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Article Excerpt
Prologue
DURING the seventeenth century, Japan's social order took shape in the form of a hereditary four-status order of--in descending socioethical rank--warrior-rulers (samurai), peasants, artisans, and merchants. There were restrictions on intermarriage, social interaction, and clothing. This was justified by reference to Confucian theory. The functions of the four groups were seen as symbiotic, such that together they would constitute a stable and virtuous society (Totman, 2000: 225).
Not everyone fit into this structure, including the thousands of lesser clerics who staffed Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, the shop hands and household servants and day laborers who lived on the margins of urban communities. Some day laborers were landless peasants, others came from the populations of hereditary pariahs (eta or kawata) and nonhereditary punitive outcasts (hinin). Found mainly in the Kyoto vicinity or in central Japan, these pariahs generally lived in their own communities, pursued their own professions, and were subject to their own leaders. On the edge of this pariah population were the entertainers: singers, dancers, and actors who were associated with the licensed quarters (Totman, 2000: 228-9).
Pariah communities had developed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as leather workers (kawata) and as handlers of animal and human corpses. Local elites encouraged their development during the time of constant warfare since leather was a key item in the production of amour. With the outbreak of peace after 1601, demand for these goods declined and the communities were relocated to the margins of towns or to sites where they formed their own villages. Outside the four-class system, however, there was not much to distinguish them from artisans in towns or peasants in the countryside. But from the eighteenth century, regulations were introduced by central and local government that elaborated symbols of status distinction and enforced separation of residence and function. Different demographic trends were also present. Peasant smallholders produced families of modest size but pariah groups did not face the same pro-creative constraints. As a result the pariah population grew, despite attempts by government to restrict it. This altered power relationships between neighboring pariah/nonpariah communities, creating tension and increased status consciousness (Totman, 2000: 276).
After the Meiji restoration of 1868, the four-caste hierarchy was abandoned and much of its structure dismantled. A new peerage was created from court nobles and some former samurai, but most former samurai had to make do with the essentially hollow rank of shizoku. The rest of the mainstream population, including pariah groups, was lumped together as commoners (heimin). By 1910 former status had little meaning in the lives of most Japanese except for the former pariahs, now commonly referred to as burakumin; they faced discrimination in the developing job market, in schools, in marriage, and in myriad other ways when they interacted with the mainstream community (Totman, 2000: 300).
Burakumin became politically active from the 1890s onwards and, despite government attempts to restrain their activity, in 1922 formed the Suiheisha, or National Levelers' Society. This group demanded the complete emancipation promised in an 1871 edict, including economic and occupational freedom, and protection of members' human dignity. The movement remained active until the 1930s, but was finally unable to hold out against pressure from the wartime state (Totman, 2000: 389-90).
The movement revived in the 1950s as the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) and continued to confront instances of discriminatory words, deeds, and policies while demanding a comprehensive program of improvements to address the difficulties group members encountered. In the 1960s, following rapid economic growth, the state was persuaded to fund improvements to streets, schools, clinics, and housing in burakumin communities and to provide rent subsidies and other assistance to families in those communities.
The remedial action taken by government provided younger burakumin with more education, skills, and connections, and better paying jobs that enabled them to marry and settle more freely outside their communities. Government provided substantial sums of money for these improvement programs. Meerman estimates the amount spent between 1969-1993 at about $134 billion (2001: 13). The government has, however, refused to make discrimination illegal.
The BLL continues to campaign against residual discrimination but, as more and more young burakumin leave their communities, there is less support for its activism. Passing into the mainstream is still hampered by educational and economic disadvantage. It may be that as a marginal community the burakumin have been disproportionately affected by the current recession, although there is no evidence of this yet. Totman, among others, expects that improved schooling, employment, and generational change will continue to erode old prejudices, leading to a solution to the burakumin problem (2000: 532).
Introduction
Thus far we have a fairly bland, uncontroversial summary of the background and current state of burakumin. Yet this account leaves many questions unasked and unanswered. Most important, note the implication that there continues to be a need for lobbying efforts but that the problem is being or has been solved. However, within Japan there is furious disagreement about how this group developed, the role it played historically in the twentieth century and before, and what its prospects are. The main aim of this paper is to summarize some aspects of that debate and suggest answers to the questions of how this group developed and how its status changed over time. In the final section I will consider the group's condition today, its prospects for the future and whether it is or ever was a "pariah group." First, a few words are necessary on the context to intellectual debate in the mid-twentieth century.
Japan's defeat in World War II--or as radical Japanese would put it, the defeat of emperor-centered nationalism--created an ideological vacuum that was filled for most intellectuals by Marxism. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP), although tiny, illegal, and underground, had been one of the few groups that had refused to compromise with the war, and Marxist explanations also helped to make sense of what was happening to defeated Japan.
Marxism was not new to Japan in 1945, nor was it adopted uncritically. During the 1920s and 1930s there had been fierce debate among rival Marxists about the nature of Japanese capitalism. The problem was how to explain its major contradiction; namely, that while there was clear evidence of industrialization, imperialism, and monopoly capitalism, there was also abundant evidence of "economic backwardness and distress in the countryside, and the persistence of apparently outmoded political institutions--the emperor system, the Privy council ...--despite the introduction of Western constitutional forms associated with multi-party democracy" (Hoston, 1986: 4). The debate was complex, and most of it need not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that two schools developed. One argued that the Meiji restoration was a bourgeois democratic revolution that had swept aside the feudal elements of the previous period to create a modernized, political, economic, and social structure. The other insisted that the revolutionary events in the 1860s and 1870s amounted to an incomplete revolution that left intact, for example, the imperial institution that formed the basis of a semifeudal absolutist regime.
This was more than a theoretical debate, since it had practical consequences for revolutionary socialists. While the former position suggested that strategy should aim at socialist revolution, the latter view proposed instead the need for a two-stage affair, the first of which would be to complete the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, which would be followed at a later stage by socialist revolution.
Thinking about Japanese history has been decisively influenced by this debate. This is especially true on the historical origins and current situation of burakumin. Prewar there was very little substantive work on the issue. Serious...
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