A history of filth: Defilement discourse in medieval Japan

From the ancient mytho-historical stories of Japan's creation to the modern economic and social dilemmas of 20th century burakumin (“people of the hamlet”), defilement discourse in Japan serves a means by which to define and explain the parameters of both private and public existence as well as private and public behavior. Although a subject of much interest for Japanese scholars, defilement discourse in medieval Japan has not received its due attention in English-language scholarship. My dissertation explores the development of religious, social, and political discourse on defilement, focusing on the period ranging from the 10th to the 15th centuries. Using a variety of primary sources, including codal collections, house diaries, and Buddhist literary anecdotes, I examine the two general varieties of defilement in the medieval period, transmittable “touch defilement” and transgression defilement, within which we find a range of phenomena and social ills, including death, childbirth, accidental fire, meat-eating, crime and illness.;I explore how concern for transmittable defilement, which was rooted in the standardization of ritual protocol, helped to delimit the physical and cosmological boundaries of the medieval world. Efforts to check the transmission of defilement influenced both the way in which physical spaces such as buildings were created and the manner in which individual persons navigated them. I also examine how transgression defilement, which was not bounded by the same rules of transmission, developed in intimate relationship with medieval notions of crime, illness, and the development of outcaste groups.;The divergence of issues posed by touch defilement and transgression defilement challenges traditional Western understandings of defilement and taboo/prohibition. My study critiques both the Western understanding of defilement and taboo as well as the Japanese understanding of medieval religious history by examining the complex of influences and interests revealed in defilement discourse. In exploring the differences, and often inconsistencies, between various aspects of defilement, my study demonstrates that medieval notions of defilement had fundamental impact at both the social and cultural level, affecting the relationship between individuals and between individuals and institutions within a social and symbolic order, as well as the composition of that symbolic order itself.