Dodging and Confronting Stigma: Outcast and Marginal People in Medieval Japan

Dodging and Confronting Stigma examines the lives of people who were stigmatized or marginalized in Japan’s late classical and medieval ages. Often characterized as beggars, they in fact pursued a wide range of occupations and lifestyles, even while haunted by discrimination and exploitation. They developed skills, acquired property rights, and even manipulated the elite who controlled them, thereby achieving some degree of self-determination. Outcasts are frequently mentioned in the records of Buddhist temples, and the variety of references provides evidence for the many ways they participated in medieval religious life: as cleansers of pollution, as cremation and burial workers, as objects of salvific efforts―and as guards and enforcers in an increasingly militarized religious establishment.

Complex and stratified, outcast society as a whole included people who demanded their rights through litigation and arms, just as did others in Japan’s medieval world. The emergence, especially in the late medieval age, of people who occupied marginal positions in society―neither wholly stigmatized nor wholly free of stigma―complicates the picture. Such marginal people included bearers of Japanese culture such as garden designers, theatrical performers, and shamans, making it impossible to simply write them off as social pariahs or victims of discrimination. Janet Goodwin demonstrates that outcast and marginal society was a complex one whose members fulfilled diverse functions necessary to medieval society, formed complex relationships with institutions and individuals of power, and made enduring contributions to medieval culture.

Most studies of late classical and medieval Japan focus on elites: monarchs and courtiers, powerful warriors, and high-ranking religious figures. Indeed, these are the people who appear prominently in sources of the time. However, tantalizing pictures of outcast and marginal people appear in an array of sources such as aristocrats’ diaries, legal documents, tales, scrolls, and screen paintings, among others. In emphasizing people at the bottom of society and on its margins, and the ways that they dodged and confronted stigma, this book broadens the picture of Japanese society of the time.

Janet R. Goodwin was a founding faculty member of the University of Aizu in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan. Now retired, she is research associate at the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California.