Meiji Gakuin Course No. 3505
Minority and Marginal Groups of Contemporary Japan
Lectures #7 & 8: Kegare
1．Thesis: Doya-gai and Kegare
2．Antithesis: Rejecting Kegare theory
3．Synthesis: Exclusion of the head, of the heart
Thesis
I got this idea while researching Japanese “doya-gai”:
YADO 宿 An inn, a place to stay
DOYA ドヤ A cheap place to stay (Street slang: ‘yado’ reversed)
DOYA-GAI ドヤ街 District with many doya, a flophouse district, skid row
‘3 Great Doya-gai’
Kamagasaki 釜ヶ崎
San’ya 山谷
Kotobuki 寿町
日本の３大ドヤ街
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Doya-gai: ‘special preserves’
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Clearly marked boundaries;
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Inhabited by people differentiated from those outside by class, status, gender or
ethnicity;
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Governed by rules of behaviour different from those prevailing outside –
something like what Lefebvre calls 'special preserves' (1991:35).
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Henri Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space [Production de l'espace].
Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell.
The mainstream view
* Many Japanese do not even know that doya-gai exist.
* Those who do know about doya-gai will avoid them.
* They are shocked to hear that a foreigner would even consider going into a doya-gai.
(In fact doya-gai are not particularly dangerous places… I never saw a gun or a knife drawn
in anger in 2 years of fieldwork.)
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Special preserves 2
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Exaggerated reputation for danger
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Association with death and misfortune
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Detachment from family system
While writing my thesis, I came across the work of Namihira Emiko. Her
Japanese-language book Kegare came out in 1985.
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Though Namihira originally wrote in English
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"Hare, Ke and Kegare: The Structure of Japanese Folk Belief." Doctoral
dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1977
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"Pollution in the Folk Belief System." In Current Anthropology, Vol.28, No.4,
S65-74, 1987.
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The Red & the Black
Black kegare/fujo: Associated with death 黒不浄・死
Red kegare/fujo: Associated with blood (esp. childbirth and menstruation, hence also
associated with women) 赤不浄・血、特に出産・月経の血→女
Who uses these words?
* Hare commonly used to mean ‘auspicious.’ Eg ‘good weather’, also hare-gi, 晴れ
着, clothes for celebratory occasions
* Ke ケ Never heard it. Only scholars? But maybe that’s not too surprising, as it’s a
residual category, signifying the absence of the sacred. 「その他」、特殊じゃないカテゴ
リー
* Kegare 穢れ – Rare. Sometimes used by schoolkids, like “cooties” (US), “the lurgy”
(UK). Sometimes also written 汚れ, which is usually read yogore and simply means dirt.
(Note that the kega 穢 in kegare 穢れ is the same character as the e 穢 in eta 穢多, one
of the ancient words used to discriminate against what are now sometimes called
Burakumin 被差別部落民）
Namihira’s influences: Japanese folklorists like Sakurai Tokutaro and Harada Toshiaki…
and behind them, the figure of Yanagida Kunio 柳 田 国 男 . There are also some
non-Japanese influences: Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo, 1966 メアリ・ダグラス、９５年 『汚穢と禁忌』
（塚本利明訳）
思潮社
Emile Durkheim father of sociology (1858-1917)
エミール・デュルケーム ,社会学の創設者
Durkheim’s influence on Japanese social science is enormous… a friend of mine once said
that even ordinary Japanese people sound like Durkheimians when they talk about society.
“We Japanese are like this” is a Durkheimian statement, because it implies that the
individual is molded by society.
The theory also applies to time: Hare time – new year, summer solstice 夏至点,
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Taian 大安 in 6-day lunar calendar
Kegare time – day of funeral, deceased person ’ s death day (nenki 年 忌 ), all
commemorative days for the dead (hōji 法事)
Ke – regular day to go shopping etc
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… and also, perhaps, to people
Some scholars argue that discrimination against certain minorities, such as Burakumin
handicapped people, Hansen’s disease sufferers, Hibakusha etc., may be an expression of
kegare thinking.
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Suppose Namihira is right… (… and many think she is not. Is it really OK to
generalize to the whole of Japanese traditional society from just three fishing villages?):
what happens to that conceptual division of space when people leave the countryside?
Postwar Japan has seen a massive, rapid rural to urban population shift.
