On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan 0674066685, 9780674066687

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On the Margins of Empire

Harvard East Asian Monographs 349

On the Margins of Empire Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan

Jeffrey Paul Bayliss

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center and distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2013

© 2013 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College

Printed in the United States of America

The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of Japa nese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bayliss, Jeff rey Paul, 1965– On the margins of empire : Buraku and Korean identity in prewar and wartime Japan / Jeff rey Paul Bayliss. pages cm. – (Harvard Aast Asian monographs ; 349) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Provides new insights into the majority prejudices, social and political movements, and state policies that influenced the perceived positions of Koreans and Burakumin as “others” on the margins of the Japanese empire and also the minorities’ views of themselves, their place in the nation, and the often strained relations between the two groups”–Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-0-674-06668-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Minorities–Japan–History–20th century. 2. Discrimination–Japan–History–20th century. 3. Buraku people–Japan–History–20th century. 4. Koreans–Japan–History–20th century. 5. Japan–Social conditions–20th century. I. Title. DS830.B39 2013 305.5'68095209041—dc23 2012050265 Index by Eileen Doherty-Sil Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

Acknowledgments

Research and writing require not only time and effort on the part of the individual whose name eventually goes on the cover, but also help, support, and inspiration from many, many others whom the author is fortunate enough to meet in the process. One corollary to this observation is that the longer it takes to produce a manuscript, the more people its author becomes indebted to. This book is a case in point, and it is now high time for me to give proper thanks to all those who made it a better work, as well as those who helped to keep me on track and safe from utter discouragement throughout the ordeal. Any faults and shortcomings that remain in spite of their efforts are entirely my own. This book began as a dissertation in Japanese history at Harvard University. I wish to thank first and foremost Andrew Gordon, who as my graduate school adviser kindly shepherded me through the process of turning a vague idea into a manageable research project with the patience of a saint at every turn, in spite of my false starts and lengthy detours along the way. I was also fortunate enough to meet Matsuzawa Hiroaki early on in my graduate days, during a year he spent as a visiting professor at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Matsuzawasensei had an uncanny knack for dismantling my most cherished misconceptions about Japanese history in the kindest and most encouraging way imaginable. I thank him for the hours he spent reading this work in its various iterations, and the time he generously gave me beyond that to discuss it. While at Harvard, I also had the great good fortune to learn about Korea from Carter Eckert over a series of courses and seminars,

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Acknowledgments

and benefited enormously from his insightful comments on the dissertation. I am likewise deeply indebted to Albert Craig and the late Harold Bolitho, who read portions of the work that first took shape as seminar papers early in my graduate school career, and let me know in no uncertain terms when they expected better and why. What came to be a lengthy stint in Japan for research was initially made possible by a Fulbright IIE fellowship during 1998– 99. As a research student at Hitotsubashi University during that time, I was lucky enough to join the zemi of Nishinarita Yutaka and Mori Takemaro. Their help in making contacts with other researchers in Japan and gaining access to important archives proved to be instrumental in facilitating the early fieldwork on this project. I also must thank the graduate student members of Nishinarita-Mori zemi, who took me in as one of their own from the first day. A special thanks goes out to one of them in particular, Hur Kwangmu, who just happened to be working on a dissertation on the treatment of Koreans under welfare policies in prewar Japan while I was at Hitotsubashi. I learned a great deal from this senpai, who was never reluctant to share his materials and insights with me. While at Hitotsubashi, and again during a subsequent stay in Japan, many scholars of both of the minority groups explored in this study were extremely generous with their time, materials, insights, and friendship. On the buraku side, I wish to thank Kurokawa Midori, Sekiguchi Hiroshi, and Tomotsune Tsutomu for being such kind and capable mentors, colleagues, and comrades over the years. Fukuoka Yasunori, whose work encompasses both minorities, introduced me to many individuals in both communities from his own fieldwork, and gave me opportunities to present portions of my work to some of his own students and colleagues working on problems of discrimination in contemporary Japan. On the Korean side, special thanks are due to Higuchi Yūichi, along with the other members of the Zainichi Chōsenjin Undōshi Kenkyūkai, Kanto chapter, for their expert help in locating sources and their rigorous critiques of some of my early ideas. I also owe much to Mizuno Naoki of Kyoto University, for making his database of pre-1945 newspaper articles on Koreans in Japan available to researchers like me free of charge; I would not have found many of the sources used in this study without it. Research institutes and archives proved indispensable in the pursuit of this project, and I have become indebted to the staffs of many over the

Acknowledgments

vii

years. To list all of them would take up far too much space, but among them certain places and people stand out for their gracious support: in Kobe, the Hyogo Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (Hyōgo buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo); in Kyoto, the Bank of Yanagihara Memorial Museum (Yanagihara ginkō kinen shiryōkan) and the Kyoto Center for Buraku Research Materials (Kyōto buraku mondai kenkyū shiryō sentā); in Osaka, the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute (Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo), with special thanks to Nakamura Seiji of the same; and in Tokyo, the Ohara Institute for Social Research (Ōhara shakai mondai kenkyūjo) at Hosei University, and the Institute for Asian Cultural Studies (Ajia bunka kenkyūjo) at International Christian University. I owe William Steele and Kenneth Robinson, both former directors of the IACS, a particularly large debt of gratitude for making the resources of the institute available to me over the years, across many trips to Japan. To those who generously paid the bills for all of this work: in addition to the earlier-mentioned Fulbright IIE fellowship, I was also the beneficiary of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies during 2003–2004, and a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Nippon gakujutsu shinkōkai) during 2007–2008. Some parts of this manuscript have appeared previously as journal articles. Portions of Chapters 3 and 6 are revised from Jeffrey P. Bayliss, “Minority Success, Assimilation, and Identity in Prewar Japan: Pak Chunggm and the Korean Middle Class,” Journal of Japanese Studies 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008). I wish to thank managing editor Martha Walsh for permission to publish these portions in the present work and express my gratitude to her and then co-editors of the journal Marie Archordoguy and John Treat for their painstaking help in improving the original article. Portions of Chapter 7 are likewise adapted from my article in the March 2001 edition of Asian Cultural Studies, entitled “Grass-Roots ‘Multiculturalism’: Korean-Burakumin Interrelations in One Community.” I would like to thank again the staff of the Institute for Asian Cultural Studies at International Christian University for their help in publishing this article. Many people who read or listened to me present portions of the manuscript at various stages in its evolution offered invaluable advice

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and intellectual stimulation that made it a better work in the long run. I would like to thank David Howell of Harvard and Dani Botsman of Yale for their insightful comments on the manuscript at its early and mid-developmental stages, respectively. William Hammell at the Harvard University Asia Center and manuscript editor Julie Carlson both deserve high praise for making the manuscript better than it was when I first submitted it, as do the two anonymous readers whom the Asia Center selected to review it. At Trinity, I have been blessed with brilliant colleagues who gave me plenty to think about in regard to my work on this topic, through engaging conversations and suggested readings from their own areas of expertise. In my own department of history, I wish to thank Zayde Antrim, Jack Chatfield, Sean Cocco, Jonathan Elukin, Dario Euraque, Luis Figueroa, Scott Gac, Cheryl Greenberg, Joan Hedrick, Sam Kassow, Kathleen Kete, Gene Leach, Michael Lestz, Seth Markle, Lou Masur, Susan Pennybacker, and Gary Reger. Of those outside of my department, I would like to particularly thank David Cruz-Uribe, Pablo Delano, Vijay Prashad, Maurice Wade, and Rieko Wagoner for sharing their thoughts on my work and their friendship. All of the Trinity students who have taken my “Living on the Margins of Modern Japan” course to date and so were forced to read most of the manuscript also deserve praise for their patience and penetrating questions on the text that helped me to make it clearer and more accessible. In the course of researching and writing one must also live, of course, and the following people made doing so much more interesting and fulfi lling. I wish to thank grad school comrades Michael Burtscher, John Frankl, Noel Howell, Kyu Hyun Kim, Tae Yang Kwak, Ted Mack, Hiromi Maeda, Eiko Maruko, and Hiraku Shimoda for their criticisms, insights, suggestions, and occasional help in the fine art of procrastination. Outside of strictly academic confines, I also wish to thank the many, many aikidōka I have had the plea sure and privilege to train with and learn from over the years: Kobayashi Yasuo-shihan and everyone at Aikido Kobayashi Dojo in Tokyo; Michael Sheahonshihan and the members of the Greater Hartford Aikikai; and Dick Stroud-shihan, Sioux Hall-sensei, and the members of the MIT and Harvard Aikido Clubs, in par ticu lar Corey Johnson, Daryl Muranaka,

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Mike Pak, and Fabien Sorin. All of these folks helped to keep me healthy and sane as the research for this book took shape. The final words of thanks go to those to whom I am most deeply and obviously indebted. To my parents, Paul and Joyce Bayliss, who first instilled in me an intellectual curiosity that made this study possible and a sense of justice that made the topic compelling, I owe far more than I would ever dare to enumerate. The same debt of gratitude I owe to my partner, Kiyoko, and our son, Isaac, for their steadfast love and patience with me over the long haul of this project—which in many ways has grown up with Isaac—from its first conception to the final galleys.

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

List of Tables

xiii

Introduction

1

Modernity and Marginalization: Describing Burakumin and Koreans in Meiji Japan

23

Early Buraku and Korean Reactions: Modernity and Empire from the Margins

79

Minorities and the Minority Problem in the 1920s: Threats to State and Empire, and the Liberal Response

112

Minority Activism and Identity Politics in the Age of Imperial Democracy

166

The “Minority Problem” in Japan’s “New Order”: State Minority Policies and Mobilization for War

221

Minorities in a Time of National Crisis: Burakumin and Koreans during Mobilization and War

266

Interminority Relations, 1920–45: Movements and Communities

335

Conclusion: Prejudice, Policy, and Proximity on the Margins of Empire

381

Contents

xii

Reference Matter Bibliography

397

Index

415

Tables

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Average Daily Wages by Composition of Labor Force, 1927 Settled Population of Koreans in Japan, 1910–29 Average Daily Wages for Koreans and Japanese by Occupation and Average Days Worked per Month Average Monthly Wages for Buraku Occupations, 1930–32 Settled Population of Koreans in Japan, 1930–45 Koreans by Occupation Type, 1925–40 Korean Candidates in Local and National Elections, 1931–43

119 126 128 224 232 234 304

On the Margins of Empire

Introduction

For those with more than just a casual interest in modern Japan, the once widely held notion of it as a remarkably homogeneous, socially harmonious nation has been exposed as a historically constructed and carefully maintained fiction— one that conceals a diversity of groups of various ethnic and social backgrounds in order to deny their claims to membership in the nation and facilitate discrimination and exploitation. Over the past four decades, scholars of Japan working in a variety of fields have produced a wealth of studies on groups such as the Ainu, Okinawans, Koreans, and the burakumin. These studies have also dealt with the prevalent discrimination that all these groups have faced in Japanese society. Indeed, the exploitation, prejudice, and marginalization that they have suffered, and their struggles to combat such treatment, have been the focus of most studies on minorities in Japan. While such a focus is certainly justified, in the process of exploring the marginalization of these groups, researchers have in one sense duplicated the very situation that they set out to draw attention to: individual minority groups and their position vis-à-vis the majority society are thoroughly examined, but usually in a manner that suggests the particular group in question is the only exception to an otherwise valid paradigm of Japanese homogeneity and social harmony. That is, for all of the minority groups named earlier, extensive bodies of literature exist in which the other minorities in Japan generally receive only passing mention at best. This is somewhat surprising, not only because these groups have faced similar discriminatory treatment in terms of employment,

2

Introduction

housing, and marriage, but also because the stereotypes of moral degradation and deviance from “proper” social norms that are used to justify such treatment vary only slightly from one minority to the next. The near total lack of a comparative approach in the study of Japan’s minorities is particularly striking in regard to the Korean and buraku minority populations, which have worked many of the same jobs and in many of the same industries, suffered similar problems of discrimination and exploitation, and in many cases even lived together in the same communities. My intention in pointing out this lacuna is not to cast aspersions on the merits of previous scholarship in these fields. The single-minority focus of such scholarship is understandable if we consider that explorations of the prewar history of minority groups—particularly the Korean and buraku communities— emerged in the context of vigorous movements waged by each group to combat discrimination and win greater civil rights in postwar Japanese society. The influence of the postwar minority rights movements over the character and focus of contemporaneous research is most striking in regard to the burakumin. Scholarly interest in the prewar history of the buraku minority and its struggles against discrimination expanded rapidly starting in the 1960s, when the buraku liberation movement (buraku kaihō undō) entered a new, contentious phase in its development. After the Japanese government issued its landmark “Report of the Dōwa Policy Deliberative Council” of 1965, a rift opened in the liberation movement between activists who sought to use the report to push for progressive legislation, and those who remained wary of government intentions and shunned reliance on the state. In the increasingly bitter factional

1. Throughout this study, I shall follow the practice of Japa nese researchers of the history of the burakumin and use the term “buraku” as an adjective in reference to the burakumin and the areas in which they live (e.g., “buraku communities,” “buraku laborers,” and “buraku economy”). 2. The report declared that the problem of anti-buraku discrimination was “a matter involving basic human rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Japan,” and as such was “both the responsibility of the state, and at the same time a matter of importance for the nation as a whole”; see Dōwa taisaku shingikai, “Dōwa taisaku shingikai tōshin,” p. 223). This landmark report was very progressive in many ways, but the Buraku Liberation League eventually split along political lines over the questions of whether to support the report and the various dōwa (harmonization) programs that

Introduction

3

dispute that followed, scholars were asked to bolster the claims to historical legitimacy of one of the two sides in the debate by portraying it as the true ideological heir to the Suiheisha, the buraku liberation movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite the acrimonious political factionalism that fueled this debate, during the late 1960s and early 1970s research by both sides regarding the so-called buraku problem and the prewar buraku liberation movement employed a formulaically Marxist frame of analysis, a point of view inherited from the pioneering studies conducted by activists and scholars during the 1920s and 1930s. Some, for example, explained the persistence of anti-buraku discrimination into the modern period in terms of “feudal remnants,” whereas others viewed it as a contradiction inherent in the rise of Japanese monopoly capitalism. In either case, all scholars seemed to agree that the buraku problem was inextricably entangled with the emperor system, although the exact nature of this connection was rarely clarified beyond the notion that “where there is noble, there is base” (ki areba sen ari). Another area of general agreement for scholars during these otherwise contentious years was the tendency to view the buraku minority as essentially proletarian in character, although the exact nature of its connection to the wider Japanese proletariat remained open to debate. Linked to this assessment of the fundamental character of the burakumin was a view of the Suiheisha as a movement with intrinsic connections both to class struggle and to those social movements that promoted class struggle, although on this point, too, there was much debate about the

were implemented by the government in the years that followed it. Buraku activists aligned with the Japa nese Communist Party saw the report and the government policies as a thinly veiled attempt to co-opt the buraku liberation movement and bring it under government influence. Activists in the rival Japa nese Socialist Party faction, by contrast, believed that the Buraku Liberation League could effectively take control of the policy initiatives and make them work for both the buraku communities and the wider political aims of the movement. 3. Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 135. 4. Ibid. 5. Uesugi, Tennōsei to buraku sabetsu, p. 13. The phrase was originally coined by Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, whose central role in the pre- and postwar movements against antiburaku discrimination earned him the appellation “the father of buraku liberation.”

4

Introduction

misinterpretations and tactical errors committed by the prewar movement in its search for an effective strategy. Characterizations such as these were justified to a large extent by the situation of minority groups during the prewar period. Remnants of feudalism, particularly a lingering popu lar preoccupation with one’s “high” or “lowly” birth, certainly had a bearing on the persistence of prejudice against the burakumin— and just as the emperor had resided above and beyond the pale of society in general, the common perceptions of buraku ancestry placed the burakumin at an antithetical space located at its lowest, most ostracized fringes. While the connection to monopoly capital was harder to observe given that buraku laborers were almost entirely excluded from employment in the industries where such capital was concentrated (see Chapter 3), it cannot be denied that the buraku community’s economic situation declined rapidly as Japan developed into a modern, capitalist economy. The economic instability and exploitation that the burakumin faced as a result of this decline meant that they were indeed to a great extent classifiable as proletarian. Furthermore, the Suiheisha, as we shall see, maintained strong ties with the wider Japanese proletarian movement for much of its existence, and was greatly influenced by the rhetoric of class struggle in general. Even so, to portray the prewar buraku minority and its liberation movement as having an ardent ideological commitment to opposing the state and striving for social justice was in certain respects to create an illusion. Fostering such an image obviously helped buttress postwar buraku activists’ claims to moral authority and historical legitimacy— and in this sense such scholarship itself can be viewed as a part of the buraku identity politics of the postwar period—but it also ignored certain aspects of the Suiheisha that cast doubt on the veracity of this image. Starting at the end of the 1970s, new currents in research regarding the history of the burakumin and the Suiheisha emerged. Amino Yoshihiko’s research on the medieval roots of the forebears of the early modern pariah groups challenged the common notion that the institutionalization of outcaste status under the early Tokugawa rulers was wholly to blame for the discrimination that these groups had faced, the legacy of 6. For an overview of this debate in the historiography of the Suiheisha, see Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, pp. 11–38.

Introduction

5

which continued to plague the burakumin in the modern era. Admitting that institutionalization was an important legal milestone, Amino argued that the social stigma that gave rise to outcaste status had its initial roots in the treatment of groups of what he termed jiyūmin—“free people” who led lives less tied to agriculture than most nonelite members of society and performed ser vices that were thought to rid society of malevolent influences. Other researchers have looked at the formative impact that the rise of the modern nation-state in Japan and the modes of Western thought imported concomitantly with it had on perceptions of early modern outcastes, leading to the formation of the buraku minority. Casting aside the “feudal remnants” thesis, Uesugi Satoshi has authored a pioneering study on the historical and legal processes that resulted in the so-called “Kaihō-rei” (emancipation decree) of 1871, which did away with legally sanctioned pariah status, but paradoxically contributed to the rise of modern forms of anti-buraku discrimination. Likewise, both Hirota Masaki and Imanishi Hajime have explored the rise of new forms of discrimination in relation to the burakumin and other groups deemed to be outside of mainstream society during the early Meiji period. Fujino Yutaka, too, has focused on the effects that social Darwinism, ideologies of eugenics and hygiene, and imperialism had on the production of modern prejudice and discrimination against the buraku community. Recent scholars have applied similar frames of reference to explore the construction both of discriminatory views of the buraku minority and of the ideologies that prewar buraku activists mobilized to combat these views, in the context of the formation of the modern nation-state in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan. Fujino Yutaka’s work on the Suiheisha has revealed diverse influences such as nationalism and reverence for the emperor, religious idealism, and minority ethnic nationalism. Kurokawa Midori has explored the image of the burakumin maintained

7. Amino, Muen, kugai, raku. 8. Uesugi, Meiji ishin to senmin haishirei. 9. See Hirota, “Discrimination in Modern Japan,” pp. 603–11, and Sabetsu no shisen; as well as Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei bunka and Kokumin kokka to mainoriti. 10. Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” pp. 135– 67. 11. Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū.

6

Introduction

by state authorities and various strata of majority society from the early Meiji period onward, as well as the way in which burakumin of various social strata and political inclinations reacted to such stereotypes in constructing new identities for themselves. Her work on this latter aspect is particularly insightful, in that it reveals discrepancies between the way Suiheisha leaders and the rank and file understood their identity as burakumin. In a similar vein, Sekiguchi Hiroshi has focused on the motives of ordinary burakumin who joined the Suiheisha during its earliest years or created grassroots organizations to combat discrimination and to express their political culture and minority identity. As was the case with scholarship on the buraku minority in the early postwar period, scholarship on Koreans in Japan also focused on the minority’s impoverishment and their struggles against the discrimination and exploitation that had engendered it. The earliest works of this sort were surveys of living conditions and community formation among the Korean minority conducted by Japanese and Korean-minority researchers starting in the 1950s and 1960s. For the most part, these surveys focused on the poverty and oppression experienced at that time by the Korean community, although some also contained background information on the prewar development of the minority community in Japan. Studies of a more historical nature produced during this period usually examined a particular episode or aspect of the prewar experience of the Korean minority, such as the violent persecution and killing of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. 12. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida. 13. See Sekiguchi, “Shoki suihei undō ni okeru ‘seiji bunka,’ ” pp. 42– 64, “Suiheisha sōritsu to minshū,” pp. 102–28, and “Kokumin shakai keiseishi no naka no suihei undō.” 14. See, for example, Pak Jae’il, Zainichi Chōsenjin ni kansuru sōgō chōsa kenkyū. 15. One early example is Kang Jae’fn, “Kantō daishinsai to Chōsenjin hakugai,” pp. 56– 68. The massacres of Koreans in the aftermath of the 1923 earthquake attracted the attention of many researchers in the 1960s and beyond, not only in light of the enormity of the slaughter itself, but also because the incident highlighted the degree of animosity that the Japa nese harbored against Koreans and served as a watershed in the history of relations between the Korean minority community and majority society. The researcher who has done the most to probe the details of this episode and make materials on it available to others is Kang Tfksang; see his works Gendaishi shiryō, vol. 6, Kantō daishinsai to Chōsenjin, and Kantō daishinsai.

Introduction

7

From the 1970s onward, the history of the Korean minority received increasing attention. Iwamura Toshio, a historian of prewar leftist social and political movements, was one of the first to offer a comprehensive history of the minority and its relation to the Japanese working class during the prewar period. Along with Iwamura, and very much at the forefront of a more sustained interest in minority groups, were researchers such as Pak Kyfngsik, who was himself a first-generation member of the Korean minority community and whose research interests also included modern Korean history. Pak’s work on the minority’s history explored a wide range of pre- and postwar aspects: community formation, labor history, political and social movements, labor conscription of Koreans during wartime, and government policies for forcibly assimilating minority groups. These scholars made profoundly important contributions to our understanding of Korean minority history. Just like scholarship on the buraku minority during the 1960s and 1970s, however, research on the Korean minority produced during the 1970s and 1980s tended to portray the minority as possessing a firm proletarian class consciousness. Furthermore, such scholarship connected this commitment to class struggle to a zealous nationalist effort to liberate Korea from Japanese colonialism. Here too it is important to note that such an image was justified to an extent: the vast majority of Koreans in prewar Japan were laborers, and Korean involvement in leftist unions and in other groups espousing anti-capitalist platforms was a feature of the minority for much of the period in question. Likewise, the Korean minority’s dissatisfaction with Japanese rule expressed itself through the anti-imperialist platforms of such organizations. By focusing on the most ideologically motivated, outspoken portion of the minority, however, such research suggested a level of ardent Korean nationalist activism and ideological commitment that was more accurately attributable to students and a relatively small number of organized laborers than to most minority Koreans, who were generally employed in menial occupations, living in isolated communities, and 16. Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū. 17. See, for example, Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiryoku, Tennōsei kokka to zainichi Chōsenjin, Zainichi Chōsenjin undōshi, Zainichi Chōsenjin, and Zainichi Chōsenjin seikatsu jōtai (kaihō-mae).

8

Introduction

having a wide range of reactions to life in Japan, including apathy and even support for Japan and its empire (though supportive views were generally dismissed as aberrant betrayals of the minority’s proper ethnic consciousness). Whatever the limitations of such research, however, Pak Kyfngsik and other scholars of his generation laid a solid, enduring foundation for the field of Korean minority studies in Japan, and inspired a new generation of researchers to explore further facets of Korean experience in preand postwar Japan. Scholars in research groups such as the Zainichi Chōsenjin Undōshi Kenkyūkai (Society for Research on the Korean Movement in Japan) organized around Pak Kyfngsik to publish articles on a wide variety of Korean issues in the journal Zainichi Chōsenjinshi Kenkyū, which explored the history of the minority from vantage points such as local history, women’s history, labor history, and oral history interviews. A central figure in the society, Higuchi Yūichi, has produced detailed explanations of wartime policies toward the Korean community in Japan and the Korean reaction to these at a time when overt dissent was practically impossible. Also representative of this trend in scholarship is the work of Kim Ch’anjfng, who has used oral history interviews and archival sources to record the subaltern histories of Korean factory girls, day laborers, coal miners, and residents of Osaka’s largely Korean Tsuruhashi area. In a similar vein, Matsuda Toshihiko’s exploration of Korean participation in prewar electoral politics has revealed a largely neglected class of political entrepreneurs among the minority. On the level of local history, Horiuchi Minoru has provided new insights into community formation and labor activism among Koreans in Hyogo Prefecture. Within the contexts of labor migration, state policy, and the ideological contradictions inherent in Japanese imperialism, researchers in Japan have more recently connected the study of the Korean minority in Japan with other, more general research on various aspects of Japanese history. Nishinarita Yutaka has examined the prewar minority from a variety of 18. Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenyū; Kim Ch’anjfng and Pang Sfnhi, Kaze no dōkoku; Kim Ch’anjfng, Ame no dōkoku, Hi no dōkoku, and Ihōjin wa Kimigayo Maru ni notte; Matsuda, Senzenki no zainichi Chōsenjin to sanseiken; and Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi.

Introduction

9

angles, including its migration and settlement patterns, the labor recruitment and control policies aimed at it, levels of education among the minority, and the dynamics of wage discrimination. Hur Kwangmu has delved into the rising presence of Koreans within the most impoverished sectors of urban Japan and shown how welfare commissioners and other administrators appealed to popular stereotypes in instituting a “double standard” that barred most Koreans from access to public relief, while Japanese who were in fact better off managed to qualify. Finally, Oguma Eiji has examined the way the Japanese empire employed a rhetoric of inclusion in order to justify its control of colonial populations whose cultures were vastly different from that of the Japanese, and how some among these populations—including many Koreans in Japan— attempted, but failed, to use this ideology to their own advantage by calling the state to task for its hypocrisy. English-language scholarship on both minorities has drawn much from the findings and approaches of researchers writing in Japanese, while at the same time bringing its own problem consciousness to the analysis of theses minority situations. For many writing in the 1950s and 1960s, these minorities were viewed primarily in terms of the challenges that their movements for national liberation and civil rights posed to the Japa nese state. Th is was especially true of early scholars of the Korean minority, writing within the context of the increasingly frigid Cold War in East Asia. David Conde appears to have been the first to examine the minority and its historical origins in the prewar era, suggesting that its transnational character presented difficult problems for American occupiers attempting to maintain order in Japan. Shortly thereafter, as Japan stood poised to regain its independence, Edward Wagner’s The Korean Minority in Japan, 1904–1950, published in 1951, attempted to provide a greater understanding of the Korean situation in Japan and its history to the English-reading world. Appearing more than a decade later, Richard Mitchell’s study of the minority was in much the same vein as these earlier works: all were focused mainly on the situation of the 19. 20. 21. 22.

Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka. Hur, “Senzen Nihon no hinkonsha kyūsai to zainichi Chōsenjin.” Oguma, “Nihonjin” no kyōkai, esp. pp. 362– 91. Conde, “The Korean Minority in Japan.”

