ABSTRACT
Japan's social outcasts, the burakumin, have been studied in numbers ofliterary works, but very few such works have been adapted as films.] The earliest instance on record dates from 1910, a film whose print has been lost. Titled Hanambuki (Scattering cherry blossoms), its story concerns a doomed love affair between an aristocrat and his burakumin maid.2 Perhaps the best-known postwar example is Kon Ichikawa's Hakai (The broken commandment, 1962). It adapts a novel of the same title by the Meiji era writer Toson Shimazaki.
