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

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Ian Neary

Okiura discusses the beginning of academic research on buraku issues in the 1940s and several key publications in the 1950s, the most important of which was "Buraku no Rekishi to Kaiho Undo'(Buraku History and the Liberation Movement) (Buraku Mondai Kenkyujo, 1955). Okiura notes that this marked a major advance over anything previously published:

* it was premised on the idea that just as Japanese history cannot be understood without reference to the emperor, neither can it be understood without reference to the pariah class;

* it traced the existence of a pariah class from the earliest period of recorded Japanese history--the seventh and eighth centuries to the early modern period, and discussed for the first time a discriminated class in the Middle Ages; (1)

* it noted the existence of research on various pariah groups in different parts of Japan;

* it focused on those groups that produced leather, noted the variety of names used for them, and, for the first time, also noted the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that led to the systematization of the early-modern outcast system;

* although unable to overcome the rough and ready class notions of prewar historical materialism, it problematized the notions of "class" and "status" for the first time in terms of the development of the productive forces and the social division of labor;

* it used archive data for the first time to demonstrate the systematization of discrimination in the period from 1688 to 1735 and the resistance of the discriminated to the restrictions on their liberty.

It did not, however:

* compare the early origins of the buraku issue to the broader issues of the development of status systems in Asia;

* provide adequate analysis of the religious ideology/ideologies that supported the status systems;

* consider the change between earliest times and the Middle Ages in the ideas of pollution on which discrimination was based;

* investigate the social structures within which discrimination occurred in the ancient Middle Ages-early modern periods or consider the key turning points;

* elaborate regional differences (Okiura, 2000: 26-9).

During this first period it was suggested that, although socioeconomic status structures changed from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, there was some, possibly substantial, continuity of outcast lineage. However, Harada Toshihiko in the mid1950s suggested that the main elements of buraku discrimination in the early modern period could not be traced back to earlier eras. The legal formation of the outcast system was created in the late seventeenth century. Others (for example, Arashiro Moriaki) regarded discriminatory attitudes toward slaves of various kinds in the ancient period as a template for later attitudes and institutions (although the systematization of discrimination did not take place until after 1640, with the launch of the seclusion policy (Okiura, 2000: 132).

From the mid- to late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the horizons of historians expanded to include comparisons of aspects of Japan's history with that of other Asian countries. At the same time, new approaches to historical method were introduced, including perspectives derived from Gramscian notions of hegemony; structuralism; Foucault's earlier work; and the Annalist methodology that focused on the details of historical development. In buraku history, the formation and development of pariah groups in the Middle Ages attracted particular attention. Kuroda Toshio, in two seminal articles from 1972 and 1975 (Kuroda, 1972, 1975), argued that hinin at this time were quite distinct from similar groups that appeared both before and after: