The buraku in modern Japanese literature: Texts and contexts

Journal of Japanese Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-39

  Fowler, Edward ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0038247528     PISSN: 00956848     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/133390     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. In Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 35-36.
2. Hijikata Tetsu, "Prologue," Kaihō bungaku no dojō: buraku sabetsu to hyōgen (Akashi Shoten, 1987), p. 21. (All works in Japanese published in Tokyo unless otherwise noted.)
3. More formally, hisabetsu burakumin. For the sake of convenience but at the same time following accepted practice, I use the abbreviated term. The history of naming the highly diverse groups of people presently subsumed under the modern category "burakumin" is a complex one. Eta and hinin are only the two most common in a long list of terms used in the premodern period. After the Meiji Restoration and well into the twentieth century, shinheimin, tokushu burakumin/tokushumin, and mikaihō burakumin were all used but fell out of favor because of the prejudicial nuances embedded in their very names. See the entry "Buraku no koshō" in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., Buraku mondai jiten (hereafter, BMJ) (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1986), p. 791. The Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo or Buraku Liberation Research Institute (BLRI; changed in 1998 to Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute, or BLHRRI) is the research wing of the Buraku Liberation League.
4. In this essay I use "buraku" in the singular as a stand-in for all the hisabetsu buraku known to exist in Japan, largely, but far from wholly, in the country's western and southern prefectures: some three or four thousand by the government's count (exclusive of several prefectures); six thousand by the count of the buraku itself, as represented by the Suiheisha (more formally, Zenkoku Suiheisha, or National Levelers Association; founded 1922), and its post-war reincarnation, the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaihō Dōmei; hereafter, BLL). This usage is not without negative ramifications: it underscores the difference between marginalized communities and majority society while suppressing differences between various buraku. I follow accepted practice and employ the term provisionally for the sake of convenience here nonetheless, and note that Hijikata has done likewise in his own remarks cited above. The problematic of the monolithic buraku does, however, need to be taken into account - to wit, in the efforts, with varying degrees of success, of the Kansai-based Suiheisha, and later the BLL, to appeal to a national constituency. On the diversity of - and within - the buraku, see, for example, Watanabe Toshio, "Burakushi no tenkan," Gendai shisō, Vol. 27 (February 1999), pp. 32-51, esp. pp. 39-41.
5. Hijikata, Kaihō bungaku no dojō, p. 16.
6. Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 807.
7. David Levering Lewis, in his introduction to The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, which he edited (New York: Viking, 1994), comments on this efflorescence. "Because so little fiction or poetry had been produced by African Americans in the years immediately prior to the Harlem Renaissance, the appearance of a dozen or more poets and novelists and essayists seemed all the more striking and improbable" (p. xvii). (Leon Coleman does note, however, the existence of 30 novels by 20 different black authors by 1920, the eve of the Harlem Renaissance.
8. See his Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Critical Assessment [New York: Garland, 1998], p. 18).
9. Thirteen writers are listed in the table of contents of Harold Bloom, ed., Black American Prose Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994).
10. Turning from quantity to quality, Leon Coleman makes the following assessment: "Prior to the Twenties, the black artist had been considered as something of an oddity, as an interesting exception to his race, who could not be judged by the ordinary criteria of excellence. At the end of the decade, white audiences were becoming accustomed to the works of Negroes in drama, in literature, and in music, and black artists were beginning to be measured by the same critical standards that were applied to white artists" (Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, p. 156).
11. Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu" (Ōta Shuppan, 1994), p. 81.
12. Literary production clearly was not the focus of burakumin activists during this period. An editor of Senmin ("Chosen people"; a homonym of "despised people," i.e., the premodern term for outcaste groups) put it succinctly in response to a letter asking why the magazine did not publish literature: "We have no time for that now" (Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu" ibid., p. 82).
13. Watanabe does not touch on the issue of literacy, but does quote Kimura Ki, a mainstream critic sympathetic to the Suiheisha, who writes in 1926: "From my own perspective, I would oppose any effort by those without the skills or training simply to dash off fiction" (Watanabe Naomi, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu" ibid., p. 81).
