had been frozen, and lawsuits initiated by kawata underlings (tega) concerning succession to office

[73] The information that follows comes from ibid., 5-15. As a general rule, the execution of criminals was not associated with kawata executioners and guards in medieval times. There is mention of an execution performed by a kawaramono in 1488 (Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*]buraku , 139).

[74] Banba Masatomo, "'Buraku' no sui-i to mibun kisei no kyoka^[*] : Shinshu^[*] ni okeru burakushi sobyo^[*] (3)," pt. 1, Shinano 13, no. 8 (1961): 33-34; idem, "Mibunsei no teppai e," 35. On the size of the homesteads (yashiki) in the Kamasu buraku, Komoro domain, in Kita-Saku, see Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 61-63. Danzaemon's yashiki in Edo was about 1,000 tsubo (3,300 square meters), and he is said to have drawn income from 3,000 koku; other eta/hinin heads are said to have held 300,000 to 400,000 ryo^[*] , and a drum maker from Watanabe hamlet near Osaka is said to have held over 700,000 ryo^[*] (Kobayashi Shigeru, "Kinsei ni okeru Buraku kaiho^[*] toso^[*] ," Rekishi koron^[*] 3, no. 6 [1977]: 90-91; Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 103). Danzaemon in Edo was allowed to posture as a small daimyo on certain official occasions. For instance, when he paid New Year's visits m senior and junior counselors and to the three commissioners, he was carried in a sedan chair and accompanied by spear bearers (Mase, "Ishiki no naka no mibunsei," 270).

and abuses of authority were widespread.^[75] It will be recalled that the domainwide struggle of 1856 in Okayama was forced upon the kawata leadership by their subordinates. In some of these disputes, shares in the privilege of patrolling villages (dannaba kabu) were at issue. These shares were controlled by the main houses, which were the equivalent of titled peasants in kawata communities. In Kamasu, for instance, only 30 percent of the households enjoyed such shares, which, as in peasant villages, could be transmitted or sold.^[76]

After leather workers were forced to relocate to the castle towns, they were often moved to the outskirts as the towns' population expanded (this occurred, for example, in Kaizu, Sunpu, Odawara, and Kanazawa). The reasons were in part functional, for their work as prison guards or executioners or post attendants for checking travelers made it necessary for them to resettle outside the town; in part economic, the outskirts being inferior locations; and part cultural, having to do with notions of pollution.^[77] In late medieval times similar separate communities had formed around market and temple towns, where a floating but semistable population of entertainers, tatami makers, and others had settled.

In the population rosters and land cadasters of the late sixteenth century many people were registered as "kawata," a reference to the leather workers or their fields.^[78] Sometimes whole communities were registered as such, separate but not independent from peasant villages. Asao Naohiro stresses that on Hideyoshi's land survey, no kawata villages were registered as autonomous units; they were always appended

[75] For details of internal governance of kawata communities, see Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. 1, 34-36; and Ozaki's study of Kamasu buraku in his Shinshu^[*] hisabetsu buraku , 75-76. For intrahamlet struggles in Shinano communities, see ibid., 20, 100-150, 296-99; Banba, "Mibunsei no teppai e," 36-39; and idem, "Ueda-ryo^[*] nai ni okeru 'eta' sosho^[*] jiken," Shinano 17, no. 11 (1965): 1-12, and 18, no. 3 (1966): 30-48.

[76] Ozaki, shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 85. Igeta notes that over the years some households succeeded m accumulating quite a large number of such shares, which did not automatically translate into leadership positions (Igeta, "Kuchi-Tanba," 107).

[77] In Hozu village, for instance (see chapter 4), forty-two kawata households (including 250 people and 12 cattle) were relocated, not without some monetary remuneration, from the center of the village to a lowland closer to the Hozu River, which was exposed to frequent flooding (Igeta, "Mikaiho^[*] buraku," 112).

[78] For this paragraph, see Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 35, 36, 86.

to peasant villages.^[79] Sometimes the entries were hierarchized, as when kawata were listed after peasants but before aruki (messengers and jobbers on the payrolls of villages and towns). However, many were listed with their own kokudaka, some as owners of as much as twenty koku, although such entries are only found in rosters and cadasters west of Shinano. It is not quite clear whether these entries identified an occupation or what came to be their fixed hereditary legal status. One thing is certain: these entries were not discriminatory as such; the households thus identified were not subject to special discriminatory laws, and the kawata had not yet been organized "nationally," for this happened in the 1720s.

Only very rarely were leather workers entered on early Tokugawa records as "eta" (in Kumamoto in 1604, Awa in 1623). In the 1660s and 1670s, however, around the time when a new class of economically independent peasants was vying for political power in the villages, a great number of domains began to record kawata as eta. It is not clear to what extent the link between an increased competition among commoners and a stepped-up discrimination against kawata can actually be documented. At the same time, in some provinces around Kyoto, communities of kawata were relocated to less desirable locations that often were plagued by flooding or other natural disasters.^[80]

Throughout the seventeenth century the bakufu and the various domains were engaged in haphazard efforts to regulate and order the marginal populations engaged in numerous "lowly occupations." Thus, for instance, the dyers of Kyoto, initially labeled eta, succeeded in being recategorized separately; in Omi province, however, dyers were organized into a kawata community.^[81] Hunters also succeeded in separating themselves from the kawata. The expanding area of Danzaemon's control over the kawata, all of eastern Japan by the 1720s, and the extension of his jurisdiction over hinin and entertainers culminated in the recording of kawata (and Danzaemon's) genealogies in the early eighteenth century, which testifies to this ongoing effort at regulating the nonpeasant lower population strata. Yet judging from the frequent queries by various local authorities in other parts of Japan concerning

[79] Asao, "Kinsei no mibun," 36.

[80] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 45.

[81] Ibid., 189; NSSS 14:267n.

the locus of authority over kawata or hinin, it is evident that the situation was far from clear.^[82]

Starting in 1678, the one kawata household of Kodaira village (Kita-Saku) was entered as eta in the population register. Around the same time, however, kawata in that area were also referred to as chori^[*] ("officials"), often written with the homophonic characters meaning "removed, separate from the town." Sometimes they were entered as yakunin ("officials") on the temple rosters for memorial services (kakocho^[*] ).

The practice of registering individuals in official records as members of a separate, defiled category of human beings came also to prevail in Buddhist temples around the end of the seventeenth century, whereby discrimination was extended into the afterlife. At Fukuoji^[*] in Kodaira, for example, the pre-eighteenth-century term yakunin had been replaced by 1725 by eta . Three decades later discrimination continued to grow: the names of deceased temple members who were kawata were now put on a list kept separate from the list of deceased peasant members. Moreover, posthumous names (kaimyo ) with the additional character kaku ("tanned leather," also read as kawa , "hide," "pelt") were bestowed on kawata.^[83]

Customarily, posthumous names were honorific titles that ennobled the deceased to varying degrees, depending on the sum of money paid by the family to their Buddhist temple. In the early nineteenth century the bakufu was sufficiently disturbed about the inappropriately high ranks commoners were being granted in the afterlife to pass legislation

[82] See the numerous requests for clarifying questions regarding penal jurisdiction over kawata and hinin in Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] . Igeta discusses some of these requests regarding mixed marriages and incognito kawata servants in his "Kon'in sabetsu." See also Tsukada Takashi's interesting article on various suits by conflicting lower occupational groups that resulted in officializing the hierarchical relationships between them ("Kasomin^[*] no sekai," 225-68).

[83] On the numerous ways posthumous names on tombstones identified the dead as separate beings, sometimes as "humanoids," using the character meaning "to look like [humans]," sometimes even as beasts, chiku , see Kobayashi Daiji, Sabetsu kaimyo^[*] . Much of this study is concentrated on Ueda city and Chiisagata district, adjoining Kita-Saku district in Nagano prefecture. A temple in Nagano is said to have charged 3 million yen for converting a discriminatory posthumous name into a regular one (15). The oldest discriminatory posthumous name Kobayashi mentions dates from 1622 (180).

on the proper posthumous status for kaimyo.^[84] The bakufu, however, did not have to worry about the kawata: the Buddhist derby made sure they maintained their assigned status even in the afterlife. Discriminatory posthumous names were chiseled on tombstones, allowing for the immediate identification of kawata graves, a practice that continued well into the mid twentieth century, mainly in eastern Japan, where the tiny kawata communities often share graveyards with majority Japanese. Kobayashi Daiji reports a case of discriminatory posthumous names as recently as 1980.^[85] The Soto^[*] branch of Zen Buddhism in Nagano also had the term sendara in its posthumous discriminatory repertory for kawata, sendata being the Japanese transcription in characters of the Sanskrit candãala , the name of an outcaste group in India.^[86] In medieval texts sendara had been associated with butchers, labeled evil people (akunin ).^[87] Thus did mid-Tokugawa Buddhist monks recognize and sanction discriminatory practices against the Japanese kawata as similar to the casting out of India's "untouchables," long before modern scholars recognized the similarity.

