Japan's Outcaste Abolition

The Struggle for National Inclusion and the Making of the Modern State

Noah Y. McCormack

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415501323
• eBook ISBN: 9781136283673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia japonesa

The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classed people into hierarchically ranked status groups ( mibun ). The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, adapting and clarifying existing customary divisions between warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Subsequently, during the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule, status laws backed by coercive force worked to limit social mobility between groups and regulate relations between people of different status.

This book begins by examining the origins and evolution of the outcaste groups within the Tokugawa status order. It then looks into the complex processes leading up to the abolition of outcaste status and the institution of legal equality in 1871 under the Meiji regime, and analyzes subsequent practices and theories of social discrimination against firstly 'former outcastes' and 'New Commoners' and then ' Burakumin '. Finally, it analyses the tactics and strategies of liberation adopted at local and national levels by anti-discrimination movements in Meiji Japan.

Detailing the history of early-modern Japanese outcastes into the post-abolition era, Japan's Outcaste Abolition explores the dynamics of national inclusion, social exclusion, and the making of disciplined modern subjects. It will therefore be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese history, culture and society, social history and Asian studies.

1 Outcaste status after equality

The Tokugawa Shogunate, which governed Japan for two and a half centuries until the mid-1860s, classified people into hierarchically ranked status groups, known in Japanese as mibun. In terms of political and administrative power, roughly speaking, military samurai stood at the top, outcastes at the bottom, with sundry others between them. Since status was hereditary, and each group had its own distinct vocations, privileges, and obligations, the groups that people were born into largely determined their life-chances. The early Tokugawa rulers legally established these status groups through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, adapting and clarifying existing customary divisions between warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants. Subsequently, over the course of Tokugawa rule, status laws backed by coercive force worked to limit social mobility between groups and regulate relations between people of different status.

The creators of this social order, in which all groups were subject to close and detailed bureaucratic regulations regarding production, consumption, and social interaction, had aimed to create a stable and self-perpetuating system that would allow them, and their heirs, to remain in power. But people continually sought ways to improve their standing, and in so doing, ceaselessly infringed status regulations and undermined the status order. Among the most significant factors propelling attempts at status mobility was the development of a market economy. Taking advantage of a status-based division of labour that in principle shut samurai out of commerce and agriculture and locked them into military and administrative roles, some merchants and peasants prospered greatly in the emergent market system, bringing about a separation between political and economic power that tended to widen over time. This divide in turn heightened general dissatisfaction with the prevailing status order, as the politically empowered complained about their relative impoverishment, while traders and peasants took issue with their exclusion from formal political power.

Tokugawa outcastes were an anomalous grouping stationed at the bottom of the status system. To use the term ‘outcaste’ in the context of Tokugawa Japan is in fact somewhat misleading, as it is a term of convenience covering an assortment of sub-commoner Tokugawa status groups, and was not a widely used official designation of the time. Some of these outcaste groups performed low-level order-keeping work under samurai supervision, others produced artisanal leather goods, still others performed religious rites, while the great majority engaged in agricultural production and were substantially the same as surrounding peasant populations in all but their nominal status. The common quality that joined these contrasting outcaste groups was the perception, based on Shinto precepts, that they were ritually polluted as a result of their involvement in unclean work relating especially to death, as well as in cleansing practices to treat such pollution.

The Tokugawa Shogunate accorded outcastes a high degree of autonomy over internal matters that did not involve members of other status groups, and the leader in the Kanto region, hereditarily known as the Danzaemon, held considerable political power over his 60,000 or more outcaste subjects, as did his equivalents in the Kansai region and elsewhere. Such officially recognized leaders of outcaste groups tended to be wealthy, especially in the case of elite members of the most populous Kawata or Chori status group that enjoyed occupational monopolies over dead military and commoner stock animals, as well as leather goods production, which became a lucrative source of income as market opportunities expanded. This group’s members tended to refer to themselves as Kawata in the west of Japan, suggesting leather-related work, and as Chori in the east, suggesting involvement in official administrative work. However, officialdom and often popular usage derogatorily termed them Eta, which was written with kanji characters signifying ‘very polluted’.