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What happens to categories of thought / instinct when population moves to the big
city? The patterns of mountains, plains and coast has nothing to do with most people in
Tokyo…
BIG CITY LIFE: The rural past is much closer to the present for most people in Japan than
in, say, Britain. Do the old patterns of thought persist? Does kegare still affect the way
people think in modern, urban Japan? Maybe doya-gai are kegare zones in modern cities?
Other kegare zones might include:
Akasen 赤線 Red-light districts
Buraku / Dowa chiku 部落・同和地区 Areas of social outcasts
Ethnic ghettoes ゲットー Especially Korean districts
Cemetries 墓地 … Buddhist temples?
And there are many examples of ritual pollution avoidance in everyday urban life
Tom Gill 1996: Big city kegare
The Reasoning
Social detachment in life (single men) and death (Muen Botoke 無縁仏)
Avoidance by mainstream citizenry
Physical dirt
Bloody wounds (red kegare??）
Association with ill fortune
Association with death (mean age at death, about 60-62… black kegare?)
Adjacent to other polluted zones
Antithesis
The theory goes down well in Britain… but bombs in Japan.
View of Japanese academy
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Sekine Yasumasa, Anthropology of Kegare: The Living World of Harijans in Southern India
(1995)
Shintani Takanori From Kegare to the Gods (1987)
For many Japanese academics, ‘ritual pollution’ is itself a polluted term... In modern Japan
Anti-Kegare Argument
Using terms like ‘kegare’ suggests that Japan is somehow different from other
industrialized nations… perpetuating the ‘myth of Japanese uniqueness.’
(cf Peter Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, 1986).
… in fact, ghettoes and skid rows exist in many other industrialized countries and people
do not use primitive categories of thought to describe them.
William Foote Whyte. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum
Chicago UP, 1943
“... a slum district... which is inhabited almost entirely by Italian immigrants and their
children. To the rest of the city it is a mysterious, dangerous, and depressing area.
Cornerville is only a few minutes' walk from fashionable High Street, but the High Street
inhabitant who takes that walk passes from the familiar to the unknown…”
Whyte and other Chicago school sociologists never felt the need to use terms like ‘ritual
pollution’ to explain American slums… (maybe they were missing something??) … the
nearest word would be “stigma.”
2. Class / status explains the doya-gai
Japanese sociologists do not deny the existence of social discrimination… but they
argue that Marxist or Weberian analysis explains the phenomenon.
Middle-class Japanese avoid doya-gai because they have money and doya-gai dwellers do
not (class consciousness, cf Marx), or because they are ‘solid citizens’ and doya-gai
dwellers are not (status consciousness, cf Weber). It has nothing to do with purity and
impurity a la Douglas or Namihira.
In other words…
Japan exhibits modern discrimination, not primitive discrimination.
3. Red kegare?
There are no menstrual huts in Tokyo and you can buy sanitary towels in any convenience
store. Clearly this kind of kegare has disappeared… why should we assume that other kinds
persist? This is modernity!
(A couple of times when I have discussed defilement issues with foreigners, they have
claimed that Japanese hairdressers will not serve menstruating women, and cited this as a
possible case of aka-fujō. I asked Japanese hairdressers: they stated that some of the
chemicals used in dying and perming hair could be harmful to a woman in the weakened
state caused by menstruation, or occasionally that (for some reason) the hair does not
respond well to dying when a woman is menstruating. They would laugh at the proposition
that they were uneasy about the touching the scalp of a woman defiled by menstrual blood,
although personally I feel slightly unwilling to discard the possibility that there might be
some faint echo of kegare thinking in the background here.)
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I start to see the point…
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 1984. Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An
Anthropological View. Cambridge UP
Ohnuki-Tierney’s take on pollution
… applies Douglas’ theory to Japanese consciousness without any adjustment.
Ch.2 Japanese Germs
Japanese have a powerful exclusionary consciousness … internal space (uchi 内 ),
perceived as ‘pure’ and external space (soto 外), perceived as ‘impure.’ ‘Japanese
germs’ are conceptual, not real. Hence taking shoes off when entering house, obsessive
gargling and hand-washing, etc.
I beg to differ. I’ve lived in Japan for 20 years. I take my shoes off to keep the tatami mat
clean. I gargle to avoid throat infections. I wash my hands because it feels good to be clean.
It has nothing to do with ‘ritual pollution’… (Have you noticed that Japanese women have
the longest life expectancy of any national/gender group in the world? Perhaps all that
gargling, hand-washing and mask-wearing isn’t as silly as it seems.)