10

Introduction

Korean minority within the developing contexts of prewar and wartime labor mobilization, the Cold War, and relations between the two Koreas and Japan— and all voiced a concern with what they saw as the radicalism of postwar political activity among the minority. Other researchers viewed these minorities in terms of race relations and explored the economic, social, and psychological effects that discrimination by the majority society had on the Korean and buraku communities. The anthropologist and psychologist George DeVos, together with Hiroshi Wagatsuma and Changsoo Lee, took the lead in introducing these aspects of the Korean and buraku experiences to an English readership. These surveys of minority populations and the problems facing them contributed greatly to a more nuanced appreciation of a society generally assumed to be “homogeneous.” At the same time, however, by echoing a concern for the problems of racism and race relations that had emerged from the American experience of the civil rights movement, these studies had a tendency to treat the difference and the discrimination in static terms, rather than exploring how images of difference— conceived in terms of race or otherwise— developed over time. Researchers from the 1980s onward have benefited from the wealth of historical studies produced by their Japanese colleagues during the postwar decades, while bringing their own perspectives to bear on these minority issues. Ian Neary’s groundbreaking study of the prewar buraku liberation movement documented the interactions between the Suiheisha and the state—interactions that, in many ways, brought the autonomous organization more into line with state conceptions of welfare and social organization as Japan mobilized for war in the 1930s. On the Korean side, a rising interest in issues of labor migration, imperialism, and ethnicity in the West led scholars of Japan such as Michael Weiner to revisit the subject of the Korean minority community. Weiner’s two works on the minority explore the rising radicalism of students in response to Korea’s loss of independence during the early twentieth century as well as the Korean community’s roots in the “push-pull” dynamics of labor 23. Mitchell, The Korean Minority in Japan. 24. DeVos and Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race; Lee and DeVos, Koreans in Japan. 25. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control.

Introduction

11

migration that occurred amid exploitative colonial agricultural policies and rapid industrialization in Japan during World War I. Furthermore, he analyzes the ideology of Japanese imperialism with regard to this growing Korean presence, and explains how the contradictions inherent in this ideology led to discrimination and a bureaucratic inability to deal effectively with what came to be known as the “Korean problem” during four decades of Japanese rule over Korea. Most recently, Ken Kawashima has shown how the very tenuousness of opportunities for Korean employment and housing in Japan were built into a system of exploitation that the capitalist state used to keep Korean wages low while shutting the labor migrants out of the majority job market. My approach to understanding the histories of the Korean and buraku minorities is indebted to the scholarship of previous researchers writing in Japan and abroad, particularly those whose work has appeared since the late 1980s. I share their interest in the connection between the ideologies deployed in the rise of the modern Japanese nation-state and empire and in how these stereotypes applied to Koreans and the burakumin. I also share a concern—most prevalent in the works of Fujino, Kurokawa, and Sekiguchi, but also present in those of Higuchi, Oguma, and Weiner—for probing the complex ways in which minority individuals and their communities reacted to marginalization, stereotyping, and the subsequent state efforts at minority incorporation. Given the striking parallels between these two minority communities in terms of their socioeconomic position in Japanese society and the degree to which they were ostracized from the majority, I compare the buraku and Korean experiences of marginalization and their reactions to it on a variety of levels, and juxtapose the state policies that were designed to control and incorporate them. Against this backdrop, I also explore how members of the two minorities viewed and interacted with one another during the quarter century leading up to Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. An examination of how images of each of these groups evolved in the eyes of the Japanese majority will show how the differences that marked these groups as minorities were constructed through a complex interaction of forces that arose simultaneously with modernization and imperialism. 26. Weiner, Origins and Race and Migration. 27. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble.

12

Introduction

In addition, the stereotypes of burakumin and Koreans that were in currency by the end of World War I provided the backdrop against which state policies to encourage greater minority assimilation and incorporation into mainstream society were formulated, and shaped the conceptions of minority identity that activists from within these communities reacted to in their own movements. While regional differences in the views and treatment of minorities—particularly the burakumin—may have been observed in Japan during the late nineteenth century, part of my argument here is that prevalent images of these minorities were in a very real sense “homogenized” nationally just as they were propagated by the popu lar press during the Meiji decades. Chapter 1 traces the marginalization of Koreans and burakumin within the context of the ideologies that informed it from the 1870s through the first decade of the twentieth century. In regard to the burakumin, it begins by revealing how the abolition of pariah status, premodern views of defilement associated with outcaste communities, and measures enacted to achieve a more modern and efficient documentation of the population combined to create the burakumin as a modern minority of national scope. The pre-Meiji ideas about outcaste identity examined here would continue to inform views about the nature of buraku minority identity well into the modern period, although they would come to be interpreted through a new, increasingly standardized vocabulary. Likewise for the Koreans, the chapter explores the declining stature of Korea’s image as a culture of Confucian learning during the Bakumatsu years, its subsequent portrayal as a backward country in “civilization and enlightenment” discourse, and its rapid recasting as a nonviable state populated by lazy and insouciant subjects and led by an incompetent monarchy. Analyzing the discourse on burakumin and Koreans in parallel from these starting points, the chapter shows how subsequent stereotypes informed by ideologies such as social Darwinism, hygiene, and eugenics— all pivotal modes of thought in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Japan— cast both burakumin and Koreans as the antithesis of the proper Japanese citizen by ascribing to each a strikingly similar set of undesirable traits. The study also shows how this process of constructing minority identities received input from various levels of majority society, creating multilayered and contradictory conceptions of what the Koreans and burakumin were like— contradictory images that ultimately made it

Introduction

13

extremely difficult for a minority individual or group to behave in a manner that would not be seen as affirming some prevalent stereotype against them. Starting in Chapter 1, I use the term “discrimination” to refer to the ostracizing treatment in word and deed that Koreans and burakumin faced. The reader may wonder why I do not employ the term “racism,” since these attitudes and actions would be called “racist” if they were applied to ethnic or racial minorities in societies where more-or-less observable differences, such as skin color, act as signifiers of belonging to a minority group. My preference for a term that seems more general and thus less descriptive, however, arises from two considerations. The first is that in Japanese discussions of the problems faced by these minorities, the term employed is sabetsu, which translates to “discrimination,” rather than the Japanese phrase for racism, jinshu sabetsu—literally, “race discrimination.” Whenever the latter term appears in Japanese discussions, whether during the time period under consideration or today, it is only used in reference to problems in other societies and cultures. The reason for this was that those discussing how the Koreans and the burakumin related to the Japanese tended to avoid characterizing their difference from the majority in racial terms. This reticence may have been connected to a similar hesitance to use the concept when describing the Japanese people; although Japanese scholars of the 1890s generally embraced a worldview informed by social Darwinian views of humanity, they were not entirely comfortable with the racial hierarchy they inherited from the West, which placed Japanese below the white races. Perhaps for this reason, from the turn of the century onward Japanese scholars writing on Japan began to emphasize the importance of minzoku— a nebulous term that suggests bonds of a shared culture and history, similar to equally slippery English terms such as “nation” and “ethnic group”— over jinshu (“race” in the biological sense). Using a description of the Japanese that appealed to common history and culture, rather than one that relied on race, also provided ideological justification for Japanese imperialism. As Oguma Eiji has demonstrated, starting from the latter 28. Morris-Suzuki, Re-inventing Japan, p. 87. See also the discussion of this shift in late nineteenth-century Japa nese anthropological writings in Sakano, Teikoku Nihon to jinrui gakusha, pp. 103–5.

14

Introduction

half of the Meiji period, most scholars in prewar Japan agreed that the Japanese people were the result of a long history of racial blending. Many argued that it was this very proclivity to absorb diverse racial elements and assimilate them into a culturally homogeneous whole, centered on the imperial clan, that endowed the Japanese with a unique capacity for incorporating and improving other peoples. Discourse on the nature of Koreans and burakumin developed within the context of the broader concern for justifying Japanese imperialism through appeals to this assimilative power of the Japanese. In state rhetoric as well, once burakumin and Koreans had been incorporated within the empire they became subjects of a benevolent, fatherly emperor who ruled with “impartiality and equal favor” (isshi dōjin)—to use a commonly employed phrase— over all his subjects, no matter their backgrounds. The reader may still object that all of this is of little concern: since “race” is itself a social construct, applied arbitrarily to groups perceived to possess some common trait deemed to be significant, the label “racism” can be applied to discrimination against any group that is construed as sharing characteristics that define them as “different” from the majority. Although this is a valid point, given the strong connection for those of us from English-speaking cultures between “racism” and “race” as a set of phenotypic markers—most commonly and notoriously skin color—the use of the term “racism” to describe the discrimination faced by Koreans and burakumin in Japan runs the risk of reifying the difference between these minorities and the majority and characterizing the relationship between discriminator and victim as one that was much less ambiguous than it really was. “Passing” in majority society was always a possibility for burakumin and Koreans, but that only made the threat of having one’s “true nature” revealed all the more ominous for those who tried it. By the same token, although I use the term “minority” in reference to both the Koreans and the burakumin, I do not mean to suggest

29. Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, esp. parts 1 and 2, pp. 19–202. 30. Memmi, Racism, pp. 17–18. Memmi further points out that in the absence of an observable trait on which to hang the racial distinction, one can always be invented. 31. A similar idea seems to be at work in our preference for the term “anti-Semitism” over “racism” when referring to discrimination against Jews, even though there are antiSemites who would claim that Jews belong to a separate race.

Introduction

15

by this that empirically observable differences exist that set the people belonging to either group apart from the “majority.” I simply use the term as a kind of shorthand to refer to a group that is marginalized from mainstream society, based on discursively constructed conceptions of difference employed for specific social and political purposes. The experiences of buraku and Korean individuals and communities and their responses to the discrimination and exploitation they faced are explored and compared in Chapters 2, 4, and 6. Chapter 2 focuses on the late Meiji years, when Japan fought two wars on the Korean Peninsula that solidified its status as an imperialist power in East Asia. The heightened sense of popular patriotism that heralded the achievement of a modern nation-state led to increasingly negative stereotypes about burakumin and Koreans in Japan. The reactions and opinions of elite members of these minorities—business and community leaders, in the case of the burakumin, and students enrolled in Japanese universities and technical colleges, in the case of Koreans—were distinctive and telling. That is, despite their opposing views of the Japanese victories— buraku community leaders reacted with patriotic pride, whereas Korean students came to understand that these developments represented a grave threat to Korean sovereignty—both exhibited a similar understanding of their position and role in their respective communities. Buraku elites saw themselves as the rightful leaders and reformers of their communities who should serve as an interface between the group and majority society, whereas Korean students nominated themselves as intellectual leaders for what they hoped would become a popu lar movement to protect Korea’s autonomy by modernizing its culture. Their realization of the nation—be it Japanese or Korean— and their place in it, however, came at the price of a problematic relationship with the less fortunate whose best interest they claimed to represent. Chapters 4 and 6 examine the responses of organized minority rights movements— specifically the Suiheisha, formed in 1922 to combat antiburaku discrimination, and a variety of student and labor organizations established by Koreans, but most prominently the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei (Federation of Korean Labor in Japan)— and the communities they represented during the period of liberal “Taishō democracy” and years of intensifying mobilization for war, respectively. The focus of this analysis is the politics of minority identity; that is, the ways

16

Introduction

in which members of both the Korean and buraku minorities defined their identities as minorities in the changing historical contexts examined, and at multiple levels in their social movements and in the communities where they lived. Koreans and burakumin, like groups facing discrimination and oppression everywhere, frequently negotiated and redefined their identities vis-à-vis majority society and the state in an attempt to gain advantages such as government concessions, gaining the moral high ground over a prejudiced majority, or fostering a sense of pride and increasing solidarity among members of the minority group. This process of negotiating and redefining identities could be carried out consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and reactively, on organizational as well as individual levels, but insofar as these identities were never fixed and always contested, the process was inherently “political.” Throughout this negotiation process, minority organizations, communities, and individuals had to contend with the stereotypes and prejudices that the majority held against them (the identity that the majority ascribed to the minority) as well as the state and its policies of assimilation and control. Minority identities were thus defined and redefined in a sort of dialectical process by which some of the views promoted by majority society were rejected, and others were incorporated and turned to the minority’s advantage. In addition to these domestic elements, international events and currents of thought— such as the Wilsonian idea of national self-determination, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the concept of an international proletariat—informed minority visions of who they were and how they related to state and majority society. The identities they arrived at through this process were contained within a field of possibilities bordered by identification with majority Japanese society on one side; assertion of historical, ethnic, and even racial differences from the majority on another; and appeals to class affiliation with the proletariat on yet a third. Just as Korean and buraku identities were never fixed, they were also continuously contested between movements and their minorities because, despite what many activists claimed, neither minority was a homogeneous community. In fact, the comparisons in this book show that both minority communities displayed a greater degree of socioeconomic stratification than much of the older literature on burakumin and Koreans admits. A bourgeoisie arose within both minority communities, and

Introduction

17

despite differences in the conditions and historical moment of its appearance within each group, in both cases this most successful class within minority society found itself confronted with very similar problems in defining its own position vis-à-vis both majority society and its connection to its own minority community. The paths to socioeconomic advancement that minority individuals took and their opinions about the Japanese nation and empire, on the one hand, and their minority’s place in these, on the other, reveal the extent to which their success removed them from the world of less fortunate Koreans and burakumin, and imparted to them attitudes prevalent in majority society. Bourgeois Koreans and burakumin were not the only ones to sometimes disagree with activists’ interpretations of what it meant to be a Korean or burakumin. Although groups like the Suiheisha and Korean labor unions projected the image of minority communities joined together in solidarity by a strong sense of common purpose, the motivations and concerns of the leaders often differed significantly from those of the rank-and-file members. In particular, the leadership of minority movements was greatly influenced by general trends observed in other social movements in Japan at the time, and they responded to the situations and government policies confronting them in ways that usually mirrored such trends, even if this meant that they portrayed the identity of the minority group in ways that ignored the beliefs and day-to-day concerns of the rank and file. Fluctuations in the degree of support for minority movements among the subaltern of the minority community, as well as the words and deeds of rank-and-file members, provide glimpses of how the less ideologically and politically motivated among these minorities perceived their place in Japanese society. Far from opposing the rhetoric of the state on all counts, minority activists consciously appealed to such ideologies as a means of decrying the hypocrisy of the state and majority society for permitting discrimination to continue. This was particularly true of the Suiheisha, as revealed in activists’ statements about the emperor’s place and role in the Japanese nation and Japan’s “peerless” national polity. For their part, representatives of the Korean minority were less likely to invoke such rhetoric, but when they did, they used it similarly: as a critique of the status quo treatment of the minority by the majority and the government. This is not to suggest that such declarations of allegiance to the ideals of the nation

18

Introduction

were necessarily feigned; I argue, to the contrary, that the degree to which Suiheisha activists and a few Koreans continued to pursue this line of rhetoric in condemnation of discrimination eventually led to their cooptation by the state during the war, precisely because they found themselves left with no autonomous ideological space from which to resist the rhetoric of mobilization, despite the persistence of discrimination. The advent of anti-establishmentarian minority movements in the early 1920s, and their subsequent embrace of Marxism and other radical ideologies, encouraged the government to focus greater attention on achieving a cohesive society, in part by solving the problems posed by minority groups. The government attempted to bring about this cohesion through suppression, co-optation, and control. Suppression of radical ideologies and those who promoted them was largely the province of the police, and for most of the 1920s and 1930s all minority activists who espoused “dangerous ideas” were treated similarly. Policy initiatives aimed at cooptation and control, however, were formulated specifically for Koreans or burakumin, and were distinctive to each. These policies and the ideologies that buttressed them during the comparatively liberal 1920s and the following period of increasingly stringent social control and mass mobilization during the 1930s and Pacific War years are examined in Chapters 3 and 5, respectively. These chapters focus on the twin concepts of yūwa (㵡੠, “harmony,” “conciliation,” or “integration”) and dōka (ৠ࣪, “assimilation”), which dominated the rhetoric of policies designed for both minorities. Yūwa implied a variety of vaguely defined notions, all connected to the idea that the government should combat the socially divisive influence of discrimination against minorities by urging the majority to discard its prejudices and accept burakumin and Koreans as fellow subjects of the emperor. In contrast, dōka, although in many respects no less vague in content, required that burakumin and Koreans change their lifestyles to conform to the idealized conception of how proper Japanese lived and behaved. The logic of assimilation demanded this transformation even though in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these minorities had been cast as the antithesis of the image of ideal Japanese behavioral norms. Previous researchers of both minorities have commented on the ideology behind the assimilation programs each minority group endured, and the insensitive, high-handed nature of the policies that resulted. A parallel reading of the policy platforms and official pro-

Introduction

19

nouncements regarding each minority, however, reveals that although both groups were urged to assimilate to majority norms of behavior and discard their “aberrant” ways, there were important points of divergence between the policies that eventually emerged for each minority community. These differences ultimately resulted in a much more coercive set of policies for the Korean minority than for the burakumin, and exposed the degree to which the state judged the allegiance of minorities to the nation based on their adherence to superficial cultural norms, and extended a certain amount of acceptance to them in return. Chapter 7, the final chapter of the book, explores how the two minorities interacted and viewed one another against this complicated historical backdrop. I analyze this relationship through the multiple lenses of their organized social movements, the industries that employed workers of both minorities, and the buraku communities that became home to growing Korean settler populations from the 1920s on. Such an approach is novel, but the question of interactions between Koreans and burakumin has drawn the attention of previous researchers. Scholars of buraku history writing in the 1970s occasionally took note of what they saw as instances of Korean-buraku solidarity in the face of exploitation during the prewar period. One such work was Kobayashi Sueo’s Zainichi Chōsenjin Rōdōsha to Suihei Undō, published in 1974. Others devoted sections of studies to describing an interminority solidarity born of a mutual recognition that both Koreans and burakumin suffered discrimination and exploitation, due to a combination of ethnic and class prejudice, from Japanese who were better off. These accounts, written in the period when scholarship served the interests of the buraku liberation movement’s identity politics, give a strong impression of minorities finding common cause and forming a “united front,” but the accounts of mutual cooperation they relate are anecdotal at best. A representative example is Hijikata Tetsu’s story of a single Korean who lived in a buraku community in which few other Koreans resided. Kobayashi’s work has even greater problems: in spite of its title, Korean Laborers in Japan and the Suihei Movement, only half of the book examines 32. Kobayashi Sueo, Zainichi Chōsenjin rōdōsha to suihei undō. 33. See the section entitled “Chōsenjin no nakama to,” in Hijikata, Hisabetsu buraku no tatakai, pp. 261– 70.

20

Introduction

relations between Korean and buraku laborers, and then only in the context of a single incident— a 1931 strike at the Taki Fertilizer plant in Hyōgo Prefecture—in which the Suiheisha played only a minor role in supporting the strikers. The gradual move away from scholarship written to concur with the identity politics of postwar minority rights movements has opened up a view of minority-majority relations that extends beyond a simplistic dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed. Within this trend, some scholars have turned their attention to the manner in which the minority that they focus on—be it Koreans or burakumin— came to be influenced by the other. In addition to the aforementioned works by Hur, Kurokawa, and Nishinarita, which all mention the economic and residential impact of one minority community on the other, Kim Jungmi’s critical evaluation of the Suiheisha and its successors in the postwar era has revealed provocative evidence that many in the buraku liberation movement held discriminatory attitudes toward other Asians, including Koreans. And at the subaltern level, Ha Myfngseng’s analysis of Korean entry into and eventual domination of the lowest levels of the prewar labor market in cities such as Kyoto and Osaka shows how Korean migrants gradually displaced burakumin from industries that had traditionally relied on buraku labor, while establishing a presence within buraku communities. These studies certainly add to our understanding of the complexity of the situation faced by Koreans and burakumin during these years, and suggest a variety of directions for comparative analysis. And yet, in all of them, the “other minority” appears solely as a situation to which the minority in question reacts, or as a condition that influences its experience in some formative way. In Ha Myfngseng’s study, for example, the labor market and community of the burakumin provide the work and living environment for Korean migrants to the Kansai-area cities he explores, but the reaction of burakumin living and working there to the Korean arrivals is not explored. The case is similar for Kim Jungmi’s study: buraku liberation activists’ attitudes toward Koreans and the question of Korean independence appear, but the nature of Korean activists’ attitudes toward the buraku minority is left unexamined. My 34. Kim Jungmi, Suihei undōshi kenkyū. 35. Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi.

Introduction

21

aim in Chapter 7, then, is to put the relationship between these minorities at the center and so illuminate the subtle interdependencies that animated the Korean and buraku experiences during this time. That much of this history is defined by misunderstandings and mutual animosities will come as little surprise to those familiar with the histories of immigrant and minority groups in other national settings. Yet it would be far too simplistic to view this as a case of similarly disadvantaged groups taking out their frustrations on one another; instead, what this book shows is that there were very specific reasons why these two minorities failed to form lasting bonds of cooperation, despite parallel movements to combat discrimination during the prewar period. On the subaltern level, in the communities where Koreans and burakumin both lived, majority prejudices, cultural and economic factors, as well as the state’s separate policies to assimilate and mobilize each minority, all intervened to inhibit the appearance of a more cohesive relationship. Since interminority relations such as these took place in buraku communities that, willingly or unwittingly, became host and home to significant numbers of Korean migrants, part of the book has a local focus. Reliable information on such communities is often hard to come by, however; prewar newspapers, for example, usually did not make overt reference to the “special status” of the buraku communities they covered (for fear of inviting vociferous censure from the Suihesha for divulging such facts), and historians writing in the postwar era have avoided mentioning communities by name for similar reasons. Thus although it is relatively easy to find out where Korean communities were located, it is not always easy or even possible to determine if a given Korean community was located in a buraku area. For this reason, I focus on a small number of buraku communities in which Koreans settled during the 1920s

36. Scholars writing from the 1960s through the middle of the 1980s usually referred to specific buraku communities by pseudonyms or by the first letter of its name as it would be spelled in the roman alphabet. The point of this circumspection was to prevent individuals and organizations from using the information obtained through such works to discriminate against residents of these areas in marriage, employment, and access to schools of higher education. Since the late 1980s researchers have gradually abandoned the practice.

22

Introduction

and for which there exists a detailed and reliable trail of evidence gathered from local newspaper articles, police and local government reports, accounts in minority organization publications, and oral-history interviews of those still living in the community who have a thorough knowledge of its pre-1945 past. Two such communities in particular receive a great deal of attention here: Yanagihara (also referred to as Higashi Shichijō or Sūjin), located in the city of Kyoto; and Yasunaka, located within the orbit of metropolitan Osaka. This book connects the histories of two of Japan’s largest minority populations to the modern history of Japan in novel ways. It also recovers some of the complexity of the Korean and buraku experiences in Japan during a time when the rapid achievement of modernity and empire both marginalized these groups in new ways and placed them in an ambiguous relationship with each other and with the majority culture. How did the state and these minorities themselves confront this ambiguity and make sense of their place in Japanese society? How did they view one another within their shared, ambiguous position in the Japanese empire? The answers to these questions provide new insights into how minority Koreans, burakumin, and the majority culture came to know one another and interact during the final decades of Japan’s empire and beyond.

ch apter 1 Modernity and Marginalization: Describing Burakumin and Koreans in Meiji Japan

When two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule came to an end in 1868, the emerging leaders of the Meiji Revolution found themselves in shaky control of a conglomerate of multiple domains, operating on economic and social policies that in many ways had ceased to function effectively. Bringing all of these domains and the people living in them together to create a modern nation-state would prove to be a monumental task with no single historical precedent to offer guidance. To make matters worse, the leaders felt compelled to achieve this sweeping reformation of Japan as rapidly as possible, because their goal was security as much as it was modernity. The Meiji Revolution occurred in the midst of a more general crisis brought on by Western imperialist encroachment into the traditional world order of East Asian foreign relations. To the leaders of the new regime, the best way to avoid the fate of a once peerless China was to embrace the very systems and worldviews that seemed to make the West so powerful. The recasting of Japanese society that followed was thus forged in the furnace of an imperialistic worldview, and incorporated many of the ideological underpinnings of late nineteenthcentury European imperialism. Ultimately this shift had important consequences for defining what it meant to be Japanese in the Meiji period and beyond. During these formative years, both the buraku and Korean minority groups in Japan were defined and redefined as they were simultaneously incorporated into and marginalized from the emerging vision of what it meant to be Japanese. Far from being a sidelight of “mainstream” his-

24

Modernity and Marginalization

tory, the story of this process shows how discourses on hygiene, social Darwinism, eugenics, nationalism, and imperialism in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Japan provided new visions of the ideal Japanese citizen-subject. Both the buraku and Korean minorities would have to contend with these views in the years that followed, both as marginalized individuals and through the minority organizations that eventually arose to combat discrimination. Modern stereotypes of Koreans and burakumin did not emerge de novo; they evolved from views developed during the centuries preceding Japan’s late nineteenth-century quest for security and modernity. Some of these views contrast with the images of Koreans and burakumin that arose in the midst of the Meiji modernization program, and so reveal how much the imperialistic worldview that accompanied it altered the way Koreans and burakumin were construed. Other early views, however, proved more enduring, and informed later understandings of who these people were and how they related to the majority Japanese population.

Early Modern Understandings of Outcastes and Koreans People belonging to various pariah-status groups, referred to collectively as senmin (“unclean people”), lived in Japan for centuries before the Tokugawa period, but it was only in the course of the country’s unification during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that outcaste status, like samurai and commoner status, became hereditary in a legal sense. This change was part of the social policies instituted under the regimes of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa shoguns. The category of senmin was by no means monolithic: it contained a variety of groups with widely differing officially mandated occupations and duties. The largest and most well known of these was the eta (〶໮,

1. For an overview of the history of pariah status prior to the unification and the manner in which senmin status became hereditary, see Harada, Hisabetsu buraku no rekishi, pp. 72–108. In English, Gerald Groemer explores this same history, particularly in regard to the formation of the eta and hinin as the major senmin groups in the regions under direct control of the Tokugawa regime, as well as its ongoing efforts to exercise control over outcastes and impoverished transients. Groemer, “Creation of the Edo Outcaste Order,” pp. 263– 93.

Modernity and Marginalization

25

“much filth”), followed in terms of numbers and scope of nationwide distribution by the hinin (䴲Ҏ, “un-human”). Their “job descriptions” differed from region to region, but in general the eta were assigned such occupations as skinning dead animals, tanning hides and making leather goods, and manufacturing footwear, as well as apprehending violent criminals whenever the need arose. The hinin were street performers, executioners, and collectors of human waste, animal carcasses, and, in some areas, human corpses. There were many other groups whose names and officially designated occupations varied widely. In most cases, outcaste groups were assigned duties that, while considered degrading, were important to the functioning of society. The sense of social separation from the so-called ryōmin, or “proper people,” who collectively comprised the rest of the early modern social classes stemmed from more than just a connection to defilement, however; as Daniel Botsman has pointed out, the assignment to outcastes of duties such as subduing dangerous criminals, assisting in their execution, and guarding the heads and bodies when on display all had the effect of associating the outcastes with the most repressive face of state authority. For the samurai rulers this had the added— and no doubt, intended— benefit of directing popular resentment toward draconian policies of the state downward, toward the highly visible outcastes who carried out

2. A government survey from 1870 found 443,093 eta and 77,358 hinin in Japan; see “Meiji shoki kaku fu-han-ken jinninhyō,” in Tanikawa, Nihon shomin seikatsushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 14: Buraku, pp. 459– 73. The same survey recorded the total population of Japan at 30,089,401, meaning that the eta and hinin together comprised roughly 1.7 percent of the total population. These figures are probably not very accurate, nor is it clear whether the tallies for eta and hinin contain the numbers of smaller, locally based outcaste groups. 3. The occupational duties given here for eta and hinin are far from exhaustive and are characteristic only for those domains under the direct rule of the Shogun. The degree to which the structure of the senmin varied from domain to domain is truly mindboggling. Duties that would be assigned to eta in the Tokugawa domains were often handled by hinin or other senmin groups elsewhere. Also, occupations that were relegated to senmin in one domain might have no such stigma attached in neighboring domains. For a comprehensive discussion in English on the origin and structure of the senmin in Japan, see Brooks, “Outcaste Society in Early Modern Japan.” Uesugi Satoshi provides a revealing look at the complexity of senmin groups in his Tennōsei to buraku sabetsu, pp. 63– 73.

