2 Buraku

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Something that must be said right off: There is no such thing as a “burakumin.”

“‘Japan is now a highly educated and fairly “intelligent” society, much more so than America, where intelligence on the average is still very low. In America, there are many Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans.’”
1986, Nakasone Yasuhiro,
then Prime Minister of Japan.
quoted in Coates 1990,p1

The term “buraku” in Japan marks a place, a neighborhood, a district that is set outside of the remainder of Japanese places, neighborhoods and districts. The term “min” or “minzoku” means “people” or “race.” (“Minzokugaku” is the term used for “ethnology,” and “minzoku kokka” is the term for “nation-state”—and so essentializing “nation” as a racially determined group). To apply the term “min” to the place “buraku” is to already accept that the stigma of the place can be located as well within the bodies of the people who dwell there. It calls into being a “race” of people defined by buraku residence. It connects a history of spatial segregation to the bodies of current residents of these segregated spaces. As I will be discussing how this connection between space and bodies was made, I will not begin by asserting this nominally.

This preamble to a description of places that are called buraku (or toshoku buraku) in Japan shifts the primary focus from the western notion of stigma, which is always first attached to bodies, and only then by their presence to spaces (e.g., ghettos). But I do not, by this, wish to suggest that the bodies of persons who have been forced to dwell in buraku areas are not also intimately affected by this circumstance. And there is an entire essentialist discourse that naturalizes the historical and current reasons for separation of people from the “general” population of an equally essentialized Japanese “race.”

The discourse surrounding the term “buraku” starts with the idea of physical separation as its primary cause. The people who were resettled in these separate places are also made different by their history of separation. And now it is this difference that gives their continued separation added legitimacy in the imaginations of those who continue to make this distinction.

The term “buraku” is a designation that once meant simply a “hamlet,” a generally applicable term for a small-scale residential unit, widely used throughout Japan before the Tokugawa (1603-1868) period. Today buraku refers mainly to those “hamlets” where shunned, stigmatized individuals and their families were put, that is, they were either directly sentenced to dwell there by an official order, or migrated there as the only available destination when they were pushed out of other circumstances. Over hundreds of years, families in Japan’s buraku neighborhoods have been serving the punishment of their ancestor’s original crimes—sometimes this was the crime of coming in from the outside, from Tohoku, say, other times it was something more local, an indiscretion severe enough to force the family from their locale through a process of murahachibu (shunning). Buraku are those far-away places that “bad people,” or people who simply looked or acted different (congenital physical or mental disorders marked persons in this way) found themselves banished to. But they were not far away, but close by, where all could watch the ongoing depravation that their residential “sentence” produced.

Histories of confinement

The wedding of the Japanese Crown Prince in 1993 renewed the discourse on the purity of the imperial heritage and with this the concomitant discourse on the impurity of the heritage of “others,” most directly (although never mentioned in the press) the latter includes Japanese persons living in buraku areas. This photo, reproduced from the program of the 4th Higashiyama buraku liberation meeting, was used to illustrate the intimate connection between these logics of hereditary exclusion.

To start to understand Kyoto’s buraku, you have to begin with a history of institutional control over space. The notion of law enforcement and punishment in Tokugawa (1603-1868) Japan includes several practices, the logics of which can be still traced in current practices, working either directly in modern society (such as the Imperial Household), or through their supposed reversal but continued marking (such as equal rights measures for women and Japanese living in buraku areas) as significant features where the discourse is silenced, but the practice is active.

The social ecology of outcasting, and of marking marginal persons in pre-modern Japan created a class/caste economy that out-grouped those who could not muster the wherewithal to keep up with the marketplace. The penalties of falling behind one's neighbors were truly extreme. More than any other condition, this yawning gulf between those who have some socio-economic stability and those sinking into the oblivion of hinin status produced the desire for middle-class status in Japan. The sentence of this out-grouping punishment was designed to run in perpetuity, an expression of the implied longevity of social contracts which still carries great weight in Kyoto.

The fact also that the buraku were not remote islands, but rather, sub-urban prison-hamlets, made their inhabitants (hinin (outcaste)) visible signs of the downside of social bad-behavior. Their poverty and the jobs they were allowed to do (cleaning up everybody’s shit, and tanning and working leather, disposing of dead bodies) added an ongoing stigma to their ancestor’s “original sin,” now long forgotten.

And their social isolation and collective guilt over time fed rumors that these were a different kind of people. I have heard this difference expressed as a difference in the consistency of their blood, for example, (which, I was told, was believed by some to be “thicker” than that of “Japanese” people).

Of course, the move to a representation of the Japanese government as a democratic state in the 19th century, made official discrimination dangerous to announce, although lists of each and every buraku address in the nation have long been available to companies and investigators, and Japan’s formal residence registration requirements (one of many pre-occupation regulations that have never been eased) makes it impossible for a family to simply move away from the buraku and forget the past. No one, it seems, is really willing to forget, even though the government makes a point of expressing its desire to bring equality to all its citizens.

After 1910 when Koreans began to enter Western Japan in large numbers, many of them were housed not in company dormitories (with the rest of the workers), but in boarding houses in buraku areas. And so the history of the buraku and that of resident-Koreans have, in Higashi-kujo, coalesced into a collective predicament. In terms of their cultural geography, Koreans living in Higashi-kujo burakus find themselves twice removed: being of an alien nationality and living in a highly marked, stigmatized neighborhood. And so, in Kyoto, and elsewhere in this region of Japan, Japanese and Koreans living in and near buraku areas find common complaints about social discrimination and lifestyle problems.

The more recent history of buraku politics and social movements has been summarized by Neary (1989) and Noguchi (1990). Ongoing efforts by buraku organizations in Kyoto¹ (e.g., Buraku Liberation Research, Higashiyama Executive Committee, burakumondai o kangaerukai [Meeting to Consider the Buraku Problem]# 4, 1994) and elsewhere highlight the fact that, despite official silence over their situation, the fundamental circumstances that have long characterized their out-caste condition have not been addressed.

¹I attended an evening meeting, which was held in a hall that was filled with men in business suits. The speakers spoke with passion about their histories and circumstances. The audience listened with barely controlled impatience. The final speaker asked for questions. When there were none, the meeting ended. Outside, I noticed that, as they walked away from the meeting, and out of the buraku, clusters of government officials and business executives chatted animatedly. Many of them fumbled in their pockets, and returned to their lapels the lapel pin that marked their corporate affiliation—The pins they refused to wear even though their supervisors required that they attend this meeting. By this gesture they affirmed the active social discrimination that the meeting was supposed to address.