Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order by Timothy D. Amos

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order by Timothy D. Amos Constantine Vaporis Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order. By Timothy D. Amos. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020. 220 pages. Hardcover, £120.00. Timothy D. Amos has been working for almost two decades on questions of marginal status, caste, and untouchability in Japanese society, publishing numerous articles and a book on the burakumin in modern Japan.1 In the volume under review here, he builds on that work and on the work of Gerald Groemer as well as that of Japanese scholars, such as Harada Tomohiko and Tsukada Takashi, to offer us a study of caste in early modern Japan. The focus is on eastern Japan, the location of the outcaste order that was the largest in the country during the early modern period and that was controlled by the institutional leader known as Danzaemon (an office title also rendered by the Tokugawa shogunate as etagashira, "chief of eta"). While asserting that his book "cannot claim to be comparative in any straightforward sense" (p. 3), Amos makes useful comparative observations that elucidate the nature of Danzaemon rule based on the work of scholars of India and other regions of the globe. [End Page 352] The book's main argument is that the order under Danzaemon "was a caste-like configuration rooted in the idea and practice of mibun [status] established in the 17th century as a result of early modern Tokugawa rulers' decisions to engage in a state-building project rooted in military logic that built on the back of pre-existing social and political structures which included manorial, kinship, and historic regional social arrangements" (p. 4). One of the things the study confirms is that despite the Tokugawa period often appearing to be so richly documented, there are serious limitations on reconstructing the seventeenth-century past. Given a documentary evidentiary base that is concentrated on issues related to governance, Amos's investigation perforce focuses on the main duties expected of outcastes, that is to say executing criminals, policing the unregistered population, and procuring and supplying leather. By examining the historical evolution of these duties and the privileges that came with their performance, he argues that "early modern outcastes clearly experienced Japan as a kind of caste society" (p. 5). Chapter 1 introduces some of the main issues involved in Amos's treatment of the status system as a form of caste. It outlines those characteristics of the outcaste order under Danzaemon that reveal similarities between caste forms in subcontinental Asia and Japan. In Japan, the "Edo Outcaste Order" (Amos borrows Groemer's term here) was composed "of social outcastes to whom a significant amount of stigma was attached," which could be "ratcheted up" at certain times (pp. 21–22). Amos argues that the element of hierarchy, though often missing or understated in discussions of status in Japan, "was an embedded feature" of the Tokugawa social system, one that "was legitimized in ways that produced a scapegoat function for Danzaemon and his subordinates" (p. 15). He presents the factual nuts and bolts that are required to understand the context of his argument, for example the statistic that a substantial population (7,720 households in 1800) lay under Danzaemon's control, three-quarters of whom were classified as eta (or chōri, the preferred term for self-identification); the institutional structure of leadership under Danzaemon; the relationship of those leaders with the shogunate via the Edo city commissioners (machi bugyō); the physical layout of the space in Edo occupied by Danzaemon and the community under his leadership; and the economic basis of his rule, which lay in control of mercantile activities related to leather procurement and handicrafts including leather, drum skins, and candlewicks. Chapter 2 outlines the construction of the Edo outcaste order, tracing its historical formation out of earlier clan-based social arrangements and pre-Tokugawa economic systems. Here Amos lays out the various theoretical debates among Japan scholars about the concepts of ritual pollution and how certain peoples in medieval society came to be regarded as polluted or of inferior caste. Organized into occupational communities, these outcaste groups were...