One of the earliest E-Maki, or art-scrolls in Japan depicts hoards of Gakki or hungry ghosts involved in various activities in order to appease their hunger, including eating corpses and ordure. The interesting thing about this scroll is that the “ghosts” are remarkably real looking–in fact, with their distended bellies and scant hair, they look for all the world like a group of outcast people with the symptoms of extreme malnutrition. Furthermore, these ghosts do not have the typical features of the Japanese, who are also depicted in the scroll going about their Heian-era business. My opinion is that far from being the fanciful pictures of supernatural beings, these hungry ghosts are actually outcasts who were forced to live in just the manner as they are shown in the scroll. What group of people with Caucasian features are historically known to have been living in Japan at that time? The Ainu.

This following passage from page 71 of Strickmann’s Chinese Magical Medicine seems particularly germane: [please read Japanese for Strickmann’s Chinese]

“…Like the Indian demonology, Chinese conceptions of the realm of the extra-human included a wide range of beings. Moreover, as in India, human outsiders were always at risk of undergoing instant demonization. The ‘foreigners’ who figure so picturesquely as ghouls and monsters in the Book of Mountains and Seas included not only the residents of politically distinct states but also the various non-Chinese people or aboriginals living in close proximity to Chinese towns and villages. Such underprivileged non-Chinese were assimilated to animals, if not to demons; the very names assigned to them in Chinese are written with classificatory elements setting them among the beasts….Even within the larger cultural area, dehumanization and demonization were (and still are) a frequent means of reinforcing identity and group solidarity….”

Of course, there could have been other groups living in Japan that we simply don’t know about; or perhaps the anonymous artist of the scroll had traveled to other countries to see the lives of starving outcast groups, still it’s interesting to think that perhaps this scroll is an early ethnographic record of those Ainu that attempted to live among the Japanese at about the same time as the Norman Conquest.