I realise that Japanese scholars reading my stuff about kegare probably experience a similar
annoyance to that which I feel reading claims about ‘Japanese germs.’ Of course they get
upset when foreigners ascribe their social systems to primordial, magical forms of thought!
When all is said and done… It’s just another form of orientalism.
Abandoning kegare:
Losing confidence, I cut the kegare chapter from my thesis when I prepare it for
publication.
Men of Uncertainty: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan
(SUNY Press, 2001).
I concluded that I’d contracted the anthropologist’s disease: exoticism. Using exotic forms
of thought to account for behavior that has a perfectly rational, humdrum explanation.
Synthesis (?)
The Return of Kegare
Working in Japanese universities the last decade, I start to realise that there are lively young
Japanese scholars who do believe in kegare… the debate is alive.
Here’s one example concerning funerals – events traditionally associated with kegare.
The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan, by Hikaru Suzuki.
Stanford UP 2001
Describes fieldwork at Moon Rise, a funeral parlor in Kitakyushu
Claims that kegare is largely gone from the funeral industry
Evidence:
Ladies drop into the Moon Rise café for tea & cake when not attending a funeral –
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unthinkable if this were a zone of ritual pollution (p 213)
Much shorter funerals and post-funeral mourning (p 94)
Workers who handle cadavers have higher, not lower status (pp 176-177)
Mourners get to wash body themselves (Ch. 7)
Not so fast!
Murakami Kokyo, a religious studies postgrad at Tokyo U, criticizes Suzuki for ignoring
some of her own findings (in a review I edit for SSJJ):
Suzuki admits that some kegare practices linger in the case of cremations (Ch.3)
Funeral workers struggle to find marriage partners (Ch 5).
Parents oppose children joining the funeral industry, and conceal their offspring’s
employment from acquaintances (p. 134)
Excessive prices charged for items used in funerals, which Murakami sees as a surcharge to
cover the ritual pollution absorbed by the undertaker.
As for the café, he argues that “kegare is a social, not an individual, mode of thought”
Individual Japanese may feel fine about socializing in a funeral parlor, but Japanese society
still discriminates against undertakers…
Murakami Kokyo, review of Hikaru Suzuki’s The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in
Contemporary Japan
Social Science Japan Journal Vol.6 No.1
April 2003, pp. 139-142.
Rethinking kegare
First, does class/status really explain social discrimination in other industrialized countries?
What about the NIMBY phenomenon?
NIMBY: Not In My BackYard
For some reason, the term has never caught on in Japan. Yet this is NIMBY territory.
E.g. Japan has 52 nuclear plants. 13 are concentrated in Fukui, 10 more in Fukushima: a
very high level of concentration.
Reverse NIMBY: Poor, rural regions of Japan accept an N-plant because of government
sweeteners. Once they accept one, it is easier to accept another… and gradually people start
to avoid those parts of Japan…maybe in future people from Fukui will be discriminated
against…
… is that the transition from NIMBY to kegare?
Reference
S. Hayden Lesbirel, 1998. NIMBY Politics in Japan: Energy Siting and the Management of
Environmental Conflict. Cornell UP.
NIMBY vs KEGARE
Objecting to a nuclear power plant: rational (though sometimes arguably selfish)
Beating up a homeless old man: irrational, visceral
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Objecting to a homeless shelter…?
Concentration policy
Because of objections to homeless people by mainstream folk, shelters are often built in
non-residential areas (e.g. Tokyo’s biggest is in a warehousing district of Ota ward) or in
doya-gai (e.g. Yokohama’s only one is in the middle of Kotobuki).
Kotobuki also has facilities for alcoholics, mentally handicapped, single-parent families etc.
Stigmatization: The gradual shift from rational objection to visceral disgust… from
NIMBY to kegare?… maybe that’s the meaning of the word “stigmatization.”
Cf. Lois M. Takahashi, 1998. Homelessness, AIDS and Stigmatization: The NIMBY
Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century.
Irving Goffman: Stigma theory
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963)
Goffman says that stigma falls into three categories:
1. Abominations of the body: various physical deformities.
2. Blemishes of individual character
Blemishes of character are inferred from, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment,
addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, or radical political
behavior.
3. Tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion
Beliefs that are transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a
family.
AIDS is not very contagious, yet it is highly stigmatized. Takahashi’s account of NIMBY
campaigns against construction of homeless shelters and AIDS facilities in California
smacks of visceral hatred, not rational self-interest… ‘spiritual pollution’ seems a better
explanation than class or status. In any country, NIMBY and ‘kegare’ are part of a
continuum of stigma.
