Japan's Outcaste Abolition by Mccormack Noah Y.;

Author:Mccormack, Noah Y.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1016087
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Indigenous outsiders

Concerned with identifying the natures of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ (especially colonial) populations, scholars in emerging disciplines such as ethnology and anthropology kicked off the modernization of theories about the origins of New Commoners in the Meiji period. The main possibilities raised for Eta origins were indigenous populations, and Korea.

Among the first to raise the possibility of a connection between former Eta and indigenous groups was the pre-eminent figure of early Japanese anthropology, Tsuboi Shogoro (1863–1913), a one-time student of the US biologist Edward Morse at Tokyo Imperial University. Morse, like many of the Western scholars in Japan during the Meiji period, had taken a keen interest in the origins of the Japanese, and constructed a kind of race replacement theory according to which the contemporary Japanese had displaced the Ainu, who before them had displaced a pre-Ainu population (Hanihara 1986: 14–16).

Tsuboi Shogoro shared Morse’s interest in this unknown pre-Ainu population, and, studying Ainu legends, became intrigued by mention of a diminutive hole-dwelling non-Ainu people known as koropokkuru. Tsuboi decided that this little-known group might have been that unknown pre-Ainu population (Siddle 1996: 81). While he never made explicit claims about the matter, there are hints that Tsuboi at one stage hoped that some former outcastes might prove to be a remnant koropokkuru population. In a speech he gave to the recently established Tokyo Anthropological Society in 1886, Tsuboi reported that during the course of an archaeological dig in the Ashikaga area, he had discovered that local former outcastes manifested some linguistic differences and were shunned by others. More to the point, he announced that they dug subterranean chambers. ‘When winter comes, they dig round holes and put roofs on them’, using this as a workspace for leather work and sandal making (Tokyo Jinruigakkai Hokoku, November 1886, KBSS1: 78–79). One can speculate that Tsuboi’s interest in hole-dwelling outcastes was related to his interest in the mythical troglodytes known as koropokkuru.

While his interest may well have been innocent in intent, the implication was that Eta were a remnant archaic population, destined to die out in the manner envisaged for other ‘inferior’ groups such as the Ainu and Australian Aborigines. Tsuboi’s imaginings went no further, however, and he thereafter appears to have written nothing more about possible links between outcastes, New Commoners, and remnant indigenous populations. Indeed, in an interview with the Buraku rights activist Okamoto Wataru some decades later, Tsuboi unambiguously declared that Buraku residents and Japanese people were of the same race (Okamoto 1921: 265–67).

Other scholars also suggested that Buraku residents might have links to non-Japanese indigenous populations. In a 1902 treatise on agricultural policy, Yanagita Kunio, the most celebrated Japanese folklorist and ethnologist of the twentieth century, suggested that Eta were not descended from the same stock as modern Japanese people. Yanagita argued that the ancestors of modern Japanese were agriculturalists who had immigrated from southeastern Asia. As a result of the establishment of Buddhist and Shintoist religious interdictions on killing animals and eating their meat, the southerners’ general

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