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Paper short abstract

This paper traces the Sanka as an itinerant group of people in Japan’s cultural imagination, from Kida Sadakichi’s readings of Taichū’s Naion no michi and Moromori’s diary, through Misumi Kan’s recasting of the Sanka as the “lost people” of archaic Japan, to their afterlives in contemporary media.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the disappearance, invention, and reappearance of the Sanka as itinerant people in Japanese history and cultural imagination, showing how mobility becomes a lens for envisioning origins, alterity, and social exclusion. Historically, the term seems to have referred to mobile groups who combined hunting, river fishing, gathering, and bamboo basketry, moving among temporary shelters on the margins of rural society and within peri-urban interstices. Their limited visibility in censuses, the scarcity of material remains, and their poor fit with state-centred narratives facilitated their erasure from official historiography, leaving the Sanka largely to folklorists until later sociological and historical reassessments. A key anchor for this discussion is Kida Sadakichi’s reconstruction of nomenclature and social location. Kida proposes that sanka-mono likely derives from saka no mono (people of the slope), a label for groups said to have settled on unused land near urban centres and survived through low-status occupations. He supports this claim with early modern evidence from Naion no michi (1634) by the monk Taichū, a manual that codifies memorial-tablet practices across social strata and situates “Sanka” within a fluid taxonomy of marginal people. Read alongside entries in the Diary of Moromori, where sakamono appears to denote a later offshoot of the inugamibito of Gojōzaka (shrine jinin of Gion and shōmonji who recited the Bishamonkyō), these sources suggest that “Sanka” functioned less as an ethnic label than as a contingent social category shaped by geography, labour, and exclusion.

In the twentieth century, the Sanka were reinvented as a “lost people” through nationalist fantasies surrounding jindai moji, the apocryphal Uetsufumi, and the mediatised figure of Misumi Kan, who recast a poorly documented category as custodians of archaic knowledge imagined to predate the Japanese state. Although later scholarship has exposed the fragility of this claim, the image seems to continue to circulate in contemporary cultural production and popular media, including Sasatani Ryōhei’s Sanka (The Mountain Song, 2022) and the now-closed “Occult Entertainment University” YouTube channel. By tracing these trajectories, the paper aims to clarify the unstable boundary between ethnography, pseudohistory, and popular imagination in the construction of Japan’s "archaic" past.