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- Convenor:
-
Timothy Amos
(National University of Singapore)
Send message to Convenor
- Section:
- History
- Sessions:
- Friday 27 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel examines the early modern Japanese status order, how it changed over time, and how it was eventually dismantled after the Meiji Restoration. It specifically analyses changes in relation to outcaste status, occupation, and ownership among communities in eastern and western Japan.
Long Abstract:
Understanding the dynamics of the status order (mibun chitsujo) is crucial for understanding cultural institutions, systems of governance, and socio-economic relations in early modern Japan. Groundbreaking scholarship over the last three decades has revealed that members of publicly sanctioned status groups in the early modern period were called upon to perform official duties (goyō) for the governing authorities in whose jurisdiction they resided in exchange for various rights and privileges that enabled their survival and reproduction. Among one particularly well-known early modern outcaste group, variously labelled kawata, eta, and chōri, the duties performed by them often included the official supply of leather to the authorities or engaging in execution duties. In exchange, such communities would also often receive privileges, whether in the form of monopoly privileges or in special concessions such as tax-exempt property. Such status can certainly be viewed as something that inhibited early modern subjects, but it also clearly functioned as a means of guaranteeing the livelihood of outcaste subjects.
Understanding the salient features of the early modern status order, how it changed over time, and how it was eventually dismantled after the Meiji Restoration remains one of the important areas of 19th century Japanese historical research, particularly in relationship to Japan's outcaste communities that often reveal substantial regional variation in eastern and western Japan. The papers in this panel each address this topic, adopting different but compatible time frames and approaches. The first paper explores the long-term transformation in chōri (eta) status during the early modern period in eastern Japan by highlighting and analyses a historical shift in chōri (eta) thinking about leatherwork from a status-based duty to a more economically-focused occupational trade. The second paper examines labour organization in a former outcaste village in the early Meiji period in western Japan, revealing how former outcastes successfully managed beef production as an occupational group of skilled artisans. The third paper examines how the national land reforms of the 1870s, the abolition of various forms of early modern land ownership, and the introduction of public and private property was carried out in Asakusa-Shincho, a land grant controlled by outcast chieftain Danzaemon.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 27 August, 2021, -Timothy Amos (National University of Singapore)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the long-term transformation in chōri (eta) status during the early modern period in eastern Japan. It highlights and analyses a historical shift in chōri (eta) thinking about leatherwork from a status-based duty to a more economically-focused occupational trade.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines Danzaemon's monopoly over an item that was central to the formation process and subsequent identity of the Edo outcaste order: leather. Danzaemon, as well as people of chōri (eta) status under his rule in eastern Japan, were commonly identified by other members of society in relation to their leatherwork, and there was potential to earn considerable income from leather procurement and leatherwork. For Shinchō residents in Edo, as well as in some regional localities further abroad, income earned from leatherwork could be substantial, and this aspect of chōri life in some ways became increasingly conspicuous during the early modern period.
A growing demand for leather products over the course of the early modern period, and the emergence of a variety of socioeconomic practices that sought to profit from the private sale of cattle and horses as well as their various parts, encouraged a semi-normalization of the activities required to acquire them. Stigmatization of leatherwork and livestock specialists in important respects gradually weakened over time, although pollution ideology was still certainly mobilized in different ways to target chōri. Such changes undergirded a slow transformation in the relationship of rule between the Tokugawa shogunate and the chōri (eta) leader Danzaemon, as well as local chōri groups and other members of localized status orders.
Over the longue durée of the early modern period, a distinct shift can be witnessed in chōri thinking about leatherwork, from a status-based duty to a more economically-focused occupational trade. Terms such as shokubun (official function) and yakutoku (privilege derived from duty) dominated Edo outcaste order discourse in relation to their specified socioeconomic roles in the early modern social order for much of the Tokugawa period, but notions of kagyō/shogyō/shokugyō (occupation), tose (livelihood), and ribun (profit margin) came to be increasingly utilized by members of chōri communities to define their own activities as well as to highlight their own occupation-based economic activities and motivations.
John Porter (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
Paper short abstract:
In the 1870s, the Meiji state initiated a nationwide land reform, which abolished the various forms of early modern land ownership and divided land into public and private property. This presentation examines its impact on Asakusa-Shinchō, a land grant controlled by outcaste chieftain Danzaemon.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 1870s, the Meiji state initiated a comprehensive, nationwide land reform commonly referred to as the Chiso kaisei (Meiji Land Tax Reform). It abolished the various forms of early modern land ownership, possession, and occupation, and divided the nation's land into two categories: public and private property. In the process, the state officially rejected the various modes of collective ownership and use that developed over the course of the early modern period, and seized control of all tax-exempt property, including urban land grants and untaxed commons. At the same time, it moved to confirm individual land ownership rights and issue official deeds of ownership to landholders. The process began in major urban centers, including Tokyo, where the first deeds were issued to local landholders in the twelfth month of Meiji 4 (1871). It advanced quickly in the city's commoner districts (machikata), where modes of formal possession closely resembling individual private ownership were deeply entrenched and individual land parcels had long been treated as commodities that could be appraised, exchanged, and accumulated.
The process proved more complex, however, in parts of the city traditionally classified as tax-exempt. Unlike residential lots in Tokyo's commoner neighborhoods, tax-exempt land parcels could not be formally exchanged. Commonly, the early modern authorities granted permanent use rights to a specific individual or organization that developed and administered the holding. Over time, many such holdings were partitioned and complex systems of informal ownership and tenancy developed among the occupants. Generally, however, the early modern authorities were aware only of the official grantee and had no knowledge of local ownership relations. When moving forward with the seizure and reallocation of previously tax-exempt land in the early 1870s, the Meiji authorities ultimately had to confront these informal systems of ownership and tenancy, and address the demands of traditional occupants. This presentation examines one such case: that of Asakusa-Shinchō, a tax-exempt land grant in northeastern Edo/Tokyo provided to outcaste chieftain Danzaemon.
Michael Abele (University of North Carolina, Chapel-Hill)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation examines labour organization in a former outcaste village in the early Meiji period. Using archival documents from the village level, I show how former outcastes successfully managed beef production as an occupational group of skilled artisans.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation examines the reorganization of property and labour in former kawata outcaste communities in the early Meiji period. During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), property relations were determined by status, a system of organizing production and political control through semi-autonomous occupational groups, such as peasant villages or town wards. Under this system, outcaste communities held property rights over all dead draft animals in their local communities, giving them a virtual monopoly on leather production. Until the abolition of status in the early Meiji period, the outcaste village managed the collection, disposal, and skinning of dead draft animals as a status group. Following the abolition of outcaste status in 1871, however, outcastes lost their exclusive right over carcasses but continued to work in trades like carcass rendering or beef production. Earlier scholars have argued that this points to the larger failure of the so-called "liberation edict," in that it deprived outcastes of the few benefits of the old feudal system while preserving the discrimination it engendered. In contrast, I use archival documents from the village level to show how the butchers and renderers in former outcaste villages were skilled artisans who forged a new system of labour organization from the wreckage of the status system.
My paper examines an incident from late 1872 when thirty-six former outcastes in Kawachi province (Osaka prefecture) were arrested for failing to comply with new sanitation regulations for beef production. I use the documents related to the arrest and prosecution of the individuals involved to reconstruct the organization of carcass disposal in this former outcaste community. By combining the list of individuals arrested with an analysis of their various roles and place in the village, I reveal the kind of villagers who engaged in beef production in the early Meiji period. I show that, far from being poor disposed outcastes, the men involved in cattle slaughter and disposal were skilled artisans who occupied a favourable position in village society.