The logic of discrimination penetrated the religious domain in other ways as well. Since families usually did not change temples, modern data on burakumin temple affiliations reflect quite accurately the Tokugawa situation. In regions scattered with tiny settlements, kawata shared temples with other commoners. Even then, they often went to special temples that served only kawata (etadera ). A nationwide survey conducted in 1968 of all 1,470 etadera revealed that 91 percent were New Pure Land (Jodoshinshu^[*] ) temples. These "polluted" temples were orga-

[84] For a law dating from 1831, see Narusawa Eiju^[*] , "Rekishiteki ni mita mikaiho^[*] buraku no kaimyo^[*] ," in Shukyo^[*]to buraku mondai , ed. Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo^[*] , 1982), 17o-71.

[85] Kobayashi Daiji, Sabetsu kaimyo^[*] , 15.

[86] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*]hisabetsu buraku , 26-33; see also 329-35. For information on sendara and candãla , see Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 56. For the twentieth century, see Narusawa, "Mikaiho^[*] buraku no kaimyo," 158-87; and Wakamiya Yoshinobu, "Hisabetsu buraku ni totte no kami to hotoke: Komoro-shi Arabori de no minzoku chosa^[*] o chushin^[*] ni," Nihon shukyo^[*]to buraku sabetsu , special issue of Dento^[*]to gendai , no. 73 (1981): 79- 112. I discuss the question briefly in the context of ancestor worship in my Sosensuhai^[*]no shimborizumu (Kobundo^[*] , 1987), 171-72, 179-80.

[87] For example, in the Chiribukuro , a mid-thirteenth-century dictionary; however, m an expanded version of the mid fifteenth century, the Ainosho^[*] , the kawata are associated with pollution (Kuroda Toshio, Nihon chusei^[*]no kokka to shukyo^[*] [Iwanami shoten, 1975], 380).

nized separately into a specialized institutional hierarchy in direct connection, not with the sect's head temple in Kyoto (Honganji), but with midlevel head temples (chuhonzan^[*] ) specifically for the kawata.^[88]

There is a striking regional pattern to these temple affiliations. Almost all burakumin temples west of the central region are New Pure Land temples; only in Okayama and Takayama does one find temples affiliated with other Buddhist sects: Nichiren and Pure Land. East of Shinano (in the Tokai^[*] , Kanto, and northeast regions) one finds a variety of Buddhist sects serving burakumin, including the Nichiren, Rinsai, Soto^[*] , Tendai, and Shingon sects. Moreover, fully 80 percent of the New Pure Land temples belonged to the Nishi Honganji branch, which claimed descent from the original line of the founder Shinran (1173-1262) after Tokugawa Ieyasu split up the sect in 1602. Ninety percent of these temples affiliated with Nishi Honganji are located in the Kinai area around Kyoto; there is not a single one in the central region or to the east of it.

Shinran's populist, egalitarian message appealed to the kawata.^[89] Because kawata had been concentrated in the Kinai, where the most radical followers of Shinran, the Ikko^[*] sect, had organized armed resistance (ikki) against warlords in the sixteenth century, before the Tokugawa period, Teraki Nobuaki tentatively linked kawata to the Ikko^[*] ikki even though there is scant evidence for kawata participation in these ikki.^[90] The close association between Nishi Honganji temples and kawata in the Kinai seems significant within the context of Teraki's argument, since a great number of these temples were established during the heyday of the Ikko^[*] movement.

[88] This and the following information on religious affiliation can be found in Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 55, 192-221.

[89] Shinran (1173-1262) identified his followers, all believers in the sole power of nenbutsu (reciting the name of Amida Buddha), as human beings with the lowest karma: toko ("killers of dogs and sheep and sellers of sake"); and Nichiren (1222-82) wrote that he was the son of a sendara (Kuroda, Nihon chusei^[*]no kokka , 388).

[90] In eastern Japan, the Hakusan Shinto shrine in Kaga province is especially venerated by the burakumin. Hakusan seems to have been the protective god of socially marginal members of society, since he is also seen as especially protective of children (Shibata Michiko, Hisabetsu buraku no densho^[*]to seikatsu [San'ichi shobo^[*] , 1972], 17-24). Teraki mentions a close link between the kawata communities and Hakusan belief in Shinano, and he writes of three thousand horsemen having been dispatched by two large Hakusan shrines in Kaga to join the Kaga ikki in the sixteenth century (Kinsei buraku , 193).

Toward a Legislated Racism

Just as Karl Marx argued that "the economic" constitutes the hidden or suppressed truth of past societies, now revealed to us by the workings of capitalist society,^[91] one can make a case that racism reveals the quintessential operations of the ascription of any inherent inequalities, such as those that prevailed in a "society of orders" like Tokugawa Japan. Viewed from this perspective, which is not that of the logician, racism is not a particular variety of discrimination; rather, all forms of discrimination produce effects like those of racism. The Tokugawa history of today's burakumin points to practices and ideologies that betray racist sentiment developed from what was originally a status distinction.

We have seen how asymmetrical punishments meted out for kawata and peasants were following the 1843 Clog Thongs Riot. By the standards of late Tokugawa juridical practice, this was not unusual. In 1796 the bakufu's superintendent of finances, who had a seat at the Tribunal (Hyojosho^[*] ), answered a query whether or not commissioners should conduct direct investigations of eta/hinin after preliminary interrogations by lower officials. The superintendent's answer was that there should be no distinctions in this regard between ordinary commoners (heijin ) and eta-hinin. But, he added, their sentences should be different.^[92] In 1839 it was decided that when peasants and kawata filed joint suits in court, they should be treated differently (sabetsu , discrimination): peasants should squat on straw mats, kawata on the gravel, or three shaku (almost one meter) lower.^[93] Clearly this could be construed as an official strategy to drive a status wedge into possible solidarities among commoner groups.

Differential punishments for samurai and commoners were routine throughout the Tokugawa period, but the singling out of kawata around the turn of the nineteenth century was something altogether new. The first Tokugawa segregation law for "eta, hinin, chasen , and

[91] Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 460. This thesis has been reformulated by Bourdieu, who argues for the pervasiveness of "interests" even in the symbolic realm; Foucault has substituted power for Marx's economic interests.

[92] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 217.

[93] Ibid., 337.

the like" dates from 1778.^[94] It expresses concern with the lawless behavior of eta, hinin, and chasen and with their "mingling incognito with peasants or townspeople at inns, eateries, drinking establishments, etc." This law was followed in 1804 by the first listing of special penalties for kawata and hinin.^[95] The latter document refers to precedents going back to 1771, but not earlier.

Bakufu regulations before the end of the eighteenth century mentioned kawata but did not legislate discrimination and segregation in a comprehensive manner. In this the bakufu followed pre-Tokugawa practice. For example, a kawaramono who in 1518 assaulted a silk merchant did not receive particularly harsh punishment from the Muromachi bakufu court.^[96] Where official prejudice existed, however, it was manifested in various ways. Teraki Nobuaki mentions a common practice dating from the early Tokugawa period, the cartographic custom of leaving out figures for road sections passing through kawata hamlets when computing distances between two points.^[97] If maps are representations of the land and its occupants, this practice may have implied that the kawata did not belong in Japan. Similarly, a decree of 1763 required that hinin be removed from the road to Tokugawa Ieyasu's shrine in Nikko^[*] when the Korean embassy passed through.^[98] The image of Japan that was visible on maps (as seen through the eyes of officials) and from sedan chairs (through the eyes of foreign dignitaries) did not include kawata or hinin.

In reality, of course, kawata were far from being ignored by the authorities. The first reference to kawata in Tokugawa edicts dates from 1657. They were mentioned only in passing, though, in an addendum to the fourth article of a nine-point directire regarding the catching of thieves. Kawata figured in a list of socially undesirable elements "one should look out for," the list subsequently adopted in goningumi village

[94] Ibid., 151-52; TKKz 5:474-75 (no. 3434). In some domains, chasen (one of the many low occupational groups) were distinguished from kawata; they performed similar functions as guards or at funerals under the direction of kawata leaders (Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 48; KDJ 9:456).