For the upper outcaste echelons, degrading treatment related to perceptions of their pollution, including the appellation Eta, were among the major sources of dissatisfaction with the status order, and they attempted to gain commoner status for themselves through financial and service contributions to the ruling authorities. At a more popular level, others expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that peasants enjoyed a superior position to outcastes when it came to making decisions that concerned both groups, for example in allocating tax burdens and water rights, or making changes in land use patterns. Still others protested that they were no different from honourable peasants, but suffered from being referred to as Eta, and called for a rectification in this situation. Overall, some outcastes sought to maintain the benefits they received from their economic niche in the Tokugawa order while improving their own position in the social hierarchy, some claimed increased local autonomy, and others demanded freedom from the bonds of outcaste status. Similar to the case of peasants, merchants and low-ranking samurai, however, outcaste claims were limited to calling for incremental improvements. Partly reflecting the very diversity of outcaste groups, as well as their internal divisions of status and wealth, there was no unified outcaste stand against the Tokugawa order and its outcaste system.

In the mid-nineteenth century, mounting anxiety over the increasing Western presence in the East Asian region provided additional impetus to the increasingly fractious popular calls for major reforms to the social order. The growing and evident European influence in China and India in particular brought home to Japan’s policy-makers the need to achieve a higher degree of national unity so that Japan could better resist the advance of Western imperialism. That Japan was politically fragmented into competing domains and factions, and also socially partitioned into status groups whose members had separate economic and political interests, became a major problem requiring urgent resolution. Debilitated by these unresolved contradictions, the Tokugawa regime eventually fell, to be replaced by the Meiji government in 1868.

In its attempts to address these social, economic and political tensions, the new government quickly implemented policies that aimed to achieve the interlinked goals of economic and military development based on national integration. The government made status groups equal before the law, thereby constructing a basis for fostering a sense of national unity. It also introduced, among others, freedoms of occupation, residence, and movement, formally liberating economic, social and political activity from the bonds of status. In return for such liberalization of the Tokugawa order, the new state would impose greater demands on the people: in the newly established system of universal education, productive work, as well as in the new national military. People gained a much greater degree of choice in determining how they would live their lives, but at the same time the state constructed a context promoting the selection of officially approved options that would contribute to the achievement of national ends. Foremost among the new primary values that the Meiji government and its ideologues urged the populace to adopt were civilization, modern discipline, and patriotism.

Developments such as the abolition of outcaste groups and the establishment of universal legal equality symbolize critical moments in the transition from a society in which ascribed status determined people’s life-chances, to a modernizing one in which achievement became increasingly important. But although formal equality meant that privileges and life-chances were no longer literally status-based birthrights, this did not instantly obliterate the social significance of family history and past status, nor did it radically transform the ways in which people had been accustomed to making sense of their lives. Equality and newly granted freedoms neither mechanically devalued the position of former samurai nor did they automatically elevate the position of former outcastes or members of other subaltern social strata. Even subsequent to changes in the legal code, the population remained vertically segmented along former status lines, with former outcastes in particular being devalued in relation to others.

Previously, the Tokugawa Shogunate and its subordinate domanial lords had established and maintained outcaste status as a stigma that usually led members of other status groups to subject outcastes to avoidance and denigration on the grounds that such people were ritually polluted and of lowly status. This treatment was based on the fact that many outcastes engaged in leather goods production and butchering work, as well as execution and policing related tasks, and the perception that such work was exceedingly polluting. If former outcastes continued to be disadvantaged in social relations with others during the Meiji period, even though they enjoyed legal equality, it might seem reasonable to explain this as a straightforward matter involving the persistence of traditional social practices into the modern era. Such an explanation would appear adequate, given that it is no simple matter for modernizing governments to legislate out of existence anti-egalitarian systems and everyday practices rooted both in people’s minds and in the social institutions of a status society.