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such orders, rather than upward, toward the warriors-turned-bureaucrats who made the rules, passed judgment, and determined which punishments to exact. Doing the “dirty work” of state and society was considered to be the natural calling of those born into outcaste status, yet the connection to these lowest-level jobs was more a rationalization for discrimination than a reason for pariah status. As David Howell has explained, under the Tokugawa system outcastes were outcastes regardless of what they actually did to support themselves. Although a lack of consistency between mandated occupation and actual livelihood was a feature of non-outcaste society as well, the fact that most outcastes supported themselves through the same means as non-outcastes highlights just how arbitrary the nature of status discrimination was during the early modern period. Although the reasons for being labeled a senmin were arbitrary, the barriers that separated them from non-outcaste society were formidable. Senmin lived in segregated communities that were typically separated from those of their closest ryōmin neighbors by distances greater than those that divided the neighborhoods of ryōmin of different social classes. And although the boundary between the commoners and the samurai social groups was permeable in both directions, the situation was quite different for passing in and out of outcaste status. That is, while it was possible for non-outcastes to have their status commuted to that of the hinin, usually in punishment for some sort of crime or other social transgression, it was almost never possible for outcastes to climb out of their pariah status. This was particularly true for the eta, the largest

4. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan, pp. 50–58. In addition, Botsman notes that, far from finding these duties odious, Tokugawa-period outcastes may have found in them an opportunity to command some “respect”— albeit in the form of fear—from their social betters through serving as the representatives of state power. 5. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth- Century Japan, pp. 46– 66. 6. In various places and at various times there were exceptions to this rule, particularly in regard to hinin living in the crowded city of Edo. See Groemer, “Creation of the Edo Outcaste Order,” pp. 280– 93, for examples. 7. Howell, Geographies of Identity, p. 25. 8. The procedure, known as “hinin teka,” is described in detail in Botsman, Punishment and Power, pp. 77– 79.

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pariah group. Stringent protocols for behavior that outcastes were required to observe when interacting with non-outcastes—which were much more rigorous and demeaning than anything commoners had to follow when interacting with their samurai betters—underscored the vast social gulf between outcaste and non-outcaste. Although outcaste villages in rural areas were often regarded as “branch villages” (edamura) of a nearby peasant “main village” (honson), contact between the residents of the two communities was confined to official matters and ser vices that outcastes were compelled to provide to the peasant community. Outcastes were also given no voice in decisions made by the elders of the main village that affected their branch village. As demeaning as this situation may seem to our modern, democratic sensibilities, it is important to note that pariah status as it operated in the Tokugawa period gave outcastes a defined role in society, as well as protection of their interests in fulfilling it. Outcaste communities maintained officially sanctioned monopolies over the occupations they were entrusted with, some of which (like production of leather and leather goods) turned out to be very lucrative. This mandated role and position within the Tokugawa system probably accounts for another seeming anomaly in regard to the outcastes during the Tokugawa period: despite the immense social distance between outcastes and non-outcastes during the seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth century, few Japanese scholars bothered to comment on the nature of the outcastes or speculate about their historical origins, in stark contrast to the case in the modern period. While the outcastes occupied a subordinate position within Tokugawa society, Koreans presented a highly valued presence outside of it. In the

9. It was possible for samurai and commoners who had been sentenced to hinin status as punishment to return to their original status, but this possibility was not open to those who had been born into hinin or other outcaste status groups. For the eta, the only noteworthy example of such status commutation was that of the Edo eta- gashira (“eta chief,” the administrative conduit between the Tokugawa bakufu and the eta communities in Tokugawa-controlled domains) Danzaemon and his immediate retainers, which occurred as late as the first month of 1868, shortly before the bakufu itself was overthrown. On commutation of hinin status, see Kobayashi and Akisada, Burakushi kenkyū handobukku, entry for “ashi-arai,” p. 330. On the Danzaemon’s release from pariah status, see Howell, Geographies of Identity, pp. 82–83. 10. Howell, Geographies of Identity, pp. 21–22.

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wake of Hideyoshi’s disastrous invasions of Korea, the Tokugawa regime sought a rapid stabilization of relations with its closest Asian neighbor, as well as a way to bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of populations under its control. As the research of Ronald Toby has shown, the bakufu was particularly interested in obtaining diplomatic missions from Korea for these purposes. Since the bakufu hoped to portray these as Korean embassies coming to pay homage to the shogun, in a certain sense it was projecting itself as superior to the Korean court. Even so, Japanese officials dealing with Korean dignitaries were careful never to show the slightest sign of arrogance. For the bakufu it was the very dignity and respectability of these Korean embassies that made them so effective in promoting the legitimacy of the shogun’s rule. Indeed, the Tokugawa held Korean cultural and intellectual achievements in very high regard. Neo-Confucian scholars such as Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan, who played important roles in laying the philosophical foundations of the Tokugawa system, were greatly influenced by Korean Confucianism. If the bakufu and its neo-Confucian scholars held Korea in high esteem, however, by the latter half of the Tokugawa period scholars belonging to the proto-nationalistic Kokugaku (national learning) school began to make less flattering statements about Koreans. While they by no means launched diatribes against Korea or its culture, these scholars made allusions that linked them to the despised outcastes. As early as 1750, for instance, Yamaguchi Kōjū claimed that the eta were descended from Korean immigrants who had settled in Japan in the remote past. Aoyagi Tanenobu (1766–1836), adding to this interpretation, claimed that the ancestors of the eta were Korean prisoners of war brought back to Japan following Empress Jingū’s legendary subjugation of the Three Korean Kingdoms. Aoyagi thus linked outcaste origins not merely with immigration from Korea, but also to the subjugation of it— even if this subjugation was mythological. While Yamaguchi and Aoyagi were not the first to propose a foreign origin for the eta, they were the first to offer Korea as the point of origin

11. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan, pp. 25–44. 12. Hatada, Nihonjin no Chōsenkan, p. 13. 13. Uesugi, Meiji ishin to senmin haishirei, pp. 16–17.

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and connect it with military conquest. The point of these claims may have been to assert Japanese supremacy in East Asia given the increasingly frequent appearance of European ships in Japanese waters around this time. It is also possible that connecting Korea, the very model of Confucian statecraft, with a group as lowly as the eta was a veiled attack on the sanctity of Confucianism by scholars of a rival school. Whatever the reason, the notion that the eta had emerged from conquered Korean stock would provide scholars, officials, pundits, and others for decades to come with a ready explanation of what made the burakumin “different” from other Japanese, as well as a way to disparage Koreans through this perceived connection with Japan’s lowly pariahs.

Burakumin and Koreans in the Age of “Civilization and Enlightenment” After the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu, the Satsuma-Chōshū insurgents-turned-oligarchs sought to recast Japan as a modern, unified nation-state. This necessitated a greater reach of the state into the lives of its people than had ever been attempted by the Tokugawa political framework and status system, a development that would entail important consequences for the people who would come to be called the burakumin. It also meant that Japan would have to leap into the brave new world of international diplomacy and imperialist power politics, rather than relying on the Confucian protocols of the old, China-centered East Asian order— a step that would eventually redefine the way the Japanese viewed Korea. The push to create a unified citizenry out of the separate classes of people under the Tokugawa social hierarchy began in 1870, when most samurai privileges were abolished and the status system was simplified into a two-tiered hierarchy that encompassed a vast majority of commoners and a small aristocracy, all under the emperor. At first this overhaul of the old system left the pariah status untouched, but it too succumbed a year later with an edict issued by the Meiji government in the eighth

14. Earlier scholars who bothered to comment at all on the outcastes had already attributed their origins to Chinese immigrants or the Ainu. For examples, see ibid., pp. 11–14.

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month of 1871: “The titles eta and hinin, and others of the kind, shall be abolished. Henceforth the people belonging to these classes shall be treated in the same manner both in occupation and social standing as commoners (heimin).” With this tersely worded notice, all individuals of pariah status became commoners, and so joined the majority of the Japanese as equal subjects of the emperor. But the reason for this broad reform remains something of a mystery. Records of discussions among those ministers of state most directly connected to the issuing of the edict show that in the months prior to its appearance they had surprisingly little to say on the issue. Some scholars have claimed that the idea was the brainchild of a particularly enlightened early Meiji bureaucrat named Ōe Taku. Others have seen it as an attempt to secure an exploitable source of labor for Japan’s fledgling industrial enterprises. Whatever the source of inspira15. Following the translation appearing in Ninomiya, “An Enquiry Concerning the Development and Present Situation of the Eta in Relation to the History of Social Classes in Japan,” 109, I have taken the liberty of adding the phrase “and others of the kind” to more fully capture a specific meaning in the original text (〶໮䴲Ҏㄝ), which made the edict applicable to all outcaste groups. This edict, which had no title when issued, eventually came to be known as the kaihō-rei, or “liberation decree.” 16. Ōe, a former Tosa samurai, served as a minor official in the short-lived Civil Affairs Ministry. Years later, he claimed that he submitted a proposal to the government through his ministry superiors that became the basis for the decision to abolish pariah status. Many scholars have taken him at his word, including Ian Neary (Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 30– 32). Uesugi Satoshi has criticized such a view, however, by pointing out that Ōe’s proposal received scant attention from the government at the time, and called for a gradual and selective elevation of outcastes to commoner status rather than a sweeping removal of pariah status. Furthermore, Ōe’s own Civil Aff airs Ministry was abolished a month before the directive was issued, and played no part in the decision-making process. See Uesugi, Meiji ishin to senmin haishirei, pp. 103–4. 17. This was a favored thesis of some postwar Marxist historians, such as Fujitani Toshio. In criticism, Uesugi points out that there is no evidence of a large influx of buraku laborers into the industrial sector in the wake of the abolition of pariah status. Given the limited scope of the sector during the early Meiji period, it seems unlikely that industrialists would have felt a need to employ former outcastes in any case (see ibid., pp. 154–55). Uesugi’s own thesis is that the decision had less to do with the outcastes themselves than with the land their communities occupied. In many areas, this land was exempt from taxation in exchange for the odious tasks and corvée labor that outcastes were required to perform for their domain lords. Th is system stood in the

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tion or ulterior motives for the change, looming large in the thinking of Meiji leaders were Japan’s image in the eyes of the West and a need to reorganize society to function more effectively as a modern nation-state. Howell points out that they would have been aware of the recently concluded American Civil War and understood that the United States would take a dim view of anything remotely resembling slavery. The abolition was also consistent with other early Meiji policies to dismantle the status system and realize greater social cohesion by making all Japanese equal before the emperor, as promised by the state slogan of “impartiality and equal favor” (isshi dōjin). Although clear statements of the rationale for abolishing pariah status are rare in the records of discussions within the new government, the most thoroughly argued standpoints that have been found do indeed address these last two concerns noted by Howell, as well as incorporate a statement of belief in natural human rights. Undoubtedly the most forceful of these statements was from a young Katō Hiroyuki, who submitted it in the fourth month of 1869 to the records of the Kōgisho, an early advisory council to the government comprised of middle-ranking samurai. He writes: Although not much is certain in regard to the eta and hinin, to continue to treat such people, who are no different from the rest of the human race [jinrui], as beings outside of the human world is undoubtedly a flagrant affront to the Way of Heaven. Furthermore, in this day and age, there can be no greater national disgrace for our country in our intercourse with foreign nations than the continued existence of this state of affairs. It is my sincere wish that the new government consider doing away with the labels eta and hinin and make these persons one with the common people. . . . For the new government to remain unconcerned in regard to this issue would, I fear, constitute a grave flaw in the Imperial Rule of our nation.

Official announcements and explanations to citizens by various prefectural governments regarding the government’s decision to incorporate the outcastes into the commoner class seemed to echo Katō’s concerns to way of instituting a modern land market as a basis for national tax revenues (ibid., pp. 118–28). 18. Howell, Geographies of Identity, p. 89. 19. Quoted in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 12.

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a significant degree. A public notice issued by the government of Fukuyama Prefecture during the tenth month of 1871, for example, went into great detail on the morality of the measure. Although there are various stories that claim the ancestors of those called the eta, chasen, and hinin were persons who came from foreign countries, they are nonetheless possessed of limbs and bodies and, like commoners, are undoubtedly human beings, fit to rule over all other beings. That human beings should interact amiably with one another is the Way of Heaven, and the growing friendship among the various countries of the world in recent years accords with this principle. . . . In essence there is no distinction among the nobles, commoners, and the eta and hinin, since all are invested with their own share of talent and wisdom. On the whole, commoners have no monopoly on intelligence, nor are the eta universally ignorant. There are none born into this world as human beings who, by honing their powers of understanding and discretion, and exerting themselves in their work, cannot acquire their rightful share of human happiness. However, until now the path of learning has not been opened sufficiently, and the will of the gods has not been made plain. Thus both the high and the lowly remained oblivious to these principles, and despised the eta and hinin as if they were animals.

This notice made passing reference to the idea that the outcastes were of foreign origin, but accorded it little importance. Rather, the emphasis was on the egalitarian concept of the “Way of Heaven.” In arguing for the inherent equality of outcastes and non-outcastes, and claiming that its necessity would be recognized through progress along “the path of learning,” the authorities in Fukuyama Prefecture appealed to the idea of natural human rights and the desire for “civilization and enlightenment”—concepts that in many ways characterized the 1870s. The truly “enlightened” would realize that all human beings were equal, and desist from discriminating further against the former outcastes. Such a concern for the morality and humanitarianism of the edict and for the injustice of any continued discrimination after 1871 not only became the leitmotif of official pronouncements, but also characterized 20. Notice issued sometime during October 1871 in ibid., p. 415. The chasen were a local outcaste group, engaged in the production of bamboo products, including the tea whisks from which the group took its name.

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the writings of intellectuals and social critics working outside of the government during the decade. Two such “civilization and enlightenment” thinkers to comment on the subject were Nishimura Kanebumi and Yokokawa Shūtō. While both referred to familiar theories regarding the Ainu or Korean origins of the outcastes, neither saw such ancestry as sufficient reason to continue ostracizing them. Rather, in language that was both Confucian and “enlightenment-oriented,” they argued that such treatment went against “the Principles of Heaven and Way of Humanity” (tenri jindō), and demanded that burakumin be accepted into society on an equal and unconditional basis. The press in the 1870s exhibited a similar point of view in its reporting on the self-improvement efforts of recently liberated pariah communities. The Nisshin kibun, for example, praised the autonomous efforts of former outcastes in Nishi-no-saka, Nara Prefecture, for their determination to build a school in their own community, calling it “the result of civilization and enlightenment” and urged majority commoners to realize that “holding them [the former outcastes] at a distance is after all a violation of the will of the Imperial Court.” The same paper later put an even finer point on this line of argument in a similar story of community self-improvement. If things continued at this rate, the article concluded, “in a few years those commoners who now look down upon the former eta will end up being treated with contempt by them.” Yet former outcastes expecting to be accepted as equal members of the nation-state were also expected to meet certain important conditions

21. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 40. 22. Article from the July 1872 issue, reproduced in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, pp. 353–54. 23. Article from the Nov. 29, 1872, issue, in ibid., p. 355. Although the admiration and praise extended toward buraku community efforts at self-improvement in such articles were certainly supportive and heartfelt, journalists may have had additional motivations beyond these. As Imanishi Hajime points out, such articles could also be read as a kick in the pants, so to speak, aimed at majority society. While portraying progressive buraku communities as bastions of enlightenment, the popular press also subtly capitalized on deep-seated majority feelings of superiority toward the former outcastes, by intimating that the tables might soon be turned. See Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei-bunka, p. 50.

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hinted at in many of the official announcements of the liberation edict. The progressive announcement from Fukuyama Prefecture quoted earlier, for example, offered this advice to the liberated: Moreover, if there are any among those previously called the eta who become self-important and impudent after they are suddenly ranked among the commoners, their conduct will only lead to pointless complications. That such conduct would be disastrous for them goes without saying. It would also become a matter of inconvenience for the country as a whole. For this reason, they should accept the purport [of this edict] with heartfelt gratitude, comport themselves with prudence, and, mindful of the Way of Heaven, act always with courtesy. Thereby gradually gaining the acceptance of the common people, they should endeavor to sustain themselves and support their families.

The message was as clear as it was contradictory: even though former outcastes were now equal to other commoners before the law, they had better not act that way— at least for the foreseeable future. Keeping a humble profile despite their new equality was not just a means of avoiding “complications” with the majority; it was also required to show proper gratitude to the state, lest they become an “inconvenience for the country as a whole.” But how exactly was a former outcaste supposed to behave in order to exhibit the required “prudence and courtesy”? The statement, and others like it, provided no guidelines, except for the veiled injunction against becoming a burden on the charity of others. Were the liberated outcastes expected to bow and scrape to other commoners, and avoid “defiling” those commoners’ communities and homes, just like during the Tokugawa period? If so, what was the point of being liberated? Furthermore, did the warning against becoming impoverished mean that they should continue to pursue the same occupations some had throughout the early modern period, even though the stigma attached to these jobs effectively marked those workers as outcastes? To continue might be perceived as stubbornness rather than diligence and sensitivity to the sensibilities of their majority neighbors, and it certainly would not promote the outcastes’ integration into society.

24. Notice issued sometime during October 1871, reprinted in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 415.

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The commoners’ reaction to the edict suggested that despite the government’s lofty language, real change would be difficult. In rural areas in particular, commoners reacted to the edict with what David Howell has aptly termed “murderous violence.” In one infamous incident, the Mimasaka Blood-Tax Rebellion of 1873, rioters killed eighteen former outcastes, injured numerous others, and set fire to many of their communities before the violence subsided. While the rioters were upset over more than just the abolition of pariah status—military conscription and a new system of taxation were in fact two of their main sources of indignation—in many ways it became a lightning rod for their sense of dissatisfaction and bewilderment with the new order. For many, the outcastes’ inclusion suggested not the elevation of those former pariahs, but their own demotion as commoners. Most of the commoners must have felt, too, that it was a flagrant example of the new regime’s violation of the moral economy they had lived by for over two centuries. So they both sent to local authorities a call for the immediate repeal of the liberation edict and, during the rebellion, presented the outcaste communities they encountered with an ultimatum: revert to the old standards of deferential behavior, or be attacked violently. Incorporating the outcastes into the modern nation-state thus changed the nature of discrimination from status-based and socially regulated to a matter of personal sentiment. Whereas before the edict majority commoners had to despise outcastes because they were pariahs, after the edict they chose to despise these minorities based on pre-modern perceptions of these peoples’ defi ling influence. Commoners may have feared that the liberation edict would make it impossible for them to determine who the outcastes mingling among them were. But as things turned out, another revolutionary piece of early Meiji legislation would ultimately, although unintentionally, ensure that the residents of former pariah communities and their descendants remained identifiable as such. The Family Registration Act (Koseki-hō) was issued in the fourth month of 1871 to replace the early 25. Howell, Geographies of Identity, pp. 89–109. 26. Ibid., p. 92. 27. Ibid., p. 88.

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modern system of temple registers. Under the Tokugawa registration system, separate registers had been maintained for each class and were attached to a specific village or neighborhood temple; through the Family Registration Act, the Meiji government sought to institute a universal registration system that would have validity throughout Japanese territory. The new system called for all those living in a given administrative area to be entered into the same register, regardless of status. Another major change came in the format and content of the registers. The new registers contained detailed information concerning not only the male head of the household (koshu), which was itself a new legal concept introduced by the law, but also everyone in his family, male and female, including any women who married into it. On each household record, vital information for its members, such as dates of birth, marriage, and death appeared along with a new entry for the “original place of residence” (honsekichi) of the household, that is, the address at which the family lived when the register was compiled. Each household record thus served as an official document of family lineage, fixing individual human beings within a line of ancestors that was itself attached to a particular community within Japan. This system, in conjunction with the extension to commoners of the right to use family names, greatly facilitated the process of identifying and keeping track of the over 30 million Japanese subjects alive at the time, as well as their future descendants. Furthermore, since the registers were official documents, open to perusal by anyone that wished to see them and required in a wide variety of social and official transactions, their importance to the individual and his or her place in society could hardly be ignored. 28. For an explanation of the Tokugawa temple registry system and how it differed from the registers instituted under the Family Registration Act, see Taniguchi Tomohei, Koseki-hō, pp. 2–4. 29. Commoners were permitted to use surnames by a decree of Sept. 19, 1870. This right, however, was not extended to outcastes prior to the abolition of pariah status. The Family Registration Act in essence turned the right to possess a surname into a responsibility to do so, since the law required such names to be entered in the register. It is interesting to note that the only Japa nese to be exempted from registration under the new law, in any form whatsoever, were the members of the Imperial Family, who also never took a surname.

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The Family Registration Act was issued prior to the edict abolishing pariah status, and so did not call for the registration of outcastes. But by the time the process of compiling the registers was completed—in the second month of 1872—pariah status had been abolished, and former outcastes were incorporated into the new registry system like other commoners. Some researchers have claimed that these 1872 registers contained discriminatory notations on the entries for families of former outcastes, such as small red dots on a corner to “mark” those families’ documents or labels such as moto-eta (former eta) or shin-heimin (“new commoner,” a term coined by officials to make distinctions between former outcastes and other commoners that rapidly took on a derogatory nuance), but a thorough survey of the 1872 registers has yet to be conducted to determine how common such designations may have been. Even without such discriminatory markers, however, the koseki registers would attach one’s family lineage to a specific, identifiable community through the entry for “original place of residence” (honsekichi). In the case of former outcastes who were still residing in areas identified as pariah communities at the time their registers were compiled, then, a connection to that community would be passed on to their descendants, for even if they moved away from the area, and their children were born and raised elsewhere, this entry remained unchanged. If the Kaihō-rei had granted the former outcastes the freedom of mobility within majority society by abolishing the proscriptions against mingling with others, the Koseki-hō ironically tied many to their original communities, no matter where they or their descendants went in Japan. In 1898 the establishment of the Meiji Civil Code would tighten these bonds by lending legal sanction to the notion of the ie (ᆊ, family as a hierarchical social unit), and the related concepts of iegara (ᆊᶘ, 30. The existence of discriminatory notations on the 1872 registers became a rallying issue for the postwar Buraku Liberation League (BLL) in the mid-1960s. In response to the BLL’s charges that the registers were still being accessed and used for discriminatory purposes against burakumin, the government decided to permanently close these documents to public inspection in 1968. While the documents still exist, the government has to date denied all requests to inspect them, even for the purpose of research. Kobayashi and Akisada, Burakushi kenkyū handobukku, entry for “Jinshin koseki mondai,” pp. 352–53.

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“birth” or family status) and kettō (㸔㍅, bloodlines, pedigree), which in turn made marriage a relationship between families rather than individuals. The ultimate effect of the Family Registration Act, however, was something more— and ultimately something different—than simply that of binding former outcastes and their descendants to an association with historical pariah areas in perpetuity: it subtly altered the composition of the group of people who could from then on be stigmatized as sharing outcaste roots. Having a former outcaste community noted on one’s family register as their honsekichi was by no means a guarantee that one’s ancestors had actually been outcastes. As the Tokugawa order began to unravel in the early nineteenth century, non-outcaste commoners began to settle in and around outcaste communities, either because they turned to begging out of extreme poverty and thus became wards of the hinin, or because they made inroads into lucrative outcaste industries and took up residence in pariah communities in the process. Although there is no way of knowing how many of these non-outcastes stayed in their adopted communities through the creation of the official family registers in 1872, those who did ended up with that community as the honsekichi on their family register. By the same token, the turmoil of the late Bakumatsu and early postRestoration years invited increasing numbers of outcastes to abscond from their designated communities. All of this chaotic mobility took on the proportions of a social problem in the early Meiji years, leading the central government to issue orders to local authorities in urban areas to round up vagrants and others of indeterminate abode—including members of a nomadic group known as the sanka (ቅぽ)— and, when 31. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 44. For information on the Meiji Civil Code and its role in creating the modern ie system, see Fuse, Kekkon to kazoku, pp. 54– 71. 32. On commoners being absorbed into the ranks of the hinin, see Howell, Geographies of Identity, pp. 29–30. In the case of the city of Edo, Groemer, in his “Creation of the Edo Outcaste Order,” pp. 283–87, reveals that the incorporation of indigent commoners began to occur at least a century before the Bakumatsu period. For an analysis of commoners making inroads into traditional eta industries and taking up residence in their communities in the late Tokugawa period, see Hatanaka, “Mibun o koeru toki,” pp. 403– 60.

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possible, forcibly repatriate them to their “proper” community of residence. Failing that, the authorities were to settle them in the areas where they had been apprehended. It is quite likely that by the time their family registers were compiled, many outcastes had managed to slip undetected into non-outcaste communities in the midst of all this upheaval, just as many non-outcastes found themselves in pariah communities when their “original place of residence” was indelibly recorded. All of these people—along with others living in areas that had no historical connection to pariah status, but exhibited local features regarded as undesirable or taboo—became the human foundations of a new group to suffer marginalization for various, modern reasons, based on the preMeiji notions of the connection between place and status. Their descendants would eventually come to be referred to generically as the burakumin. The irony was that the very system of registering citizens that made this modern form of discrimination possible and sustainable from one generation to the next, through the traceability of the honsekichi on one’s family register, was part of the same modernization drive that had urged Meiji leaders to abolish pariah status in the first place. 33. The order was issued by the Imperial Council of State (dajōkan) during the fourth month of 1870. The text appears in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 28–29. For a fuller treatment of these early Meiji efforts to repatriate displaced persons, see Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei-bunka, pp. 51– 60. 34. Communities in the immediate vicinity of facilities such as slaughterhouses, crematoriums, and sewerage treatment plants often became subjected to such stigma, due to assumed outcaste nature of these enterprises. Other modern buraku communities arose in areas adjacent to pre-Meiji outcaste communities, as impoverished people began to settle in the area— or were forcibly settled there by local authorities after being apprehended for vagrancy—thus causing the reputation of the older community to be extended to include the newer as well. Ian Neary notes several examples of communities that formed in the Bakumatsu and early Meiji periods that came to be regarded as former outcaste areas for such reasons, despite having no connection to pre-Meiji pariah groups; see Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 34–35. In some areas, rapid urban development resulting from the construction of military bases during the mid- to late-Meiji period created impoverished sections that were then further stigmatized by the placement of odious municipal facilities in their midst. See, for example, the case of the Arata section of Maizuru (Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Mikaihō buraku no jittai, pp. 113–17), and the Yamate section of Kure (Kobayakawa, Hiroshima-ken chiiki no burakushi, buraku kaihō undōshi nenpyō sōkō, pp. 57– 63).

