The hinin and city wards of nineteenth-century Osaka

Abstract

From the mid-seventeenth century, with the formation of Osaka city, members of the hinin status group, an organization originally composed of beggars and indigents alienated from all forms of ownership, became established in urban society within an organization called the “kaito fraternity of the four places.” Over time, members of Osaka’s hinin fraternity secured the right to beg as a means of survival and were entrusted with the duty of policing and providing relief to the “new hinin” and “wild hinin” who emerged on the margins of the hinin status group. As an extension of those activities, the hinin fraternity also came to perform a range of official police duties under the authority of the City Magistrate’s Office. While members of the hinin fraternity possessed specialized begging rights and official duties, those rights and duties existed inside a broader network of social relationships. Namely, members of the fraternity were only able to survive by begging because they maintained relationships with city neighborhoods and townspeople that provided alms. Similarly, members of the hinin fraternity were only able to perform official duties because they maintained a relationship with the magistrate’s office, which ordered them to perform those duties, and with the individual neighborhoods that employed “hinin watchmen.” In this paper, I focus on how the will of Osaka’s townspeople restricted efforts by members of the hinin fraternity to redistribute begging rights during the nineteenth-century. By doing so, this paper highlights the stratified and composite nature of early modern Japan’s status society.