J.R. Goodwin
Amino Yoshihiko has challenged Kuroda’s interpretation. Amino’s arguments are based on
studies of the broad category of non- agricultural people: peddlers, iron casters, salt makers, sea-
farers, and performing artists, as well as hinin and others characterized as outcasts. Often itiner-
ant, some non- agricultural people were beyond the control of local or regional lords, but rather
had a license to travel and sell their wares that was guaranteed by the throne itself.^20 Others serv-
iced temples, shrines, or other shōen proprietors. Instead of farming lands from which they paid a
share of the crop as rents or taxes, they were often given the produce from “salary fields” to pay
for their services. Rather than seeing salary fields as a way to reinforce the dependency and base
status of non- agricultural workers, Amino points out that shōen officials and some warriors were
compensated in the same way.^21 He argues that non- agricultural people, including hinin, should
be classified as shokunin or “people of skill.” He further maintains that in early medieval times,
those who dealt with pollution professionally were regarded with fear and respect, accorded
special status as temple or shrine workers, and seen as servants of the Buddhas and the kami; and
that in fact, they were credited with the special power to nullify defilement.^22
Kuroda Toshio has subsequently contested Amino’s thesis, questioning the premise that puri-
fication, disposing of corpses, and assistance at burials amounted to a special skill that qualified
their practitioners as shokunin. He also maintains that Amino over- emphasized organized groups
of hinin living in special lodgings at Kiyomizuzaka near Kyoto and Narazaka near Nara. In Kuro-
da’s view, the most typical hinin was the leper- beggar, not the cleanser of defilement.^23
A number of other scholars have weighed in on this debate. Like Kuroda, Nagahara Keiji sees
those who were cast out from their families and communities as the central objects of discrimina-
tion. Pointing out that such people were often called kojiki (beggar)-hinin, Nagahara maintains
that calling them non- persons was appropriate:
To be excluded from their communities, the base of all ordinary social and economic activ-
ities in medieval Japan, was to lose even the minimal social and economic privileges enjoyed
by all. So, in a social sense, they ceased to be “persons.”Nagahara supports the view that the fear of death pollution played an important part in defining
outcast groups, and notes that such fear was directed especially toward lepers.^24
Nagahara’s interpretation, which also seeks the roots of the Edo- period discriminatory system
in medieval practices, is clearly at odds with that of Amino. Steering a somewhat middle course
is Ōyama Kyōhei, who sees early medieval hinin and the like as occupying the bottom tier of
commoner society—of low status but not outcasts—and points out that many of them were
organized into groups that resembled merchants’ and artisans’ guilds known as za.^25 Wakita
Haruko acknowledges good points on either side of the question, but generally speaking she
favors Kuroda’s interpretation.^26
Based on his examination of illustrated scrolls that depict hinin, Kuroda Hideo has suggested
a compromise view. He argues that in its portrayal of recipients of the itinerant monk Ippen’s
charity, Ippen shōnin ekotoba (1299) depicts a stratified hinin society. In one illustration, three dif-
ferent groups of alms recipients sit outside the temple where Ippen and his followers are located.
Closest to the temple is a group of mendicant monks sitting in a circle. Then come beggars and
disabled people in another circle, and finally lepers, either in a circle or a disorganized group,
depending on the version of the scroll. Those considered most impure—lepers—are the farthest
from the temple. One copy of the scroll dated in the mid- fourteenth century shows three men
standing between the second and third groups, holding six- foot staffs and wearing white hoods
and veils. Kuroda identifies these men as bosses (chōri) of hinin lodgings or their immediate under-
lings. It is such people as the chōri that formed the za- like structure of hinin lodgings, he argues;