J.R. Goodwin
of the hill (saka)” were given charity.^4 Brief though they are, these references suggest that outcast
groups had resided in the capital for some time, since the diaries express no surprise at their
existence.
Records from temples, shrines, and individual religious practitioners provide rich sources for
understanding outcast society. Religious institutions mobilized outcast groups for purification
work, and Buddhist monks provided welfare for beggars, lepers, and other outcast people. A
number of scholars have cited such records, some of which are discussed below. Literary sources
such as tale collections and illustrated scrolls are often used to supplement a sketchy documentary
record. A tale about a “rich beggar” in Konjaku monogatarishū suggests an interesting mismatch
between wealth and social status.^5 Illustrated scrolls and screens not only indicate what outcasts
looked like, what they wore, and some of the jobs that they performed, but also suggest attitudes
toward them within the larger society.^6
Nevertheless it is difficult to form a complete and credible picture of the lives of outcasts, or
even to determine who was actually cast out from society, and when. Of course, Japanese society
underwent many significant changes between the eleventh century, when outcasts first emerge in
the sources, and the Edo period, when outcast status was legally fixed. Obviously these changes
produced different conditions for people’s lives. The nature, timing, and effects of these con-
ditions have been debated over a number of years by scholars writing in both Japanese and
English.
Two major arguments dominated work on medieval outcasts in the 1970s and 1980s. First,
when and why were certain people and groups marked off from society and made victims of
discrimination? Second, were these people truly outcast, or should historians rather emphasize
their legal rights and their indispensability to mainstream society? Not all issues have been
resolved, and work in the 1990s and later has often focused on narrower topics such as the type
and extent of control exercised by elites.^7 In this chapter, I will examine these scholarly debates,
concentrating on postwar and contemporary historical analyses.
Origins of outcast status
One theory on origins links late classical and medieval outcasts to craftsmen subordinated to
government bureaus in the Chinese- style ritsuryō state. As that state began to disintegrate at the
end of the ninth century, such status discrimination was legally abolished. According to postwar
historian Hayashiya Tatsusaburō, however, some craftsmen retained their despised status and
became subject to elites who established themselves as proprietors within the shōen (estate) system.
Hayashiya sees these craftsmen as the predecessors of a long line of victims of discrimination, and
argues that they lived in servitude in places called sanjo.^8 Thus according to Hayashiya, outcasts
from later classical and medieval times can trace their origins to craftsmen subjugated first by the
government bureaucracy and then by elite landholders who were the bureaucrats’ heirs. This
argument was challenged by a number of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Wakita
Haruko has maintained that early inhabitants of the sanjo were not necessarily outcasts, and that
exclusion and discrimination were based on social conditions in medieval times, not on those in
the early classical age.^9 Elsewhere, she suggests that it is unreasonable to search for a single cause
of a multi- faceted phenomenon: that the names by which outcasts were called indicate several
different origins.^10
Several scholars have focused on concepts of ritual pollution to explain the origin of discrimi-
nation against certain groups and individuals. Contact with death was thought especially defil-
ing. People about to die were often evicted from their homes so as not to defile their families, and
pollution was contagious—it could be passed on from those who had direct contact with death