Changing views about ritual pollution during the formation of medieval Japanese society

Abstract

Two times at which the kind of social relations an individual is involved in become very clear is when he is born and when he dies. Observing the behavior of people surrounding a new-born infant and a dying person is an effective way of clarifying the social relations that will or have determined that person's life. The present article attempts such an observation in the hope of shedding light upon the nature of social relations in medieval Japan. It was a dominant idea at the time that as soon as a person was born or died, pollution was generated. As to how the people around the new-born or the deceased reacted, the seemingly natural response of avoidance was not the case. Rather, from the mideleventh century on, a way of thinking came into vogue regarding the spontaneous pollution emanating from the natural life cycle as having a positive meaning. That is to say, a change was occurring in how people reacted to pollution, indicating the formation of a new set of social relations characteristic of medieval Japan. The "victim" of such unintentional, spontaneous pollution became the social group described in the sources as ikka 一家 (lit. "the family"), which from the end of the Heian period indicated in functional terms, a group composed of the new-born's (deceased's) patrilineage and lateral kin. The occurrence of such pollution on an "ikka" scale is a specific phenomenon of the process by which patrilineal households (ie 家) precipitated out of ancient period extended patrilineal clans (uji 氏). One important feature of this new kinship organization was the succession of rights enjoyed by parents directly to their children, and made rituals conducted at the moments of birth and death important for firmly establishing and legitimizing parent-offspring relations.