14. For a fuller exposition of Kimura's critical essay, which originally appeared in the pages of the literary magazine Shinchō,
15. see the very useful two-volume history of buraku-related literature by Umezawa Toshihiko, Hirano Hidehisa, and Yamagishi Takashi, entitled Bungaku no naka no hisabetsu buraku zō (hereafter, Hisabetsu buraku zō) (Akashi Shoten, 1980, 1982), Vol. 1, pp. 204-7.
16. Quoted from a press release by Stone Bridge Press, posted on the Internet through "H-Japan" on March 5, 1999. The short story collection is Eve Zimmerman, trans., The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1999).
17. In addition to being the subject of several books in Japanese (see, for example, Yomota Inuhiko, Kishu to tensei: Nakagami Kenji [Shinchōsha, 1996],
18. and Watanabe Naomi, Nakagami Kenji ran [Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1996]),
19. Nakagami is already the subject of numerous critical studies in English, among them: a special issue in Japan Forum (Vol. 8, No. 1 [March 1996]), edited by Mark Morris;
20. Alan Tansman, "History, Repetition, and Freedom in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 1998), pp. 257-88;
21. and Nina Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 155-225.
22. On Nakagami's rapid canonization, see Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, pp. 205-8.
23. Those interests can perhaps be characterized as celebration, denunciation, and economic mainstreaming: i.e., taking pride in the positive aspects of burakumin life and affirming the cultural heritage; denouncing examples of individual and institutional discrimination; and lobbying for improved livelihood on the fronts of housing, education, and infrastructure.
24. Ichinose Naoyuki, Kitagawa Tetsuo, and Hokujō Saijirō, eds., Buraku mondai bungei sakuhin senshū (hereafter abbreviated as Senshū) (Sekai Bunko, 1973-80).
25. (Kitagawa Tetsuo, in his commentary to the first volume, notes as well the paucity of critical works that specifically address the buraku question in Hakai and other literary texts in which the buraku figures centrally Buraku mondai bungei sakuhin senshū [ibid., Vol. 1, p. 168]).
26. The choice of authors mentioned here is, of course, an arbitrary one, if only because notions of the canon are far from stable. My list is guided by the prominence each author holds in standard literary histories and/or recent critical discussions, and the existence, in nearly every case, of a "collected works" (zenshū or chosakushū).
27. There is an English translation, long out of print, of one work by Noma (Zone of Emptiness [Shinkū chitai; Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1956])
28. and of Part One of Hashi no nai kawa by Sumii (The River with No Bridge [Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1990]), also out of print.
29. Noma Hiroshi's criticism of Hakai, which was appended to the first paperback reissue of the original edition, is even broader and more pointed than Hijikata's. Noma writes that despite its hallowed place as one of Japan's first successful examples of modern fiction, Hakai - and Meiji literature as a whole - should be subjected to a thoroughgoing critique from a contemporary perspective, because it has actually contributed to the pain and suffering of burakumin. "Kaisetsu," in Shimazaki Tōson, Hakai (Iwanami Bunko, 1973 [reprint of 1957 edition]), p. 347.
30. Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," p. 18.
31. See the foldout chart facing p. 32 in Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," ibid. Watanabe also includes a seventh, "miscellaneous" category.
32. See Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," ibid., ch. 1, esp. pp. 17-27.
33. For an informative analysis of the uses of illness in Hakai, see Michael K. Bourdaghs, "Shimazaki Tōson's Hakai and Its Bodies," in Helen Hardacre with Adam L. Kern, eds., New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 161-88.
34. (Another version is available under the title "The Disease of Nationalism, the Empire of Hygiene," positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 6, No. 3 [Winter 1998], pp. 637-73.) Other burakumin characters in Hakai, significantly, are marked by the usual distinguishing characteristics: Ōhinata and Rokuzaemon, for example, both noted for their wealth (Ōhinata is ill in the bargain); Rokuzaemon's beautiful daughter, offered up in marriage along with a fabulous dowry to an aspiring politician; and the burakumin men working at the slaughterhouse, distinguished only by their animal-like physical appearance.
35. See Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," pp. 27-28.
36. Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," Ibid., p. 28.