However, the situation is more complex. Although outcaste people commonly were vilified and avoided as base and polluted in the Tokugawa period, such treatment was hardly universal. In fact, the situations of outcastes varied considerably in time and place. Early Tokugawa leather-working Kawata seem to have been considered a type of artisan much like any other, contrasting sharply with the later perception of Kawata as lowly and polluted beings, symbolized by the increasingly common official usage of the term Eta to designate their group. Nevertheless, a small number of outcastes such as the Danzaemon in Edo were exceedingly wealthy and powerful, being able to raise small but well-armed militias at the end of the Tokugawa era or even to offer Kyoto authorities thousands of labourers for railway construction projects in return for status promotion. Many were desperately poor, living in relatively densely populated fringe settlements and making a subsistence living from agricultural land of lesser quality, with butchering and leather related work constituting a minor but vital secondary occupation. In urban areas, outcaste leather goods traders formed business partnerships with merchants that developed also into social relationships, reflecting a society-wide move, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, away from hereditary status determinism and towards increased meritocracy and economic rationalism.

Given the regionally and temporally divergent circumstances of Tokugawa outcastes, post-abolition discrimination against former outcastes cannot be reduced to a matter of remnant feudal prejudices. In the modernizing social order of Meiji Japan, which included the abolition of outcaste status and the establishment of formal legal equality, people continued to subject those whom they considered to be marked by the stigma of outcaste descent to practices of avoidance and denigration. But the abolition of outcaste status and the institution of legal equality transformed the range of possible social meanings of these practices, which henceforth were open to being construed as constituting unreasonable discrimination. Our research reveals that the social isolation of post-abolition outcastes in fact deepened as an unintended consequence of abolition and the institution of legal equality.

However negative the prevailing perception and treatment of particular Tokugawa outcaste groups may have been, the importance of their occupational specializations usually ensured that they were functionally integrated into regional society. The various outcaste groups engaged in a range of important occupations ranging from leather-goods making and the conduct of shamanistic rituals to agriculture and low-level policing. These occupations necessitated cross-status interactions, and outcaste groups formed integral if lowly parts of local and regional communities encompassing commoners, samurai and religious practitioners. Inter-status friendship may have been the exception rather than the rule, but outcastes and members of other status groups were unavoidably joined through their common involvement in trade, festivals and religious observances, agriculture, and policing.

The Meiji state’s introduction of legal equality and occupational freedoms helped, however, to dissolve these relationships, and where factors propelling the formation of new bonds across former status lines were absent, the result was often an increase in the social alienation of former outcastes. The case of leatherworking outcastes illustrates this tendency. Faced with the cancellation of their official monopolies over deceased military horses and peasant cattle, which meant that henceforth they would have to purchase dead stock from the animal’s legal owner in a competitive market, some former outcastes sought other means of making a living – commonly agriculture – partly deterred by the cost of such stock purchases, but also drawn by the hope of finding greater social acceptance. In their place, a number of former samurai, their military stipends discontinued under the new regime, entered into the leather and meat industries in the hope of finding profitable work. Peasants in some regions did likewise. However, where outcastes retreated from traditional leather-related work and trade, the result was the loss of income, as well as the erosion of ties to the leather goods merchants who had formerly been their trading partners.

Another example concerns policing work. When the Meiji government set about building a professional police force, it mainly recruited former samurai. Most of the former outcastes who had performed policing tasks under samurai supervision during the Tokugawa period were disemployed. This is considered to have been partly a consequence of prejudice against them, and partly due to the government’s pressing desire to find gainful employment for the large numbers of newly unemployed samurai, so as to avoid social unrest. Again, the effect was that the range of former outcaste social interactions was reduced, and their authority and economic position degraded.

Changes involving religious rituals also contributed to the deepening social isolation of some former outcastes. In the Tokugawa period, it had been common for members of certain outcaste groups to play an important part in local religious festivals. Most often, they were charged with conducting cleansing rites. But after the abolition of outcaste status, some villages began to exclude former outcastes from these customary roles. Resenting the government’s abolition of outcaste status and the promotion of all those classed as such to commoner status, a development that some equated with the demotion of peasants to outcaste status, villagers minimized their relations with former outcastes and shut them out from formerly shared religious events. In these cases too, given an absence of factors promoting the growth of new social bonds, the Meiji state’s legal erasure of status led to less, rather than more, social interaction between former outcastes and others.