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The Meiji modernization drive simultaneously invented a historical legacy. Although outcaste status had operated in diverse ways from region to region and from one pariah group to the next in early modern Japan, from the abolition of pariah status onward any community assumed to have historical ties to pre-Meiji outcastes rapidly came to be viewed as a “former eta village” whose residents were thus—to an equal degree of uniformity— descendents of the eta. This logic was applied to all buraku communities and their residents, no matter what the nature of their Tokugawa period “roots” had actually been. The Meiji state’s push to mold a uniform and unified citizenry out of a diverse crowd of samurai, peasants, and townspeople thus created, as a side effect of sorts, the image of an equally uniform minority—the burakumin— assumed to be the lineal descendants of a homogeneous eta population. By the beginning of the 1920s, as we shall see, even the buraku activists who gathered to launch the Suiheisha bought into this notion. In contrast to the burakumin, minority Koreans in Japan were much less a subject of intellectual or popular scrutiny during first decade of the Meiji period. Even so, early Meiji leaders viewed Korea very differently than did their Tokugawa counterparts. To see the change, one need look no further than the early debates among the Meiji oligarchs around the question of “subjugating Korea” (Seikanron), which occurred in 1873, and the forcible opening of Korea to trade and diplomacy with the Kanghwa Treaty of 1876. While it would be inaccurate to see in these events the expression of a fully developed imperialistic drive toward controlling Korea, they reveal a dramatic change from the days when Tokugawa rulers were eager to receive Korean embassies as a way of bolstering the shogun’s cultural authority. In the realm of political thought as well, there was a marked shift. No longer were Korea’s cultural achievements held in high esteem, like they

35. In the former case, Saigo Takamori and his supporters sought to punish the Korean court for what they saw as its audacity in refusing to recognize the Meiji state, while the latter was an early exercise in “gunboat diplomacy,” a là Commodore Perry, motivated by a desire to secure Japan a place in the international system of free-trade imperialism and in the hope of nudging Western powers to revise the unequal treaties they had saddled Japan with in the 1850s. For an in-depth analysis of political motives and debates in the two incidents, see Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 31–49.

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had been by neo-Confucian scholars during the Tokugawa period. For instance, in 1875 the premier intellectual voice of “civilization and enlightenment,” Fukuzawa Yukichi, offered the following thoughts on Korea in an editorial in the Yūbin hōchi shinbun: If we inquire what kind of country it is, we find that it is a small, barbaric country in Asia, with a state of civilization far behind that of our Japan. There is no advantage to be gained in trading with it or benefit to exchanging embassies with it, nor is there any need to study its teachings or fear its military strength. Even if they [the Koreans] were to come to our capital and ask to be made a dependent state, this would be no great cause for joy. And why should that be so? As I have said before, if Japan does not gain the strength to hold the countries of the West in check and thereby secure the right to join their ranks, we cannot truly call ourselves independent.

Although less than a decade later Fukuzawa would emphasize the importance of “guiding” Korea through reforms like those carried out in Japan, he still saw nothing worth preserving in Korean traditional culture. On a superficial level this rejection of Korean intellectual achievements may seem to echo the derision of the late Tokugawa Kokugaku scholars, but the motivation was completely different. The Kokugaku scholars were calling for a return to a time before the Japanese body politic had been “corrupted” by Confucian influences from China and Korea. For Fukuzawa, by contrast, anything that did not contribute to the national goal of obtaining the power and respect of the Western nations in order to survive in the world of imperialist diplomatic and military relations was a potentially harmful distraction. If the attainment of “civilization and enlightenment” would enable Japan to share in the source of Western national strength, and the incorporation of the former outcastes into a unified, modern nation-state (so long as they behaved in the proper manner) was a part of this effort, then Korea must also be rejected as another discredited relic of the past.

36. Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Ajia shokoku to no wasen wa waga eijoku ni kansuru naki no setsu,” Yūbin hōchi shinbun, October 7, 1875, quoted in Takasaki, “Bōgen” no genkei, p. 10.

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Social Darwinism and Marginalization: Scholarly Discussions The transformations that occurred in Japan from the end of the 1870s through the early years of the twentieth century greatly defined the shape of state and society for the decades to follow. During the next twentyfive years, beginning with the rise and fall of the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, there developed a highly centralized, authoritarian state structure, buttressed by an increasingly effective propagation of the ideology of the emperor-centered “family state,” which provided citizens with a more cohesive sense of what it meant to be Japanese while enhancing state control over them. During this period, Japanese imperialism also emerged, as the nation waged modern warfare against Qing China and czarist Russia over the fate of Korea. In the midst of this transformation came subtle changes in ideology that had enormous implications for the way Koreans and burakumin would be viewed, especially in relation to the Japanese “family state.” As the Freedom and Popu lar Rights Movement ebbed, “civilization and enlightenment” thinking and the commitment to ideas of universal equality and human rights that had characterized the 1870s were abandoned by intellectuals in favor of a new way of viewing the world: social Darwinism. First introduced to Japan in the 1870s, and subsequently propagated through the translation of the writings of Herbert Spencer into Japanese over the next decade, this new social philosophy seemed to promise a “scientific” explanation of why certain peoples prospered while others were subjugated. For Japanese intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, this suggested a much clearer national agenda than the more amorphous call to “civilization and enlightenment.” The strength of the appeal could be seen in the speed with which some former proponents of the old slogans embraced the new doctrine. As early as 1882, both Fukuzawa Yukichi and Katō Hiroyuki had become advocates of social Darwinist views. 37. Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 140. 38. Hirota, Sabetsu no shisen, pp. 105– 6. Hirota claims that Fukuzawa and Katō were early advocates of social Darwinian ideas in Japan, and their views would not become more widely shared until later in the decade.

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Japanese intellectuals’ application of the idea of “survival of the fittest” to Japanese society produced a new interest in the burakumin and the question of what set them apart from other Japanese. The result was a sustained discourse that described buraku “deviance” in the overlapping terminology of eugenics and race. Those concerned about Japanese chances of surviving in the melee of competing races emphasized the need to ensure that Japanese racial stock was healthy and strong. One proponent of these views was Takahashi Yoshio, a former student of Fukuzawa’s at Keiō Gijuku. In his 1884 publication On the Improvement of the Japanese Race, Takahashi touched on the subject of the burakumin and the challenge that their incorporation into the ranks of commoners posed for the eugenic health of the nation. In the former feudal world, the classes of samurai, peasant, artisan, merchant, eta, and hinin were in place, and marriages between those of different classes were seldom permitted. This was especially true of the eta and hinin, with whom one would not even share the same fire, to say nothing of marriage. . . . [But] today the eta and hinin of former times have finally joined the ranks of commoners and now carry on with their social interactions just as other people do. Thus it is a matter of course that the bloodlines of this lot will spread in our society as well. Especially among the lowliest people [karyū no jinmin], families in which leprosy runs are not rare. Experts on such matters tell us that leprosy cannot be eradicated from a family line even with the passing of five generations. For this reason, neglecting to clarify the blood lineage [of a potential marriage partner] and marrying one from a family line with a history of malignant disease will not only risk polluting the blood line of one’s own household, but could do the same to those of the families of [future] in-laws as well.

Takahashi’s reasoning in this passage is clearly based on the misconception, all too common in his day, that leprosy and other “malignant diseases” such as tuberculosis were inherited rather than transmitted through the environment. It is also worth noting that Takahashi was not singling out the former outcastes and their descendants for exclusion from the Japanese gene pool: his use of the term “the lowliest people” was a reference to the poor in general rather than the burakumin specifically. While he may 39. Takahashi Yoshio, Nihon jinshu kairyō ron (1884), passage quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 44.

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not have intended to justify marriage discrimination against the burakumin, however, there is no reason to believe that his readers would have interpreted his admonition otherwise. Indeed, if Takahashi felt any qualms about identifying buraku bloodlines as genetic carriers of malignant diseases, others saw no reason not to do so. Many writers surmised that segregation and discrimination against the early modern outcastes and their modern descendants had forced them to marry among themselves for generations, resulting in a genetically disastrous degree of inbreeding. Marriages are formed between those in the same buraku, and since their sense of proper, moral behavior is so poor, repeated instances of consanguineous marriage are the result. Thus a single bloodline is passed on continuously without interruption. Hideously crippled and deformed individuals appear generation after generation. Some have pus draining from their eyes; some are completely bald. There are others still whose mouths and noses have completely rotted away, and at the most extreme, even those who possess no limbs at all— a most hideously haunted house, as it were, worthy of being called the very extreme of despair in the human world.

Aside from mistakenly attributing diseases like leprosy to a genetic origin, accounts such as this grossly exaggerated both the extent to which such diseases were prevalent among the burakumin and the degree to which consanguineous marriage was practiced in buraku communities. As seen from these quotations, a tendency to equate marriages between partners of the same community with marriages between blood relatives

40. In regard to this passage, Kurokawa Midori has pointed out that Takahashi sought the expulsion of leprosy and other such diseases from the Japa nese gene pool based on his flawed understanding of their nature, and not the exclusion of the burakumin per se; had Takahashi grasped the true nature of such diseases, she suggests, he may have seen no reason to warn against intermarriage (ibid., p. 45). But Fujino Yutaka’s claim that Takahashi’s views constitute a “justification of the taboo against intermarrying with the burakumin” (Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 141) still stands, regardless of what Takahashi’s intent may have been. 41. Junkei, “Burakuteki senmin no kyōka,” Mujintō 4, no. 5 (1899), quoted in Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 153. 42. Moreover, most apologists of eugenics at this time appear to have overstated the actual connection between consanguineous marriage and genetic birth defects. For a concise overview of the general eugenic views regarding marriage voiced in Japan at this time, see Fujino, “Buraku mondai to yūsei shisō,” pp. 125–31.

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facilitated this conclusion. Yet there is evidence to suggest that marriage between individuals of the same community, including consanguineous unions, may have been more common among the non-buraku majority in rural areas than it was among their buraku neighbors. Accusing the burakumin of posing a eugenic threat to society required not only oversimplifying the actual state of affairs in many minority communities, but also turning a blind eye to the prevalence of “eugenically unsound” practices among the majority. While some intellectuals made sweeping assumptions about the eugenic health of the burakumin, others used social Darwinian ideas to propound equally specious explanations for anti-buraku discrimination. The result was a modern reinterpretation of the old Kokugaku claims of foreign, and particularly Korean, origins for the outcastes. Equating what was apparently the weakest group in Japanese society with Asian neighbors who seemed ill fit for survival within a cutthroat, imperialist world order, after all, made perfect Darwinian sense. If Koreans and burakumin were of the same racial stock, then the shortcomings of one were the shortcomings of the other: the backwardness of the burakumin suggested that the Koreans were incapable of self-rule, whereas the assumed “civilization gap” between Korea and Japan suggested that the burakumin were both different from other Japanese and incapable of self-improvement. In stark contrast to the rhetoric of universal human rights of a decade earlier, such explanations accepted racial animosity as an unavoidable, even natural 43. A study of rural villages in Nara Prefecture conducted as late as 1915, for example, made repeated reference to the extreme mistrust of outsiders on the part of those in non-buraku communities. So great was this sense of mistrust that villagers were known to remark derisively of those who married individuals outside of the community that “she couldn’t find anyone to marry her in the village” or “there’s no way any woman in the village would have married into his family” (see Takenaga Mitsuo, Kindai Nihon no chiiki shakai to buraku mondai, p. 251). In his analysis of the Nara-ken fūzoku-shi, Takenaga points out that such closed marriage practices resulted in majority villages in which many of the residents were related to one another, and consanguineous marriages were thus not at all uncommon (p. 252). In contrast, in buraku communities such as Yasunaka, Osaka Prefecture, a network of peddlers traveling between buraku communities in Osaka and Nara prefectures served as a source of information on young men and women of marriageable age in other communities. Until the 1950s, Yasunaka received most of its brides from buraku communities in Nara. (Interview with Saeki Chizuko at the Yasunaka kaihō kaikan, Mar. 1, 1999.)

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condition, and placed the blame for prejudice and discrimination on the victim. The anthropologist Fujii Kansuke, writing in an 1886 issue of the journal Tokyo jinruigaku zasshi, provided a typical example of this line of reasoning in an article titled “The Eta must be Foreigners.” My supposition that the ancestors of those who are derided as eta today were people brought over from the Three Korean Kingdoms during ancient times may be demonstrated in light of the following two facts. First, other Japanese despise them, and second, the eta eat meat. [ . . . ] Although the people brought over from the Three Korean Kingdoms in ancient times were divided and settled throughout the various provinces, the Japanese probably scorned them because they were of a different race, and avoided having any interaction with them. The long history of this habit has produced the state of affairs seen today. Furthermore, the reason why the eta have eaten meat since ancient times is the result of a long established practice, dating back to their ancestors from the Three Korean Kingdoms, who were obviously meat-eaters. However, until only recently the Japanese held the belief that eating meat was unclean[. . . . ] Because those brought to Japan from the Three Korean Kingdoms ate meat, the Japanese looked upon them as base and defiled, and this in turn must have led to the label of “eta” [much filth].

The circular nature of Fujii’s reasoning, while striking in this passage, was by no means rare for those who took the old legends of Korean slaves and war prisoners at face value. The connection to foreign conquest offered by these legends was in itself significant, since it seemed to offer “proof” of the core tenet of social Darwinism within an imperialist context. And yet, as Oguma Eiji has demonstrated, most Japanese anthropologists and others writing on the origins of the Japanese during the Meiji period subscribed to the view that the Japanese were themselves a composite of many races. The archaeologist and anthropologist Torii Ryūzō, for example, contended that the Japanese people emerged from a long process of racial blending in which the aboriginal Ainu were mixed with peoples arriving later from the Asian continent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Such a belief, however, did not prevent him 44. Fujii Kansuke, “Eta wa takokujin naru beshi,” Tokyo jinruigaku zasshi, no. 10 (Dec. 1886), in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, p. 553. 45. See Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shiwa no kigen, particularly chaps. 1–4. 46. Ibid., pp. 24, 74.

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from concluding, after conducting a physiological survey of a handful of individuals from two buraku communities in Hyōgo and Tokushima prefectures, that the burakumin “bear an extremely strong resemblance to the ‘Malayo-polynesian’ people aboriginal to the Malay Islands, and exhibit none of the features of the Mongolian race.” How could scholars claim, on the one hand, that the Japanese were an aggregate of various “non-Japanese” groups, while on the other hand claiming that the burakumin were different because they were of foreign stock? The assumption behind many of these claims was that the outcastes had remained intrinsically more foreign precisely because they had failed to mix as thoroughly as had the other races that made up the Japanese. This view of the burakumin had grave implications for the minority’s position within the emerging ideal of an emperor-centered, homogeneous Japanese nation-state: the kokutai. If we think of the kokutai not as a vertical hierarchy, with the emperor at its apex, but as a concentric map of racial purity, which radiated out from the emperor at its purest center through the privileged kazoku nobility and ranks of commoners, then the burakumin came to occupy a tenuous position at the outermost fringes. Japanese intellectuals also turned the lens of social Darwinism upon the Koreans, but the minority Korean community would not start to attract the same scholarly attention until Japanese interests in the peninsula had made Korea and its people a more pressing, national concern. 47. “Eta no junruigakuteki chōsa,” Hinode shinbun, February 1898, in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 11. Torii’s surveys were carried out in 1897 and 1898. Torii’s assignation of Malayan traits to the burakumin is significant in light of the social position that advocates of the multiracial makeup thesis generally assigned to the Malayan “physiological type” among the Japa nese. Captain F. Brinkley, editor of the early English language Japan Mail, provided a succinct summary of such anthropological ideas about the position of different racial types among the Japa nese in a 1908 introduction to ancient Japa nese civilization. “It is probable that the Japa nese are a mixed race. Among them are to be found Mongolian types and Malayan types, the former constituting the patricians of the nation, the latter the plebeians.” See Brinkley, “Summary of Early Japa nese History,” p. 579. 48. A notable exception was Fukuzawa Yūkichi. As we have seen, Fukuzawa had commented— disparagingly—on the nature of Korean culture and society as early as 1875. His hopes for the redemption of Korea improved in 1881, with the arrival of a diplomatic mission from the peninsula that included young, reform-minded Koreans

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In the years leading up to the Sino-Japanese War, frustration over the continuing vacillations and seeming incompetence of the Korean court, along with disparagingly ethnocentric observations of Korean life by Japanese observers, led many intellectuals to propose sweeping explanations of the deeper “problem” that was keeping Koreans from embarking on their own Meiji-style self-improvement program. By the time of the Russo-Japanese War, such notions had crystallized into a view of Korean society that Japanese historians have since dubbed teitairon, or “stagnation theory.” Less a theory than a collection of views on the Koreans’ inability to improve their own situation, “stagnation theory” was based on the social Darwinian belief that all societies could be placed along a continuum of progress from barbarity to civilization, and that the Koreans had stalled at a point along this continuum— a point that Japan had passed long ago. In a series of essays he wrote in 1906 while traveling in Korea, the scholar of colonial policy Nitobe Inazō expressed such views of Korean backwardness, using images that are at once pastoral and bleak: Life is Arcadian. I feel as though I were living three thousand years back, in the age of our Kami. Many a face do I see that I should have taken for the likeness of a Kami— so sedate, so dignified, so finely chiseled, and yet so devoid of expression. The very physiognomy and living of this people are so bland, unsophisticated and primitive that they belong not to the twentieth or to the tenth—nor indeed to the first century. They belong to a prehistoric age[. . . . ] The Arcadian simplicity of the folk gives no promise of primitive energy; their

such as Kim Ok-kyun, who would become a protégé of Fukuzawa’s. Thereafter, Fukuzawa’s opinion of Korea fluctuated with the vicissitudes of court politics and foreign relations in Seoul, as Japan and Qing China vied with one another for influence over various factions at court. With the crushing of a failed coup attempt by the proJapanese “independence faction” in 1884 and the signing of the Tientsin Convention in the following year, Fukuzawa gave up all hope for Korean reform from within. For an analysis of Fukuzawa’s views on Japa nese policy toward Korea and China within the context of a wider public debate on foreign policy prior to the Sino-Japanese War, see Itō Yukio, “Nisshin senzen no Chūgoku/Chōsen ninshiki no keisei to gaikō ron,” pp. 114–15, 147–52 in particular. Takasaki Sōji elucidates the various stages of Fukuzawa’s evolving views of Korea and Koreans, complete with substantial quotations from Fukuzawa’s articles on the subject and a summary of Korean views of Fukuzawa, in his “Bōgen” no genkei, pp. 9–23.

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habits do not remind us of the untamed vigor of Homeric songs, nor of Tacitus’ descriptions of early Germans, nor indeed of the fresh chronicles of the Kojiki. The Korean habits of life are the habits of death. They are closing the lease of their ethnic life. The national course of their existence is well-nigh run. Death presides over the peninsula.

But, as Peter Duus has shown, in the late Meiji period a more prevalent stream of thought emphasized cultural affinities between Korea and Japan as a sign of underlying racial kinship. This way of imagining the Koreans was eventually dubbed by one of its leading proponents the nissen dōsoron (᮹冂ৠ⼪䂪, the theory of common ancestry between Japanese and Koreans, usually abbreviated to dōsoron). As with the earlier-mentioned explanations of foreign origins for the burakumin, dōsoron scholars presented ancient legends as if they were historical fact. As further (and less dubious) proof of ancient historical ties, some writers also pointed to the cultural contributions and ser vice to the throne that ancient émigrés from Korea had provided. Although the ideas of dōsoron advocates were more accommodating of Koreans than those of the teitairon writers, the social Darwinian principle of interracial struggle and conquest appeared in dōsoron explanations as well. Many dōsoron apologists suggested that an advanced, “heaven-descended” (amakudari) race, originating from somewhere outside of the Japanese archipelago (though never from the Korean Peninsula, significantly) migrated to Japan in the prehistoric period. There they brought the peoples already residing on the islands under control through military subjugation and superior cultural and moral influence and gave birth to Japan’s imperial line. Furthermore, by incorporating stories from the Kojiki of Empress Jingū’s conquest of the peninsula, many dōsoron writers also claimed that this imperial race went on to subjugate the Korean Peninsula after

49. Nitobe Inazō, “Primitive Life and Presiding Death in Korea,” in Nitobe, Works of Inazo Nitobe, vol. 1, pp. 327–28. 50. Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 413–23. 51. The term was coined by Kanazawa Shōsaburō, a linguist who, on the eve of the annexation, characterized the Korean language as “nothing more than an offshoot of our national language, sharing the same relation with it as that of the Ryukyu dialect.” Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, p. 97. 52. Duus, Abacus and the Sword, p. 422.

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consolidating its hegemony over Japan. Even if Koreans and Japanese were to be viewed as belonging to the same race and sharing the same culture, conquest and domination were still part of the picture. While many writers in the dōsoron vein saw little need to go beyond explaining the “history” behind the racial affinity of Koreans and Japanese, some tried to tackle the obvious question of why vast cultural differences had developed between the two peoples. As with explanations of the racial inferiority of the burakumin, some claimed that the Korean “racial stock” contained a larger proportion of “inferior” elements than that of the Japanese. Others claimed that Korea’s geographic separation from Japan made it difficult for those on the peninsula to maintain nourishing cultural contacts with their brethren on the archipelago, or that Korea’s proximity to China had caused its people to be led astray by Chinese culture. Even so, the bonds of blood and culture between the two peoples remained strong and viable in the dōsoron vision. Writing in the immediate wake of the annexation, the historian Kita Sadakichi explained: The annexation of Korea truly restores the relationship between Japan and Korea to the way it was in ancient times. . . . One could say that, if Korea is like a weak branch family [bunke], our country is truly the affluent and stable main family [honke]. . . . A branch family [such as this] does not have the wherewithal to support itself adequately. For this reason, threatened from one direction and tormented from another, our pitiful brethren had to curry favor with those around them, and lived truly wretched lives. Thus, there was turmoil in their home, and this in turn came to cause problems not only for the main family, but for other neighboring houses as well. In contrast, the main family grew extremely prosperous by obeying the family precepts [kakun] that have 53. The general unwillingness of dōsoron writers to claim that the race that conquered and ruled Japan and Korea had been indigenous to the archipelago seems to have stemmed from the fact that most accepted the belief that the Ainu were the descendents of such original inhabitants. The Ainu too were viewed as a “weak” race that lost control of the Japa nese islands to stronger peoples from elsewhere. In all of these arguments, the influence of European and American ideas about race was plainly evident. For example, journalist and statesman Takekoshi Yosaburō claimed that the Ainu were a “barbarian people” like the “red race of North America.” (Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa kigen, p. 98.) 54. For examples of this line of argument, see Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 419–20.

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existed since the time of the founding ancestors. . . . In such a situation, it is natural that they [of the branch family] themselves would long to return to the main family, and that the main family would happily accept them. Such is the essence of the amalgamation of Korea. . . . Since they have now rejoined the empire, they must swiftly assimilate themselves into the people of the nation [ippan kokumin ni dōka shite] and in the same way become faithful subjects of His Majesty the Emperor. This will not only result in their own happiness, but will bring glory upon the grand traditions of their forefathers.

For proponents of dōsoron, the racial affinity between Koreans and Japanese left no room for the existence of a distinct Korean culture: their complete assimilation was the only acceptable goal. This blending could be easily achieved, however, since the Japanese had proven themselves so adept at assimilating other races and, moreover, because the Koreans were not actually of a different race to begin with. An unquestioned assumption that “race” equaled “culture” pervaded dōsoron thinking. Although dōsoron and teitairon might appear to be opposing interpretations of the historical and cultural connections between Korea and Japan, in fact the main difference between the two concerned their prognoses for whether the Korean people could be incorporated smoothly and seamlessly into the Japanese empire. In arguing that Korean culture was “stuck” at a stage much like that of Japan’s own past, teitairon advocates in essence claimed that, with proper guidance, Koreans could be brought up to the level of the Japanese. For the most pessimistic, such as Nitobe, the gulf was so wide and the lack of “primitive energy” on the part of the Koreans so great that it would take Japan centuries to bring these colonial charges to a comparable level of civilization. As dire an assessment as that seemed, however, Nitobe did not reject the possibility of eventual success in the endeavor. For their part, dōsoron advocates chose simply to ignore the question of how long and difficult the road to complete assimilation of the Koreans would be. Indeed, what was missing from the arguments of both “camps” was a discussion of how to actually go about the task of assimilating the Koreans. This was particularly problematic in the case of dōsoron, because by 55. Kita Sadakichi, Kankoku no heigō to kokushi, cited in Hatada, Nihonjin no Chōsenkan, p. 38. 56. Peattie, “Japa nese Attitudes toward Colonialism, 1895–1945,” p. 95.

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the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, it had become the leitmotif in discussions of colonial policy for why Japan’s control of Korea was both justified and bound to succeed. If dōsoron advocates ever reflected on the implications that the all-too-prevalent theories of Korean origins for the burakumin had for the successful incorporation of their long lost Korean brethren, however, they might have had found reason for concern. If theories of Korean origin were to be believed, it meant that the descendants of ancient Korean immigrants had failed to assimilate adequately even after several generations of beneficent Japanese influence. More generally, too, the very willingness of many scholars and intellectuals to attribute a Korean source to a group held in such low esteem should have cast doubts on the people’s willingness to accept Koreans as equally Japanese.

Disease and Threats to Social Order: Commentary in the Popular Press If the 1870s had drastically upset the social order of Japan, the 1880s provided a shock of equal proportion to the economic order: the Matsukata Deflation, which began in 1881 and lasted throughout much of the decade. For buraku communities, many of which had yet to recover from the blow dealt by the loss of monopoly rights on the disposal of carcasses, this shock was felt all the more painfully. Even in prosperous, urban buraku communities, like Yanagihara in Kyoto, the economic downturn took its toll. In 1887, a study of local buraku communities conducted by the Kyoto Department of Industrial Promotion classified 749 households in Yanagihara (67.4 percent of the total) as “facing great difficulty in making ends meet due to the general economic recession.” Among this group, 400 households (36 percent of the community total) were described as “having few possessions and needing to pawn articles of clothing just to get enough food to eat.” The remaining 349 households (31.4 percent) were found to “have no possessions, receive help from their neighbors to feed themselves, and stand on the brink of starvation.”

57. Kyoto-fu kangyō-ka, Meiji 19-nen rinji kyū eta/hinin chōsa, quoted in Shigemitsu, “Yanagihara ginkō-shi,” p. 120. The same survey recorded a total of 1,111 households in the community.

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The increasingly conspicuous poverty of such communities, especially those located within Japan’s urban landscape, presented a stark contrast to the kind of modernity that Japan was trying to achieve. During the 1880s, the popular press began to take note of the situation in terms that revealed a drastic break from the inclusive rhetoric of “civilization and enlightenment” that had characterized articles on the burakumin during the 1870s. This negative attention increased from the middle of the decade onward, as a severe outbreak of cholera in 1886 led authorities and the press to consider that the crowded, unsanitary conditions of such communities had led to the epidemic. The heightened concern over the spread of cholera and other infectious diseases, however, led to more than just an image of burakumin as ignorant of proper methods of hygiene. Rather, a lack of hygiene became linked to the burakumin at a much more intrinsic level, as if slovenliness and disease were part of their very nature. An article in the Hinode shinbun on the problems that Yanagihara was encountering in its bid to be incorporated into the city of Kyoto alluded to such an essential difference. Although the article observed that the community’s geographic position— bordering on the city directly to the southeast—made its incorporation seem a matter of course, it pointed out that “villages such as this have left a deep impression of their hereditary peculiarities [iden no tokushitsu] in the minds of most people, who thus naturally avoid social interaction with them.” This, along with the community’s “peculiar customs,” remained an obstacle to Yanagihara’s incorporation within the city of Kyoto. This process of essentializing and stereotyping the nature of buraku communities and their residents continued without respite into the next decade. Near the close of the nineteenth century, a lengthy feature story in the magazine Taiyō on conditions in a large buraku community in Tokyo’s Asakusa Ward, authored by none other than the journalist and social critic Yokoyama Gennosuke, provided a summation of such views.

58. For a fascinating analysis of the impact of late nineteenth-century cholera epidemics in Japan on thinking about hygiene, see Anbo, Minato Kōbe korera, pesuto, suramu. 59. “Yanagihara-sō o ikan sen,” Hinode shinbun, Sept. 9, 1888, in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, pp. 190– 91.