[95] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 6, 155.

[96] KDJ 3:758, s.v. "kawaramono."

[97] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 44. This cartographic practice was abolished by law on April 2, 1869 (Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 107).

[98] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 136.

laws: "Buddhist monks, yamabushi (mountain ascetics), wandering ascetics, mendicant monks with flutes and bells, eta, hinin, etc."^[99] Large cities conducted investigations and introduced reforms (aratame ) and passed administrative measures for hinin (Osaka, 1644; Kyoto, 1654; Edo, 1674) and kawata (Kyoto, 1715; Edo, 1719).^[100] These were efforts to tighten control over the floating population of senmin, who were neither samurai nor peasants, craftsmen nor merchants.

By the end of the seventeenth century the prevailing practice was to list kawata separately from peasants, sometimes in completely different population rosters. In Matsumoto domain (Shinano) beginning in 1722 kawata and hinin were even listed under the separate heading jingai ("outside humans"), written with the same characters, in reverse order, as today's pejorative term gaijin (foreigners).^[101] Starting with Danzaemon in 1719 and continuing into the 1730s, the genealogies of kawata were being checked in Kyoto, Edo, and a number of domains,^[102] apparently to build a data base around the membership of these classes. In later years these data were used in so-called eta hunts (etagari ) in Edo, Osaka (1798, 1827, 1833), and Kyoto.^[103] One such etagari conducted in Kyoto in 1831 yielded fifty-three kawata who were trying to "pass." In 1722 Danzaemon was established as a well-pedigreed "national" chief for the hinin and kawata in the eastern provinces (the eight Kanto provinces; Izu, Suruga, and Kai to the west of them; and the northeastern provinces).^[104] In order to establish a clear hierarchy between hinin and kawata, the former were required to cut off their topknots and were forbidden to wear headgear.

The 1720s and 1730s constitute a watershed for segregation legislation aimed at kawata in many domains, perhaps prompted by the bakufu's retrenchment reforms collectively known as the Kyoho^[*] Reforms.^[105]

[99] Ibid., 102. See article 1 of the goningumi rules (1662) of Shimo-Sakurai, Kita-Saku district, in appendix 3; cf. articles z and 3 of the goningumi rules (1640) of the same village in appendix 2.

[100] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 44, 46.

[101] Banba, "'Buraku' no seiritsu," 56.

[102] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 108, 138.

[103] Kobayashi Shigeru, "Buraku kaiho^[*] toso^[*] ," 91.

[104] For details of the national governance of the kawata/hinin, see Cornell, "Caste Patron," 56-70; and Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 99-100.

[105] For an excellent, detailed discussion of these reforms, and the only one available in English, see Kate Nakai, "Kyoho^[*] Reforms," in the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan 4:330-31.

This institutionalization of discriminatory practices against kawata and hinin gathered momentum with each subsequent reform (Kansei, 1780-1790s; Tenpo, 1830s), eventually culminating in the intra-race racism of the nineteenth century. Earlier some domains had issued status legislation for the kawata: Awa domain had decreed in 1699 that kawata should dress more coarsely than peasants, and Choshu^[*] domain in 1813 had decreed that "eta, chasen, and the like" should not be extravagant in their clothing or home design and should not engage in occupations other than those authorized by the domain.^[106] During the period of the Kyoho^[*] Reforms a number of domains made a concerted effort to restrict social intercourse between kawata and other commoners. The domains of Matsumoto, Komoro, Iwamurata, and Okudono (Shinano, the latter three in Kita-Saku) all issued legislation for kawata in the year 1738.^[107] In 1704 the Okudono domain (the location of the Bonboku Incident of 1771) acquired additional villages in Kita-Saku (around Tanoguchi) as a tobichi , or detached parcel. On that occasion the domain issued a comprehensive law comprising eighty articles, but none of them directly concerned the kawata. In 1738, however, the domain issued a seven-point directive aimed specifically at the kawata population. Reissued again in 1779 and 1809, this law constituted the domain's policy toward the kawata.

It is worth noting that in 1704 there were only eleven kawata households in the domain, spread over five (seven in 1738) of the twenty-five villages. By 1838 the kawata population, in ten villages, still numbered only 107 members. In 1765 in Komoro domain (15,000 koku), with a population of approximately the same size, the kawata population was 438 in ten villages, half of it concentrated in Kamasu, the largest kawata community in both Komoro domain and Shinano province.^[108] How could such a minuscule "minority" population possibly represent a threat? What motivated domain officials to implement discriminatory and segregationist directives against the kawata in 1738? Judging from the regulations of that year and later, when they were reissued, the concerns seem to have been the following.^[109]

[106] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 45; another example is Toyoura domain in 1683 (Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 103-4).

[107] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*] hisabetsu buraku , 17, 72-74, 243-44.

[108] Ibid., 52

[109] These rules, all from the Kita-Saku area, can be found in the following publications: for Okudono and Komoro in 1738, ibid., 75-74, 244-45; for Chiisagata district in 1819 and 1838, ibid., 232-26; and for Iwamurata in 1783, Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. 2, Shinano 16, no. 9 (1964): 29.

Standards of segregation, which were perceived as breaking down, were the main concern: the kawata were behaving too much like ordinary peasants. Concretely this involved reinstituting status-marking practices and creating new ones. Practices signifying status were fairly consistent throughout the area and the country, with only a few local variations. Laws consistently stated and restated that kawata could wear only straw sandals; wooden clogs were forbidden, as was the use of umbrellas or parasols; and clothing with family crests and haori jackets were proscribed. Kawata could not build new-style houses and were forbidden to hang streamers (nobori ) from poles or roofs during village festivals.

These laws set kawata clearly apart from other peasants, although, as already mentioned, in certain places, such as Hozu village, titled peasants directed very similar taboos against other peasants. Social interaction was regulated and reduced to a minimum, usually only when official business was involved. As a rule, kawata were instructed always to be courteous and deferential toward peasants. Kawata could wear their short swords only when they were on official business, such as guard duty, and certainly could not parade about with them in other villages, posturing as officials. Even for one-day trips they needed permission from the village headman. At plays or entertainments they were to appear only in the line of duty, in accordance with instructions from the local headman, but not among the audience or as participants. Nor could they be seen at teahouses or drinking establishments. When going to the fields or mountains, they had to take back roads. They were forbidden to enter peasants' homes or even commoners' shops except on official business. Finally, they were not permitted to mingle with ordinary people (heijin), a regulation that led, as noted earlier, to a practical prohibition of mixed marriages. (For a translation of these and other regulations, see appendix 5.)

It was essential that these Japanese be identifiable as "other" at all times. While ultimately ancestry became the criterion for determining who were kawata, more visible signs were needed to differentiate them. In Tosa, persons of kawata status could not be in the streets after 4:00

P.M. (1780).^[110] In Matsushiro domain, which had the largest kawata population in Shinano (380 households with a total population of 2,450 in 1869),^[111] all kawata were required to carry a lantern so that they could be identified at night (1841).^[112] As we saw in the Okayama uprising in 1856, they had to wear special clothing; elsewhere they had to wear pelts or pieces of animal fur.

Since kawata hamlets were set apart from society, fugitives sought refuge there. Others were lured to kawata hamlets by the opportunities of the sometimes lucrative leather trade.^[113] That kawata hamlets were "hotbeds of criminals," as one Confucian scholar put it, is sheer derision. On the other hand, certain legal decisions criminalized the hinin and kawata population as a whole. In Osaka hinin status had become criminalized in 1680 by virtue of a decree stating that anyone buying clothes from hinin would be treated as a thief, the assumption being that hinin, already presumed to be criminals, peddled only stolen goods.^[114] A new twist in the law regarding disinheritance (kando^[*] , kyuri^[*] ) had a similar effect with regard to the kawata. Disinheritance of an individual, it will be recalled, precluded the threat of punishment by vicarious guilt that made social groups (family, neighborhood, village) legally responsible and punishable for crimes committed by persons who had absconded. When a member fled the village, only after several active searches had failed to produce the fugitive could disinheritance be implemented. In the late eighteenth century numerous laws denied kawata communities any such protective clauses. If kawata absconded, a nagatazune ("long search") was ordered that did not end after a certain period, in other words, a search in perpetuity. Thus kawata communities were always responsible for crimes committed by their wayward members and held punishable for them.^[115]

Popular views of pollution and its association with certain occupa-

[110] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 45.

