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.