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Claiming that the burakumin had become “equal to the other people of the land in legal terms only,” Yokoyama launched into a description worth examining at length for what it reveals of anti-buraku prejudice in the press at the turn of the century. Yokoyama vividly described the buraku community as an assault on the senses: “If one ventures into Kameoka-machi, an indescribable stench assails one’s nose. Th is stench is always present upon meeting people or visiting their homes. In the end, it gives one an excruciating headache. . . . No matter how dull one’s olfactory sense may be, one would not consider spending more than thirty minutes in this place.” The “stench” of the buraku, as pictured in this passage, was attached not only to the community, but also to individual bodies belonging to it. The description seems to suggest that it was these very human bodies, not a lack of sanitation facilities, that produced this odor: it was endemic to the burakumin themselves. Yokoyama went on to describe in detail the debauched lifestyle of the community’s residents. The men blew all of their daily wages on alcohol and prostitutes. When they did return home, there was no end of marital strife in store—“fights between husband and wife, jealousy, hatred, and other conflicts fill the time between meals.” Even education—which writers in the 1870s had celebrated as the key to “civilization and enlightenment” for the minority—was, in Yokoyama’s view, entirely wasted on them. His report questioned what difference exposure to learning for only a few hours a day could make for such children, “when they return to families with no order, no ideals, and no interest in education at home— nothing but a vast, limitless wasteland. This immediately scatters any ideas that they may have acquired during the day at school. . . . Thus, 60. Tengai Bōbōsei (Yokoyama’s pen-name), “Shin-heimin shakai no jōkyō,” Taiyō 5, no. 22 (Oct. 1899), reproduced in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 85. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., p. 86. In an explanation that perhaps reveals the extent to which the Meiji Civil Code’s redefinition of marriage as a matter between families, and not individuals, had influenced popular perceptions of what a proper marriage should be, Yokoyama surmised that much of this marital strife could be attributed to the degree to which young people in the community chose their own marriage partners without any prior consultation with their parents.

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they can attend school for two or three years and leave with nothing to show for it in their demeanor, only the ability to read a few characters.” Yokoyama placed all the blame for these and other shortcomings on the moral and psychological makeup of the burakumin, which he summed up in the following terms: They are truly the orphans of society, and character traits normally associated with orphans are glaringly obvious among them as well. In contrast to the coarseness of their appearance, language, and manners, they are in fact extremely cowardly. Timid and impertinent as they are, they also have a strong tendency towards extreme circumspection. Most conspicuous about them, however, is their abundance of suspicion, which makes them intensely mistrustful.

Scathing as it may seem, Yokoyama’s assessment of the minority’s character and worth was unusual for the time only in terms of its length and detail. Particularly during and after the nationwide cholera epidemic of 1886, stories on buraku communities in the popular press typically portrayed disease and poor sanitation as endemic conditions and linked these to a lack of intelligence, disregard for personal hygiene, and other innate behavioral defects of the people living there. Certainly the burakumin were not the only people in Japan to receive such bad press at this time; non-buraku urban slums and their residents were likewise viewed as a source of epidemic diseases and a whole host of social problems. Yet the fact that someone like Yokoyama, whose reporting on the

63. Ibid., p. 88. The same section also reveals the extent to which Eu ropean and American prejudice against Africans had taken root in Japan by this point. “Not just in moral education, but also in math and writing, the problem is the same. The same principal states that it would be easier to try to teach African natives [than these children].” 64. Ibid., p. 87. 65. Kurokawa (Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 51–55) cites numerous examples of such articles dating from the mid-1880s onward. 66. See, for example, press reports surrounding a campaign in Osaka during this same period to have the community of Nago-machi (today part of the Kamagasaki area) moved outside of the official city limits, available in Kiso Junko, “Nihonbashi hōmen/Kamagasaki suramu ni okeru rōdō-seikatsu katei,” pp. 64– 65. Noah McCormack examines the impact of ideologies of eugenics and public hygiene on views of the urban poor in Tokyo at the turn of the century in “Civilising the Urban Other,” pp. 21–43.

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conditions of the urban poor in Tokyo revealed a notable degree of sensitivity to their plight, would choose to portray the residents of Kameokamachi with such harsh, prejudiced images suggests that more than just deepening poverty was behind this disparaging press. To what extent were these popular views of buraku deviance and filth influenced by the concurrent social Darwinian discussion of the burakumin among intellectuals? The answer is difficult to ascertain, although it is certainly plausible that commentators such as Yokoyama and other journalists were familiar with arguments about eugenics and buraku history. For most Japanese, the media attention to disorder and disease in impoverished communities, whether buraku or not, no doubt supplied reason enough to avoid contact with these people. If the rising modern concern about epidemics, hygeine, and public sanitation cast suspicion on impoverished communities as the source of epidemics, the assumed historical connection of buraku communities to the stigma of “defilement” and “pollution” meant that they were even more likely to be considered carriers of all manner of threats to the health of society. Traditional views of defilement, once seen as an affront to “civilization and enlightenment,” now became the basis for new, modern notions of buraku deviance. While buraku communities faced declining economic security and a worsening image in the popular press, Koreans experienced increasing Japanese imperialist encroachment into the economy and politics of the peninsula. Much as we saw in regard to intellectual discourse on the nature of Korean culture and history, however, Japan’s growing involvement in Korea during the 1880s and 1890s did not release a flood of articles on Korea and its people in the popular press. Prior to the end of the Russo-Japanese War, as Peter Duus’s examination has revealed, the most replete images of Koreans appeared in guidebooks and travelogues published by journalists traveling on the peninsula or Japanese entrepreneurs who had settled in the treaty ports. An early work in the genre, Adachi Keijirō’s Miscellaneous Notes on Korea, published in 1894, provides striking examples of such images despite the relatively early date of its appearance. Writing under the pen name “Joshū 67. Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 397–406. 68. Joshū Koji (pseud.), Chōsen zakki.

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Koji,” Adachi attributed to Korean society all manner of uncivilized, unhygienic, and immoral behaviors. In tune with colonizer discourse everywhere, Adachi reported a monumental shiftlessness in the Korean personality, which in combination with what Adachi claimed was their persistent underhandedness in the pursuit of personal gain made his interactions with Koreans a constant source of frustration. This laziness, in his view, had its intellectual corollary in a stubborn adherence to hidebound superstition, which he evidenced through lurid descriptions of a variety of unsanitary practices involving human excrement and urine, the latter of which Adachi claimed Korean women used as a cosmetic and even drank as a means of promoting beauty. Adachi reserved his most damning rhetoric, however, for the Confucian tradition that provided the moral bedrock of Korean society, charging Korean women with a shocking lack of the feminine virtue of chastity. According to Adachi, despite the Confucian facade Korea was in fact a hotbed of adultery, where married women had their paramours leave women’s shoes outside of the door to their female-only living quarters to make it appear that they were entertaining female guests. The point of the ruse seems less than clear, however, in light of Adachi’s subsequent assertion that Korean husbands would let other men sleep with their wives in exchange for money. He even went so far as to categorically declare that “all prostitutes in this country are the wives or concubines of other men, and [women] who are not wives or concubines cannot become prostitutes.” Adachi’s impressions of Korean women are not based on any firsthand knowledge, nor is he even consistent in his opprobrium; later in his account, he reveals his curiosity—if not fascination— concerning Korean women when he laments that they generally avoid the Japanese neighborhoods of Pusan, making it very difficult for the (predominantly male) Japanese residents to get to know them. His hearsay sources among the Japanese community were no doubt just as unfamiliar with Korean women as Adachi: as scholars have learned from Barbara Brooks’s study of prostitution and sexual relations across the line between colonizer and colonized in Korea and Manchuria, during its buildup phase and beyond 69. Ibid., pp. 35–38. 70. Ibid., p. 102.

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the Japanese colonial experience was unique for having a large population of Japanese women “on the ground” in the emerging colonies to serve as prostitutes and mistresses for Japanese military officials, bureaucrats, businessmen, and carpet-bagging entrepreneurs. When intimate relations between colonizer and colonized occurred at all, Brooks observes, they typically involved Korean men and Japa nese women, rather than the converse. Disparaging and inaccurate images of Koreans like those promoted by Adachi were widely shared among the Japanese community in Korea and reveal the mixture of derision and fear that settlers and travelers felt in encountering the Koreans as the vast majority whose language, customs, and culture the Japanese visitors had no ability— and perhaps little desire—to understand. While isolation and cultural alienation may in part explain the motivation behind portraying Koreans as degenerates, it is important to bear in mind that the form that these images took and the nature of the degeneracy they described were influenced by contemporary understandings of “proper” Japanese behavior. Japanese men ideally were honest, productive, and patriotic, so therefore Korean men were deceitful, lazy, and concerned only with personal gain. Likewise, if the crowning feminine virtues under the ie system were chastity and loyalty to one’s husband, Korean women threatened the stability of their families and society by being inherently unfaithful. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the preoccupation with sanitation, hygiene, and social order that blurred the line between public and private— all defining characteristics of Meiji modernization—had powerfully defined how the Japanese people saw themselves and the world. Their views of the Koreans and the burakumin were constructed to provide an easy contrast that helped them to place themselves in this new order.

71. Brooks, “Reading the Japa nese Colonial Archive,” pp. 295–325. Brooks points out that the high proportion of women among the early Japa nese settler populations in Korea and Manchuria serves to distinguish Japa nese colonialism from the historical experience of European colonial regimes, in which the predominantly male colonizer populations of the early years relied on native women for sex; only later, as administrators and others began to arrive in the colony with spouses and families in tow, did the prevalence of such interracial relationships decline.

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In the years to follow, as Japan’s military involvement on the peninsula deepened over the course of two wars, the Japanese press focused more attention on the shifting political situation than on the conditions of Korean life. In explaining these developments, the press employed characterizations drawn from the emerging stereotype of the Korean personality, all of which cast a dim light on the outlook for Korean selfimprovement: incompetence, cunning, and recalcitrance. Reports on the Tonghak Rebellion, which set the stage for the SinoJapanese War, provide an early example of this line of interpretation. In reporting on the rebellion, the Japanese press seemed to brush over the activities of the Tonghak peasant rebels and focus instead on the incompetence of the Korean court and military in dealing with the situation on its own. Much was made of how the Tonghaks prevailed against a large punitive force of Korean soldiers sent from Seoul. Such a failure by the Koreans, in the Japanese view, revealed an abysmal lack of esprit de corps in the Korean military. The press also disparaged the Korean court for its supposed cunning in turning to China for support in putting down the rebellion, its interminable vacillation over national policy, its political corruption, and its rudeness and stupidity in refusing to heed Japanese demands for reform. Cunning and rudeness were not to be construed as signs of real willpower, however; nor was the political incompetence described as a problem of Korea’s rulers alone. An editorial in Tōkyō asahi likened the present state of “political decay and moral enervation” in Korea to the situation in Japan during the Bakumatsu period, but asked incredulously whether even the Tonghaks were truly interested in carrying out real reforms. Despite the similarities to the

72. “Ōtori kōshi no jikiwa,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 16, 1894. In addition, an article in the June 8, 1894, edition of the Jiji shinpō, while characterizing the Tonghaks as lawless and brutal, had as much if not more scorn for the ineffective Korean military, which had failed to put down the revolt. See Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, vol. 2, p. 26. 73. “Hatashite dokuritsu ka, Nihon kara nen o oshite,” Jiji shinpō, July 13, 1894, and “Bin ippa teikoku no yōkyū o kyozetsu,” Jiji shinpō, July 25, 1894, both quoted in Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, pp. 29–30. 74. “Chōsen no nairan,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 25, 1894.

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Japanese experience half a century before, the Koreans were seen as incapable of their own restoration. The years between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars added very little to this image of Korea and its people. After the establishment of the protectorate on November 17, 1905, however, obstinacy and violence were added to the list of Korean traits. The terms “bigoted diehards” (ganmei-ha) and “insurgents” (bōmin, bōto) began to appear in the press with increasing regularity as labels for the Korean militias that had sprung up to harass Japanese military units and settlers. These groups were almost never portrayed in the Japanese press as Korean patriots. Instead, they were called “lawless elements” or at best “so-called patriots,” and blamed for the murders of innocent civilians, Japanese and Korean alike. Resistance against Japan could not be dignified with the label of “patriotism,” because Japan was supposedly trying to secure Korea’s independence from China. Koreans who resisted were thus imagined as paradoxically fighting for a return to subservience to another state, rather than as embracing the opportunity that Japan extended. Resident-General Itō Hirobumi employed this line of reasoning at a press conference where he angrily denounced King Kojong’s attempt in 1907 to bring the plight of Korea before the world at The Hague. With the Treaty of Kanghwa, he reminded his audience, Japan was the first to secure Korea’s independence. . . . Furthermore, with the Treaty of Tientsin [of 1885], Japan made China recognize Korea’s independence, and in turn secured such recognition from the United States and the other great powers as well. Even so, in spite of the fact that the world powers including Japan had already recognized Korea’s independence, bigoted and stubborn Koreans were quite satisfied with being a tributary state of China, and this led to the war in 1894. . . . It was the same with the deplorable cause of the conflict in 1904, which arose from Korea. Their subservient way of thinking [jidai shisō] constantly proves to be an obstacle to their independence. At such turns, Japan always goes to great lengths to protect Korea’s independence. . . .

75. For murders of Japa nese, see “Kankoku kōtei jōi shimatsu,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, July 21, 1907, quoted in Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, p. 402. The killing of “one thousand pro-Japanese farmers,” all supposedly members of the “Advancement Society” (Ilchinhoe), is reported in “Shin-Nichi-ha Kanjin issenmei satsugai saru,” Jiji shinpō, June 20, 1908 (see Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, pp. 431–32).

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And yet, although that independence is being safeguarded by Japan, it is absolutely ridiculous that they should now take it into their heads that Japan is trying to undermine it.

Itō’s reference to the “subservient way of thinking” ( jidai shisō) that he found so frustratingly prevalent among Koreans alluded to the Korean political tradition of sadaejgi (џ໻Џ㕽, jidai-shugi in Japanese). Sadae, which is considered the neo-Confucian basis of the Yi dynasty’s historical suzerain relationship with China, originally meant “serving the Great,” but to the minds of Japanese commentators it was nothing more than a peculiar kind of toadyism rooted deep in the Korean psyche. It was this national character flaw, according to the Japanese, that foreclosed the chances for a spontaneous national revitalization in Korea like that seen in Japan during the 1870s, and undermined the possibility of any true sense of patriotism in the hearts of the Korean people. From the mid-1880s through the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the Meiji state increased its efforts to achieve greater control over society by instilling among its people a greater sense of belonging to the nation. That the burakumin and Koreans became increasingly marginalized during these same years should come as no surprise. As Imanishi Hajime has observed, the state program of converting people into citizens of the nation and subjects of the emperor during these pivotal decades came about under a regimen of new rules designed to establish shared values and customs. Intellectuals, journalists, and other commentators cooperated with this program in their own way by depicting those who did not conform to the emerging national mold as a threat to the health and proper functioning of society. Thus even though marginalization was never a deliberate undertaking—no one set out to describe difference as deviance for the express purpose of rejecting these groups from the national culture or of denying them the respect owed to fellow human beings—it developed just the same. Moreover, when Japan finally achieved imperialist world power status in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, explaining this “deviance” as a means of correcting it took on a new sense of

76. “Kankoku wa tsune ni mizukara dokuritsu o yaburu,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 1, 1907, quoted in Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, p. 406. 77. Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei-bunka, pp. 69– 70.

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urgency, as Japan’s new international position seemed to demand even greater state control and popular support to ensure that the nation would continue to prosper. Under the resulting scrutiny, the focus shifted in subtle but revealing ways.

Burakumin and Koreans under National Mobilization and Annexation Japan’s victory over the Russian Empire in 1905 instilled the public with a tremendous sense of pride in the nation, but that pride came at a very high price. The war had cost Japan 170 million yen— seven times the national budget for 1903— and more than 100,000 lives, but unlike its victory over China a decade before, Japan received no indemnity payment from Russia. Worse yet, despite the severe state of economic exhaustion brought about by the war, victorious Japan would now be expected to compete with the other imperialist powers in the cutthroat arenas of trade, industry, and economic security. Faced with such a predicament, Japan’s leaders came to the conclusion that an unprecedented regimentation of the populace was needed to mobilize the economic and spiritual resources of the nation as efficiently as possible. One vital aspect of this program was the “local improvement movement,” through which the government hoped to rationalize the political and economic structure of rural Japan in order to build a more cohesive and fiscally sound nation from the ground up. Buraku communities, plagued with chronic poverty from the early 1880s on, represented a glaring obstacle to achieving these aims. To address the situation, the central government established in 1907 its Buraku Improvement Policy (Buraku kaizen seisaku) as an addendum to its local improvement initiative in majority communities. The policy called on prefectural governments to organize improvement groups, often labeled kyōfūkai (moral reform societies), in buraku communities under their jurisdiction. These groups had three general purposes: (1) to improve levels of sanitation and hygiene in the community, (2) as with the

78. For the costs of the confl ict, see Miyachi, Nichi-Ro sengo seijishi no kenkyū, pp. 3–4. 79. Ibid., p. 7.

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larger aims of the local improvement movement, to impress upon burakumin the importance of saving money and paying taxes, and (3) to eradicate undesirable and criminal behavior by promoting school attendance and vocational and moral education programs. Although these organizations were designed to help the burakumin improve themselves, the authorities in charge of them had grave doubts about the minority’s ability to do so. A case in point was the moral reform society established in Kyoto’s Yanagihara area. Far from empowering the residents to improve their own community, the rules represented a massive intrusion of authority into the everyday lives of the burakumin. A list of fifty-two “personal rules” to be obeyed unconditionally admonished residents against everything from drinking alcohol to allowing themselves to be naked even in the privacy of their own homes, to eating snacks between meals or napping during lunch breaks. Given such stringent rules and the domineering attitude of Yoshimura Mitsuru, the zealous local police chief in charge of the organization, it is not surprising that members of the community rapidly became disenchanted with the society. By 1911, a mere ninety households out of the nine hundred that had initially joined were officially recognized for their perseverance in continuing with the group’s savings scheme. Initiatives in buraku communities across the nation had a similarly poor track record, failing to make much of an improvement in the lives of their residents or to promote the acceptance of their communities by the surrounding majority. The initiative failed in no small part because of the view, held even by those in charge of the program at its various levels, that the burakumin were fundamentally different from other Japanese. Trying to remake them in the mold of “proper” Japanese subjects was thus, for many, an exercise in futility. In the end, when the moralistic austerity 80. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 81–82. 81. Yoshimura Mitsuru, “Gojin no mitaru tokushu buraku,” Keisatsukyōkai zasshi, no. 100 (Sept. 1908) and no. 102 (Nov. 1908), available in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, pp. 188– 90. 82. Shiraishi, “Yanagihara-chō to buraku kaizen undō,” pp. 84–85. 83. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 83. Kurokawa points out that, even among administrators not directly involved in the buraku kaizen program, within the wider context of the local improvement movement this view increased antagonism toward, and avoidance of, the minority. This was because the movement essentially pitted

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measures failed to produce the desired results, the blame came to rest solely on the shoulders of the burakumin. Although short on concrete results in the communities concerned, the buraku improvement policy did produce a wealth of studies on the burakumin. Compiled by prefectural governments as a means of providing an “objective” and “scientific” survey of local buraku communities, these studies restated many of the speculations and assumptions voiced in the 1880s and 1890s with an air of unquestionable academic authority. This was particularly evident in the sections on community history and ancestry. A report compiled by Mie Prefecture in 1907, for example, stated with certainty that buraku communities in the northern and western parts of the prefecture were settled by Koreans and Chinese brought to Japan by Empress Jingū, whereas those in the southern part were established by Ainu prisoners subjugated by the legendary Yamato Takeru. These reports introduced a new term into the language: tokushu buraku. It first appeared as early as 1899, in an official document from Nara Prefecture, but was not used widely until the Buraku Improvement Policy was implemented. It could be rendered in two different ways, both read tokushu buraku: ⡍⅞䚼㨑, meaning literally “special hamlet,” and ⡍。䚼㨑, or “hamlet of a special type.” In both cases, “special” had a decidedly negative connotation. These two versions were used interchangeably, but as Fujino and Kurokawa point out, the second, which contains the modifier ⡍。, was clearer about how the burakumin were “special” because it used a character also seen in Japanese terms such as shuzoku (。ᮣ, racial group) and jinshu (Ҏ。, race). The popular press latched on to the new terminology in no time: by 1908 tokushu buraku and tokushumin (itself a contraction of tokushu burakumin) had replaced shinheimin (“new commoner”) in newspaper coverage of the minority community. neighboring municipalities against one another in a competition to impress the central government as the most “model” community. Having a buraku community within one’s municipal area was thus seen as a devastating handicap. 84. Ibid., p. 77. 85. Kojima, “Hisabetsu buraku no rekishiteki koshō no mondai,” pp. 169– 71. 86. Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 149; Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 77. 87. A survey of articles appearing in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, reveals that in most local newspapers, terms such as shinheimin or hinmin

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Along with assumptions of racial difference came equally specious “observations” of physiological peculiarities. Many writers, like the Christian social reformer Tomeoka Kōsuke, whom the Home Ministry had employed as an adviser to the buraku improvement program, claimed that buraku communities exhibited higher birth rates than did majority communities. “Due to a long period of life under conditions different from those of normal people,” Tomeoka explained as if he had scientific evidence to support his assertion, “an abnormality has developed in their physiology, which has resulted in them giving birth to more twins than other people.” None of these writers used hard evidence to back up claims regarding birth rates in the buraku community; they simply went by hearsay, or inferred from the overcrowded conditions prevalent in such communities that birth rates were abnormally high. Far from scientific observation, claims of the minority’s abnormal fertility may have been inspired by more vulgar beliefs by some majority males about the sexuality of buraku women. Kitahara Taisaku, a Suiheisha activist and army private who at one point served time in a military prison for his attempted direct appeal to the emperor to end discrimination in the military, recounts an episode from his days in an army reformatory brigade that suggests such beliefs among the troops. On their way back to their camp from a day of military training exercises, Kitahara and others in his brigade came upon a small hamlet by the side of a river where a small leather-tanning factory stood. After concluding that this must be an “eta” village, Kitahara’s companions began discussing the desirable sexual qualities of buraku women; supposedly there were a greater number of attractive women among the minority, and their genitalia were more appealing than those of majority women. This connection between assumptions about minority sexuality and moral laxity on the one hand, and reproductive and physiological differences on the other, was by no means unique to the case of the burakumin. We need look no further than the nineteenth-century European

buraku (“hamlet of the poor,” another mid-Meiji euphemism for the burakumin) had been replaced by this time with the newer jargon. 88. Quoted in Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 154. 89. Ibid., p. 153. 90. Kitahara, Senmin no kōei, pp. 199–200.

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colonial discourse on the sexuality and physiology of African women to find striking parallels. In comparison to European conceptions of the “Hottentot” female, in fact, Japanese ideas about the aberrant nature of buraku women were notably restrained, tending to hint at underlying biological differences rather than making such differences the focus of the discriminating “scientific” gaze. Indeed, Japanese commentators directed their attention less to physiological differences than to undesirable character traits such as laziness, impropriety, licentiousness, dishonesty, and cowardice. Among these, the minority’s tendency to engage in criminal behavior became an issue of paramount concern. Tomeoka, for example, enumerated the various kinds of crimes supposedly prevalent among the minority, including “conspiring to commit murder, abduction and rape resulting in death, assault resulting in injury or death, theft involving injury or murder,” and “extortion.” An exposé in Kyoto’s Hinode shinbun likewise noted that the burakumin had a tendency to act bravely in groups, often committing crimes of revenge on those who had insulted one of their comrades, and were likely to provide refuge to fugitives from the law. While it seems plausible that impoverished burakumin would turn to crime, these studies greatly exaggerated the criminal activities of the minority. The very police statistics that Tomeoka cited, for example, did not support his claims. Incidents of larceny ranked first, followed by gambling, assault resulting in injury, draft-dodging, pilfering of timber from government or private lands, violations of hunting regulations, and other petty crimes and misdemeanors. Murder appeared nowhere on the list. Even so, Tomeoka concluded that “the shinheimin, much more 91. For an insightful analysis of European views of female African sexuality and reproductive physiology, see Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” pp. 223– 61. 92. Tomeoka, “Shinheimin no kaizen (2),” Keisatsu kyōkai zasshi, no. 81 (1908), reproduced in Tomeoka and Dōshisha daigaku jibun kagaku kenkyūjo, Tomeoka Kōsuke chosakushū, vol. 2, p. 289. 93. From a report by Tomeoka quoted in Obara Shinzō, “Nara-ken ni okeru tokushu buraku kaizen no hōshin,” Kokka gakkai zasshi, vol. 24, no. 10 (October 1910), reproduced in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 5, pp. 363– 64. 94. Tomeoka, “Shinheimin no kaizen (2),” pp. 289– 90. The source of the statistics is not given, but Tomeoka states that they are for the year 1905.

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than normal people, are acting in disregard for the laws of the nation.” Likewise, in a most damning assessment of their depravity, the Hinode shinbun declared that the burakumin “lack[ed] any understanding of the nation or loyalty to it.” These fears of criminality and disloyalty appeared to be shockingly confirmed for many by the so-called Great Treason Incident of May 1910, in which Kōtoku Shūsui and twenty-five other anarchists and socialists were accused of plotting to assassinate the Meiji emperor. Although in reality most of the defendants, including Kōtoku, were innocent of any wrongdoing, the government used the fact that four of the accused had been discovered in possession of explosives as an excuse to deal a decisive blow to Japan’s inchoate socialist movement. The list of suspects contained two individuals with connections to the burakumin: Ōishi Seinosuke and Takagi Kenmei. Ōishi was a doctor who operated a free clinic in the buraku community of Shingū-machi, Wakayama Prefecture. Takagi, a Buddhist priest in the same community, became acquainted with Ōishi through Ōishi’s activities with a Christian charity active in Shingū, and the two men found they shared a common sense of indignation over the treatment of the poor. Neither, however, was originally from the community, nor were they even of the minority: Ōishi had settled in the area after returning from medical training in America, while Takagi had been assigned to the local Jōdo Shin sect temple. This fact was ignored in articles on the incident in the months following the trial in January 1911. In one article, for instance, Ōishi was described this way: As a descendant of the tormented eta, even if by chance one is born with talent there is no place in this world to achieve what one sets one’s mind to. Such was the case with one of the notorious perpetrators of the “incident” last year. Although wealthy and possessing talent, as an eta he chose to commit lese majesty and break the law. When one considers that his initial motive for doing so came from the frustration he felt at the social oppression he faced for being an

95. Ibid., p. 290. 96. Quoted in Obara, “Nara-ken ni okeru tokushu buraku kaizen no hōshin,” p. 364.

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eta, the question of what to do about them certainly seems to deserve a great deal of careful thought.

