Kegare

Kegare is the Shinto idea of ritual impurity or defilement. It is best understood not as moral guilt but as a state in which life-force is diminished or withered, a dulling of the brightness and vitality that the kami love and that ordinary life should have. Its typical sources are death, blood, disease and decay: the things that oppose freshness and life.

Because kegare is a condition rather than a crime, it can be contracted without any wrongdoing at all, by proximity to death, for instance, and it calls not for forgiveness but for removal. That removal is purification, harae, and the two ideas belong together: much of Shinto practice is organized around the movement from pollution to cleanness, so that a person or place is made fit once more to approach the kami. The pattern is set in myth by the god Izanagi, who is defiled by his journey to the land of the dead, Yomi, and cleanses himself by washing in a river on his return, the primordial act of purification from which, the Kojiki says, further kami are born.

Article one treats kegare chiefly through its mythic origin in Izanagi's purification and its general association with death, blood and decay. How that framework has been applied to living women's bodies, historically and in continuing controversy, is a separate and more contested part of the picture that article one leaves aside.

Because menstruation and childbirth were classed among the sources of kegare, women were historically excluded from many sacred precincts during these states, and some sites, most prominently certain mountains sacred in Shugendo practice, barred women from ascent altogether for centuries, restrictions in several cases only formally lifted in the nineteenth or twentieth century under pressure to modernise rather than through a change in the underlying doctrine.

The clearest still-live instance concerns the sumo wrestling ring, the dohyo, treated as a sacred space purified by Shinto ritual before use and from which women remain barred by long custom on kegare grounds, a rule reaffirmed even after a widely reported 2018 incident in which officials asked women, including a nurse who had entered to give emergency aid to a collapsed local mayor, to leave the ring. Critics called the exclusion indefensible in a medical emergency; the sumo association apologised for how that incident was handled while maintaining the underlying rule, treating the ring's purity as tradition to be preserved rather than a policy open to exception, exactly the tension between an inherited purity framework and contemporary equality norms that recurs, in different specifics, across several purity systems this collection describes.