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).