Articles like this highlighted the prevailing image of buraku violence and criminality and restated it in terms of a bitter animosity toward society, state, and sovereign, as well as a tendency to embrace dangerous ideas. While discrimination was often implicated as a cause of their antisocial behavior, the overall impression given by writers at the time was that the burakumin were overreacting to what were often innocent slips of the tongue. Rather than hating society for ostracizing them, the suggestion was that they should devote themselves to proving to the rest of the nation that they deserved to be treated as equals. The burakumin’s stubborn refusal to change their ways and improve themselves, despite nearly four decades of “liberation” from pariah status, served as another indication of the underlying difference between this minority group and the majority Japanese. Just a year prior to the Great Treason Incident, the assassination of Itō Hirobumi by the Korean nationalist An Chungggn, in Harbin on October 26, 1909, provided a shock of almost equal proportion, and forced Japanese society to grapple, with unprecedented intensity, with the question of what Koreans were like. In the wake of the assassination, the press was awash in stories about the Koreans, as well as articles on Itō, his efforts on behalf of Korea, and his career as a statesman in general. Itō’s greatness as one of the fathers of the Meiji state provided a glaring contrast to the ignobility of the people responsible for his death. “As a people, the Koreans have always been fond of assassination,” an article in the Tōkyō 97. Excerpt of an article from the Ni-roku shinpō, July 4, 1911, quoted in Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 82. Ōishi was one of the eleven defendants to be executed along with Kōtoku. Takagi, apparently considered less of a “threat” to the state, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by imperial amnesty the day after the verdict, but ended his own life in prison in 1917 (pp. 80–81). 98. This line of reasoning was evident even prior to the Great Treason Incident. The aforementioned Yanagihara district police chief Yoshimura Mitsuru, for example, listed among the minority’s main character flaws disrespect for authority, belligerence, and an unnecessary sensitivity to unintentional and “trifling” instances of terms such as eta, yotsu (“four,” a predominantly Kansai-area reference to the minority, perhaps likening them to four-legged beasts), and shinheimin. Yoshimura, “Gojin no mitaru tokushu buraku,” p. 182.

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asahi shinbun declared in an early analysis of the underlying cause of Itō’s murder, “and killings in the course of political struggles are daily occurrences.” The idea that the blame for Itō’s death rested not only with An Chungggn, but also with all Koreans everywhere, spread rapidly through the Japa nese public. Stories from Kobe, which was home to a sizable population of Korean candy peddlers, reveal that these peddlers suffered a sudden, devastating drop in business after the assassination. When the familiar call of the Korean peddlers making their rounds was heard, one article observed, “even children on their way home from school break into conversation about how one of the nation’s greatest men was killed by one of these Koreans.” Some adults even took to physically assaulting the peddlers. Likewise, accounts of violent clashes between Korean and Japa nese coal miners began to appear over the following months, despite the near total lack of them before, suggesting that tensions between the two groups may have been exacerbated by the assassination. The stereotypes of Korean treachery and animosity promoted by the press that fueled these incidents impelled the new Resident-General Sone Arasuke to remind reporters at a press conference that they should refrain from describing Korea as if it were Japan’s enemy.

99. “Aa Itō kōshaku!” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Oct. 28, 1909. 100. “Chōsen ame-ya no kyōkō,” Ōsaka mainichi shinbun, Oct. 29, 1909, reproduced in Komatsu, Kim, and Keizō, “Kankoku heigō” mae no zainichi Chōsenjin, p. 322. 101. “Itō-kō no katakiuchi,” Kobe shinbun, Nov. 23, 1909, reproduced in Komatsu, Kim, and Keizō, “Kankoku heigō” mae no zainichi Chōsenjin. 102. See for example, “Kan kōfu korosaru,” Kobe yūshin nippō, May 15, 1910, and “Nikkan no chi no ame,” Tajima shinbun, May 20, 1910, both reproduced in Komatsu, Kim, and Keizō, “Kankoku heigō” mae no zainichi Chōsenjin. Although Imperial Ordinance 352, promulgated in 1899, barred foreign unskilled laborers from living and working in Japan, the law did not apply to Koreans, due to the unequal nature of the Kanghwa Treaty. Since Japa nese nationals residing in Korea were granted extraterritoriality in the treaty ports, whereas Koreans in Japan received no such preferential treatment, under international legal practices in force at the time they were allowed to reside and work anywhere in Japan in exchange for being subject to its laws. For a detailed discussion of the drafting of Imperial Ordinance 352, see Hsü Shu-chen, “Nihon ni okeru rōdō imin kinshihō no seiritsu,” pp. 553–80. 103. “Sone tōkan no iken,”Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Nov. 6, 1909.

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Such a warning, however, could not reverse the process by which images of Korean violence, incompetence, and lack of gratitude were being combined to create a more detailed, and ultimately damning, picture of what Koreans were like. One day before Sone’s admonition, the author and journalist Shibukawa Genji wrote the following passage as the opening to what would become a twenty-one part series of articles, revealingly titled “Frightful Korea.” Placing Itō’s death within the historical context of Japan’s involvement with Korea since the dawn of the Meiji period, he suggested that it may have been futile to expect anything better than this from Korea and its people. A Korean has killed Prince Itō. When one thinks of it, the plain fact of the matter is that Saigō, Okubo, Etō, Maebara, and the tens of thousands of heroes who served in the wars against China and Russia— all were in a sense killed by Koreans. The cost for those wars—billions of yen squeezed out in tears of blood—this too was pointlessly scattered across the barren hills of Korea. . . . And yet, even now there is no sign of anything particularly good sprouting from that soil. When one considers that we will no doubt have to continue putting up with its vexing problems, and expending who knows how much in money and lives for it, one will see that, for Japan, there can be no more frightful a country than this.

The uproar over the assassination, and the public discussion of Koreans, faded in the months following Itō’s death, but only temporarily. In August of the following year Japan annexed Korea, thus bringing the “frightful country” and its people into the imperial fold. In order to commemorate such an auspicious national occasion in a properly celebratory way, some papers hurried to provide their readers with more optimistic assessments of who the Koreans were and how they could contribute to the empire. While more accommodating, many of these articles simply restated a common theme in imperialist writings on colonized peoples

104. Genji, “Osoroshii Chōsen (1),” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Nov. 5, 1909. Shibukawa wrote this series while traveling in Korea with Natsume Soseki. To his credit, he apparently revised his opinions during his trip. Although Shibukawa found plenty to complain about in regard to the Koreans he saw while traveling, he was also shocked and disappointed at the way Japa nese officials and civilians alike treated them. He concluded the final installment by writing that he would like to take up the series again sometime, perhaps under the revised title of “Interesting Korea.”

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by commenting favorably on the physical strength and endurance of Koreans. An article entitled “The Personality of the Koreans,” for example, was seemingly generous in claiming that Korean indolence was simply the result of their being viciously exploited by rapacious officials, and that Korean laborers hired by the Japanese to build railways in Korea had actually outperformed Japanese laborers. Although the author of the article tempered such praise by observing that “it is impossible for them to manage an enterprise as its director,” still Koreans were described as possessing “innate qualities” for following orders, qualities that made them extremely well suited for manual labor in agriculture, industry, and mining. Korean honesty and simplicity was also praised, albeit in a similarly backhanded way. The premier Meiji nationalist Uchida Ryōhei, for example, claimed that only a relatively few Koreans were truly malicious and deceitful, while the vast majority possessed a rustic simplicity that made them extremely trusting of others. Similarly, Imanishi Tatsu, a scholar of Korean literature, claimed that most Japanese had drawn their conclusions of what Koreans were like by observing the morally corrupt residents of urban areas like Seoul and Pusan. Koreans in the countryside, he pointed out, possessed an easygoing simplicity that made them “adorable.” That such assessments of the Korean personality were as domineering as they were positive should not surprise us. Koreans were granted no agency by such views. A Korean capacity for intelligence or responsibility was hardly ever mentioned. These were the virtues of obedient subordinates, not those capable of responsible self-rule. When a sense of agency was attributed to Koreans at all, it generally came with negative connotations attached. Koreans, many writers claimed, were opportunistic, conniving, and extremely suspicious of 105. Nor was this line of commentary anything new for Japa nese observers, as Duus has pointed out in his examination of travelogue literature (Abacus and the Sword, pp. 405– 6). 106. “Chōsenjin no seikaku,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 26, 1910. 107. “Gappei to yoron,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 24, 1910. 108. “Chōsen no kōshi retsujo,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 28, 1910. Interestingly, however, Imanishi found very little worth praising in Korean morality tales, which he found to extremely rigid and lifeless.

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others. At the same time, they were said to be very good at flattery and cajolery, since these were valuable skills for getting by in a corrupt society. Sharing his impressions of life in Korea as the head of the Seoul branch of the Dai-Ichi Bank, Takagi Masayoshi described the Korean people as “calculating, individualistic, and self-interested. As long as it suits their own purposes, they will make a big fuss over someone, but once that person is no longer in a position to help them, they won’t even give him the time of day.” Even a Korean’s intelligence was considered a negative characteristic. Numerous articles linking Korean university students in Tokyo to rumors of nefarious plots appeared in the wake of the annexation, giving the impression that an educated, intelligent Korean was likely to be a disloyal, subversive one. On the whole, then, despite the fanfare that accompanied the Meiji state’s vast expansion of the human dimensions of empire— and the frequent appeals to dōsoron arguments of racial kinship that appeared in the news to justify it—the popular press gave its readership very little reassurance that the Koreans could be incorporated easily and harmoniously into the fabric of Japanese society. During the weeks leading up to the annexation, in addition to stories of student conspiracies, there were frequent reports from the peninsula of attacks by Korean “insurgents” and thwarted plots on the life of Resident-General Terauchi Masatake in the breaking news column of dailies like Tōkyō asahi. Even 109. “Gotsugō-shugi no kanjin,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 27, 1910. 110. See, for example, “Ryūgakusei no fukinshin,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, July 18, 1910; “Mizou no keikai,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, July, 23, 1910; “Ayashiki gakuseidan no kōdō,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, July 24, 1910; “HaiNichi gakusei kyokai hobaku,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 12, 1910; and “Inbō roken,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 15, 1910. In almost every case, the students involved were associated with universities in Japan. 111. Oguma Eiji has noted the frequency with which the ideas of academic proponents of common ancestry theories appeared in the popular press around the time of the annexation, often in articles written by these scholars themselves. See Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, pp. 105– 7. 112. Examples include “Bōto junsatai o osou,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, July 25, 1910; “Jūki mitsubaisha hobaku,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 4, 1910; “HaiNichi-ha no dōsei,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 8, 1910; “Zai-Hawai Kanjin fuon,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 25, 1910; and “Hainichi-ha Kanjin no bōkō,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 26, 1910.

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when there was nothing to report, stories describing the “uncanny calm” of Seoul on the eve of the official announcement suggested that journalists expected the peninsula to plunge into chaos at any moment. On a deeper level, even more troublesome to the Japanese than Koreans’ resistance, real or assumed, to the annexation was the Korean community’s inherent incapacity for patriotism, which according to the Japanese perspective arose from their utter lack of understanding of the importance of community life and the courage required to sacrifice oneself for the good of society as a whole. “Korea is without either a Kusunoki Masashige or a Washington,” one article opined, contrasting the situation in Korea to models of patriotism Japanese and foreign, “all that the educated people throughout the country concern themselves with is making ends meet in their own households.” Bank manager Takagi likewise suggested that the lack of unrest in Seoul on the eve of the annexation was due to the understanding by most Koreans that Japanese control would benefit them personally, and so they were unconcerned about their loss of national autonomy. “Because of just such a disposition,” he warned, “assimilating them into our nation as fellow citizens will present us with no small amount of difficulty in the future.” For a society in the midst of an ongoing campaign to maintain and solidify the nation’s hardwon international power and prestige by insisting on its citizens’ patriotic self-sacrifice, nothing could have presented a bigger problem than this Korean predilection for what one paper referred to as jidai-byō—“toady’s disease.”

113. See “Gappei happyō to keikai,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 29, 1910, for police surveillance of the “Koreans’ dens” (Kankokujin no sōkutsu) of Kanda, Hongō, Koishikawa, Ushigome, and Kōjimachi. The Home Ministry ordered 300 police officers to be brought in from other prefectures as reinforcements for the patrols carried out in these areas. For the unexpected calm in Seoul, see “Keijō shichū seion,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 25, 1910, and “Igai ni seion,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Sept. 1, 1910. 114. “Gappei seraruru Kankoku (3),” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 26, 1910. 115. “Gotsugō-shugi no kanjin,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Aug. 27, 1910. 116. “Kankoku no seisha hiseisha,” Yomiuri shinbun, Aug. 4, 1910, reprinted in Araki, Shinbun kiji de tsuzuru Meiji-shi, p. 507.

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Modernity, Marginalization, and the Prospects for Minority Incorporation at the End of the Meiji Period By the time the Meiji period came to an end in 1912, Japan had come a long way in achieving the kind of security through modernization that had been the goal of the Meiji leaders from the beginning of their consolidation of power in the late 1860s. In just forty-two years the nation had achieved a rapidly industrializing economy, an expanding empire, and although Japa nese feelings of inferiority to the West remained strong, international recognition as one of the world’s ascendant military powers. The road had not been easy, and along the way the state had made increasing demands on its people to act in a “civilized” manner (meaning on par with Western standards of civility), to be healthy in body and mind, as well as to be thrifty, productive, law-abiding, and selflessly loyal to the state. In the process, a cata logue of ideal qualities for Japanese citizens to possess emerged, as did a contrasting set of undesirable traits and qualities. Clearly the state and its supporters in civil society never managed to achieve strict compliance to the emerging norms (or avoidance of their opposites) on the part of every member of Japanese society, either during the Meiji period or at any time thereafter. The hegemony that the Meiji state achieved by the end of the period, however, ensured that the vast majority of Japanese would have at least agreed that the character traits valued by the state were desirable. As members of the Japa nese majority strove to comply with the state in developing these favored qualities, the undesirable traits and qualities came to be identified with burakumin, Koreans, and other groups in the Japa nese empire that had become marginalized from the mainstream by dint of their pre-Meiji history, culture, or lifestyle. This early modern link was crucial. For even though many of the images of deviance that came to be applied to such groups were the product of a modern discourse on what was desirable for a society and what was not, as Howell has argued, it was a group’s position outside of the Japanese polity or at the autonomous fringes of its status system during the

117. For more in-depth explorations of how this hegemony was achieved during the Meiji period, see Makihara, Kyakubun to kokumin no aida.

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Tokugawa period that initially marked it as a subject of concern in that discourse. The modern descendants of the outcastes and the Koreans represented two such groups, and the images of both produced during the Meiji modernization process developed along similar trajectories. To be sure, the descriptions of each differed in some respects: unlike the burakumin, for example, Koreans were never portrayed as genetically inbred or inherently diseased. Likewise, the burakumin, despite being linked to the Koreans, were never described in terms that emphasized their racial kinship with the majority or claimed they were stuck at an earlier stage of civilization than their majority neighbors. Yet these differences arose out of misapprehensions of social customs among the burakumin, on the one hand, and a need to justify imperialist encroachment on Korean sovereignty, on the other. For both groups, the late nineteenth-century preoccupation with achieving national strength through the disciplines of hygiene and eugenics, and with it a shift from “civilization and enlightenment” to social Darwinism as the ideological compass for determining Japan’s place in the world, combined to yield images of the minority’s filth and a preoccupation with its racial difference (whether to assert it, as in the case of the burakumin, or deny it, as seen in imperialist scholarly discourse on Korea). After the nation achieved the shaky position of a resource-poor world power with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the push to make society more orderly and its members more productive and loyal to the state added another layer of interpretation to the way both groups were perceived. Descriptions of character and behavior took precedence over images of racial or biological difference, albeit without completely displacing them. These new interpretations of the nature of Koreans and burakumin emphasized their supposedly pathological tendency toward behaviors that worked against the state’s agenda of social mobilization. These layers of interpretation resulted in images of both groups that would remain remarkably consistent and durable across the decades to follow, providing the justification for the discrimination that both communities would confront in negotiating their place in the nation and connection to society.

118. Howell, Geographies of Identity, esp. pp. 131–204.

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Three final observations about this process and the images of burakumin and Koreans it produced bear mentioning. First, while the realization of modernity at home and empire abroad were goals of the Meiji state, this does not mean that the state was the sole, or even primary, source of interpretations that marginalized burakumin and Koreans. The Meiji state established the ideals it sought to realize, but it was largely individuals outside of the government— scholars and journalists foremost—who embraced these ideals (even if they did not always agree with state policies designed to achieve them) and depicted the burakumin and Koreans as negative examples in light of them. Even when the state seemed to get into the marginalization game itself, for example with the reports on buraku communities produced under the aegis of the buraku improvement initiative, the views expressed originated from those individuals charged with studying the minority or managing programs on the local level to improve it. That these reports subsequently received official endorsement highlights the cooperative nature of the discourse between state and civil society on what counted as “Japanese” and what did not at the dawn of the twentieth century. The second observation recognizes a paradox: the discourse on Korean and buraku identity that portrayed both as deviant from the idealized Japanese citizen occurred precisely because the state was trying to consolidate these groups into its vision of a nation-state and empire in which all subjects of the emperor shared a link deeper and more fundamental to their identity than the mere legal fact of citizenship. Nowhere were the tensions this produced more evident than in descriptions of racial difference, conceived of in terms of biological or physiological characteristics. As we have seen, when the idea was brought up in scholarly discussions of Koreans around the time of the annexation, it was typically employed to deny that there was any racial difference between Koreans and Japanese. It was part of an effort to set Japanese control of Korea on a moral high ground, as it were, far above the land-grabbing domination of different races being practiced by the Western imperialist powers. Even in descriptions of the burakumin, however, the idea of race received less emphasis toward the end of the Meiji period. Although notions of

119. Duus, Abacus and the Sword, pp. 432–34.

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racial and biological difference were prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, and never overtly denied during the remainder of the era, by the end the focus had shifted, as it had for the Koreans, to behavioral differences. This shift reveals an ongoing attempt to incorporate these groups, because cultural difference and behavioral deviance would seem easier to remedy than racial difference. Indeed, the very theories of the heterogeneous nature of Japanese racial origins suggested that this had happened before: the “heaven-descended race,” as some theorists referred to the ancestors of the imperial line, had not only subjugated and intermarried with other races, but exerted a superior moral influence over them in the course of racial amalgamation. But even if differences of culture and behavior might be considered to pose less of a barrier to successful assimilation than those of eugenics or race, the type of society that Japan had become by the end of the Meiji period militated against this. The socialization of the Japanese in the latter half of the Meiji period provided no incentives for the majority community to be tolerant of difference, no matter how it was conceived. For most Japanese, then, differences of culture and behavior, real or assumed, served only as markers of an underlying, indelible deviance from the norm. This leads us to a final observation about what all of these views and characterizations of burakumin and Koreans implied for the chances of successfully incorporating them into the Japanese nation-state. By the end of the Meiji period, both groups had been characterized as filthy, lazy, morally corrupt, violent, ignorant, naïve, gullible, obstinate, devious, deceitful, cowardly, suspicious, selfish, ingratiating, cunning, rude, and subversive. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this list of qualities; indeed, much the same list has been applied to colonized populations and disadvantaged minorities in a wide variety of national and historical contexts. It is worth noting, however, that when these alltoo-common stereotypes are enumerated in this fashion, it becomes apparent that the resulting list contains qualities that seem impossible to reconcile with one another: how could Koreans or burakumin be at once naively honest yet deceitful, gullible yet profoundly suspicious of others, ignorant yet cunning, or cowardly yet prone to violence? Albert Memmi aptly suggests that the phenomenon of describing the colonized in such mutually incompatible terms arises because it is the utility of the descriptions applied to the colonized that is important to the colonizer, not their

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overall logical consistency. That is, each characterization justifies the colonizer’s treatment of the colonized or explains the disadvantaged position of the colonized in a way that does not find fault with the colonizer. Memmi’s characterization refers specifically to the European colonizer who would establish residence in a colony and rapidly develop and promote characterizations of the “natives” that justified the act of colonization. Indeed, this was very much the case with Japanese settling in Korea around the turn of the last century, as we have seen. The Meiji modernization process, however, expanded the subject of these stereotypes to include not just peoples in the lands that Japan took colonial possession of, such as the Koreans and Taiwanese, but also groups such as the Ainu and Okinawans, who could be viewed as “colonized” in light of the political autonomy and separate cultural identity they had maintained from Japan prior to the Meiji period, and ultimately even those Japanese assumed to have a connection to the outcastes of preMeiji times. At the same time, the Meiji state vastly expanded the audience for such stereotypes to the entire population of Japan proper. As a result, those Japanese who had never even encountered a burakumin or Korean— or any of the other groups mentioned earlier, for that matter— came to share this very detailed and decidedly negative impression of what these people were like. The self-contradictory nature of this cata logue of stereotypes had another important consequence: it left individuals no way to disprove the negative qualities attributed to them. Since the stereotypes contradicted one another, no matter how well a minority individual assimilated to Japanese modes of behavior, he or she could never hope to avoid behaving in a way that reinforced at least one of these negative views. If the Japanese empire was to truly become a close-knit “family-state,” in addition to having Koreans and burakumin give up their deviant ways and consider themselves morally upstanding Japanese, the majority would have to discard any consciousness of differences between themselves and their colonial charges or disadvantaged countrymen at home. Yet how could they ever forget, when anything a member of either group did might be taken as just another example of one of their “typical” traits?

120. Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 83–84.

ch apter 2 Early Buraku and Korean Reactions: Modernity and Empire from the Margins

The recasting of Japanese identity that was part of building a modern nation and empire created images of burakumin and Koreans that emphasized their differences from the idealized vision of what it meant to be Japanese. Since the discourse on Japanese identity during these years was omnipresent, with characterizations of the marginalized usually a part of discussions on Japan’s imperial mission in Asia or conversations about the need to strengthen the economic and spiritual fiber of the nation, these images of burakumin and Koreans also had a wide audience. By the end of the Meiji period, then, even those who had never visited Korea or observed a buraku community had access to a wealth of images and value judgments concerning such places and the people who populated them. Yet the dissemination of such information extended beyond those who could unproblematically situate themselves among the ranks of the “Japanese”; the people who actually belonged to the marginalized were exposed to them, too. In the process, they also absorbed values and worldviews that defined what it meant to be civilized, productive, and morally upstanding, even as these qualities of character were denied them. How did burakumin and Koreans in the Meiji period react to the negative stereotypes applied to them? What if any place did they claim for themselves in the Japanese nation and empire through their responses? The answers to these questions differ between the two groups, and also within them, in accordance with the conditions under which Japanese efforts at nation- and empire-building came to confront minority individuals of

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various positions in their respective communities. The responses offer insights into how the Koreans and burakumin reacted to the prospect of incorporation into the Japanese “family state” prior to the rise of a politics of minority identity that became openly adversarial toward the state in the 1920s. These early reactions provide revealing points of contrast with those of the 1920s, and suggest positions on the dilemmas of incorporation and assimilation that would have resonance in the decades to follow. A few caveats regarding the following analysis: for the most part this examination focuses on reactions of individuals from the wealthy and/or well-educated elite strata of these two groups. This is first and foremost because the ideas of such individuals come to the surface of historical investigation much more frequently and clearly than those of other individuals. Furthermore, this chapter focuses more on ideas expressed by the burakumin than those articulated by the minority Korean population. By the end of the Meiji period, the Korean population in Japan was still quite small and for the most part made up of seasonal, largely itinerant laborers who did not leave much of a written record of their thoughts. For Korean reactions, then, I focus on those of Korean students in Japan during the early twentieth century, who did leave behind more documentation of their ideas about the problems of modernity and empire.

Buraku Community Responses in the Early Meiji Period: The Embrace of Equality and “Civilization” When the abolition of outcaste status was announced in 1871, the reaction from pariah communities was swift and elated. Residents of Watanabemura, for example, took to the streets and danced to the rhythm of festival drums in celebration. But the outcaste communities also responded to the unprecedented development in ways that reveal a grasp of the problems involved in fitting into majority society. If local authorities were worried lest the former outcastes refuse to abandon their old, defiled lifestyles and livelihoods, in many areas these fears were ungrounded. This was especially true for those outcastes who had been engaged in the disposal of animal carcasses: whole communities signed pacts to abstain from 1. Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 321.

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any further involvement in such work. Residents of one buraku community in Kyoto Prefecture who made such a pledge explained that to engage in such work would only prolong the community’s association with defilement. A similar pact in Shimoda-mura, Osaka Prefecture, called on residents not only to refrain from disposing of carcasses, but also to give up trading in leather goods or peddling straw sandals without concealing them from view during transport. Furthermore, the pact admonished residents to mind their general appearance when visiting other villages. Whether those who drew up and signed such pacts were motivated to do so by the admonishments of prefectural and local authorities is unclear, but in any case, they were certainly acting on their own accord. While incorporation had been granted from above, residents of these and other buraku communities like them saw these measures as a way to help win the acceptance of the majority and so were eager to distance themselves from occupations connected with popular ideas about defilement, in spite of the foreseeable economic disadvantages that would result. In the wake of the abolition of pariah status, burakumin policed themselves, lest they appear to the surrounding majority as in any way defiled, ungrateful, unrepentant, or different. At the same time, however, most burakumin were not interested in maintaining the old status quo when it came to interacting with others. The edict of 1871 had granted them commoner status, after all, and they understood this to mean that they could behave like commoners, regardless of the social situation. Soon after the announcement of the edict, in many areas burakumin abandoned the practice, required of them under the former status system, of greeting even peasants with a low bow given

2. Ibid., p. 267. 3. Ibid., p. 322. 4. Of course, not all outcastes engaged in the business of carcass disposal may have reacted in this manner. A similar revision instituted by Wakayama-han in 1870, just prior to the abolition of outcaste status, led to a very different reaction. There, outcaste communities throughout the Kinai region, where leather processing was a leading outcaste industry, criticized the revision and submitted a petition to the authorities for its repeal, citing the economic hardship that the abolition of free access to carcasses would cause outcaste communities (ibid., pp. 298– 99). Such communities may simply have been reacting to the abolition of traditional monopoly rights without the simultaneous abolition of pariah status, however.

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on hands and knees. Furthermore, burakumin began to appear at local pubs and community bathhouses expecting to be served in the same manner as others. They even showed up at shrine festivals and other community events held in the main village to which their buraku community was attached, and asserted their right to participate. All of this greatly annoyed their non-buraku neighbors. Especially in rural communities, where one’s identity was practically impossible to conceal, proprietors of bars and bath houses turned local burakumin away, claiming that to serve them would prove devastating for their business with other customers. In the face of such rejection, however, burakumin responded in ways that reveal how unwilling they were to return to the old behavioral status quo, and how far they had come, in a very short time, to viewing their new status as an unconditional right rather than a conditional privilege. They confronted those who refused to acknowledge their equality as commoners through demonstrations and other acts designed to intimidate those who had discriminated against them and dissuade them from repeating the offense. A fascinating example was the minomushi odori, or “basket worm dance,” performed by burakumin in what is now Kagawa Prefecture as a response to discrimination from their majority neighbors. The night after an incident, buraku protestors, clad in straw raingear so as to conceal their faces completely, encircled the home of the offending individual and performed the dance in ominous silence. On other occasions, particularly when the residents of buraku communities were prohibited from taking part in festivals or other ceremonies held in neighboring majority areas, they brought their case before the local authorities. Since buraku communities were often “branch villages” (eda-mura) connected to a non-buraku “main village” (honmura), these complaints were usually withdrawn when the main village applied economic pressure to keep the branch village in line. Those cases that did make it to a hearing before local government officials or

5. 6. 7. 8.

Uesugi, Tennōsei to buraku sabetsu, p. 249. Ibid.; Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 36. Hirota, Sabetsu no shisen, pp. 84–85. Ishijima, “Sei-san nōmin hōki to shogakkō kishō jiken,” p. 371.