[111] Banba, "Mibunsei no teppai e," 41.

[112] Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. z, 31.

[113] Hatanaka documents the concentration of wealth in some kawata communities and in-migration there by non-kawata ("'Kawata' mibun," 308-9, 328-35).

[114] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 103.

[115] For such bakufu laws issued in 1781, 1792, and 1802, see ibid., 162, 189-90, 252-54; for the difference between kando^[*] and kyuri^[*] , see ibid., 312.

tions were officially sanctioned through legislation marking kawata as a visually identifiable class of people to be avoided. This led not only to perceptions of kawata as lawbreakers and their communities as "hotbeds of criminals" but also to racist views that naturalized the kawata as literally nonhuman. In Oshu^[*] domain in Iyo (Shikoku) all male and female kawata over the age of seven were obliged to wear a piece of animal fur measuring fifteen square centimeters at all times; each kawata family also had to hang an animal pelt at the entrance to their home.^[116] In Kaga in 1776, Matsumoto's term jingai was used in a notification stating that "since kawata are originally different from humans, they should not be in places where humans congregate."^[117] As we shall see, a theory was developing that the kawata were indeed racially different from the Japanese. This view of the kawata as belonging to the realm of beasts was also adopted by intellectuals such as Kaiho Seiryo^[*] (1755-1817), rationalist and mercantilist, who wrote that they "are like animals (kinju^[*] dozen^[*] ) ... there is no morality in their heart (kokoro ni zen'aku no naki )."^[118] But before turning to the question of racist ideology, we shall take a look at the economic dimension of segregation.

Economic Suppression

Discriminatory regulations were not only segregationist. Some were explicitly intended to control the kawata's economic status by either reducing them to poverty or keeping them there. Like peasants restricted to agriculture and required to deliver tribute (in principle, in rice), the kawata were required to engage in leather works. Represented by the authorities as a "privilege," this occupational restriction seems to have been fairly well established by the end of the seventeenth century.^[119] Choshu^[*] domain reissued such restrictive laws in 1743, 1771, and 1836. There were laws strictly forbidding the kawata to buy cows or horses and then slaughter them or to engage in other trades that ordinary commoners engaged in.^[120] A bakufu edict of 1612 had already for-

[116] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 59.

[117] Ibid., 45.

[118] Ibid., 60.

[119] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 104.

[120] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 127, 142, 334.

bidden the killing of cattle, and in 1614 a kawata was crucified in Matsumoto because he had broken a similar law.^[121] This prohibition was not new, however, since laws forbidding the slaughtering of horses and cattle had been issued some nine hundred years earlier, in 676, and again several times in the first half of the eighth century.^[122] In Toyota village, reportedly, if common peasants removed dead horses, they would be considered kawata; elsewhere it was specified that the removal had to occur only at night.^[123] In principle, the owner of a cow or horse lost ownership over it when it died; the carcass, taken to a designated place in the village, was taken possession of by kawata.^[124] Nevertheless, a trade in live cattle for slaughter and consumption most likely existed anyway, since investigations were conducted, sometimes across whole provinces, into the slaughtering of cows and horses (e.g., in Bizen, Bitchu^[*] , and Omi^[*] in 1734).^[125]

Status systems function to minimize competition by automatically excluding all holders of other ranks from the benefits or entitlements associated with a particular rank. This would apply also to the situation of the kawata: they held a monopoly, guaranteed by overlord authority, in leather working but were excluded from other trades. To explain the absence of kawata in northeastern Japan, Harada Tomohiko hypothesizes a link between increased discrimination against the kawata and increased competition among commoners generated by an expanding commercial economy. The commercial economy was weak in the northeast, and discrimination against kawata was absent there, as were the kawata, but discrimination against kawata was strong in the more commercialized regions where the kawata were concentrated.^[126] Ian Neary suggests that the Emancipation Decree of 1871, which certainly did not result in equality, had the devastating effect for the kawata (perhaps intended) of bringing commoners in direct competition with kawata for

[121] Ibid., 99; Banba, "'Buraku' no seiritsu," 55 n. 3.

[122] Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 55, 78.

[123] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 498.

[124] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 49.

[125] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 124-25. Recent archeological excavations indicate the widespread consumption of animal meat, although not beef, in Edo (see Uchiyama Junzo^[*] , "San'ei-cho^[*] and Meat-eating in Buddhist Edo," Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 19, nos. 2-3 [1992]: 302).

[126] Harada Tomohiko, Buraku sabetsushi kenkyu^[*] (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1985), 230-31. For a cultural explanation, see above, n. 49.

modern businesses such as butcher shops or shoe manufacturing, which logically would have been the kawata's prerogatives.^[127]

Competition for scarce economic goods was reflected by other restrictions. Iwamurata domain prohibited kawata from increasing their land holdings, and peasants were forbidden to sell them land. Fields owned by kawata were often of low quality and small, and access to water was often difficult to obtain. Thus, fields were mostly used only as a limited source of food and supplementary income, especially later in the Tokugawa period. The data for Kamasu, the largest kawata community in Shinano (located outside Komoro, Kita-Saku), illustrate this well (see table 22).^[128]

Kamasu's kawata population doubled from 120 to 237 persons (42 to 49 households) between 1723 and 1868, but the holdings decreased from a total of 45 koku to 29. The average holding of taka holders (64 percent of all households in 1723, 61 percent in 1868) dropped from

[127] Neary, Political Protest , 32.

[128] Ozaki, Shinshu^[*] hisabetsu buraku , 66, 89, 91.

1.7 to x koku, which, averaged out over all households in the buraku (taka holders and nonholders), amounted to a drop from 1.1 to 0.6 koku per household.

In contrast, the figures for the Kamasu village peasant population are higher than the kawata figures at the beginning (155) and lower at the end (207), marking an increase of only 33 percent. (The kokudaka remained the same, 108 koku; the number of households increased from 32 to 46.) The average holding of taka holders (72 percent and 78 percent of all households) dropped from 4.7 to 4 koku, which, averaged out over all households in the village, amounted to a drop from 3.4 to 2.4 koku per household. It should also be noted that in the early nineteenth century the Kamasu kawata were strictly forbidden to purchase land or even mortgage their own.^[129]

Kamasu's population growth was not exceptional. The dramatic universal increase in the number of kawata in comparison with the rest of the population, which stabilized after the 1720s, has long been noted by historians. The population of the Watanabe kawata community near Osaka increased fivefold between 1692 and 1856 (from 840 to 4,257), while the population of Osaka declined by 7 percent (to 320,780) during the same period.^[130] In Ueda domain (Shinano) the kawata population increased from a total of 329 (70 households) in 1726 to 893 (110 households) in 1868.^[131]

Historians have offered several explanations for this phenomenon, ascribing to it a combination of outside factors (the influx of drifters) and natural growth (facilitated by strong religious beliefs against infanticide), diet (kawata ate meat), and the growth of a market economy from which the kawata would have benefited (the price of leather went up, keeping pace with other rising prices).^[132]

[129] Ibid., 94.

[130] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 54.

[131] Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. 2, 16-17. The kawata population continued to increase well into the twentieth century. During the first sixty years after the Meiji Restoration (1868) the burakumin population increased by 400 percent, while the general population increased by only 80 percent (Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 114 n. 15). For a population diagram of three villages and their attached buraku between 1725 and 1875, see Hatanaka, "'Kawata' mibun," 313.

[132] Steer hides fetched twice as high a price as horse hides, with cow hides in between. The price of steer hides increased from 0.700 to 1 kanmon (both dates unknown), then to 1.600 in 1781, 1.800 in 1812, and 1.900 in 1821 (Banba, "'Buraku' no seiritsu," 54-55 n. 2). Using tables m convert copper coins into silver value (Nihonshi jiten [kaitei zoho^[*] ], ed. Kyoto Daigaku bungakubu kokushi kenkyushitsu^[*] [Sogensha^[*] , 1960], 845) at exchange rates prevalent in Edo and price lists for Higo rice to be found on p. x of the appendix to any of the thirty-five volumes of Nihon nosho^[*] zenshu^[*] (Nosangyoson^[*] bunka kyokai, 1977-81), one finds that the value of steer hides remained fairly constant, being the equivalent of 0.25 koku of rice. Teraki (Kinsei buraku , 50) puts the value at 1 koku for the mid Tokugawa period.

