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.