37. The quoted phrase is from Okamoto Wataru's 1921 work, Tokushu buraku no kaihō (Keiseisha Shoten, 1921).
38. Shimizu Shikin, "Imin gakuen," in Kozai Yoshishige, ed., Shikin zenshū (Sōdo Bunka, 1983), p. 221.
39. Hokkaido was by no means the only territorial objective of relocation. As Kenneth B. Pyle notes, members of one of Japan's first political parties argued for the establishment of an "Eta colony" in the Philippines in order to rid the mainland of the problem of prejudice (The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885-1895 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969], p. 158).
40. Tokutomi Roka shū, Vol. 17 of Itō Sei et al., eds., Nihon gendai bungaku zenshū [Kōdansha, rev. ed. 1980]), p. 102.
41. Omoide no ki is translated by Kenneth Strong as Footprints in the Snow (New York: Pegasus, 1970; see pp. 207-8). The passage above, as are all citations from the Japanese in this essay, is my own translation.
42. See Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," pp. 29-30.
43. The dark skin color alluded to in the above passage is another "marker" of difference in many texts. Tokuda Shūsei, in his "Yabu kōji" (1896), plays against convention when he describes the story's outcaste doctor-hero as so light-skinned as to make one believe that he was not an eta. The doctor is marked in another way, however, so as never to leave his identity in doubt - namely, by a birthmark below one ear.
44. (Okada Saburō et al., eds., Shūsei zenshū [Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 1989 reprint], Vol. 1, p. 273.) Shūsei's story also follows convention by marking the male character (here, the doctor) with a visible, physical deformity and the female character (the doctor's daughter) with an invisible but psychological (and ultimately more damaging) one - an obsession with her eta identity, which causes her to go mad - fitting, once again, the stereotype articulated by Watanabe. Tōson reverses this latter convention in Hakai when he applies the psychological marker of "dis-ease" to his male character, Ushimatsu.
45. Tokutomi Roka shū, p. 103.
46. (Strong, trans., Footprints in the Snow, pp. 208-9.)
47. The representational ideology in the above passages by Shikin and Roka is brought into bold relief through comparison with a postwar narrative: "Kanro" (Cold dew, 1946), by Ishikawa Jun (1899-1987). In this story, based on the author's own experience touring several buraku in western Japan in late 1945 as an observer for the Welfare Ministry, the narrator visits a "district" (chiku) in Shikoku accompanied by a man who, though himself a majority Japanese, lives in the buraku with his burakumin wife. The narrator's initial foray into the "street" of this buraku, with this quasi-insider as a guide, is revealing: We are now in the very middle of the district. There is no street, and nothing lines our route on either side. The spaces between houses are vacant, and there is no way of telling to which house the spaces belong. There are stables and sheds, spots for threshing the barley and for drying straw, wells and outhouses; the path that winds through them all is the "street." Any unknowledgeable soul who happened upon the place alone would easily become lost. . . . I see about me no young men of working age. Some would be in the fields, or in factories or in offices; most, however, are doubtless working as casual laborers. Work that can be done at home is the task of women and the elderly, it would appear. As for the children - although none is especially dirty, their sashes are sloppily tied, and some are bleary-eyed. "What about trachoma?" I ask. "Actually, there are far fewer cases than before." (Isikawa Jun zenshū, Vol. 2 [Chikuma Shobō, 1989], pp. 339-40.) Although several images in this citation recall those in the earlier passages, their function in the narrative is radically different. Here the outsider tries to make sense of his surroundings. Gone is the rhetorical urge to convert the images/figures into unknowable Others; in its place is the desire to establish logical connections between observed phenomena (streets devoid of young men, bleary-eyed children, etc.) and their root causes.
48. Shisen o koete and Taiyō iru mono were translated under the titles Before the Dawn (I. Fukumoto and T. Satchell, trans.; New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924)
49. and A Shooter at the Sun (T. Satchell, trans.; Kobe: Japan Chronicle Press, 1925), respectively.
50. Kudō Eiichi, "Kagawa Toyohiko to buraku mondai: Suiheisha to no sekkin to rihan," in Watanabe Tōru and Akisada Yoshikazu, eds., Suiheisha undō shiron (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1986), p. 126.
51. Included in Kagawa Zenshū Kankōkai, ed., Kagawa Toyohiko zenshū. Vol. 8 (Kirisuto Shinbunsha, 1962). Publication of the book ceased in 1922, the year of the Suiheisha's founding, after it had gone through nine printings.
