ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the legacies of caste in pre-Tokugawa Japan in order to better understand the early history of Danzaemon and the formation of the Edo outcaste order. It contends that new early modern systems of governance gave shape to pre-existing regional orders in important ways. Using scholarship on premodern outcaste communities from the Kantō, Kansai, and other Japanese regions, as well as parts of the subcontinent, the chapter focuses on the historical transformation of the chōri (eta) group, demonstrating how it emerged within a historical division of labour, but one that was also significantly determined by political power exercised by warlords and the early Tokugawa shogunate. Pre-Tokugawa ideas and practices related to occupation, kinship, and hierarchical notions of superior and inferior rooted in notions of ritual pollution that spread out from centre to periphery were refashioned in new ways in the early part of the Tokugawa period, which impacted both the form and content of the Edo outcaste order.
