Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
In Japan the "Burakumin" are a caste of society that traditionally worked in "impure" professions such as animal slaughter, grave digging, and executioners. These families were barred from entry into normal life, and were not afforded the same rights as the normal citizenry to work, conduct commerce or travel. They were only able to legally marry within their own ranks, leading to a natural segregation of these families into their own distinct subset of the Japanese ethnicity. This Burakumin subgroup did have their place in society however, they were the only ones permitted to work in the aforementioned necessary occupations; and so were able to carve out a permanent place in society for themselves. The laws surrounding the segregation of burakumin society are now gone, but there are still a sizeable number of such families which continue to live "separate" from society. There are various reasons why this is the case: legacy discrimination from large companies and housing being the most oft discussed, but the primary reason seems to be that these people just want to stay separate, they feel different from the mass of the Japanese population and have no desire to disappear into their mass despite the wordly benefits it would bring.
In Japan the size of the Burakumin population varies wildly with the method used to count them, but the average count for those who live in burakumin communities following their traditional lifestyle is in the order of one million, and slowly decreasing. That's a lot of people, but their influence is hardly thought of at all within the wider Japanese society, and certainly not considered in the world's vision of Japan. The same can be said for many countries own "burakumin" esque subsets. In England we have the group broadly known as "Gypsies". Its a catch-all term for the several nomadic groups that still live in Britain (and indeed across Europe), and who live a life in opposition (both metaphorically and physically) to the general populace. In Britain we can split "Gypsies" into two broad groups: "True Gypsies" or the more confusing yet for some reason politicly correct term of "Romani" of which we have about 300,000, and the "Tinkers" or "Irish Travellers" of which there are about 100,000. Romani-Gypsies can again be split into various wild and exciting sounding groups such as the "Border Gypsies", "Lowland Gypsies" and the enigmatic "Kale Gypsies" who speak "Romani-Welsh", the only Celtic creole language. They all descend from ancient merchantmen who helped bridge the gap between India and Europe before Christians were allowed to deal in such trade. Nobody (including themselves) know where they exactly came from, and this uncertainty is reflected in their named: "Gypsy" means "Egyptiany", and "Romani" means "Romaniany". From genetic tests we know they are from some area of Western India / Afghanistan, but its safe to understand these people have long been their own distinct group. There also exists the "Roma", who are similar but distinct group who arrived in Britain post-war and so retain much of their more continental disposition in contrast to those who have been on Britain for centuries.
Irish Travellers have a much clearer origin but no clearer a history. Irishmen have been living in Britain since before even the English, and there are records of vagrant Irish families travelling England in the 1100s. The classic travelling funfair of England is a broadly Irish affair even to this day, still coinciding with the same annual patterns of royal market fairs that they have followed for many centuries. Both groups are commonly associated with organised crime, just as the burakumin are the core group from which the Yakuza draw their recruits.
Obviously (or I guess maybe not to non-Europeans) Gypsies of any creed are not a particularly beloved addition to the cultural landscape. They are a form of accepted criminal gangs: roving bands of nomads who pitch up to villages around the country, squat on common land for a week or two, and proceed to terrorise local businesses and citizens through random acts of crime. All of this is "part & parcel" of rural English life, and the policeforce refuse to do anything about it. An unspoken rule of British law is that Gypsies are above it. I used to work at the corner shop in my home village, and we had a "gypsy button" under the counter to be pressed whenever a gypsy came in. This would trigger the manager to enact the gypsy protocol which consisted of following them around the shop hoping they would be scared off (which never worked). We'd get a group in every two years or so, who would take over the village park (wrecking it in the process) and prey on the vulnerable of the village to swindle or burgle. A weirdly accepted form of mediaeval harrying that nevertheless is a common plight in the English countryside.
But they don't only live in travelling bands of caravans, many gypsy communities live in semi-permanent pre-fab houses constructed on purchased land (without any planning permission though). These shanty towns are held in common between families, with the buildings used by the community in a way very alien to us normalfolk. There was a girl who went to my primary school who lived in one such place, built on the grounds behind an old manorhouse (who I assume they paid some form of rent to). She was a weird girl who hardly showed up to school; her name was "Pheobe", yes spelt incorrectly... I remember in the last week of school we went around the class to say which secondary school we'd be heading off to next Septemeber. But when it got to Pheobe she announced that she wouldn't be going to school; she'd been betrothed to a 16yr old gypsyboy in Norfolk so would be moving over there to live with him... If this was any other child I'm sure some combination of social services and the police would have been called there and then, but Gypsies are of course above such things.
As well as these more obviously distinct ethnic groups of travellers there are those who do descend from the mass bulk of society, but live outside of the system. Homeless men are a relatively common sight in big cities, even though its rarely a choice. The distinction between a "hobo" and a "tramp" is somewhat blurred, but apparently its the difference between the hopeless druggie begging at the entrance to the tube station versus the hairy bush-man who pitches his tent in the bushes by the park for a week or two before disappearing over the hill. The tramps think themselves better than the hobos, and the hobos would probably broadly agree. A "navvy" is a generic term for those who live on boats. This includes "house-boats" which are usually set in one place, and "narrowboats" which traverse the vast canal network of England. These people usually live on boats by choice, its a cheap way to own a property of sorts after all. Navvies are usually strangely gentile in nature, often the hangers-on from the hippy-generation of the '60s who never outgrew their "phase". Finally we have the truly enormous number of people who live permanently in caravan parks. These can range from actual moveable caravans to two-storey pre-fab structures with a front lawn and a drive. The limelight was swung onto these people during the covid-pandemic, when the police were sent in to clear out the caravan parks and send people back home. It was uncovered than around 100,000 people called nowhere else home but their caravan, a news story that faded into obscurity quickly and which the police decided to ignore. Most of these people are retirees, selling their old brick-and-mortar house to move into a caravan in some sleepy seaside town to live out their days in a never-ending summer getaway.
All of these people (numbering nearly 1 million in all, live outside of what the government has determined to be "acceptable"; such arrangements will exclude you from accessing many of the services provided by the state, and operate in a grey-area of the law. It is actually illegal to be homeless in the UK, although this law is one that is only enforced when it is prudent to do so, and which the police are powerless to actually punish. Similar to the Burakumin of Japan, Britain has its own complex set of "outsiders", living amongst but separate from the general populace, most of which voluntarily at this point. These people are broadly ungovernable, which seems to be majorly at odds with our modern world: making it all the more intriguing that they are able to live so peaceably (ish) alongside it. A way of life out-of-time even a millennia ago, but somehow still chugging along out of the purview of history.
