Japan: Sanka, Legendary Gypsies Living in the Wild · Global Voices
Scilla Alecci

This post is part of our special coverage Indigenous Rights.
Sometimes forgotten issues, people or stories come back from oblivion and awake something in the collective imagination. Sometimes too, the protagonists in those stories become part of a legend, whose historical origins are difficult to  track down.
This is more or less what happened to a group of people who are said to have lived in the remote mountains and plains of the Japanese archipelago until the 1970s. They are the Japanese gypsies or Sanka [ja], written as 山家 (people of the mountains) or 山窩 (mountains nomads).
What brought the existence of this group of people – seemingly never registered by any government – back to some people’s minds was a documentary by public broadcaster NHK  [ja] a few months ago.
Like some classical western literature which lingers on the myth of the ‘noble savage’, some bloggers speculated on the origins of these legendary nomads and on their ‘natural’ lifestyle.
Mount Iwate, Japan. Image by Flickr user Jasohill (CC BY-NC-SA).
Onoda explains what he has heard of the Sanka's livelihood and habits until their disappearance:
サンカ−−これは外国の話ではない。日本に住み、農家の箕と呼ばれる道具を
修繕する技術力を持ち、農家の家々を回って修繕して麦や米や調味料などをもらい、
また、河原や崖の穴に住処を作って川魚を狩猟して、河原で水浴びもしていた、
家族をひとまとまりとした漂流生活者であった。[…]
彼らは１９６０年代を最後に忽然と姿を消す。[…]
純粋に彼らが消えた理由は、生計の糧である箕を使う農家も農地も
減ったこと。自由に暮らせる森も草原も河原も開発の波で次々に
姿を消したこと。土地所有の権利者から立ち入りを許されることが
難しくなったことなど、時代を考えればそうなんだろうなと、
思うことしきり。
The story of Sanka is not something from another country. They lived in Japan and had the technical ability to mend tools such as the winnowing baskets used in agriculture. They went from farm to farm and received food such as wheat or rice in exchange for their mending work. They made their homes near river beds or in the caves of cliffs, fished in rivers, and washed themselves there also. They were drifters that lived in family units. […]
After the 1960s, they suddenly disappeared. […]
One of the reasons for their disappearance could be that tools like winnowing baskets and others that were used by cultivators and were their livelihood are no longer used. Also, forests, rivers and plains where they used to live freely had disappeared under the waves of development. They must have started having problems like landowners that wouldn't allow access to their property to strangers.
According to jiyodan, the Sanka were a free people that tried to resist assimilation by the Japanese central government which, during the 18th and 19th centuries, forced people like the Ainu people (in the northern regions of the country) and the Okinawa people (in the Ryukyu Islands) to abandon their culture and language and adopt those of the main island:
わが国には、古来から人別にも記載されない山窩（サンカ・サンガ）と呼ばれる山の民（非定住民・狩猟遊民）が居る。
明治維新以後に戸籍(壬申戸籍 /じんしんこせき)をつくるまで、山窩（サンカ・サンガ）は、治世の外に存在した自由民であった。
この山窩（サンカ・サンガ）は、九州から東北地方まで分布している所から、比較的後期の渡来系勢力に押されて、同化を拒み、山中に逃げ延びた「内地の原日本人系縄文人（原ポリネシア系）の一部ではないか」と考えられる。
つまり、先住民族の同化から取り残された残存の一部が、山窩（サンカ・サンガ）でないと、存在の理由が見当たらないのである。
勿論、山窩（サンカ・サンガ）にも渡来系勢力との接触はあるから、完全に文明から取り残された訳ではない。
山に篭った群れ、平地に降りて来て一郭に集団で居留したもの、その中間の存在もあった筈である。
そして彼ら山に篭った群れの純粋な山窩（サンカ・サンガ）の生活にも、文明や道具の一部は取り入れられたが、生活様式だけは頑なに守って独自の生活圏を山岳地帯につくり、言わば祭らわぬ人々（統治されざる人々）として存在し、それが明治維新の少し後まで無人別集団として存在して居たのである。
Nobody knows exactly why such people apparently ‘disappeared’ in the 1970s. Some believe because they were deprived of the lands where they could live free. The so-called economic miracle that made Japan the second largest economy in the world in the few decades after the war could not admit of the existence of such free-of-the-system people.
Image by Jetalone (CC CC BY-NC-SA).
According to kuronekobyakudhan [jp] who replied to questions on Sanka on Yahoo, they did not disappear all of a sudden. He believes that the phenomenon evolved and the poor got to become the new Sanka.
Some of them continued to be marginalised like many other Japanese minor social groups who because of  their humble origins, often going back to previous centuries, were discriminated against and could never become part of the main stream working society. It is a problem that exists still today even if on a different scale, and that local administrations still try to cope with:
山 窩族については徳川家康のブレーンのひとりであった林羅山などが記していますが、大正時代に三角寛が大衆紙に山窩を題材にした小説を発表するとちょっと した山窩ブームが起き、本来の山の民ではなく、社会をドロップアウトしてしまった人たち（世界恐慌もそれを後押しした）が山間部でのホームレス化してしま う社会現象が起きています。
そうした山窩族を含めた被差別民は各地に多く存在し、[…]山梨県内には調査資料では１９３５年にそうした被差別地区が２３区域１８１８人（１９９３年にはそれが６区域２９３人に縮小し た。）とあります。
Kuronekobyakudhan also said that, nowadays in every area, the government has set up an administration office just to deal with the problem of social discrimination, which the Sanka suffered, and which also means that although the problem may have been reduced, it is yet to be solved:
当然こうした仕事を担当する窓口の人は、その歴史的背景なども熟知していませんと親身な対応ができませんから、それなりの研修などを受講されています。
This post is part of our special coverage Indigenous Rights.