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courts, however, usually ended in victory for the buraku community involved. In striving to make themselves acceptable to majority society, while at the same time demanding their right to equal treatment, burakumin displayed a remarkably developed appreciation of the rationale underlying the emerging nation-state. By recognizing that incorporation carried with it both rights and responsibilities, many burakumin showed their sensitivity and dedication to the goal of “civilization and enlightenment.” In a very real sense, as Kurokawa points out, they became agents for achieving these national ideals at the community level. Nowhere was this more evident than in the enthusiasm many burakumin displayed for education following the Elementary School Ordinance of 1872. At a time when their majority peers in rural areas throughout Japan were putting the torch to the school buildings established in their communities, burakumin were launching autonomous efforts to establish such schools for their children. Every household in the buraku community of Yagi-mura, Shiga Prefecture, for example, volunteered to make straw sandals during their spare time in order to raise funds for construction of a school in their village. Similar requests for permission to establish community schools as well as fundraising activities for the schools’ operation were observed in Ehime, Hiroshima, Nara, Osaka, and Sakai prefectures. The drive to establish their own schools had to do with more than just “civilization and enlightenment,” however. The burakumin were concerned that the majority’s aversion to associating with the former outcastes posed a formidable threat to acquiring the education that was key to the burakumin’s successful incorporation into mainstream society. Rather than have their children rejected from schools in neighboring majority communities, or face discrimination there from teachers and

9. Hirota, Sabetsu no shisen, pp. 84–85; Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to seibunka, p. 48. 10. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 30. 11. Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to sei-bunka, p. 49. 12. On the establishment of buraku schools in Ehime, see Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 541. For Hiroshima, see p. 505; for Nara, see pp. 353 and 355; for Osaka, see p. 297; for Sakai, see p. 298.

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fellow students that would make it practically impossible to learn, burakumin parents wanted to establish their own schools. The burakumin were right to expect resistance. Despite their efforts at self-improvement, most of the majority neighbors of the burakumin still clung to a moral economy that demanded deference from the “outcastes.” The initial result, as we have seen, was the “murderous violence” of the anti-buraku riots of the 1870s, as well as countless less destructive and deadly attacks on individual burakumin thereafter. As the 1870s gave way to the 1880s, the shock of the Matsukata Deflation to the economic health of most buraku communities made selfimprovement initiatives almost impossible to sustain. On top of this poverty, the increasingly deprecatory images of buraku deviance that took form during these years set the hurdle for acceptance of the minority even higher, and only added to the sense of desperation in many communities. For those burakumin most in tune with wider worlds of economics, politics, and government policy, the situation faced by their communities gradually came to represent a crisis of national proportion. This appreciation grew as they realized, through contact with like-minded individuals from other buraku areas, particularly the cities of western Japan, that such problems were not confined to their own community. Intercommunity contact of this kind took place among members of a small but influential stratum of business and community leaders: a true bourgeois class within the buraku minority. It was from this stratum that a politicized conception of buraku identity first appeared, a development that, in turn, caused the state to react in ways that signaled the beginnings of a dialogue on minority identity between minority activists and organs of state authority.

13. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 32–33. Although incidents of discrimination seem to have become much more of a problem in the 1880s, even in the mid- to late 1870s it appears that buraku children were being barred from attending schools in majority communities. An editorial in the April 1875 issue of the Shimane Prefecture newspaper Hamada shinbun decried the fact that buraku children were being turned away from schools simply because majority commoners could not rid themselves of their outdated beliefs concerning impurity (reprinted in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 377). As late as August 1876, a buraku community in Nagano was forced to submit a petition to prefectural officials, asking them to order authorities in the neighboring village to admit children from the buraku community into the local elementary school (pp. 191– 92).

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Affluent Buraku Elites Caught between Community and Nation in Late Meiji Japan In spite of the increasing impoverishment of the burakumin during the late Meiji years, wealthy and successful burakumin, while a minority within their minority, remained a prominent feature of many communities. Socioeconomic stratification in many buraku communities had produced a propertied stratum by the middle of the eighteenth century, particularly in areas like the Kinai region, where the commercial economy had developed earliest. Taking advantage of expanding commercial markets, this rising stratum invested not only in land, but also in the traditional industries of their communities, concentrating the means of production under their control and taking advantage of a cheap and captive labor supply in the buraku communities to produce goods for the urban and rural market. Before long, these families also became the political leaders— or shōya— of their communities. The dawn of the Meiji period and the loss of monopoly rights over certain industries wiped out many of these families. Some, however, managed to switch over to new lines of production, albeit linked to the older industries in some way. In Osaka’s Nishihama area, for example, production of Western-style leather shoes became a major industry, preserving the association with both leather and footwear. In nearby Yao-za, which was later renamed Yasunaka, the production of glue from animal carcasses, known as nikawa, became a lucrative industry for the few who owned the means of production. Local tax records for 1886 reveal that nikawa manufacturers in Yao-za had an average annual income of nearly 276 yen, with one bringing in as much as 400 yen. The wealth was highly concentrated: four of the eight nikawa refineries operating in the community appear to have been owned by only two extended families. 14. Cornell, “From Caste Patron to Entrepreneur and Political Ideologue,” pp. 71– 72. 15. Takebe, Kinkō nōson no bunkai to sangyō shihon, p. 93, table 12. 16. Yao-shi shi hensan iinkai, Yao-shi shi (kindai) shiryō-hen (I), table on p. 410. The table unfortunately only gives figures for four nikawa operations, two owned by individuals with the family name Shibata, and two by those named Tsujimura. A local history of Yasunaka notes that the owners of the nikawa plants in the community were referred to as “the upper eight families.” (See Morita and Tsujimura, Kawachi no hisabetsu

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Like their workers, who stood little chance of finding employment outside of the buraku community due to discrimination in employment, the wealthy buraku entrepreneurs’ immediate sources of wealth, and thus their social position, were intimately connected to the buraku communities that produced them. Their concern for the economic survival of their communities was thus as intense as their interest in maintaining their own position within these communities, and their actions in the second half of the Meiji period demonstrate a preoccupation with both problems. Until recently, researchers considering the buraku minority’s struggles against discrimination have had a tendency to compare unfavorably the ideas and actions of affluent Meiji burakumin to those of the Suiheisha. Taking what they see as the Suiheisha’s commitment to radical activism against an oppressive state as the standard of what qualifies as an effective movement against discrimination, such researchers find reactionary the Meiji buraku bourgeoisie’s rhetoric of “reconciliation” ( yūwa) and calls for “sympathy” (dōjō) from the majority. More recently, writers buraku Yao-za no rekishi, p. 86.) The chronological table of the community provided in the same work, however, only gives dates of establishment for five of these, two of which were owned by families other than the Shibatas and Tsujimuras (pp. 154–58). 17. Cornell, “From Caste Patron to Entrepreneur,” pp. 73– 74. In regard to the attitudes of this stratum, Cornell claims that they believed “both material and social hardships could be allayed through the personal attainment of wealth,” and that “liabilities of caste could best be overcome by purely local initiative.” Here he seems to reveal suppositions about the nature of this class imparted from his Japa nese contemporaries in the field of buraku history. Specifically, Cornell seeks to juxtapose this image of a non-politicized but wealthy buraku elite in the Meiji period with the “men of great social identification and personal magnetism but of slight economic means” (p. 76), whom he claims replaced these wealthy forebears in the post-Meiji years. This view is clearly inspired by the view that the Suiheisha—its leadership and rank and file alike— was a proletarian orga nization. As we shall see in this section and in subsequent chapters, however, there are serious problems with the assertion that the buraku elite of the Meiji period were not concerned with combating discrimination in the arena of politics, just as there are problems with the idea that the post-Meiji buraku elite, including many of the leaders of the Suiheisha, possessed only “slight economic means.” 18. The well-known postwar Marxist historian Inoue Kiyoshi supplied what was perhaps the most condemning assessment of this type. According to Inoue, movements involving the buraku bourgeoisie saw the problems facing the burakumin as “nothing more than problems of the individual, involving the self-awareness and character of the burakumin.” Since they themselves embraced majority society’s prejudices against lower-class burakumin, “they never bothered to blame society’s prejudices. It never oc-

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such as Kurokawa Midori have provided a more nuanced view of this stratum, emphasizing both its separation from the rest of the buraku community, in terms of wealth and degree of interaction with majority society, as well as its identification with and concern for the communities that sustained it. For Kurokawa, the ambiguous relationship with the buraku community produced a kind of psychological tension, revealed in the bourgeoisie’s debates over who was most at fault for anti-buraku discrimination: the majority, for harboring such prejudice, or the burakumin themselves, for affirming the stereotypes. Likewise, Sekiguchi Hiroshi has explored the logical, developmental connection between the buraku bourgeoisie’s community improvement movement and the Suiheisha, even though the Suiheisha was intensely critical of the bourgeoisie’s yūwa approach. He sees in middle-class undertakings like Yamato Dōshikai’s magazine Meiji no hikari an effort to display, both to the majority and to themselves, that burakumin not only were capable of participating in majority society as equals, but also could contribute to the national culture. Such elements of the buraku bourgeois improvement movement in the Meiji period, Sekiguchi argues, provided the ideological foundation for the Suiheisha. The community of Yanagihara provides us with a lens through which to consider how these affluent, influential burakumin viewed their communities and the minority as a whole; the place they envisioned for themselves within these communities; and their conception of the relation between the minority and the Japanese nation-state. It also illuminates the degree to which this stratum acted on minority interest versus class interests. Although the affluent members of Yanagihara were never as prominent a feature of their community as were the magnates of the Nishihama leather industry, the extent of their wealth put them on par curred to them that the emperor system and the status system, along with the semifeudal landlord system and capitalism, which deprived burakumin and farmers of land and jobs, could be the main culprits.” (See Inoue, Buraku mondai no kenkyū, p. 56.) Recently, Sekiguchi Hiroshi has pointed out that assessments such as Inoue’s uncritically incorporate the Suiheisha’s biases in finding fault with the activities of the lateMeiji minority bourgeoiosie, rather than analyzing them in their proper historical context. (See Sekiguchi, “Kaizen undō to Suihei undō no ronriteki renkan.”) 19. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 56– 61, 105– 6. 20. Sekiguchi, “Kaizen undō to Suihei undō no ronriteki renkan.”

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with those more renowned buraku merchants and industrialists, and likewise distinguished them from the rank and file of their own community. For the most part, they were the owners of leather refineries, as well as factories producing leather goods, Western-style shoes, and traditional Japanese footwear such as setta. Figures from 1907 show that two individuals in Yanagihara had annual incomes as high as 4,000 yen, while another sixty-three residents had incomes in excess of 400 yen, at a time when the average annual salary for a public servant— a highly respected middle-class occupation—in Kyoto Prefecture was just 195 yen. This immense wealth served to separate such burakumin from the rest of the residents of Yanagihara, many of whom were leading a handto-mouth existence. Yet an awareness by the bourgeoisie of that the source of their wealth was inextricably tied to the community, along with philanthropic concern and a certain amount of pride in their community, rallied such individuals to rescue Yanagihara from the direst aspects of its poverty. In times of crisis, such as fires, floods, and sudden leaps in the price of rice, Yanagihara businessmen and community leaders donated large amounts of money and rice to aid those most impoverished and most affected in the community. Many of the wealthy Yanagihara residents who provided such community support may have shared the concerns of village headman Sakurada Gihei, who worked to check the spread of cholera because he feared the indemnification that Yanagihara would face as a “former eta” community if it were to produce a large number of cholera patients. The activities of these well-to-do residents and community leaders were not limited to such emergency aid. In fact, they were most noticeably active in promoting education and economic stability within the community. Contributions of their time, energy, and money established the Yanagihara Elementary School in 1874, and helped it become a model of buraku education during the Meiji period. Even the first principal of the school, Tamaoki Kinosuke, was a member of one of Yanagihara’s 21. Shigemitsu, “Yanagihara ginkō-shi,” p. 127. 22. See Yamauchi, Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi, kindai-hen nenpyō, pp. 14–15, 19, 25, for numerous examples of such emergency aid. 23. Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (1),” p. 3.

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affluent leather families. The community fathers also founded a night school and other programs in vocational and industrial arts for the benefit of children and adults from the community. Among these initiatives was the Shinshukai (䘆পӮ, “Enterprise Society”), a group founded in 1889 to make “the three-character word shin-heimin a name of value in the world”— a statement that foreshadowed by more than three decades the Suiheisha’s call for burakumin to take pride in being eta. As one might expect, other major concerns of the Yangihara elite included promotion of local industry and jobs for area residents. To this end, Sakurada, Akashi Tamizō, and nine other captains of local industry founded the Yanagihara Bank in 1899. The purpose of establishing such an institution was to provide a ready source of loans for community improvement projects and commercial ventures, a source that would not be subject to economic fluctuations or other factors external to the community. The bank eventually financed the establishment of major local companies such as Kyoto Leather, Inc. (in 1911) and Taishō Leather and Belt, Inc. (in 1912). In many respects, its founders envisioned the Yanagihara Bank operating like the central holding bank of a zaibatsu (financial conglomerate) of buraku industries. While these affluent residents displayed a deep concern for their community, they also kept in mind their class and its specific interests. The businesses founded with loans from the Yanagihara Bank, for example, provided some benefit to the community at large by creating new jobs, but it was the affluent entrepreneurs in charge of these companies who 24. Yamauchi, Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi, kindai-hen nenpyō, p. 13. 25. For the quotation, see Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (1),” p. 6. Although this orga nization seems to have gathered much interest within the community at first, it apparently went into rapid decline thereafter. See Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (2),” pp. 1–2. 26. Akashi, “Kō keiei rigai tokushitsu ron.” 27. Shigemitsu, “Yanagihara ginkō-shi,” p. 133. The Yanagihara Bank operated successfully for a time, but gradually, starting in the 1910s, ran into trouble. Kyoto Leather, for example, was dissolved in 1912, and Taishō Leather and Belt went bankrupt in 1917. These and other failures left the bank saddled with many non-performing loans. The Yanagihara leather industry recovered enough during World War I for the bank to reorga nize and branch out into the surrounding areas of Kyoto, under the new name of Yamashiro Bank. In September 1927, however, it fell victim to the banking crisis that had been sweeping Japan since March of that year.

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profited most. Furthermore, although it is not clear to what extent Yanagihara residents deposited their money in the bank, the rich were probably the biggest savers, as well as the most valued borrowers. Another example of the burakumin’s desire to maintain hegemony over the community was the Yanagihara-chō iemochi dōmei (Yanagihara Homeowner’s Alliance), founded in 1894. Members of the alliance were required to observe a strict set of regulations; for example, they were forbidden from selling or renting property to seven categories of people. Although the main purpose of the organization was to prevent criminals and other ne’er-do-wells from taking up residence in the community, the categories of prohibited renters were so broadly defined that they could easily be used to exclude the community’s own undesirables. Rejecting unsavory elements from the community was obviously one means of salvaging the community’s reputation, but the stiff penalties meted out to members who violated the rules suggests that the affluent leaders of the alliance were trying to solidify their control over a rising class of petit bourgeois property owners while keeping the lowest strata in line. Affluent burakumin’s wealth, business acumen, and administrative authority in their community clearly provided them with a far greater degree of contact with their peers in majority society and with various state authorities than their less fortunate neighbors could have ever managed. Their social peers among the majority even lent a hand in launching some of the community improvement projects that the Yanagihara leaders championed. The prefecture and the national government, too, 28. I have not come across any statistics on savings rates by socioeconomic strata for Yanagihara Bank. Shigemitsu (ibid., p. 138) believes that many of those who maintained accounts at the institution right up to its collapse were probably residents of Yanagihara. Even if this assertion is true, however, it sheds no light on who they were or what kinds of work they did. The 1912 Yanagihara-chō genjō mentions the Yanagihara Bank, but states that only the community’s business leaders made use of it. For the poor, the main financial institutions were the pawnshop and the loan shark. 29. Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (3),” p. 4. 30. For example, in 1883–84 Sakurada Gihei received the assistance of a Kaishin-tō affiliated group known as the Hōjōkai to revive the community’s elementary school and find work for poor residents on canal-digging projects near Lake Biwa— see Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (1),” pp. 2–3. The aforementioned Shinshukai actually started out as the Byōdōkai, which was launched by intellectuals such as Miyajima Sōhachi, Shimizu Toyoko, and scholars associated with Nishi Honganji

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honored the efforts of these prosperous Yanagihara-ites on various occasions. The Yanagihara elite in turn were generally enthusiastic, patriotic supporters of the state and those agencies invested with its authority. They feted community-wide celebrations for Japan’s victories over Qing China and czarist Russia, and donated large sums of money for the building of a new police station in their community, in addition to funding the aforementioned kyōfūkai (moral reform societies). Because of their increased contact with and involvement in majority society, the buraku bourgeoisie was in a position to face anti-buraku discrimination in a very personal manner. Community administrator Karataki Shōsaburō got a taste of this in 1906, during a gathering of regional village administrators, when the headman of one nearby community, after rubbing shoulders with Karataki, complained that he had been “touched by an eta.” At times the entire administrative system seemed bent on excluding the minority communities. Yanagihara, located right next to Kyoto Station, would seem to belong within the Kyoto city limits. But the city and its neighboring municipalities of Kii and Atago counties tried to foist the buraku community off on one another every time rezoning became an issue, and in spite of repeated requests from the Yanagihara town fathers to be included in the “old capital.”

Temple. It wasn’t until after the first lecture by this group, held in Yanagihara on June 3, 1889, that Sakurada, Tamaoki, and other local leaders sat down with Miyajima and mapped out the Shinshukai (pp. 4–5). Likewise, a “Poor People’s Work Center” was established in 1890, in part to raise funds to reimburse the physician Mitani Atsushi for the medicine he had donated while operating a free clinic in Yanagihara during a cholera epidemic earlier in the year. See Shiraishi, “Kyōto Yanagihara to buraku kaizen undō (2),” p. 3. 31. For example, as early as 1877, Sakurada was recognized by the Home Minister for his efforts in establishing the elementary school. In 1879, Sakurada and others received praise from the prefectural government for aiding victims of a fire in Yanagihara. (Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi kenkyūkai, Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi, kindai-hen nenpyō, pp. 13–14.) 32. Ibid., pp. 22, 24, 34–35. 33. Ibid., p. 36. Karataki later confronted the offending administrator and forced him to write an official apology for the utterance. 34. Surprisingly, Yanagihara was not incorporated into Kyoto City until March 1918, when its official name was changed from Yanagihara-chō to Higashi Shichijō.

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Even in the area of education, chances to experience harsh discrimination increased as one progressed to the higher grades, and into schools located in majority communities with non-buraku classmates and teachers. The childhood experience of Miyoshi Iheiji, a wealthy burakumin and community leader from Okayama Prefecture, illustrates a problem he shared with many burakumin intent on achieving success in the new society and economy of modern Japan. An intelligent and diligent student, Miyoshi later recalled how his teacher in higher elementary school exhorted his classmates to study harder, because it was “an embarrassment to have an eta at the head of the class.” The same teacher once asked him in front of his classmates, “I’ve heard that you people can’t urinate and defecate at the same time, so when you go to the toilet, which do you do first?” In Yanagihara and other buraku communities like it, wealthy buraku leaders found themselves in the awkward position of being at once an integral part of the community, but also separated from the experience of the vast majority of its residents in terms of their views of their minority, themselves, and the place of all of these in relation to the emerging modern nation-state of Japan. They understood the pain of discrimination against the burakumin even better than the less fortunate of their communities, due to the slurs and veiled references they found themselves subjected to in their interactions with their peers in majority society. Even so, their commitment to the Meiji project of nation-building meant they agreed that many of the traits that seemed to characterize their less fortunate neighbors did indeed represent deplorable “problems” for both the burakumin and the nation as a whole. In particular, the affluent burakumin decried the lack of hygiene, the poverty, and laziness associated with their own minority group. Matsui Shōgorō, an affluent burakumin from Nara who graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, even viewed the traditional but menial buraku trade of geta repair as an embarrassingly “base occupation.” For Matsui, the solution to the “buraku problem” was simply a matter of “blotting out the

35. Quoted in Inoue, Buraku mondai no kenkyū, p. 52. 36. Quoted in Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 94.

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original form of the buraku.” Okamoto Wataru, another wealthy buraku advocate of autonomous community improvement from Wakayama, similarly spoke of the “eradication of the buraku,” which he explained as “not eradicating the buraku per se, but rather expunging the peculiarities” of those who lived there. At the same time, however, these affluent champions of self-reform did not deny their connection to the minority, or seek to dissociate themselves entirely from it. Matsui himself provides a fascinating example of this mindset. Although soon after the Restoration Matsui had bought the family name and status rights of an impoverished samurai family— a move that ostensibly would have given him the means to deny any connection to the former outcastes—he continued to live in the buraku community of his birth, where he dedicated himself and much of his personal wealth to the cause of buraku improvement, in particular through the Yamato Dōshikai (Yamato Fellowship Association) and its magazine Meiji no hikari (The light of Meiji). He sometimes boasted about how his wealth had allowed him to assume a status superior to that of most in the majority, but he never denied his buraku roots. Another revealing example was Okamoto. While calling for the eradication of buraku “peculiarities,” he simultaneously pointed out that “groundless misapprehensions” on the part of the majority were as much to blame for the isolation of the burakumin as their own undesirable idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, Okamoto criticized burakumin who believed that it was just their fate to be despised, that the problem of discrimination would eventually disappear if only given enough time, or that with enough money, one need not worry about the adverse effects of discrimination. To those espousing the first two arguments, he responded 37. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 101–2. For this purpose, Matsui envisioned a program of sending impoverished burakumin to the cities after training them to become “practical people”—a phrase by which he presumably meant “productive laborers.” Those of the middle stratum would likewise be residentially integrated into majority communities. The wealthy would remain in the buraku community, but the now vacant houses of their poorer neighbors would be torn down to make room for new, modern homes for “government officials, public servants, and benevolent persons.” 38. Okamoto, Tokushu buraku no kaihō, p. 3. 39. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 94– 95; Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 105; Sekiguchi, “Kaizen undō to Suihei undō no ronriteki renkan,” p. 84.

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that simply doing nothing about the problem was tantamount to condemning one’s children to suffer the same misery, while those of the third he rebuked for their selfishness, claiming it was their duty to do something to help their poorer brethren.

Buraku Elite Activism and the Limits of Protest With their position in the minority community as a whole, their patriotism and spirit of public ser vice, and their experience of discrimination, it should come as no surprise that affluent burakumin eventually formed a national organization. The earliest attempt of this kind was the DaiNippon Dōhō Yūwakai (Society for Reconciling the Brethren of Great Japan), organized in 1903 by Miyoshi Iheiji, Okamoto Wataru, Akashi Tamizō, and several other successful buraku business and community leaders. The organization decried anti-buraku discrimination from a patriotic perspective, claiming that reconciliation among fellow countrymen was necessary if Japan was to have its magnificence recognized in juxtaposition to the West. But in regard to what must be done to bring about such reconciliation, the Dōhō Yūwakai was confronted with an uncomfortable choice: to launch a movement to impress upon the majority the injustice of discrimination, or to concentrate on teaching the burakumin to behave more like proper Japanese subjects. In the end, the organization chose the latter course, and adopted a platform calling for improvements in community morals, hygiene, education, rates of personal savings, and industry. The group had only a minimal influence: local chapters launched sporadic efforts toward these ends in some bur40. Okamoto, Tokushu buraku no kaihō, pp. 3–4, 148–53. Okamoto had particular scorn for wealthy burakumin who concealed their minority background and passed in majority society without doing anything for the burakumin. In this regard, he related the story of an acquaintance, a buraku woman who concealed her buraku identity while working as a prostitute, but continued to send money to her family and home village for the construction of Buddhist monuments there. She described herself as one “born to take money from the fools of this world in order to provide charity” to the people of her village. “Although her profession is base,” Okamoto wrote, “should we not be impressed by the nobility of her heart? There are those of our people (dōzoku) who avoid the rest of us for fear that their own status (mibun) might come to light. I would like to hear how their lot feels about the actions of this lowly woman” (p. 150). 41. Shiraishi, “Yanagihara-chō to buraku kaizen undō,” pp. 45–46.

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aku communities, but nothing more was heard of the Dōhō Yūwakai after its first meeting. The next national organization for autonomous reform efforts did not appear until nearly ten years later, with the launching of the Yamato Dōshikai on August 20, 1912. In the interim, the aforementioned Buraku Improvement Policy had drawn national attention to the “buraku problem,” and despite its generally negative character had provided buraku community leaders with increased opportunities and avenues to envision themselves and their communities in national terms. Buraku community leaders were also greatly shocked by the news of the Great Treason Incident of 1910 (described in Chapter 1), especially given that suspects Ōishi Seinosuke and Takagi Kenmei were identified as burakumin merely by their connections to the buraku community in which they lived and worked. For the patriotic buraku bourgeoisie, who never questioned the characterizations of the defendants or the veracity of the charges against them, the thought of two of “their own” plotting to kill the very emperor who had freed the burakumin from outcaste status was a source of both shame and alarm. The Yamato Dōshikai, then, set out to become a national organization that would raise the burakumin and their communities out of the depths of ignobility to which they had sunk through poverty, stereotyping, and association with the Great Treason Incident. To this end, it inherited much of the reformist platform espoused by the earlier DaiNippon Dōhō Yūwakai. The new organization also called for changes in the attitudes of the government and majority society. Dōshikai members criticized the Buraku Improvement Policy and the local initiatives it had spawned for not doing enough to achieve economic stability and selfsufficiency in the buraku community, and decried the tendency of officials responsible for implementing them to find fault with the burakumin whenever programs fell short of realizing their goals. They demanded that more be done to improve the level of instruction in buraku schools and increase the educational opportunities available to buraku children. They called for programs to help burakumin emigrate to areas such as 42. Kurokawa (Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 60– 61) surmises that the locally oriented nature of the Dōhō Yūwakai platform was in the end too diff use a basis on which to build and sustain a national movement.

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Hokkaido (where it was assumed they would not face discrimination) and demanded that the Nishi Honganji sect of Jōdo Shin Buddhism, to which most burakumin belonged, end its exploitative practice of promising burakumin a better life in the next world in return for exorbitant contributions. Although Dōshikai members held views about poorer burakumin similar to those current in majority society, on the whole they claimed that the majority was being far too harsh and unforgiving in its prejudice; hence the need for “sympathy” (dōjō). Despite such criticism of government policies, the Yamato Dōshikai was thoroughly committed to supporting the aims of the state and working for the greater glory of the Japanese nation. Articles in the group’s periodical Meiji no hikari emphasized this commitment. Dōshikai chairman Matsui Shōgorō, for example, claimed that burakumin felt a sense of deep gratitude and enduring love toward Emperor Meiji for releasing them from the humiliation of pariah status. While he admitted that some among the minority had taken to socialist ideas, he reassured his readers that most burakumin were loyal subjects, and that the Dōshikai’s mission was to keep them that way. In essence, Matsui and others in the organization claimed that the minority’s debt of gratitude to the Meiji emperor meant that they were even more loyal and sincere in their devotion to the emperor and nation than other Japanese subjects. Also in the pages of Meiji no hikari, as Sekiguchi Hiroshi points out, was an appeal to the majority to let the burakumin participate in the cultural and intellectual life of the nation on an equal footing with other Japanese. In claiming their rightful place as loyal, well-educated subjects, Dōshikai members and writers in Meiji no hikari waged a vehement battle against views of burakumin as foreigners. They refuted this label in numerous historical essays on buraku origins, and in commentary opposing the odious moniker tokushu buraku. 43. I am following Kurokawa’s analysis of the character of the Yamato Dōshikai platform. See Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 99–106, for her more in-depth discussion of these points. 44. Ibid., p. 100. 45. Sekiguchi, “Kaizen undō to Suihei undō no ronriteki renkan,” p. 83. Indeed, some of the submissions to the journal employed such ornate prose that some readers criticized the editors for publishing a magazine that was too difficult for most burakumin to read.

