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Tom Gill
Meiji Gakuin Course No. 3505
Minority and Marginal
Groups of
Contemporary Japan
Lecture #10
The Kegare
Category
Trying to account for social
discrimination in
contemporary Japan
PART1
Overview
１．Thesis: Doya-gai and
Kegare
2．Antithesis: Rejecting
Kegare theory
3．Synthesis (?): Exclusion of
the head, of the heart
Thesis
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
A different society…
Individualists?
Social outcasts?
Lonely
Places?
Alternative communities?
Shame?
Pride?
Despair?
Resistance?
Doya-gai: ‘special preserves’
(a)Clearly marked boundaries;
(b)Inhabited by people differentiated
from those outside by class,
status, gender or ethnicity;
(c)Governed by rules of behaviour
different from those prevailing
outside – something like what
Lefebvre calls 'special preserves'
(1991:35).
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.)
Special preserves 2
(a) Exaggerated
reputation for danger
(b) Association with death
and misfortune
(c) 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.
波平恵美子、
『ケガレ』
一九八五年東京堂出版
Though Namihira originally
wrote in English
• "Hare, Ke and Kegare: The
Structure of Japanese Folk Belief."
Doctoral dissertation, University of
Texas at Austin, 1977
• "Pollution in the Folk Belief
System." In Current Anthropology,
Vol.28, No.4, S65-74, 1987.
Buddhist
temples in
the foothills,
with
graveyards
behind: the
border
between
culture &
nature
Plains
between
mountains
and sea:
houses,
everyday
life
Shinto shrines
down by the shore,
facing the sea,
sacred source of
sustenance
KEGARE KE HARE
Spiritual geography
山に入ると仏教のお寺やお墓があり、死との関連＋文明と自然の境界線
瀬戸内 海の漁村では．．．
山と海の間は盆地。それは集落があり、人々が日常生活を行うところ。
漁村にとって海は聖なる場所。魚のおかげで生きていける。海岸に神道の神社を置く。神に感謝をする、吉兆の場。
ケガレ地帯 ケの地帯 ハレの地帯
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 晴れ – 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…
behind them, the
figure of Yanagida
Kunio 柳田国男
桜井徳太郎（『日本民間
信仰論』１９６９年）
原田敏明（『日本古代思
想』１９７２年
… but 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 inividual is molded by
society.
Emile Durkheim
The
Sacred
The
Profane The
Pure
The
Impure
The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, 1915
Harada Toshiaki 1972
The Sacred
Sei no sekai
聖の世界
The
Profane
Zoku
俗
The
Pure
Jo
浄
The
Impure
Fujo
不浄
Namihira Emiko 1974
The
Sacred
and
impure
Kegare
ケガレ穢れ
Everyday
Seijo /
Nichijo-
teki / Ke
正常・日常的
ケ
The
Sacred
and pure
Hare
ハレ 晴れ
Special Ordinary Special
Theory also applies to time…
Hare time – new year, summer
solstice 夏至点, 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
… 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.
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?)
March 11 2011 challenge
After the terrible tsunami, it
turned out that many coastal
Buddhist temples had been
swept away while Shinto
shrines had survived, being
further inland.
That shows one of the problems
when people try to construct grand
theory based on local fieldwork –
one part of Japan may be totally
different from another… of course.
But suppose Namihira is
right…
… what happens to that conceptual
division of space when people
leave the countryside?
… at least about some parts of
rural Japan… 波平は仮に日本の田舎の一部に当たっているとすれば
Urbanization 都市化
• Postwar Japan’s massive, rapid rural urban population shift.
• What happens to categories of thought / instinct when population moves to the big city?
• 人口が大都市に移ったら、「空気の概念的な境目」はどうなる？残る？消える？
Urbanization 都市化の推移
Country 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
UK 84 86 88 89 89 90
US 64 70 74 74 75 77
Canada 61 69 76 77 77 79
France 56 62 71 73 74 76
Japan 50 63 71 76 77 79
S. Korea 21 28 41 57 74 82
China 13 16 17 20 27 32
Source: United Nations Population Bureau
http://earthtrends.wri.org/text/POP/variables/448.htm
BIG CITY LIFE
As of 2009, 49% of Japanese people
live in cities of 1 million people +
South Korea 48%, US 45%
UK 26%, France 23%
China 17%, Germany 9%
Hong Kong 100%
Source: World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.URB.MCTY.TL.ZS
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
• 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?
(Real estate prices are lower near cemeteries)
And there
are many
examples of
ritual
pollution
avoidance
in everyday
urban life
Purifying salt
Tokyo
restaurant
Tom Gill 1996: Big city kegare
Sacred &
impure
Everyday Sacred &
pure
Kegare Ke Hare
Doya-gai
Ghettoes
Akasen
Buraku
Cemetries
Homes,
offices,
factories
Shrines
Imperial
palace
The Reasoning (1) Social detachment in life (single
men) and death (Muen Botoke無縁仏)
(2) Avoidance by mainstream citizenry
(3) Physical dirt
(4) Bloody wounds (red kegare??）
(5) Association with ill fortune
(6) Association with death (mean age at
death, about 60-62… black kegare?)
(7) Adjacent to other polluted zones
(Are they higher near Shinto shrines,
lower near Buddhist temples? Alas, I
don’t know.)
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