52. See Kagawa Toyohiko zenshū. ibid., p. 136.
53. Kudō notes that Kagawa's use of terms such as tokushu buraku and tokushumin was prejudicial even by that time and at odds with the government policy, citing the Home Ministry's use of saimin buraku. See Kagawa Toyohiko zenshū. ibid., p. 131.
54. Quoted in Kagawa Toyohiko zenshū. ibid 131.
55. Kagawa's certainty about the origins of urban slums notwithstanding, the views put forth here were contested even by contemporaries. As early as 1899, Yokoyama Gennosuke, in his Nihon no kasō shakai (Kyōbunkan, 1899;
56. reprinted in Sumitani Mikio et al., eds., Yokoyama Gennosuke zenshū, Vol. 1 [Meiji Bunkan, 1972], pp. 1-339), emphasizes the role of mass migrations in the 1880s from rural areas into the cities - not so much by burakumin as by ordinary farmers and others formerly attached to the land - as a direct result of the central government's modernization policies, which depressed rice prices, favored urbanization, and centralized capital formation.
57. See Kobayashi Takehiro, "'Tokushu buraku' ninshiki ni okeru kōzō to shutai," Gendai shisō, Vol. 27 (February 1999), pp. 96-114, esp. pp. 99-100.
58. Kudō, "Kagawa Toyohiko to buraku mondai," pp. 132-33.
59. Kudō, "Kagawa Toyohiko to buraku mondai," Ibid., p. 133.
60. Kudō, "Kagawa Toyohiko to buraku mondai," Ibid. p. 133.
61. The overwhelming scholarly consensus in recent decades is that burakumin are in fact racially and ethnically no different from majority or "Yamato" Japanese. For a brief introduction to the subject, see the entry "Imin zoku kigen setsu" in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 23.
62. For a thoroughgoing discussion of what in the United States would be regarded as the racializing of difference vis-à-vis the outcastes by the Tokugawa authorities, see Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), ch. 5, "Status and State Racism: From Kawata to Eta," pp. 243-311.
63. The chapter's informing concept is encapsulated in the epigraph, by Etienne Balibar: "The animality of man, in man and against man (whence the systematic 'bestialization' of racialized individuals and human groups) is the particular method that theoretical racism adopts in thinking about human historicity." (Quoted from "Paradoxes of Universality," in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990], p. 283.)
64. Kitagawa Tetsuo, "Kaisetsu," in Ichinose et al., eds., Senshū, Vol. 1, p. 184.
65. The work of Amino Yoshihiko succeeds in clarifying the function, if not the origin, of various "outcaste" groups through informed rereadings of medieval Japanese history. See, for example, his Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu (Chikuma Purimā Bakkusu, 1991).
66. See also Saitō Yōichi, Mibun sabetsu shakai no shinjitsu (Kōdansha Gendai Shinsho 1258, 1995),
67. and Nagahara Keiji, "The Medieval Origins of the Eta-Hinin," Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 1979), pp. 385-403.
68. Monden Hideo stresses that theories about the specifically racial origins of burakumin are relatively recent, dating back only to the late Edo period in the nineteenth century. (Suiheisha sengen: shisō to sono jidai [Akashi Shoten, 1992], p. 43.)
69. Hatanaka Toshiyuki, "'Burakushi' no kansei: 'buraku mondai wa rekishi ni kiin suru' no ka," Genda ishisō, Vol. 27 (February 1999), pp. 52-62.
70. Hatanaka Toshiyuki, Genda ishisō, Ibid., p. 57.
71. Shimazaki Tōson, Hakai, in Senuma Shigeki and Yamada Akira, eds., Shimazaki Tōson shū, Vol. 13 of Nihon kinkai bungaku taikei (Kadokawa Shoten, 1971), p. 47.
72. The word "eta" (lit. "much filth" or "greatly polluted") is used liberally, in both the narrative and dialogue portions, even though the "eta" and other outcaste groups were incorporated into the Meiji state as shinheimin in 1871 following the Emancipation Proclamation, a full two decades before the novelistic present and 35 years before the writing of Hakai. Tōson later revised his narrative in deference to Suiheisha demands, eliminating numerous terms taken to be pejorative, including the word "eta." The novel was restored to its original wording with a reissue of the first edition in 1953. See Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 691.
