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Prologue
DURING the seventeenth century, Japan's social order took shape in the form of a hereditary four-status order of-in descending socioethical rank-warrior-rulers (samurai), peasants, artisans, and merchants. There were restrictions on intermarriage, social interaction, and clothing. This was justified by reference to Confucian theory. The functions of the four groups were seen as symbiotic, such that together they would constitute a stable and virtuous society (Totman, 2000: 225).
Not everyone fit into this structure, including the thousands of lesser clerics who staffed Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, the shop hands and household servants and day laborers who lived on the margins of urban communities. Some day laborers were landless peasants, others came from the populations of hereditary pariahs (eta or kawata) and nonhereditary punitive outcasts (hinin). Found mainly in the Kyoto vicinity or in central Japan, these pariahs generally lived in their own communities, pursued their own professions, and were subject to their own leaders. On the edge of this pariah population were the entertainers: singers, dancers, and actors who were associated with the licensed quarters (Totman, 2000: 228-9).
Pariah communities had developed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as leather workers (kawata) and as handlers of animal and human corpses. Local elites encouraged their development during the time of constant warfare since leather was a key item in the production of amour. With the outbreak of peace after 1601, demand for these goods declined and the communities were relocated to the margins of towns or to sites where they formed their own villages. Outside the four-class system, however, there was not much to distinguish them from artisans in towns or peasants in the countryside. But from the eighteenth century, regulations were introduced by central and local government that elaborated symbols of status distinction and enforced separation of residence and function. Different demographic trends were also present. Peasant smallholders produced families of modest size but pariah groups did not face the same pro-creative constraints. As a result the pariah population grew, despite attempts by government to restrict it. This altered power relationships between neighboring pariah/nonpariah communities, creating tension and increased status consciousness (Totman, 2000: 276).
After the Meiji restoration of 1868, the four-caste hierarchy was abandoned and much of its structure dismantled. A new...