On the Origins of Japan's Outcast Communities

In July 1919 the historian Kita Sadakichi devoted a whole issue of his journal Race and History to Japan's hereditary outcast communities, the ancestors of today's burakumin. This book gathers seven of his pieces from it: a foreword, arguments about the names used for these communities, a reply on the Nagasaki Christians, a history of their oppression, and a long study of the many streams from which they came: sweepers, falconers' men, riverbank workers, leatherworkers, dyers, tomb guardians and fugitives.

Kita argues that the outcasts were never a separate race, and that the wall around them was built from custom, occupation, pollution taboos and Tokugawa policy. He wrote in the vocabulary of 1919, including terms now regarded as slurs; these are kept only where historically necessary and explained in the translator's note.

For readers of Japanese history, social history and the history of discrimination. Translated directly from the Japanese, with notes and source information.