73. See also Kawabata Toshifusa, "Hakai" to sono shūhen (Kyoto: Bunrikaku, 1984), pp. 209-30, for an extended account of Hakai's publication history.
74. There were at least 13 generations of eta leaders bearing the name of Danzaemon, from the early Edo period to the Meiji Restoration. See, for example, the family tree included at the end of the reference volume accompanying the trilogy of historical fiction based on the life of the last Danzaemon (a.k.a. Dan Naiki; a.k.a. Dan Naoki). Both works are by Shiomi Sen'ichiro; the trilogy is titled Asakusa Danzaemon (Hihyōsha, 1985-87);
75. the reference volume is entitled Shiryō Asakusa Danzaemon (Hihyōsha, 1988).
76. See Shiomi, Shiryō Asakusa Danzaemon, pp. 18-30.
77. Actually two similar affidavits (known as the Danzaemon yuisho) exist, one from 1719 and the other from 1725. This "family tree," almost certainly spurious, is but one of many examples of "official" (but equally spurious) pedigrees drawn up by artisans, tradespeople, and others not attached to the land in the medieval period, all claiming a link with an ultimate patron - typically the emperor in western Japan or the shogun in the east. See Akasaka Norio, Ijinron josetsu (Sunagoya Shobō, 1985), pp. 184-89, esp. 187-88.
78. Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (London: John Murray, 1905 [fifth edition revised]), p. 149.
79. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 273.
80. See the "Hisabetsu buraku no seiritsu densetsu" entry in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, pp. 710-11, which reviews legends connecting burakumin to the imperial line, domestic and foreign nobility, and to the warrior class.
81. See the "Imin zoku kigen setsu" and "Tokushu buraku" entries in BMJ, ibid., pp. 32 and 617.
82. It should be noted that James Murdoch, the Scottish historian, makes a similar argument early in the twentieth century in his A History of Japan, Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1910), challenging the received knowledge of Chamberlain and Hearn. "Some will have it that [the eta] were of Korean extraction. In the old records we have met with nothing that lends any support to this supposition. Koreans of gentle birth were invariably treated as gentle-folk in Japan; while their plebeian countrymen, so far from being discriminated against, were accorded immunities and privileges which must have made their condition a subject of envy to the native tillers of the soil and the native craftsman and trader. Their position in the country of their adoption was emphatically an honourable one, - honourable not only to themselves, but to Japan and the Japanese" (p. 183).
83. As Hilary Conroy puts it: "The Japan that annexed Korea [in 1910] cannot be judged to have been giving expression to a deep-seated historical urge." The Japanese Seizure of Korea: 1869-1910 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), p. 4.
84. See the "Tokushu buraku" entry in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 617.
85. According to Kobayashi Takehiro, the term tokushu buraku was in existence as early as the turn of the century but did not come into common use until after the Russo-Japanese War. See Kobayashi, "'Tokushu buraku' ninshiki ni okeru kōzō to shutai," p. 108.
86. "Tokushu buraku can be thought of as a new form of pejorative expression with racist connotations that made its appearance at a time when Japan acquired Korea" (p. 110).
87. See the "Zainichi Chōsenjin sabetsu" entry in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 287.
88. Many Japanese, of course, participated in a reverse migration to Korea (and later to Manchuria and other places where Japan had established hegemony or outright colonial rule) to seek their fortunes abroad, or perhaps, in the case of groups such as burakumin, to escape their domestic circumstances. Thus in Iwano Hōmei's "Buraku no musume" (1919), another story set in the Kyoto buraku of Yanagihara, the brother of Takako, born, as was she, to a burakumin father, "left home, she recalls, and fled to Korea, where he works in a shoe shop."
89. (Kōno Toshirō et al., eds., Iwano Hōmei zenshū. Vol. 5 [Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 1994], p. 111.)
90. An example of this demonizing is to be found in "Taishō jūninen made" (date unknown; probably 1924), by Masaki Fujokyū (1887-1962). In it, a doctor who has retired from his position as Tokyo University Medical School surgeon to open a free clinic in a Fukagawa buraku (in the face of opposition by the Doctors' Association) is prompted by the general panic and vicious rumors circulating after the earthquake to become enraged at a group of Koreans he encounters on the street and joins in a mob assault on them, murdering the lot. See Ichinose et al., eds., Senshū, Vol. 40, pp. 119-213.