As the figures for Kamasu and Ueda indicate, while the population increased dramatically, the number of households did not. This was probably because of an attempt by the authorities to stem population increase by limiting the number of households. In the first bakufu legislation that dealt comprehensively with the kawata (1778), their "illegal (hogai^[*] ) population increase" was noted.^[133] A decree of 1834 stated that "the number of kawata is increasing disproportionately in relation to that of the peasants. Someday this will become a source of problems. Henceforward only one male per household can take a bride. The other children must marry out. We will try to decrease the population one by one. Permission to marry must be secured from the appropriate officials."^[134]

How widespread such population control measures were is not known. We do know, however, that one way of dealing with the undesirable growth of the local kawata population was to relocate them to other villages.^[135] As we saw earlier, Umaji village, near Hozu, imported a whole kawata community in 1801 to work fields tenant peasants were trying to boycott. Some daimyo even had grandiose plans to utilize the kawata on a national scale to colonize Ezo (Hokkaido). Already by 1720 Arai Hakuseki, a retired shogunal adviser, had sorted out the available data on the island in his Ezoshi . Thus, interest in Ezo's economic potential antedates by several decades Tanuma Okitsugu's famous plan in the 1780s, based on a recent exploratory survey, to colonize the island with kawata.^[136]

[133] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 151.

[134] Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. 1, 56.

[135] Ibid., pt. 2, 26.

[136] Other books, less trustworthy in detail than Hakuseki's, appeared around the same time: Matsumiya Kanzan's Ezodan hikki and Itakura Genjiro's^[*]Hokkai zuihitsu (KDJ 2:271, s.v. "Ezoshi"). For Tanuma, see John Whitney Hall, Tanuma Okitsugu, 1719-1788: Forerunner of Modem Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), 67, 100-105.

The kawata had become incorporated in an emerging "colonial" discourse in two ways. Through a fabricated etymological relationship between Ezo and eta the kawata were turned into aliens, literally alienated. As alleged descendants of captives from past wars with the aborigines of Ezo, the kawata were being signified by Tani Shinzan in 1717, among others, as genealogically non-Japanese linked to a non-Japan, Ezo.^[137] Moreover, when the possibility of colonizing Ezo was actually being entertained, the proposal was made to utilize the kawata for this purpose on a grand scale. Thus in 1786/2 Matsumoto Hidemochi, the superintendent of finances, presented a scheme to Tanuma Okitsugu, the bakufu's chief political leader, for turning Hokkaido into one enormous shinden (new rice paddy):

Because the native Ebisu would not be enough for this development project, we have conceived a plan to gather eta from various provinces and move them to Ezo. When we asked Danzaemon, without revealing the location of the project, whether he had ever thought of utilizing some of his subjects (tega) to develop new fields, he said that of the 33,000 eta in his jurisdiction, 7,000 eta/hinin could be made available for such purposes. This is not enough, but Danzaemon's authority, of course, does not extend to all the provinces. However, because he has on occasion issued rules to the various regional eta leaders, we could put him in charge of all the eta/hinin of the whole country, a population of some 230,000. This would enable us to move 63 to 70 thousand eta to Ezo, including Danzaemon.^[138]

Hoashi Banri (1778-1852), a Confucian eclectic, scholar, teacher, and, at one point, elder in the domain of Hiji in Bungo province (Oita^[*] , Kyushu^[*] ), combined the idea of colonizing Ezo with kawata (who he considered to be descendants from past captives from Ezo anyway) with that of liberating them first at a giant purification ceremony: "The ancestors of the eta are captives from Ezo. And, although they are assigned the task of apprehending thieves, [their communities] are hotbeds of crimes. So we should gather them all at the Great Shrine of Ise, purify them, make them heijin [commoners], send them to the land of

[137] Morita Yoshinori, "Edo-ki ni okeru buraku e no shiteki kanshin," in Kinsei buraku no shiteki kenkyu^[*] (1) , ed. Buraku kaiho^[*] kenkyujo^[*] (Osaka: Kaiho^[*] shuppansha, 1979), 1:317.

[138] Tsuji Zennosuke quotes a section of this proposal in his Tanuma jidai (Iwanami shoten, 1980), 300-302; for the whole text, see Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 175-77.

Ezo, and set them to work at agriculture or cattle breeding."^[139] The "liberal" view of this Confucian betrays the depth of prejudice against the kawata. They are viewed as less moral than ordinary people and as property of the state who, like condemned criminals (with whom they were associated anyway), could be put to work to enrich the state. Interestingly, Hokkaido was eventually colonized and developed in the Meiji period by inmates condemned to forced labor.

The Contaminated Intelligentsia

Tokugawa discourse on society, while moving in a number of directions and shifting idiom, developed over time on a template provided by Confucianism. Whether traditional Confucian, neo-Confucian, anti-Confucian, eclectic, or Shinto, this discourse was always in dialogue with Chinese learning. Prominent in this "Chinese" tradition as it was "translated" in Japan was the view of society as divided into four classes: samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants. It should be noted, however, that this "translation" took some time. Banba Masatomo writes that the shift in categories from the Chinese "ministers, high officials, gentlemen, commoners (ch'ing, tafu, shih, shujen )" to "samurai, peasants, artisans, merchants" took hold in Japan only around the 1720s.^[140] Moreover, the expression does not occur in the Tokugawa jikki , which uses senmin ("lowly people," referring to the nonsamurai) or "peasants and merchants."^[141]

Tokugawa scholars did not seriously confront the status and class system beyond these categories. Their "four-class" system, more a gen-

[139] Quoted from Hoashi's Tosenfuron^[*] by Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 62.

[140] Banba Masatomo, Nihon jukyoron^[*] (Mikasa shobo^[*] , 1939), 172-77, esp. 176. Watanabe mentions Banba's interpretation (Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 137-38). For a more detailed analysis, see Asao, "Kinsei no mibun," 14-24. It is interesting that Banba, who after the war would pioneer new research into the Tokugawa past of burakumin, to my knowledge mentions eta only once in his book (131). Apparently following censorship guidelines, the word eta is not spelled out fully. Instead, it is printed as xta , an x replacing the e (meaning "dirt," "pollution"): even the character for "pollution" seems to have been taboo in those years. A similar practice governed the publication of Tokugawa village laws. In Hozumi Shigeto's^[*]Goningumi hokishu^[*] zokuben , the word eta is replaced by two blank squares (see, e.g., 1:97): the eta are erased just as their communities were expurgated from Tokugawa maps. Perhaps inspired by concern for burakumin sensibilities, the practice nevertheless maintained these communities as "the unnameables," the ones whose identity could not be spoken.

[141] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 137.

eral metaphor for hierarchy than a sociological concept, did not encourage discussion of status differentials within these classes, let alone of subjects like the kawata, who fell outside the system.

Occasional references to kawata were limited to incidental remarks. Texts on government policy and Confucian discussions of jinsei (benevolent government) do not contain compassionate references to kawata. Kobayashi Shigeru, who compiled bakufu directives related to kawata and hinin, found only one such reference, in the apocryphal Tokugawa seiken hyakkajo^[*] (Tokugawa Constitution in One Hundred Articles), most likely composed in the late eighteenth century, possibly by a Buddhist priest.^[142] The article reads: "Eta, beggars (hoito^[*] ), blind men and women, and indigents who have no one to rely on (tsuguru naki ), who are outside the four classes, have since the ancient past been treated with compassion so that they can make a living. One should know that this is the beginning of benevolent government."

Other remarks expressive of a reasoned attitude include the following from early Tokugawa rulers and thinkers. Ikeda Mitsumasa (1609-82), the famous lord of Okayama domain, was quoted as saying to a vassal whom he took to task for prejudicial views: "Should we really consider the eta different? They are also peasants. Skinning of wild boars and badgers and eating their meat—don't a lot of people do that (dare tote mo sumajiki ni mo arazu )? Why, then, do we look with repulsion only at them?"^[143] Whether or not he actually said this, it is perhaps significant that these words were ascribed to a meikun ("model lord"). Kumazawa Banzan (1619-91), the Confucian scholar in Mitsumasa's service and equally famous, expressed a similar logic, undoubtedly shared by the kawata. In a passage critical of the Buddhist

[142] Kobayashi, Kinsei horeishu^[*] , 127. Inexplicably, Kobayashi gives Kanpo 2 (1742) as the date for this one article, although it is article 85 of the version of the Tokugawa seiken hyakkajo^[*] (literally, the Tokugawa treasured legacy in one hundred articles) reprinted in TKKz 1:59 and in Kinsei buke shiso^[*] , Nihon shiso^[*] taikei, 27 (Iwanami shoten, 1974), 474 (hereafter NST 27). For a full German translation of the three versions, see Rudorff, "Tokugawa-Gesetz-Sammlung," 4-21. Hiramatsu Yoshiro^[*] writes that the articles "appear to have originated in about the Kansei period (1789-1801), and it is strongly suspected that a Buddhist priest had a hand in it. There is also doubt whether they even reflect the general Tokugawa legal consciousness" ("Tokugawa Law," trans. D.F. Henderson, Law in Japan 14 [1981]: 5, originally published as "Kinseiho^[*] ," Kinsei 3, Iwanami koza^[*] Nihon rekishi, 11 [Iwanami, 1976], 332-78).

