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.