91. See also the commentary by Watanabe Kimio, in his instructive and thoroughly researched Kindai bungaku to hisabetsu buraku (Akashi Shoten, 1993).
92. The reign of government-inspired anti-Zainichi terrorism after the earthquake, Watanabe notes, was largely in response to the broadly supported independence movement in Korea against Japanese colonial rule, which began on March 1, 1919, and was a driving force in raising national consciousness (pp. 391-94). On the March First Movement, see Carter J. Eckert et al., Korea, Old and New: A History (Seoul: Ilchokak, for the Korea Institute, Harvard University, 1990), pp. 276-81.
93. Mikiso Hane, for example, documents the mutual support of burakumin and Koreans working in the Kyushu mines (Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan [New York: Pantheon, 1982], pp. 241-42).
94. believe, however, that these were in fact exceptions, enabled only by peculiar circumstances, that prove the rule of animosity by the socially and economically underprivileged in Japan toward Koreans, which was fomented at every turn by the government. See Watanabe, Kindai bungaku to hisabetsu buraku, pp. 394-95.
95. The social historian Kawa Meisei, referring to Zainichi and burakumin in postwar Kyoto, remarks in an interview: "Both groups avoided outright disputes, but they did look down on each other, I believe. Some may have expressed solidarity, but they were in the minority." ("Hisabetsu burakumin to Zainichi Kanjin: shakai keizaishi-teki shiten," Gendai shisō, Vol. 27 [February 1999], p. 150. )
96. This paragraph is based on data provided by Kawa Meisei in Gendai shisō, ibid., pp. 134-52.
97. Buraku Kaihō Zenkoku Iinkai, renamed Buraku Kaihō Dōmei (BLL) in 1955.
98. Partly through coercion, partly through conscious choice, the Suiheisha abandoned its socialist worldview of the 1920s and early 1930s and eventually supported the state's aggression on the Asian continent. It disbanded in 1942. See Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-war Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), esp. ch. 8: "Suiheisha, Yūwa and the War," pp. 190-216.
99. Ōru romansu does not have an entry in the serials volume of the Nihon kindai bungaku daijiten (Kōdansha, 1976), the standard encyclopedia of modern literature, and the issue in question is extremely difficult to come by.
100. use the text as reprinted in Shiryō hohen, Vol. 9 of Kyōto Burakushi Kenkyūjo, ed., Kyōto no burakushi (Kyoto: Kyōto Burakushi Kenkyūjo, 1997), pp. 559-81. Page citations hereafter made in the body of this essay.
101. See the "Ōru romansu tōsō" entry in Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, p. 73.
102. Iwano Hōmei, "Buraku no musume," in Kōno et al., eds., Owani Hōmei zenshū, Vol. 5.
103. Sugiyama's real name was Sugiyama Seiji. It is curious that his pen name merely transforms his given name from "second-born" to "first-born."
104. The citations are quoted from the denunciation statement, anthologized in Kyōto Burakushi Kenkyūjo, ed., Kyōto no burakushi, Vol. 9, pp. 537-58; here, pp. 539-40.
105. Kyōto no burakushi, Ibid., p. 540.
106. See "Kome sōdō to buraku mondai," in Buraku Kaihōshi Kenkyūjo, ed., Buraku kaihōshi: netsu to hikari o, Vol. 2 (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1989), pp. 159-69, esp. p. 161.
107. The extent of buraku involvement nationwide in the Rice Riots (not to mention its being targeted for suppression) is indicated in the following statistic: burakumin account for fully ten per cent of those arrested and punished for their participation, even though they comprise only two per cent of the overall population (p. 165). For a more extensive account, see "Kome sōdō to Kyōto no buraku," in Kyoto Burakushi Kenkyūjo, ed., Kyōto no burakushi. Vol. 2 (Kyoto, 1991), pp. 130-66.