[143] Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*] buraku , 156-57.

clergy, he argued, "The eta are said to be polluted, but the Buddhist monks are even more so ... people are called 'eta' merely for handling dead cows and horses. But aren't those who handle dead people (shijin ), consume meat, use clothes made from animal skins (shihi , "dead skin"), and live next to hundreds of graves big eta (daieta )?"^[144] This view was rarely expressed in Tokugawa writings. Only in texts from near the very end of the period does one come across expressions of this view again. As discriminatory practices against kawata were institutionalized by official records and legislation, correlative theories developed to explain and validate this discrimination.

To justify segregation, Ogyu^[*] Sorai (166-1727) does not appeal to the sages, as he did to rationalize the four-class system, but to the "customs of the Divine Country," Japan: "Not sharing fire with kawata is a custom of the Divine Country and unavoidable (shinkoku no fuzoku^[*] , zehi nashi )."^[145] The expression "not to share fire," referring to an avoidance of kawata in order not to share their pollution, also appears in a letter circulated in 1748 by a bakufu intendant prohibiting the apparently widespread custom of "sharing fire, etc.," with kawata.^[146] As we have seen, such prohibitions against "mingling" with the kawata became increasingly common in the second half of the eighteenth century: the "custom of the Divine Country" Sorai referred to was being upheld by law; that is, the state became the carrier of "customs," while the people seemed to be more accommodating. Ultimately, the authorities seem to have dreaded the reality of the kawata itself far less than the prospect of there being none.

On his official journey to the province of Kai in 1706 Sorai passed through a kawata community. In his official travelogue (the Kyochukiko^[*] ), he notes: "We pass through the village of Utsunoya. All are butchers. I wanted to smoke but could not ask for a light." This is a reworked version of his private travelogue, Furyushishaki^[*] , where the entry reads: "When we pass through the village of Utsunoya, we see women huddled together in a boisterous clamor. Bamboo peels

[144] Teraki quotes this passage from Banzan's Miwa monogatari in Kinsei buraku , 60.

[145] Ogyu^[*] Sorai, quoted from his Seidan by Teraki (ibid.). The quotation can be found in Ogyu^[*] Sorai , Nihon shiso^[*] taikei, 36 (Iwanami shoten), 286 (hereafter NST 36). For Sorai's justification of the four classes by appealing to the sages, see Maruyama, Studies , 214, 217.

[146] Banba, "'Buraku' no sui-i," pt. 2, 16-34.

are soaking in the ditches under the protruding eaves of the houses [to be used for making leather-soled sandals, setta ]. They are houses of butchers. I feel a great urge to smoke, but refined emissaries should not break customs. I could not ask for a light. I have a poem...." In this poem Sorai refers to age-old customs and to the ten categories for noble and base people that prevailed in China. In his Seidan , Sorai alludes to the theory that the kawaramono are of a different stock: "Prostitutes and kawaramono are considered lowly people; this is the same in China and Japan, both now and in the past. Because they are of a different stock (genrai sono sujo^[*]kakubetsu naru ), they are considered lowly and entrusted to Danzaemon's rule. Nowadays, however, the old law is lost and ordinary commoners sell their daughters in prostitution and kawaramono become merchants, which is the greatest of evils."^[147]

The unproblematic acceptance of the existence of an outcaste group by many Tokugawa scholars, regardless of philosophical or political bent, represents the rejection of a core tenet of Confucian thought, namely, the idea of a universal human nature.^[148] This rejection derives perhaps from a perception of the rigid status divisions of the time as a "natural" state of affairs, and one closely linked to sacred customs dating back to Japan's divine creation. Embedded in this social or experiential "reality," Tokugawa scholars may have tended to downplay or ignore the notion of the universality of human nature so central to Confucianism. While they read social reality through Chinese texts simplifying society to four classes, they also read Chinese metaphysics through the practice of a rigidly differentiated status system that posited in a most radical way different degrees of "intrinsic worth" for members of different status orders ("six or seven kawata lives for one commoner").

[147] For the quotations from the travelogues, see Watanabe, Mikaiho^[*]buraku , 153; for the quotation from the Seidan , see ibid., 152, and NST 36:283.

[148] Nakae Toju^[*] and Kumazawa Banzan seem to have been rare exceptions. For Banzan, see above, n. 144; for Toju^[*] , see Kurozumi Makoto, "The Nature of Early Tokugawa Confucianism," trans. Herman Ooms, Journal of Japanese Studies 20, no. 2 (1994): 359-60, originally published as "Tokugawa zenki jukyo^[*] no seikaku," Shiso^[*] , no. 792 (1990): 117-18. Kurozumi discusses the difficulty Tokugawa thinkers had with the concept of a universal human nature (without linking it to social practice as I do here) on pp. 363-65 and 368-72 of the English text and 120-21 and 124-25 of the Japanese text. I am currently pursuing this issue and others in a full-length study of the kawata and senmin during the Tokugawa period.

Sung Confucianism, it has often been argued, constituted an advance in "rationalism" over traditional Confucianism and Buddhism. One may therefore conclude that the coexistence of Sung Confucianism and the "irrational" practices of segregation and indeed racism in Tokugawa Japan can only be explained by the faulty nature of this rationalism. The argument has been made, however, with regard to the development of Western racism that it is a strictly modern phenomenon and directly related to the concomitant emergence of rationalism.^[149] It would be intriguing to explore this thesis for Tokugawa Japan, less to establish a causal relationship than to establish an affinity that goes beyond the observation that a Confucian-style rationalism had no difficulty making room for racist segregation.

That Tokugawa Japan's intra-race racism was expressed and fed by the "irrationalism" of cultural nationalism as it developed in nativist (kokugaku ) discourse is more immediately plausible.^[150] Given its emphasis on purity and pollution and the explicit hatred of foreign "others" (which was China and the West, according to Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane), it seems quite logical that kokugaku thought would validate and reinforce the creation of an "internal" group of despised others.

About the Dutch and the Russians, Atsutane writes: "The slenderness of their legs also makes them resemble animals. When they urinate they lift one leg, the way dogs do. Moreover, apparently because the backs of their feet do not reach to the ground, they fasten wooden heels

[149] Christian Delacampagne, "Racism and the West: From Praxis to Logos," in Goldberg, Anatomy of Racism , 83-89.

[150] While pointing out the connection between nativist ideology and the crisis of village leadership, Harry Harootunian leans far toward an uncritical acceptance of that ideology, which, he writes, "substituted friendship, affection, and reciprocity for the fragmentation and conflict reflecting the impersonal relationships of the authority system." His focus on the relationship between the village and the overlord causes him to overlook the discrimination that was increasing at the village level precisely when (and where) nativist thought became ruralized (see his Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 230-32, esp. 232). The province of Shinano, where traditional dogo^[*] families were very powerful in village affairs, counted the highest number of Hirata Atsutane's students (see Katsurajima Nobuhiro, "Hirata Kokugaku to gonoso^[*] ," in Shukan^[*] Asahi hyakka, Nihon no rekishi 91 [1988]: 9/74; see also Fukaya Katsumi, "Bakuhansei shihai to mura yakuninso^[*] no kokugaku juyo^[*] ," Shikan 91 [1975]: 13-23).

to their shoes, which makes them look all the more like dogs. This may also explain why a Dutchman's penis appears to be cut short at the end, just like a dog's. Though this may sound like a joke, it is quite true, not only of Dutchmen but of Russians."^[151] It is interesting to note that Atsutane had to insist on his learned authority in this matter, anticipating that his readers might dismiss this information as a joke. It is also interesting to compare Atsutane's characterization of foreigners with an early-twentieth-century "popular notion" that burakumin had "one rib-bone lacking; they have one dog's bone in them; they have distorted sexual organs; they have defective excretory systems; if they walk in moonlight their neck will not cast shadows; and, they being animals, dirt does not stick to their feet when they walk barefooted."^[152]

As Etienne Balibar notes, "the racial-cultural identity of the 'true nationals' remains invisible, but it is inferred from (and assured by) its opposite, the alleged, quasi-hallucinatory visibility of the 'false nationals.'"^[153] And as deconstructionists are wont to say, (national) identities can only be established impurely, by incorporating through negation their others, which in due course they produce. Hence, it is perhaps no coincidence that in Motoori and Atsutane's discourse exclusion served as a central structuring device and that the discourse developed at a time when efforts were being made to reinstitute and reinforce kawata segregation through discriminatory laws and regulations.

