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Updated: May 18, 2025
Under this appellation were included professional mendicants, wandering minstrels, actors, certain classes of prostitutes, and persons outlawed by society. The hinin had their own chiefs, and their own laws. Any person expelled from a Japanese community might join the hinin; but that signified good-by to the rest of humanity. The Government was too shrewd to persecute the hinin.
The killing of a hinin was not considered murder, and was punished only by a fine. The reader should now be able to form an approximately correct idea of the character of the old Japanese society. But the ordination of that society was much more complex than I have been able to indicate, so complex that volumes would be required to treat the subject in detail.
Their gipsy-existence saved a world of trouble. It was unnecessary to keep petty offenders in jail, or to provide for people incapable of earning an honest living, so long as these could be driven into the hinin class. There the incorrigible, the vagrant, the beggar, would be kept under discipline of a sort, and would practically disappear from official cognizance.
So the banished man was most often doomed to become a hinin, one of that wretched class of wandering pariahs who were officially termed "not-men," and lived by beggary, or by the exercise of some vulgar profession, such as that of ambulant musician or mountebank.
It says to the hinin or not-human, "be a man, be a citizen, accept the protection of the law." It says to the eta, "come into humanity and society, receive the protection of law, and the welcome of your fellows; let memory forget the past and charity make a new future."
But for perhaps a thousand years there has been no fellowship between the people of those contiguous communities.... Nobody can now tell the history of these outcast folk: the cause of their social excommunication has long been forgotten. Besides the Eta proper, there were pariahs called hinin, a name signifying "not-human-beings."
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