108. Kyōto Burakushi Kenkyūjo, ed., Kyoto no burakushi, Vol. 2, pp. 397-99.
109. Kōichi was born to a Korean father and Japanese mother but identifies himself as Korean.
110. See Kim Ch'ong-mi, Suihei undōshi (Gendai Kikaku Shitsu, 1996), especially the section entitled "'Ōru romansu tōsō' ni tsuite," pp. 543-84.
111. Suihei undōshi Ibid., p. 549. Kim also notes (p. 547) that leaflets that the BLKC distributed in January 1952 summarizing the story and calling for the "happiness and prosperity of Japan's three million burakumin," made no mention whatsoever of the Koreans depicted in "Tokushu buraku."
112. Suihei undōshi Ibid., p. 551.
113. Kawa Meisei corroborates Kim's argument with the story he heard of a Korean family after the war living in a Kyoto buraku that, contrary to expectations, was denied admittance into a municipal housing project for burakumin. ("Hisabetsu burakumin to Zainichi Kanjin," p. 152.)
114. Kim, Suihei undōshi, p. 552.
115. Kim goes on to classify and summarize some 75 critical texts - articles, memoirs, and commentaries - dealing with the "All Romance Incident." She finds none that treats the incident as fundamentally a problem of discrimination against Koreans, and only a handful that even mention the issue with any specificity (pp. 554-69).
116. Sodachiyuku zassō appears in Ichinose et al., eds., Senshū, Vols. 27-28. Sakaichi (1919- ), along with Saikō Mankichi, is one of the few burakumin writers anthologized in Senshū.
117. Kim Tal-su [Kin Tatsuju] shōsetsu zenshū (Chikuma Shobō, 1980), Vol. 2, p. 32. Further citations made in the body of text.
118. The significance of this photographic juxtaposition of soldiers in the imperial army and the author of Hakai, a narrative deeply implicated in the problematic of the modern state, is amply demonstrated in James Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 76-102.
119. Hata: kawata: Kim also makes use of an aural pun in naming the sister of Iwamura Senko, a 28-year-old school teacher who "does not want to marry if it is with a so-called 'burakumin' (and who reportedly detests her name)" (p. 19).
120. The following remarks, addressed to the National Diet in 1940, by Matsumoto Jiichirō, longtime leader of the Suiheisha (and later the BLL), reveal his organization's collusion with the state in the cause of Japanese imperialism, even as it assumes the high road in its battle against discrimination. The mentality that would humiliate the hisabetsu buraku is of the same oppressive spirit that humiliates the people of China and the people of Korea. I must go on record here and say that it is precisely this discriminatory mentality that violates the founding spirit of the family of nations [hakkō ichiu], disturbs our own nation - both the sovereign and his myriad subjects - and opposes the polity. If we cannot resolve the problem of conciliation [yūwa] in our own country, how can we hope for cooperation among the races [minzoku]? Without cooperation among the races, where shall we find a truly new order in East Asia? I cannot but cry out that resolution of this problem must be the first step in the building of a new East Asian order. (Quoted in Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," p. 100; emphasis added.)
121. Hiemono, in Oda Makoto, Shibata Shō shū, Vol. 89 of Chikuma gendai bungaku taikei [Chikuma Shobō, 1979]), p. 31. Citations hereafter made in body of text. Yottsu is a highly derogatory term for a burakumin, derived from the perception of an eta having four legs, like an animal, and signified by a hand gesture that shows four outstretched fingers with the thumb bent in.
122. See Watanabe Kimio's discussion of this passage, and of Oda's own probable intent, in Kindai bungaku to hisabetsu buraku, p. 419.
123. Hijikata Tetsu, "Hiemono e no watakushi no hihan," in Oda Makoto, Shibata Shō shu, pp. 467-74. Further citations in body of text. Hijikata's critique is not to be confused with a formal denunciation by the BLL, with which Hijikata has long been associated. A group within the burakumin community - unauthorized by the BLL - did attack the Tokyo headquarters of Beheiren (a peace-advocacy group active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which Oda helped found), but Hijikata distances himself from this violent act (pp. 467-68).
124. Hirano Hidehisa, author of the chapter in Umezawa et al., Hisabetsu buraku zō covering Oda and Takahashi Kazumi and himself a burakumin, offers a more favorable assessment - calling Hiemono an indispensable text for thinking about discrimination - as does Kawamoto Shōichi, another burakumin writer whom Hirano cites.
