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A comprehensive analysis into the background of legal responses to, and wider implications of, hate speech in Japan.
Translated with an Intoduction by Alastair McLaughlin. The extent of discrimination against the Buraku communities is one of the most sensitive issues facing the Japanese government and the social coherence of contemporary Japan.
During the Tokugawa period in Japan (1600-1868), leather tanners, butchers, and others working in "polluted" occupations were made to live in segregated communities. These are the buraku communities that continue, despite the end of the caste system, to suffer significant discrimination. For his research, McLauchlan (Japanese studies, Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, New Zealand) conducted open-ended interviews with 21 members of the Buraku Liberation League, all members of a buraku community in East Osaka. He details the experiences of discrimination, their reactions to discrimination at the time, and their reflections on their status at the time of the interview. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
"The Burakumin. Stigmatized throughout Japanese history as an outcaste group, their identity is still “risky,” their social presence mostly silent, and their experience marginalized in public discourse. They are contemporary Japan’s largest minority group—between 1.5 and 3 million people. How do young people today learn about being burakumin? How do they struggle with silence and search for an authentic voice for their complex experience? Voice, Silence, and Self examines how the mechanisms of silence surrounding burakumin issues are reproduced and challenged in Japanese society. It explores the ways in which schools and social relationships shape people’s identity as burakumin within a “protective cocoon” where risk is minimized. Based on extensive ethnographic research and interviews, this longitudinal work explores the experience of burakumin youth from two different communities and with different social movement organizations. Christopher Bondy explores how individuals navigate their social world, demonstrating the ways in which people make conscious decisions about the disclosure of a stigmatized identity. This compelling study is relevant to scholars and students of Japan studies and beyond. It provides crucial examples for all those interested in issues of identity, social movements, stigma, and education in a comparative setting."
Modern Japanese share a myth to the effect that they harbor in their midst an inferior race less "human" than the stock that fathered their nation as a whole. These pariahs, numbering more than two million, are segregated by caste just as firmly as the Negro is in the United States. The present volume, to which several Japanese and American social scientists have contributed, offeres an interdisciplinary description and analysis of this strangely persistent phenomenon, inherited from feudal times. Its main thesis is that caste and racism are derivatives of identical psychological processes in human personality, however differently structure they may be in social institutions. It finds that what it terms status anxiety, related to defensively held social values, leads to a need to segregate disparaged parts of the population on grounds of innate inferiority. Until the time of their official emancipation in 1871, the so-called eta were distinguished visibly by their special garb. Today few clues to their identity are visible; yet, they remain a distinguishable, segregated segment of the population and bear inwardly, in a psychological sense, the stigma resulting from generations of oppression. This volume traces the story of the outcastes in complete detail--their origin, their stormy post-emancipation history, and their present leftist political significance. Large populations of outcasts live in urban ghettoes within the major cities of south-central Japan. In some of these metropolitan centers they comprise up to 5 percent of the population but contribute 60 to 65 percent of unemployment and relief roles. They have periodic trouble with the police; they manifest a delinquency rate more than three times that of the ordinary population; their children do poorly in school; they are subject to various forms of job discrimination; and few marriages are successfully consummated across the caste barrier. Some try to escape their past identity by becoming prostitutes or by entering the underworld. Those who survive discrimination to achieve status in society either live in fear of exposure [if they are "passing"] or overtly maintain their identity in proud isolation. Some who live in rural communities have achieved equal economic status with their neighbors but not full social acceptance. In their theoretical closing discussion the authors offer a challenging critique of Marxian class theory in introducing the concept of "expressive" exploitation--that is, the psychological use of a subordinate group as a repository of what is disavowed by the values of a culture in a caste society--as distinct in form and function from the "instrumental" economic or political exploitation of subjected minorities in class societies. Contributors:Gerald BerremanJohn B. CornellJohn DonoghueEdward NorbeckJohn PriceYuzuru SasakiGeorge O. Totten This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.
The River With No Bridge (Hashi no nai kawa) explores with outspoken frankness a subject still taboo in Japan: the intolerance and bigotry faced daily by Japan’s largest minority group, the burakumin. Racially no different from other Japanese, over the centuries burakumin have been cruelly ostracized for their association with occupations considered defiling. Spanning the years 1908 to 1924, the original six volumes of this novel trace the developing awareness of burakumin of their rights and dignity as human beings. Volume 1, translated into English for the first time in 1990, is a story about childhood in a burakumin village. It tells of young Koji Hatana’s questioning of the rigid social order and his growing sense of injustice as he meets prejudice from other children at school and from his teachers who try to instill in him their belief that since he was born defiled he should resign himself to his fate. Told against the backdrop of Japan’s struggle to shed its feudalistic past and enter the modern age, the novel is a courageous work and a compelling read.