Overall, the dismantling of the Tokugawa status order and the liberalization of occupations gave rise to a range of difficulties and dilemmas for outcaste communities. Income formerly derived from official policing and execution-related duties, as well as their monopolies on certain commodities, dried up. Also, some communities tried to give up their former occupations as a way of distancing themselves from the negative connotations of outcaste status. But far from becoming able to join the social mainstream, many found themselves more socially isolated than before, and in deep poverty. Although outcastes gained legal equality and a wide range of freedoms and rights in modernizing Japan, their level of social integration in local and regional society appears to have declined during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Contemporary explanations of this phenomenon quickly took a decidedly untraditional turn.

Nation formation and exclusion

The introduction of legal equality revealed status to have been an artifice of government, rather than the fact of nature that Tokugawa ideology had proclaimed it to be. And if status retained some of its power in the new era, such as in the case of former outcastes, or ‘New Commoners’ as they became known, this called for explanation, since legally, outcastes no longer existed. The polluting occupations that had formerly characterized them were now open to all, and indeed, some enterprising former samurai were visibly prospering in the meat and leather business. Popular ideas about pollution were declining in strength and the eating of beef was becoming fashionable. That prejudice against former outcastes continued, indeed deepened, even though commonly-cited religious reasons for such prejudice seemed to have largely dissipated, brought intellectuals and policy-makers to look into the matter. In the 1870s and 1880s, their efforts resulted in the construction of an explanatory model that translated the marginalization of former outcastes into a matter of racial difference, as much as of lingering status-based practices.

According to advocates of this line of thinking, if people of former outcaste status were being targeted by discrimination in the Meiji era, even though status barriers between commoners, outcastes and samurai had been dismantled, this was because the separation between outcastes and others was qualitatively different to that between, for example, commoners and samurai. In effect, they argued that former outcastes were essentially different from the rest of the population, being of a particular outcaste bloodline, which in many cases was suggested to originate in foreign lands. This difference lay at the root of former outcaste marginalization, and constituted the reason why other people took exception to dealing with them in everyday life. Re-phrasing in updated terms the Tokugawa authorities’ determination of status as hereditary and permanent, Meiji-era theorists surmised that outcaste status was biological and racial, and so implied that it was immutable.

This mode of explanation went hand in hand with an influential tendency to present the Japanese nation as being an extended ‘family state’ joined by blood ties. However, not only was it historically without basis, but it also went counter to several important intellectual and policy trends, which combined to weaken it over time. On the one hand, to claim that former outcastes were irredeemably alien went against the Meiji state’s nation-building project, which called for the fostering of a sense of national solidarity to help mobilize the populace for war and industry in a ferociously competitive international system. On another, the positing of an irreducible outcaste racial difference was contrary to the dominant intellectual trend in Meiji-era Japanese theorizing about race, which emphasized nurture over nature in order to enable the improvement of Japan’s lowly position in the Euro-American derived racial hierarchy dominant at the time.

Although ideas about foreign outcaste origins remained influential at a popular level, turn of the century academic developments especially in the fields of anthropology and archaeology helped to undermine race-based accounts of outcaste marginalization, and provided policy-makers with a theoretical pathway towards more fully integrating former outcastes into the nation. In the burgeoning body of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century academic studies investigating the nature of Japan and the Japanese, there was growing agreement that what had earlier been facilely imagined as a single and homogeneous Japanese race was in fact an amalgam. Diverse peoples had come together through history to form the modern Japanese. As this idea took hold, the view of outcastes as possessing different blood-lines to mainstream Japanese should have become untenable. But rather than completely giving up the idea that outcastes constituted a separate race, commentators instead modified their theories in a way that harmonized with intellectual developments relating to Japanese colonial expansion.

The Japanese colonization of Taiwan and later Korea took place some decades after the incorporation of Hokkaido and Okinawa, as the consensus that the Japanese people were of mixed racial origins was strengthening. Such thinking was adapted during Japan’s colonial period by apologists for Japanese expansion, who argued that Japanese colonialism constituted the restoration of a long-lost familial order, rather than the invasion and domination of alien peoples. Koreans, Chinese an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Japan’s Outcaste Abolition
• Asia’s transformations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations used for source texts
• 1 Outcaste status after equality
• 2 A status society
• 3 Outcaste status
• 4 Rationality, enlightenment, and outcaste abolition
• 5 Defiled bloodlines
• 6 Foreign origins as stigma
• 7 The stigma of place
• 8 Assimilation as liberation
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index