As mentioned earlier, pre-Tokugawa explanations of the term eta , which are still used widely today, were occupational and linked to some low occupations or religious taboos because they were associated with bloodshed or the consumption of meat. The term eta (initially not written with the characters for "plentiful pollution") was first mentioned in a mid-thirteenth-century dictionary, the Chiribukuro , which explained it in association with kiyome , or purifiers, who removed polluted items from sacred places, and linked it etymologically to etori , feeders of hawks, and associated the Indian outcast candãla with butchers. These explanations were repeated in later versions and sup-

[151] Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952), 170. For a long, virulent analysis and indictment of antiforeignism in Tokugawa thought, see Sajja A. Prasad's three-volume The Patriotism Thesis and Argument in Tokugawa Japan (Samudraiah Prakashan, 1975-84).

[152] Quoted in Ninomiya, "Inquiry," 56 n. 18.

[153] Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," 285.

plements of the Chiribukuro with a Buddhist slant (the Ainosho^[*] of 1446, using for the first time the characters meaning "plentiful pollution" for eta , associating the kawata with pollution, and the Jinten ainosho^[*] of 1532) and throughout the Tokugawa period in various writings.^[154]

Not until the beginning of the eighteenth century was there mention of a different origin for the kawata. In 1712 Terajima Ryoan^[*] , a medical doctor at Osaka castle, mentioned that kawata were butchers, gave them the (Sinified Indian) caste name sendara , and noted that one should not share fire with them, that they were of a different stock (seishi o koto ni su ).^[155] In 1725 Sorai alluded, as mentioned above, to a theory that kawaramono had a different parentage or lineage or nature from that of other Japanese (genrai sono sujo^[*]kakubetsu naru ). Sujo^[*] , the term rendered as "parentage," "lineage," "nature" (literally, "seed-nature"), indicates, according to Kuroda Toshio, that in medieval times differential human qualities were attached to status by birth, the nobility being the kishu ("noble seed"). On the other hand, the nobility were sometimes spoken of as "not of human seed but partaking of the imperial nature." At the other end of the social scale, the kawaramono were described in one fifteenth-century text as "humans, but like beasts." According to Kuroda, the medieval social imaginary was genealogical throughout and originated in, and was maintained by, the Buddhist karmic world-view. Kuroda sees sujo^[*] as none other than a translation of the Indian term for "caste."^[156] In this context, it is worth noting that other derogatory terms for classes of low people also originate in Buddhism; Kuroda mentions bonge (commoner) and hinin .^[157] Yet, we should keep in mind that there was considerable mobility among the various lower strata, occupations, and statuses of medieval society.

This genealogical imaginary, as we shall see in a moment, continued to be applied to status groups in Tokugawa times. However, while most of the karmic connotations such constructs may have had in medieval times were eventually lost, to ancestry was added a racial dimension. As already mentioned, some writings suggested that the origins of the kawata were in Ezo, in a racially distinct group. In the 1720s and 1730s,

[154] Teraki, Kinsei buraku , 25-26; Morita, "Buraku e no shiteki kanshin," 308, 318; Kuroda, Nihon chusei^[*]no kokka , 380.

[155] Morita "Buraku e no shiteki kanshin," 311.

[156] Kuroda, Nihon chusei^[*]no kokka , 361, 372, 375, 381, 388, 391.

[157] Ibid., 376, 388.

when Danzaemon fabricated, in one of his genealogies, a Chinese ancestry for himself, stories about the foreign origin of the kawata started to circulate. Thus Kyoho^[*]sewa , a record of daily life of that period, explains that the kawata were descendants from Chinese refugees who had lived in the wild and eaten animal and bird meat and were considered polluted. For that reason they were avoided by good people and forced to live apart.^[158] Nativists did not have to specify where the kawata came from. For them it was sufficient to know that they were not Japanese. Writing in 1795, Tamada Naganori wrote that "butchers, although living in the divine country, are not of divine descent (shinson ); they therefore do not venerate the gods, do not wash their hands after relieving themselves, do not use mourning garments for relatives, and do not spit when they see impurities."^[159] Not to discriminate against butchers would be against the Way, wrote Ban Nobutomo in 1847. He maintained this orthodoxy, although he clearly understood that such discrimination may have had historical explanations and that people may have had mixed feeling about such practice in his own day:

Butchers of wild animals came to be treated as if they were not human beings. If one inquires about their ancestors, many are found to hail from respectable families, and it is regrettable that it is impossible for them to become good people (ryomin^[*] ). If, however, today we would not despise them as defiled, this would be against the Way, because this would be the same as not being repulsed by the pollution of the meat of wild animals.^[160]

The transition from a medieval genealogical to a racialized social logic was apparently completed in the early eighteenth century—around the same time that the nobility in France argued its racial superiority over the common Gaulois because of their Germanic-Frankish descent!^[161] It should be noted that by then a quasi-genealogical or

[158] Morita, "Buraku e no shiteki kanshin," 312; see also 317.

[159] Ibid., 318.

[160] Ibid., 330.

[161] André Devyver has traced a similar genesis of racial philosophy of "pure blood" among the French lesser nobility between 1560 and 1720, culminating in the racist writings of Henry de Boulainvilliers (see his Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez les gentilshommes français de l'Ancien Régime [1560-1720 ] [Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1973]). According to Noël du Fail, an earlier contributor to this discourse, one of the worst marriages a country noble could contract was with the wife of a butcher, which would make his offspring bloodthirsty (181). Unlike in Japan, the French "noble race" was not said to be indigenous, since its origins were allegedly Frankish: they were the fifth-century conquerors of the aboriginal Gallic Celts, the ancestors of the common Frenchmen. Historically, the nobility traced itself back to Germany, mythologically sometimes to Abel (10, 11, 27).

racial concept of Christians had also been codified in Tokugawa law. In 1687 and 1695 laws were issued against former Christians who had publicly abandoned their faith but were suspected of having done so only for the sake of appearances.^[162] Therefore all agnatic and affinal relatives to the fourth degree and direct male descendants to the sixth generation were put under the close supervision of local officials, who had to report twice a year on their occupations, marriages, deaths, divorces, travels, and so on. The taint of Christianity, like the stigma of pollution, could not be removed and was passed from generation to generation. Similarly, in sixteenth-century Spain the Inquisition paid special attention to conversos , who were always suspected of not having become genuine converts.^[163] The French nobility (especially the lower rural nobility), Spanish converted Jews, Japanese ex-Christians, and the kawata—all more or less contemporaries—were all minorities, either threatened (the French nobles by the ennoblement of many bourgeois) or threatening (economically competitive Jews and kawata), racialized in order to set them further apart from an otherwise undistinguishable majority.

The kawata did not accept being called eta, and they did not subscribe to the genealogical and racial portrayals of themselves by majority Japanese. Using the same discourse but inverting its values, they pictured themselves as genealogically noble and racially Japanese. The major difference was that their counterdiscourse was private. We find mythological genealogies kept in the important houses of the kawata, but only very recently have they been studied seriously as avenues to the consciousness and self-representation of this oppressed minority.^[164] In the early seventeenth century the kawata from the Kinai region traced their ancestry back to Indian nobility, a certain prince Entara—phonetically close to eta and sendara —whose line was punished because he

[162] Yokota, "Kinseiteki mibun seido," 72, 76; see also KDJ 4:441, S.V. "Kirishitan ruizoku shirabe."

[163] Devyver, Le sang épuré , 50-55.

