Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
47
other categories of people were included in other non-resident groups, such as the
hinin
(non
human) that were mainly criminals, prostitutes, diviners, people who took care of prisoners,
artists, and wandering monks (De Vos & Wagatsuma 1966; Koyama 1990).
Sanjo
(scattered
places) and
honjo
(central/real place) were the terms used to refer to the districts inhabited by
these people during medieval times (Ohnuki-Tierney 1987). Most of the
sanjo
districts
originated as special compounds for ritual performers attached to major ceremonial centers,
as well as for lepers, animal skinners, and leather workers resided in these areas (Law 1997:
73). A great variety of characters were used to write the term, including scattered place, place
of divination, birthing place, mountaintop and third district (Law 1997). This variety,
according to Law,
‘tells us something not only about the range of meanings that these places
had but also about the confusion and even the hysteria that signifying the unsignifiable has
generated in Japanese society over time’ (Law 1997: 72).
With the Meiji Restoration (in 1871) and the Emancipation Edict (
Eta kaih
ō
-rei
), the
eta
and
hinin
groups were renamed
shin-heimin
(new commoners) and were granted the
freedom to move and participate in all social activities. However, while these ‘new
commoners’ had the legal right to move without restraint, they lost their monopoly on
traditional occupations as a source of economic livelihood. Representations of buraku people
from the Meiji period onward started to describe these people as the underclass of previous
times and the residents of the previous outcast areas (Uesugi et al. 1992). These people and
other disadvantaged groups and individuals were all lumped together into the modern
category of buraku, the descendants of previous outcast groups, and kept being associated
with ideas of poverty, and certain occupational practices and spaces.
From the end of the Meiji period through to the post-WWII period, governmental
policies for assimilation and new political actors emerged. The Burakumin were officially
defined as people who ‘live together in particular districts and form separate communities’
(De Vos & Wagatsuma 1966: 44). Another way to identify buraku areas and people was
known as the
koseki
system (Family Register), established in 1872: addresses, births and
deaths in the family, and social status (in the old
koseki
) of all heads of family were recorded
and enlisted and held open as public record. The buraku lists include a series of directories
containing information on buraku community locations, number of households, major
occupations etc. throughout the country. For instance, the symbol
(…)
near the address means
that the area concerned is considered to be a buraku district; the numeral 4 inside a circle, or a
circled letter D (for D
ō
wa), stand for ‘being a Burakumin’ (Gottlieb 2006: 55). In 1968, the