125. See Umezawa et al., Hisabetsu buraku zō, Vol. 2, pp. 136, 139.
126. By "orthodox," I mean acceptable to the BLL. Hijikata, as editor-in-chief of Kaihō shinbun, the BLL's official organ, and as an editor of and contributor to Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, ed., BMJ, has played a central role in shaping this orthodoxy. Nakagami, meanwhile, who frequently criticized the BLL for letting its claim to orthodoxy tend toward censorship, was evaluated somewhat skeptically by Hijikata, who writes, after the former's death: "Nakagami . . . rather than break down the wall of prejudice [in his work], chose instead to leapfrog over it. The big question, however, is whether he was in fact able to do so."
127. (Quoted in Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," p. 137. Watanabe, however, goes on to disagree with Hijikata's assessment.)
128. See Hijikata, Kaihō bungaku no dojō, pp. 3-25.
129. An essay with critical readings of several buraku-related texts is included in this book ("Shōsetsu ni miru buraku sabetsu no hyōgen," pp. 29-56),
130. as well as in the earlier Sabetsu e no gyōshi (Sōjusha, 1975), pp. 236-64.
131. See also his autobiographical Buraku: aru kutsu shokunin no shiten (Shakai Shinpō, 1969).
132. Hijikata, Kaihō bungaku no dojō, pp. 19-20.
133. In an interview published in Gendai shisō, Kawa Meisei comments on this deflecting of prejudice and on the sheer delight of engaging in discrimination. "Burakumin and Koreans - not to mention their Japanese supporters - have said, 'Prejudice is wrong!' and 'Do away with discrimination!' But I believe that both groups - at least some members of them - have in fact discriminated against each other. Discrimination is a pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone. Perhaps nothing feels as good as the act of shifting the prejudice aimed at oneself onto others." ("Hisabetsu burakumin to Zainichi Kanjin," p. 152.)
134. Hijikata, "Hiemono e no watakushi no hihan," pp. 470, 473.
135. "Aru tegami," in Oda Makoto, Shibata Shō shū, pp. 432-67. Citations hereafter made in body of text.
136. Watanabe, Nihon kindai bungaku to "sabetsu," p. 195.
137. "If discrimination in Japan is a naturally Japanese product, then the structure of Japanese fiction and Japanese culture must be identical to the structure of discrimination." Quoted from Kishū: ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari, Vol. 14 of Karatani Kōjin et al., eds., Nakagami Kenji zenshū (Shūeisha, 1996), p. 486.
138. Hijikata, Chikakei, in Hijikata Tetsu, Haha no yami (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1990), pp. 105-6.
139. The opening passage's allusion to the weighty cadences of the Suiheisha Declaration (1922) should not go unnoticed: "As a reward for skinning the hides of animals, [our ancestors] have themselves been skinned alive. For tearing out the hearts of animals, they have had their own warm hearts ripped out and the spittle of scorn sprayed in their faces." (Quoted in Komatsu Katsumi, ed., Buraku mondai tokuhon [Akashi Shoten, 1994]), p. 151.
140. In addition to his works Asakusa Danzaemon and Shiryō Asakusa Danzaemon, Shiomi is also author of a fictional biography of Saikō Mankichi, entitled Saikō Mankichi no roman (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1996).
141. My interest in reviewing the literature as a whole, rather than valorizing the achievement of a particular writer, has taken its cue in part from the work of Kawamura Minato in an admittedly different yet not entirely unrelated context: namely, colonial literature, i.e., the writings of Japanese authors based on their experiences in Korea, Manchuria, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in the Japanese empire. "I believe that colonial literature must be studied, because if no one clearly establishes that it was indeed a part of modern Japanese literature, it will simply vanish, as if it had never existed; there is a mentality in place that will make it possible for people to believe, come 50 or 100 years from now, that there was 'no such thing' as colonial literature. While it is true that there are few if any masterpieces in this literature, the value lies in what writers of the period thought, both as individuals and from the standpoint of literary history." Kawamura, Nan'yō, Karafuto no Nihon bungaku (Chikuma Shobō, 1994), p. 16.
142. Noma Hiroshi, Seinen no wa. Vol. 1 (Kawade Shobō, 1971), pp. 350-51.