[164] See Mase, "Ishiki no naka no mibunsei," 270-72; Wakita, Kawaramakimono .

had committed cannibalism, or to the Japanese mythical figure Sominshorai^[*] , a poor man who had become wealthy because he had lent his humble abode to a god. In the eighteenth century imperial ancestors (the emperor Ojin^[*] or Suzaku) and divine origins (Hakusan or Ebisu) were invoked. In the nineteenth century, far removed from the original sin of cannibalism that constituted a complicitous theo- or sociodicy of their low status, the kawata imagined themselves descendants from the Minamoto shogun (ancestors of the Tokugawa) or considered themselves simply to be codescendants of the gods with all Japanese.^[165]

People locked into a status system usually seek to improve their position within it, yet their struggles often strengthen the system that oppresses them. A status system will keep on reproducing itself unless some independent institutions develop and a counterhegemonic practice and philosophy or ideology is produced. Cataclysmic social or political events force fundamental questions about the system's utility and rationale. Tokugawa Japan had neither institutions such as churches nor independent courts to challenge the principles of the prevailing political practice. In principle and practice, reason could not prevail over law, nor law over authority. The collapse of the regime in 1868 was perhaps the cataclysmic event that offered the most opportunity for change. But the change that occurred fell far short of what the kawata might have hoped for. On the surface (tatemae), the 1871 decree declared that that official class status was abolished and that in terms of occupation and social standing the kawata would be like other commoners. But in reality the discrimination against them continued: they were entered in the early Meiji population registers, not as citizens like everyone else, but as "new commoners (shinheimin )." A public record of difference was thus established that provided an official ground, and the only one, upon which to base future discrimination. An important step toward the elimination of such a basis for genealogical racism would be to do away with the Meiji records that document it.

Until recently, access to these records was open to anyone. In 1976, through the amendment of Section 10 of the Family Registration Law, "the government restricted access to family registries to family members, their legal representatives, and officials whose job required it." This, however, is another instance of a tatemae aspect of law, for en-

[165] Mase, "Ishiki no naka no mibunsei," 271-72.

Plate 7.
Advertisement for Genealogical Tracing. The investigative services
advertised here include "confirmation of nationality and family registration,
including matrimonial history," which practically targets Koreans and burakumin.
Japan Law Journal 6, no. 2 (1993): 2.

forcement is very lax; "local registrars do not consistently enforce the prohibition on securing copies of unrelated individuals' family registries."^[166] Plate 7 shows an advertisement in English for genealogical tracing services.

One late Tokugawa voice on behalf of the kawata was Senshu^[*] Fujiatsu's (1815-64), a loyalist rebel who was ordered to commit seppuku because of his anti-bakufu activities. In a very short tract, Eta o osamuru gi (How to govern the eta), Fujiatsu articulated a vision of a new Japanese social order that included the emancipation of the kawata.^[167] Like the agricultural utopia that figured in the writings of Ando^[*] Shoeki^[*] (1703-62), Fujiatsu's imagined new social order made no

[166] Taimie Bryant, "For the Sake of the Country, for the Sake of the Family: The Oppressive Impact of Family Registration on Women and Minorities in Japan," UCLA Law Review 39 (1991): 120, 121. I thank my colleague Bryant for referring me to the advertisement shown in plate 7.

[167] Fujiatsu, a retainer of the Kaga domain, was an instructor at the Hayashi College in Edo and then in his domain school, and finally he served as rotor to the successor of the daimyo in his domain. He was one of the leaders of the small band of Kaga loyalists. A short biographical sketch serves as the preface to his tract on the kawata, which is published in NSSS 14:565.

immediate political or social impact; his tract was not discovered until after the Tokugawa period, and it did not appear in print until 1924. Like Shoeki^[*] , Fujiatsu provided evidence of views opposed to the Tokugawa status system, and to the position of the kawata within it.

Unlike Shoeki^[*] , who constructed a counterideology that was complex and decidedly utopian, the work of an intellectual, Fujiatsu, in his indictment of discrimination against kawata, offered a critical analysis of its sources and a realistic program for its abolition, the work of an official. He listed theories and rationalizations (historical, genetic, and cultural) used to justify discriminatory practices and rejected them all. For example, he dismissed as a myth the idea that the kawata originated in Ezo (Hokkaido); and he countered the idea that the kawata were not human but animal in nature by asking, "Would Heaven and Earth produce such a thing? If they are not humans, then they would be beasts or birds, grass, trees, dirt, or stones, but how could they have an animal nature if they have a human body?" Fujiatsu argued against the popular notion that those who engaged in "low" occupations were by association polluted or base: "In our country there are prison officials, but that does not make them necessarily base; burials are taken care of by monks, but that does not make them necessarily base; people in the mountains kill wild boars as an occupation, but that does not make them necessarily base ..." He believed that nothing comparable to the situation of the kawata existed in the West and concluded that the kawata must be the result of the government's status system. He then recommended that the status system be abolished and that the kawata be registered as "good people"—advice that was not followed by the Meiji government—and he urged public assistance for the economic emancipation of the kawata through agricultural start-up programs.

Conclusion

One could say that the Tokugawa status system, like status systems everywhere, served to retain "privilege among the powerful and power among the privileged."^[168] Inherently discriminatory, it was developed and expanded for specific economic and political purposes by and for those who had the power and privilege to determine those who should have less or none. Status stratification sets limits on what people can

[168] Berreman, Caste , 198.

realize; consequently they are induced to look upon those immediately above them with deference and envy and upon those immediately below them with contempt and fear.

Such dispositions are the result of man-made laws and rules of social practice, which are effective only in that they are misrecognized as something other than sheer coercion. Prescriptions in the guise of descriptions transform originally political, economic, and legal objectives into the "natural" order of things. The ought of the law slides under the is of an imaginary order structured according to symbolic categories such as nature, descent, purity, and pollution, which are presented as direct readings of reality but are in fact nothing but political values or social norms. Etienne Balibar notes in a discussion of racism that "the criteria of differentiation cannot be 'neutral' in practice; they incorporate sociopolitical values that are often challenged and that have to be imposed via the detour of ethnicity or culture.... Classification and hierarchy are above all else operations of naturalization, or more accurately, the projection of historical and social differences onto an imaginary nature.... The nature of racism is not one of proportional causes and effects, immanent regulations: it is a nature that is 'inherent,' 'immemorial,' 'always already valorized.'"^[169] Like the title "titled peasants," such symbolic constructs have the potential to develop a power within their own logic and to withstand alternative, critical readings of reality.

The escalating discrimination against the kawata in Tokugawa Japan provides an excellent illustration of this logic of practice and representation. Based on popular prejudice, accentuated by economic rivalry, articulated further and given a new layer of reality by legislation, rationalized by racial explanations and racist theories, discrimination and segregation produced, and kept on producing, a great amount of particularly painful social suffering that from today's perspective it is hard not to see as akin to racism. That the predominant idiom in Japan was and is pollution rather than the pseudoscientific notion of race, although that aspect was not absent, makes no difference to those who suffered and continue to suffer from its effects. Ritual pollution, the central concern of Shinto, may be contingent and circumscribed, but pollution ascribed to bestial origins is an existential, inalterable predicament.

[169] Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality," 290.

Pollution is not an adequate social marker of difference, for it is still an imaginary, spiritual state. The construction of racial and racist theories was an attempt to make sense of the world as fashioned by bakufu laws. The Tokugawa authorities legislated visible but nonexistential, sartorial, "attachable" (and therefore also detachable) marks of social status; that is why "passing" was a major concern. Ultimately, only official records of ancestry and birthplace could identify sites of pollution; status racism became a state racism because bakufu law constructed the legal ground for an intra-race racism.

Only with the formal collapse of the Tokugawa system did emancipation become a possibility. By then, however, the intensification of discriminatory and segregationist legislation had succeeded in giving new authority to values and practices that are now viewed as part of Japanese culture. Somewhere near Shimoda, at the site of the first foreigners' residence after Japan was opened in 1853, a memorial plaque enshrines in Japanese and English a lie that establishes an official truth, suggesting also perhaps that gaijin belong to the realm of jingai:

This monument, erected in 1931 by the butchers of Tokyo, marks the spot where the first cow in Japan was slaughtered for human consumption (eaten by Harris and Heusken).^[170]

[170] Townsend Harris (1804-78) was the first consul general to represent the United States in Japan. He arrived in Japan in August 1856 and established his post in a temple in Shimoda. Henry Heusken (1832-61) was Harris's secretary and served as his Dutch-English translator.