Defilement, Outcasts, and Disability in Medieval Japan: Reassessing Oguri and Sermon Ballads as Regenerative Narratives

This article explores four major types of defilement in premodern Japan—what I call contact defilement, transgressive defilement, Buddhistic defilement, and cyclical defilement—that are critical to understanding a wide range of premodern Japanese cultural and social phenomena and that lie behind the emergence of outcasts and the belief in serious illness as defilement from the mid-twelfth century. I demonstrate how these different types of defilement and corresponding purification rites intersect and form the backbone for such notable sermon ballads as Shintokumaru and Oguri, which flourished in the late medieval and early Edo period and which can be understood as “regenerative narratives” in which the protagonist suffers from a series of defilements and social ostracization before being purified and resurrected. The article unpacks the significance of pilgrimage to Kumano that represents both pollution and purification, and reveals the revolutionary roles that the Jishū mendicants and itinerant women (like Kumano nuns) had in pushing back against established notions of defilement and aiding those considered to be most polluted. Finally, I look at the role of original-ground stories, a new medieval paradigm in which gods/deities first suffered as human beings before deification, an excruciating experience that enabled them to understand and aid the deprived and the outcast.