Leprosy issue: Once there was a rational risk of contagion; but Japan continued to isolate
Hansens sufferers for 45 years after medical solution to contagion was found. From rational
exclusion to visceral exclusion?
Disabilities
Exclusion of the head? (People with disabilities less productive) or Exclusion of the heart?
(Visceral disgust at people of different appearance)
Homophobia Exclusion of the head? (Gay people less reproductive) or exclusion of the
heart? (Visceral disgust at people of different sexuality)
Special NIMBY: No nuclear power plants in Hiroshima or Nagasaki prefectures: “It just
couldn’t be done.”
(Executive of electric power company, quoted in Lesbirel p. 23)
Fringe solidarity: Every winter, the day laborer union in Kotobuki holds a winter survival
campaign. Mainstream unions ignore it (day laborers are potential scabs)
The only union supporting the campaign is the Union of Slaughterhouse Workers. The
fraternal delegate describes his members’ struggle against discrimination.
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Animal Liberation Front ALF
… but the friendly neighborhood butcher is a popular figure.
UK: bothered about meat
Japan: bothered about butchers
Document: Abbatoir by Kamata Satoshi, 1998
Abbatoir Culture: The Unspoken World ed/ Sakurai & Kishi 2001
Is it because of a Buddhist objection to killing (but not to eating) animals?
Or because the meat industry is a traditional monopoly of the Burakumin outcast group?
Burakumin
Burakumin are perhaps the hardest group of all to account for without reference to kegare.
Said to number 2 to 3 million… no agreement on the origins of the group (Tokugawa caste
system? Much earlier despised groups dating back to Heian era or earlier?) or reasons for
discrimination (Cultural? Occupational? Political? Ethnic??)
Not even any agreement as to who is or is not a Burakumin… is it by blood? Or by place of
residence?
The ONLY thing that can be said with confidence is that Burakumin are discriminated
against. – they just are. If that isn’t kegare, what is?
Although even here, there are post-facto rationalizations… e.g. “I don’t want my daughter
to marry a Burakumin, not because I hate Burakumin but because she too might be
discriminated against.”
The late Miyata Noboru, Japan’s premier folklore scholar, applies kegare theory
specifically to accounting for the Buraku issue:
ケガレの民俗誌：差別の文化的要因
An Ethnography of Kegare: The Cultural Causes of Discrimination (1996)
Kinds of exclusion
Kegare survives?
1. Use of salt for purification
2. No-go zones for women (tunnels, mountains, fishing boats, sumo ring)
3. Resistance to using dead bodies for organ transplants
4. Low level of blood donations; rejection of foreigners’ blood
5. Refusal to plan for funerals
6. People in funeral industry struggle to find marriage partners.
7. Homeless shelters hide identity
8. Naturalized Koreans/Chinese made to adopt Japanese names
9. Failure to confront AIDS
10. Unjustified detention of leprosy sufferers for 44 years
11. World’s highest per-capita mental hospital population
12. Meat worker discrimination
13. Failure to resolve Buraku issue
And finally…
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My last argument for hesitating to reject kegare-type explanations: I sense it myself in my
everyday life. Every foreigner who’s lived in Japan for long has had this experience: you’re
sitting in a very crowded train; every seat is taken except the one next to you.
It’s like a sort of force field.
Rationalizations
What reasons do Japanese give for their reluctance to sit next to foreigners in trains, buses,
restaurants etc?
They think you are too fat so there isn’t enough room to sit down… they are shy… they are
worried that you might talk to them in a foreign language...
… but you know, shyness is also a form of avoidance behavior, a cousin of irrational fear.
Maybe that is the key word:
AVOIDANCE
Avoidance of what is different or unfamiliar
Avoidance of what you don’t understand
Avoidance of the other
You don’t HATE that person; you don’t LOOK DOWN on that person; you don’t
DISCRIMINATE against that person… you just AVOID that person.
The late Robert Whymant, a British journalist who lived half his life in Japan in one article
described Japan as “a nation of ruthlessly innocent racists.” They have no idea that their
avoidance of foreigners might be viewed as racism.
The same might be said about attitudes to minorities in Japan generally.
Believing in kegare:
* means believing that there are aspects of modern urban life that cannot be explained by
rational choice theory.
* means being conservative in that you believe in the persistence of deep-lying structures of
thought in the 21st century city.
At the moment, I think I believe in kegare.
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