Actors and Outcasts - Everyday Life in Traditional Japan - page 137

(71) Yoshiwara girls (see p. 165 ).
Therewerealsoagreatnumberofwanderingentertainerswhohadnosuchcomfortable
abodes ( 72 ). The better of these overlapped with the lowest grades of actors. They were
the conjurers, the dancers, the singers, the puppet men, the street-corner men, and women
of all sorts, whose ranks included the semi-religious bell ringers, chest-beaters, and others
reminiscent of some of the holy men of India ( 73 ). They collected alms but were barely
distinguishable frompurebeggars, whoalso existed, andwith whomwecome tothe hinin,
the “non-humans” mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.
The hinin included not only more or less permanent and hereditary “non-humans,” like
beggars, but also temporary ones, who might hope for a return to the status of “good folk,”
or whose children might do so, such as former criminals, persons in exile, and survivors of
suicide pacts. Desperate couples often tried to die together, in order, they believed, to be
able to spend the rest of eternity in a Buddhistic paradise; the authorities were particularly
severe on them, and those who carried it through as well as the unsuccessful who survived
were treated as criminals, those who died having their corpses exposed as if they had been
executed. Double suicides had become very fashionable at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, when the great writer of puppet-plays, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, had written a series
of highly successful dramas usually involving some merchant who became enamored of a
courtesan, and ending with their suicide together. Families thus suffered for the sins of the
fathers in a very concrete way, but a number of other hinin had been reduced to this status
because economic or other circumstances had forced them to take up work that only “non-
humans” would do.