Burakumin at the end of history - history of social class in Japan

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Ian Neary

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 research really only began after 1945 and was influenced by the terms of this debate. Marxist intellectuals--nearly all historians, and certainly all those interested in the buraku issue--had to take a stand on whether discrimination and prejudice derived from remnants of feudal society that were untouched by the incomplete revolution of 1868 and thereafter, or whether they were essentially new social phenomena that directly served the interests of Japanese monopoly capitalism.