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.