Those who've heard T. R. Reid's weekly commentary on National Public Radio or read his far-flung reporting in National Geographic or The Washington Post know him to be trenchant, funny, and cutting-edge, but also erudite and deeply grounded in whatever subject he's discussing. In Confucius Lives Next Door he brings all these attributes to the fore as he examines why Japan, China, Taiwan, and other East Asian countries enjoy the low crime rates, stable families, excellent education, and civil harmony that remain so elusive in the West. Reid, who has spent twenty-five years studying Asia and was for five years The Washington Post's Tokyo bureau chief, uses his family's experience overseas--including mishaps and misapprehensions--to look at Asia's "social miracle" and its origin in the ethical values outlined by the Chinese sage Confucius 2,500 years ago. When Reid, his wife, and their three children moved from America to Japan, the family quickly became accustomed to the surface differences between the two countries. In Japan, streets don't have names, pizza comes with seaweed sprinkled on top, and businesswomen in designer suits and Ferragamo shoes go home to small concrete houses whose washing machines are outdoors because there's no room inside. But over time Reid came to appreciate the deep cultural differences, helped largely by his courtly white-haired neighbor Mr. Matsuda, who personified ancient Confucian values that are still dominant in Japan. Respect, responsibility, hard work--these and other principles are evident in Reid's witty, perfectly captured portraits, from that of the school his young daughters attend, in which the students maintain order and scrub the floors, to his depiction of the corporate ceremony that welcomes new employees and reinforces group unity. And Reid also examines the drawbacks of living in such a society, such as the ostracism of those who don't fit in and the acceptance of routine political bribery. Much Western ink has been spilled trying to figure out the East, but few journalists approach the subject with T. R. Reid's familiarity and insight. Not until we understand the differences between Eastern and Western perceptions of what constitutes success and personal happiness will we be able to engage successfully, politically and economically, with those whose moral center is governed by Confucian doctrine. Fascinating and immensely readable, Confucius Lives Next Door prods us to think about what lessons we might profitably take from the "Asian Way"--and what parts of it we want to avoid.
This book locates the development of Dōwa policy projects within their historical and political context, offering examples of human rights protection in a non-Western society. Charting Dōwa policy from its origins in the pre-war period to its revival after 1945 up to the turn of the 21st century, chapters in this study provide a social and historical review supplemented by detailed analyses of policy process and implementation at both national and local levels. No previous publication on the ‘Buraku Problem’ has focused on the direct impact of Dōwa policy in overcoming prejudice and economic inequalities. Topics covered range from left-wing Buraku Liberation League demands in the late 1950s, the Special Measures Law for Dōwa Policy Projects (SML) in the 1960s, and the evolution of a human rights based Dōwa policy into the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Through its evaluation of the relative successes and failures to improve local infrastructure and opportunities for marginal communities, this book invites comparative analysis with policies in other Asian and Western polities which seek to mitigate descent-based and racial discrimination. Dōwa Policy and Japanese Politics will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of international relations, human rights, politics, and Japanese studies.
The recent manifestation of exclusionism in Japan has emerged at a time of intensified neoliberal economic policies, increased cross-border migration brought on by globalization, the elevated threat of global terrorism, heightened tensions between East Asian states over historical and territorial conflicts, and a backlash by Japanese conservatives over perceived historical apologism. The social and political environment for minorities in Japan has shifted drastically since the 1990s, yet many studies of Japan still tend to view Japan through the dominant discourses of “ethnic homogeneity (tanitsu minzoku shakai)” and “middle-class society (so ̄churyu ̄-shakai)” which positions the exclusion of minorities as an exceptional phenomenon. While exclusionism has been recognized as a serious threat to minority groups, it has not often been considered a representative issue for the whole of Japanese society. This tendency will persist until the discourses of tanitsu minzoku shakai and so ̄churyu ̄-shakai are systematically debunked and Japan is widely recognized as both multiethnic and socio-economically stratified. Today, as with most advanced capitalist countries, serious social divides occasioned by the impacts of globalization and neoliberalism have destabilized Japanese society. This book explores not only how Japanese society is diversified and unequal, but also how diversity and inequality have caused people to divide into separate realities from which conflict and violence have emerged. It empirically examines the current situation while considering the historical development of exclusionism from the interdisciplinary viewpoints of history, policy studies, cultural studies, sociology and cultural anthropology. In addition to analyzing the realities of division and exclusionism, the authors propose theoretical alternatives to overcome such cultural and social divides.
Japan remains one of the most intriguing yet least understood nations. In a much needed, balanced and comprehensive analysis, among other remarkable revelations, this book presents for the first time a vital key to understanding the organisation of Japan's society and the behaviour of its people. The Japanese are not driven by a universal morality based on Good and Evil, but by broad aesthetic concepts based on Pure and Impure. What they include as 'impure' will surprise many readers.