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And yet, to the extent that there was a division between the burakumin and other Japanese, members had to face the problem of how to describe the relationship of the minority to majority society. This was an issue that surfaced in the very first meeting, as members debated the wording to be used in the group’s declaration. One major point of contention was the use of the term “dōzoku” (ৠᮣ, “our people”) in the second article of the Dōshikai charter: “the main aim of this society is to unite our people and to bring about the improvement and development of our people across the nation.” The minutes of the meeting reveal the difficulties involved in using this term: INO. The term “our people” implies a certain separation, so I think we should delete it. MAEDA. I agree with Ino’s opinion. IGAWA SAISUI. I see no need to delete the term “our people.” This term is necessary to distinguish our comrades, who will join together and unify their actions to bring about their own improvement and development, from among the sixty million people of this nation. IGAWA HAYANARI. I agree with Igawa’s opinion. MAEDA. How about using another term? INO. If we follow Igawa’s opinion, not only would the activities of this society no longer bring about reconciliation among our fellow countrymen [dōhō no yūwa], but worse still, would lead to us isolating ourselves. Therefore, I believe the term must be deleted.

In the end, the article was allowed to stand unedited. But the reluctance of Dōshikai members such as Ino to endorse any view of the burakumin that suggested difference from the majority, as well as Igawa Saisui’s interpretation of dōzoku as a group of people “who will join together and unify their actions to bring about their own improvement and development,” reveals the extent to which the majority values shared by this class of burakumin restricted their ability to produce an autonomous minority identity, and in turn, a cohesive movement. The most forceful argument they could launch against discrimination from such a position was that the majority was showing great disrespect to the

46. “Kaisei Yamato Dōshikai kaisoku,” p. 20. 47. “Kaigi,” pp. 2–3.

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Emperor Meiji for not honoring his wish that the burakumin be treated as his equal subjects. In spite of members’ ambivalence over identifying the minority as a distinct group within the Japanese nation, the achievements of the Dōshikai were considerable. The group brought together affluent burakumin from around the country under a platform that criticized the most egregious instances of majority prejudice and official discrimination. Through its magazine Meiji no hikari, the Dōshikai created a medium in which a sense of a national buraku community of high intellectual and cultural standards could be imagined for the first time. Even though most members were unwilling to invest that minority identity with a sense of autonomy from the majority, the Dōshikai did emphatically declare that there was no reason to be ashamed of being a burakumin, so long as one was a morally upstanding, patriotic, and hard-working individual. In the wake of the Great Treason Incident, government officials shocked by the supposed buraku connection to the incident eyed these affluent, patriotic burakumin and their movement as the only reliable segment of a minority that had otherwise all but proved its criminality and lack of patriotism. The Home Ministry sought to co-opt the Dōshikai through appeals to its patriotism and sense of public ser vice, so that the group would both monitor and improve the burakumin under a revitalized improvement initiative. In order to do so, however, the ministry had to take into account the Dōshikai’s views and demands. Dōshikai members were patriotic, but government officials must have been aware of the group’s criticism of the Buraku Improvement Movement. In some cases its members had even refused to cooperate with such initiatives: for instance, both Akashi Tamizō and Karataki Shōsaburō had resisted after realizing the arrogance and lack of empathy for the plight of the minority community by those police presiding over the Yanagihara Kyōfūkai. For the first time since the Meiji Restoration, the government seemed obliged to listen to the burakumin. The Home Ministry’s Conference on Improvement of Impoverished Villages (Saimin buraku kaizen kyōgikai), held November 7– 9, 1912, revealed such sensitivity. In addition to inviting central and prefectural

48. Shiraishi, “Yanagihara-chō to buraku kaizen undō,” pp. 75– 76.

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government officials and local improvement program leaders from around Japan, organizers also asked influential burakumin such as Okamoto Wataru and Akashi Tamizō to attend. Furthermore, in line with the Dōshikai’s dissatisfaction with the term tokushu buraku, ministry officials substituted the term saimin buraku—literally, “village of the impoverished”—as a compromise alternative for use in official reports. The term was obviously intended to appease buraku leaders, but it was greeted with little enthusiasm from majority delegates at the meeting. The problem for many was the fact that the term saimin already had a definite meaning in social policy parlance by this time (it referred to a specific economic stratum of generally impoverished people), so its new use would be confusing. The Home Ministry found itself caught between the need to create a nondiscriminatory term to appease the buraku bourgeoisie, and the need to set the burakumin apart from the majority—a situation analogous to the Dōshikai’s own debate over the dōzoku label. The tussle over naming the minority was emblematic of the larger conference. Although affluent burakumin were invited to the conference, Fujino’s analysis of the minutes reveals that officials from the central and prefectural levels of government almost exclusively dominated the floor. The proposals made at the meeting by such representatives primarily had to do with mobilizing the minority to be of greater use to the state in achieving its aims, rather than taking concrete measures to reduce discrimination and improve the plight of the burakumin. Chief among these proposals were calls for relocating greater numbers of burakumin to Hokkaido. Although officials at the meeting made sure to claim that migration would bring an end to discrimination against the burakumin by disbanding the communities they had lived in, of more immediate importance to them was the goal of increasing the population of the underdeveloped island in line with a general government policy. 49. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 85. 50. Ibid., p. 89. The plan would ultimately have failed to alleviate anti-buraku discrimination, since one’s previous connection with a particular buraku community would remain on the immigrant’s family register under the Koseki-hō. In any case, the migration plan, which was promoted by both the government and the Teikoku Kōdōkai (mentioned later), proved to be unpopular with most burakumin, and disastrous for the few who did go. Kurokawa (Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 117–22) cites evidence that fewer than 400 burakumin availed themselves of the opportunity during 1913 to 1918. Of

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In the end, the conference achieved nothing substantial, and another was not to be held until 1919. In his own written account of the conference, Akashi Tamizō blamed a “lack of sincerity on the part of the other classes,” by which he meant the majority officials and improvement workers in attendance as well as majority Japanese in general, for the failure of the conference and of the improvement movement, and the group’s inability to make progress toward reconciliation. The government was not the only sector of Japanese society to respond to the Great Treason Incident with a heightened degree of concern regarding the burakumin. In the wake of the conference sponsored by the Home Ministry, the Teikoku Kōdōkai (Imperial Way of Justice Society) was launched in June 1914. Unlike the Yamato Dōshikai, this organization was largely made up of wealthy and influential members of majority society. Its leader was none other than Ōe Taku, who had assiduously cultivated his reputation as the father of what was at this point widely (albeit erroneously) called the “liberation order” (Kaihō-rei), because he had submitted a similar— although much less sweeping— proposal to that effect prior to the abolition of outcaste status in 1871. Other luminaries of the political world whose names were associated with the organization were Itagaki Taisuke, who served briefly as its first chairman, and Shibusawa Ei’ichi, Okuma Shigenobu, and Inukai Tsuyoshi, who all signed on as supporters. In actuality, however, the Kōdōkai was very much Ōe’s one-man show; the dignitaries who lent their names to its list of officers and supporters showed little real enthusiasm for getting involved in the work of buraku improvement. Ōe’s own views of the burakumin, while in some respects progressive for his day, were far from unproblematic when viewed from the Dōshikai’s standpoint. Ōe’s standard phrase for the burakumin was karen minzoku— “the pitiful people”—a phrase that suggested they were both ethnically

those who did, most gave up and returned to Honshu soon after making the trip. Those who stayed on often did so simply because they had been reduced to abject poverty while trying to farm in such a harsh climate without experience, and thus could not afford to move. 51. Akashi Tamizō, “Saimin buraku taikai hōkokusho,” in Kyōto burakushi kenkyūjo, Kyoto no burakushi, vol. 7: Shiryō kindai 2, pp. 29–30. 52. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 97– 98.

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different from the majority and hopelessly ill-suited to better their own situation. Ōe’s views on the origins of the minority were hardly consistent across time. He argued at first that they were the descendants of Korean, Chinese, and Ainu prisoners and slaves, but later claimed that they were the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Israel. No matter what interpretation he embraced, he never rejected the idea that the burakumin were, on a very fundamental level, different from the Japanese. The Teikoku Kōdōkai’s approach to the “buraku problem” bore a strong resemblance to the views of the Yamato Dōshikai. Like the Dōshikai, the Kōdōkai appealed to all Japanese to fulfill their patriotic duty to rid their hearts of prejudice and called for greater opportunities for burakumin to emigrate to Hokkaido. But such similarities merely masked more substantial differences in the way the two organizations viewed the burakumin. The two groups had contrasting views of the way in which the nation, subjecthood, minority status, and discrimination related to one another. For the Dōshikai, as we have seen, the burakumin were Japanese in every way, perhaps even more patriotic than most of their majority peers, but most of all entitled to equal treatment due to the imperial will of the Meiji emperor. If the Dōshikai stopped short of making the demand for an end to discriminatory treatment the central pillar of its platform, it was because many of its affluent leaders sympathized with majority prejudices against their less-well-off neighbors in the buraku community. The Teikoku Kōdōkai, in contrast, viewed the burakumin as a “foreign” or at least “different” group that, like the Ainu, Koreans, Okinawans, and Taiwanese, had to be successfully assimilated if Japan expected to take its place 53. The earlier (and more standard) of these interpretations by Ōe appeared in Ōe Taku, “Karen minzoku no raireki oyobi genjō,” Shidankai sokkiroku, no. 256 (June 1914). The full text of the article is reproduced in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 6, pp. 408–11. The first appearance of his “Lost Tribe of Israel” thesis came in the following year, in Ōe Tenya (Taku), “Kōen karen minzoku no raireki oyobi genjō,” pp. 20–21. Ōe’s hypothesis rested solely on the superficial similarity in pronunciation between hafuri (⼱), part of the name of two ancient tribes that Ōe claimed had been subjugated by Emperor Jinmu, and “heburai,” the Japa nese word for “Hebrew.” Despite the patent absurdity of such a theory, Ōe continued to espouse it for many years to come, even including it in an article he would later publish in 1919 in Kita Sadakichi’s groundbreaking special issue of Minzoku to rekishi, which dealt with the question of buraku origins in an effort to otherwise lay the foreign-origin thesis to rest once and for all.

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among the great empires of the world. Assimilation, and with it an end to discrimination, were thus on one level matters of national pride. Moreover, assimilation of the burakumin was crucial to preserving the very spiritual core of the nation, the kokutai, from the threat of seductive and destructive foreign ideologies like individualism and socialism. In a reference to the supposed involvement of burakumin in the Great Treason Incident, Ōe claimed that this was a case of “individualism being taken to its extreme, resulting in socialism,” and added (apparently without recognizing any contradiction in what he was saying) that many burakumin had “lapsed into individualism, and have no idea of working for society or the nation.” For the Kōdōkai, the burakumin were both a weak, “pitiful people” and potentially dangerous to the nation itself. Although ostensibly sister organizations in the work of bringing about “reconciliation” between burakumin and their majority peers, members of the Dōshikai could not help recognizing the differences in outlook and orientation. Matsui Shfgorf, for example, would later admit to “feelings of displeasure” upon hearing Ōe’s theory of Hebrew roots. And yet, precisely because wealthy burakumin like Matsui embraced the same sense of loyalty to the state and emperor as Ōe, and based their claim to equal rights solely on the rhetoric of imperial “impartiality and equal favor,” they found themselves unable to criticize the state-centered version of reconciliation propounded by the Kōdōkai, especially when espoused by Ōe, the revered “father of the Kaihō-rei.” Such was the situation of the burakumin as Japan entered the 1920s. The affluent leaders of their communities felt the frustration of knowing deep down that they were not fully accepted by their class peers among the majority, or by the government of the very nation-state that they embraced with such a great sense of loyalty and gratitude. Compound54. Ōe Tenya (Taku), “Karen minzoku no raireki oyobi genjō,” Shidankai sokkiroku, no. 256 (June 1914), reprinted in Harada and Uesugi, Kindai burakushi shiryō shūsei, vol. 6, p. 414. 55. Fujino, “Hisabetsu buraku,” p. 157. 56. This respect may have been less than reciprocal: Sakamoto Sei’ichirō, the son of a wealthy buraku family from Nara, who would later go on to help found the Suiheisha, later claimed that Ōe always brought along his own bedding, tableware, and utensils on his speaking tours of buraku communities so he would not have to sleep on or eat off of anything provided by his hosts. See Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 100.

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ing this frustration was their own system of values, which left them little recourse but to agree, grudgingly, with much of what was said about the minority they represented. In the years to come, a new generation of socially conscious burakumin would draw on a wider variety of interpretations of the nation-state and their relation to it, and launch a very different movement for “liberation,” with a much broader base of support within the minority community. During the same years that buraku elites expressed their support for the nation and bemoaned the maligned position of their communities within it, similar images of Koreans emerged. As Japan gradually encroached on Korean sovereignty, how did those joining Japan’s empire respond to their situation?

Discovering the Nation through Opposition: Korean Student Responses to Meiji Imperialism The wars and victories that the buraku bourgeoisie and their communities celebrated with patriotic zeal were pivotal moments in the demise of Korean autonomy. Koreans with any interest in international developments and the position of their country within them could scarcely have ignored the implications of these wars and the increasing Japanese intrusions into Korean politics that accompanied them. Scholars of modern Korean history have explored the range of reactions among intellectuals and political elites in Korea. For our purposes, however, the reactions of a much smaller segment of this population—Koreans studying at schools in Japan during the years leading up to the annexation—provide a more pertinent comparison to the reactions of the buraku community elites. Like the buraku elites, these early Korean students witnessed the rise of empire from within the society of the emerging metropole, rather than from the familiar cultural surroundings of Korea. They also encountered all of the prejudicial stereotypes against Koreans that emerged in Japanese society during these years, much as buraku elites did. For Korean students, however, the nature of the response would be much different.

57. See, for example, Chandra, Imperialism, Resistance, and Reform, and more recently, Schmid, Korea between Empires.

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Early exchange students like Kim Okkyun, Yun Ch’iho, and So Chaepil are known to us due to the importance of their subsequent activities for modern Korean history, but the activities and ideas of the Koreans who followed them to study in Japan in the years leading up to the annexation have not received much scholarly attention to date. Michael Weiner’s pioneering study of early minority community formation explores the various paths by which Korean students entered schools in Japan, as well as the formation of student organizations. Weiner observes how the erosion of Korean sovereignty triggered an increasingly nationalistic response from these groups, which transformed in turn to an embrace of socialism in the wake of the suppression of the March First Movement in 1919. In a similar vein, Takegoshi Reiko has examined the process by which Korean students in Japan during the brief period of the Protectorate (1905–10) came to adopt a position of anti-Japanese nationalism while forming organizations that were initially aimed at promoting mutual welfare and fellowship among Korean students. Japanese encroachment on Korean self-rule was certainly a matter of increasing concern for these students, but it was not the most pressing problem they faced. Of far greater, immediate concern for many were the isolation of being a small and increasingly maligned immigrant population in Japan, and the poverty that most had to endure while trying to complete their courses of study. Increasing numbers of Koreans entered Japan during the protectorate years to enroll in a variety of technical colleges and universities, mostly in Tokyo, but even at the preannexation high-water mark, in 1909, only 886 Koreans were enrolled in such schools. In 1909, there were only seventy-eight Koreans enrolled in Japan as government-sponsored students who received funding from the Korean government to cover their tuition and living expenses; the rest were students attempting to fund their own studies through family

58. Weiner, Origins, pp. 117–52. 59. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” pp. 24–42. 60. Ibid., table 1, “Ryūgakusei ruinenpyō,” p. 25. The annexation, furthermore, was accompanied by a decline in Korean enrollment. Takegoshi’s figures, taken from statistics compiled by the Zainihon Tōkyō Chōsen ryūgakusei gakuyūkai and published in a 1915 issue of its journal Hak chi kwang, suggest a sharp decline in the years that immediately followed: from 600 in 1910, to 542 in 1911.

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support, personal savings, and a variety of part-time jobs in Japan. The situation of those privately funded students was often quite desperate, and many were forced to terminate their studies and return to Korea because they had run out of funding. The isolation and hardship that these self-supporting students faced in Japan led to the formation of student groups for mutual aid and fellowship. While the earliest of these groups appeared in 1895, most sprang up after 1905, during the years of the Protectorate. Typically these groups brought together students from the same areas of Korea, and so had a decidedly regional character. Others catered to the elite recipients of Koreangovernment scholarships. Aside from fellowship, the groups offered financial support in the form of redistributed membership dues, Japanese lessons, and information on part-time jobs. Many of these groups were short-lived, succumbing to the fraying influence of factionalism. Although such groups were initially organized by provincial origin or official status, Korean students in Japan at this time could not help but confront the problems arising from Japan’s increasingly heavy hand in Korean politics, nor could they ignore their own plight as victims of discrimination within a society in which deprecatory views of Koreans were gaining wide currency. In the years leading up to the annexation, both of these concerns led students to seek a more effective means of political organization in groups that transcended the confines of regional origin and enrollment status. On December 5, 1905, for example, thirty-seven students sponsored by the Korean government, all of whom were enrolled at Tokyo First

61. Ibid., p. 27. 62. Weiner (Origins, p. 154, note 24) identifies the earliest Korean student group as the “Dai Chōsenjin Nihon Ryūgakusei Shimbokkai (Greater Fraternal Association of Korean Students in Japan)” formed by Korean students enrolled at Keiō University, and claims that it existed until its demise in 1898. In light of this institution—founded by none other than Fukuzawa Yūkichi, who had been the mentor of some of the earliest Korean students in Japan—these students may have been officially sponsored. The other early student organizations that Weiner mentions in his examination all date from the years between 1905 and 1911. Takegoshi (“Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” pp. 28–31), finds much the same true of the groups she explores. 63. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 28. 64. Weiner, Origins, p. 121.

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Middle School at the invitation of the Japanese Ministry of Education, staged a boycott of their classes. In the midst of this boycott, on December 30, at least 130 Korean students in Tokyo attended a meeting led by the boycott’s organizers, where they discussed the possibility of forming some sort of permanent student organization. Out of this meeting, according to one account written years later by Korean student leaders, came the impetus to establish, on January 2, 1906, the Overseas Students’ Club (ᄺ⫳؊ὑ䚼, Ryūgakusei kurabu), the first organization to bring together Korean students in Tokyo irrespective of regional affiliation or status of support. Details about the history of the Overseas Students’ Club after its establishment are hazy at best. It seems to have continued until July 1906, when it merged with another Korean student group to form the Association of Overseas Students of Great Korea (໻䶧⬭ᄺ⫳Ӯ, Taehan yuhaksaenghoe [Korean], Taikan ryūgakuseikai [Japa nese]). But nothing is known of how many students joined, their regional origins in Korean, or their circumstances in Japan. For our purposes, however, a look at the precipitating factors behind both the December 1905 boycott and the establishment of what appears to be a more inclusive Korean student group during the following month reveals the 65. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 29. Weiner (Origins, p. 121) notes that none of the officially sponsored students attended classes once the boycott began and that all thirty-seven were eventually expelled from Tokyo First Middle School when repeated negotiations with Korean officials broke down. Seventeen of these were later readmitted to the program, while the leaders either returned to Korea or obtained admittance to other schools in Japan as self-supporting students. 66. Here and later I give the names of these student organizations in both Korean and Japa nese in cases where it is unclear which one the Koreans who joined would have considered the “official” name of the orga nization (or indeed, whether they would have seen any need to make such a distinction). In cases such as the aforementioned “Overseas Students’ Club” (Ryūgakusei kurabu), where it seems clear that the Japa nese reading was the intended name (owing to the fact that the Chinese characters ؊ὑ䚼 were not used in Korean to signify the word “club,” which had been borrowed from English), I have provided only the Japa nese. 67. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 30. This seems to be the same group that Weiner refers to as the “Japan Greater Korea Association of Students in Tokyo” or “Zainihon Tōkyō taikan ryūgakuseikai” in Japa nese (Weiner, Origins, pp. 122 and 128, table 23), although he gives “November 1906” as the date of its establishment.

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range of concerns that weighed on students’ minds in their attempts at autonomous orga nization. Participants in the boycott and those attending the December 30 meeting obviously would have been aware of the conclusion of the Protectorate Treaty, which gave Japan authority over Korea’s international relations, and they may have even heard rumors of the forceful tactics that Itō Hirobumi had resorted to in getting King Kojong and his ministers to acquiesce. Aside from the shock of this sudden loss of Korean sovereignty and high-handed manner in which Japan had obtained it, on a more immediate level Korean students now faced a lack of diplomatic representation in Japan, since Korean diplomatic missions in foreign countries—including Japan— were abolished with the loss of Korean prerogative over its own international relations. Against this backdrop, an event occurred that impelled the Korean students at Tokyo Middle School to launch their boycott. Despite the elite background of these students, and even though the Japanese Ministry of Education had itself arranged for their enrollment at the school, in an interview published on December 2 and 3 in Hōchi shinbun the principal decried what he saw as a lack of proper discipline among Korean students, and hinted that the benefits of a higher education might be wasted on them. The initial aim of the boycott was thus to obtain a retraction of these comments and an apology from the principal— a demand that was apparently never satisfied. Over the remaining years leading up to the annexation, Korean students witnessed, and reacted to, a series of events such as these. Some of the offenses seemed to provide glimpses of Japan’s ulterior motives in “protecting” Korea, whereas others exposed the general arrogance that lay at the root of Japan’s march on Korean sovereignty. Japan’s suppression of King Kojong’s aforementioned attempt to put Korea’s case before the world at The Hague in July 1907, and Itō’s orchestration of Kojong’s abdication soon thereafter, angered Korean students, who not only protested Japan’s treatment of the Korean monarch, but also voiced indignation at the way the Japanese press characterized all Korean students in 68. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” pp. 30–31. 69. Weiner, Origins, p. 121. Takegoshi (ibid., p. 29) also cites this interview, although in less detail, as the direct cause of the boycott.

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Japan as subversives who should be placed under strict surveillance. While staying in Japan, Korean students found plenty of objectionable depictions. On at least two occasions, Korean students in Tokyo’s Hongō Ward reacted with violent indignation to public caricatures of a Korean king bowing reverently before shogun Tokugawa Ienobu. An exhibit of Korean products organized by the protectorate-general as part of an industrial exhibition held in Ueno during June 1907 likewise offended Korean students who discovered among its displays an anthropological representation of a “native Korean woman.” Even at the prestigious Waseda University, Korean students were outraged to learn that a motion put before a “mock Diet” (mogi kokkai) by a Japanese student called for incorporating the Korean royal family within the ranks of the Japanese nobility, thus making the Korean king subordinate to the Japanese emperor. Incidents such as these, in combination with the vulnerability that Korean students felt due to their lack of diplomatic representation as Koreans in Japan, led student groups to merge together into larger, less regionally focused organizations. The previously mentioned Overseas Students’ Club and the Association of Overseas Students of Great Korea were early examples of this process, and they set in motion a series of subsequent mergers yielding groups of increasing size, all propelled by concerns for Korea and affronts to their dignity as Koreans. On January 28, 1908, the Association of Overseas Students of Great Korea joined with two other groups—the Naktong Fellowship Society (⋯ᵅ㽾ⴺӮ, Naktong Ch’inmokhoe [K.], Rakutō Shinbokukai [J.]) and the Honam Students’ Mutual Aid Group (␪फᄺ༥, Honam hakkye [K.], Kōnan

70. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 33. 71. The first of these incidents occurred on Oct. 27, 1906, when two Korean students, Yu Sgnghgm (᷇ᡓℑ) and Yi Chin’u (ᴢ⦡䲼), were arrested for destroying a representation of this scene made out of chrysanthemum flowers that the two came across in a Hongō-area flower shop (ibid., p. 41n22). The second incident also involved a depiction of the scene rendered in chrysanthemums, on display at a Chrysanthemum Festival in Hongō during November 1907. Weiner claims that “several hundred” Korean students attacked the work, resulting in numerous arrests (Weiner, Origins, p. 122). 72. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 41, note 23. 73. Ibid., p. 34.

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gakkei [J.])—to form the Academic Society of Great Korea (໻䶧ᄺӮ, Taehan hakhoe [K.], Taikan gakkai [J.]). Less than a year later, on January 10, 1909, the Academic Society of Great Korea merged once again with three other well-established student groups to form the Great Korea Society for the Promotion of Learning (໻䶧㟜ᄺӮ, Taehan hgnghakhoe [K.], Taikan kōgakkai [J.]). The rationale for amalgamation appeared in a call to Korean students to join in the formation of the Students’ Association of Great Korea, which was issued as part of its inaugural statement of purpose on January 11, 1908. Friends! We are all youths studying in Japan. We surely must be called representatives of our people [kukmin daep’yo]; and yet, even after more than ten years of living and studying in Japan we have nothing to show for it. As a result of not ridding ourselves of the morbid way of thinking [byfngjfg sasang] with which our ancestors infected us, we have split into “the A Association” or “the B Society,” each with its own particular character. Thus have we forsaken our national spirit [kukminjfg jfngsin]. . . . No matter what beneficial task we may undertake, it must contribute to a Korea of the Korean people [minjokjfg gn Hanguk] and bring an end to the Korea of factions [tangp’ajfg gn Hanguk]. This is none other than the demand of our Korean age [a-Han sidae ui yogu]. This is the spirit of selfawareness of the Korean people. Whether we succeed in raising this self-awareness or not is the very dividing line between life and death for our Korea.

The statement went on to declare that it was the duty of students in Japan to join forces in order to “break through the ox-like stupidity of 74. Both of these initial groups had names that suggest a regional focus in Korea. “Naktong” is taken from the name of the second longest river on the Korean Peninsula, which flows through the southeastern part. “Honam” is the name of the largest plain in Korea, which spans the boundary between South Ch’ungch’ong and North Cholla provinces. The use of “kye” (༥)— a group support and credit arrangement in traditional Korean society— also shows the persistence of cultural institutions that students brought over to Japan with them. 75. Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 30, chart 1, “Shodantai tōgō no keii.” The three organizations that merged with the Taehan hakhoe were the Taeggk hakhoe (໾ὉᄺӮ Academic Society of Korea), the Kongsuhoe (ׂ݅Ӯ, Mutual Learning Society) and the Kengakkai (ⷨᄺӮ, Research Society). 76. Quoted in Takegoshi, “Kan-matsu no tō-nichi ryūgakusei ni tsuite,” p. 33. Takegoshi provides the quote in Japanese; this is probably her translation from the Korean original. The Korean glosses I have provided for certain pivotal terms are from the original text, “Taehan hakhoe ch’wijisf,” p. 2.

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the people, corrupted over hundreds of years, and cultivate the healthy ideas of a new age.” The ardent nationalist appeal of this statement reveals that the Academic Society of Great Korea, like many similar Korean student groups at this time, had moved beyond the objectives of fellowship and mutual support among students from similar backgrounds. Indeed, the statement claims that regional affiliation or one’s status as a governmentfunded or self-supporting student—in other words, a preoccupation with region and status over the shared attribute of a common Korean homeland—were in themselves indicative of a much larger problem that lay at heart of Korea’s predicament in the modern world: “the morbid way of thinking with which our ancestors infected us.” This avenue of criticism calls to mind critiques of traditional Korean political thought by Japanese commentators at the dawn of the twentieth century, particularly in regard to the institution of sadaejgi— which they called “ jidai shisō” (toadyism) or even “ jidai-byō” (“toady’s disease”)— and the common charge that Koreans had no concept of the nation and no concern for anything beyond personal gain or family fortune. This should come as no surprise: as Andre Schmid has demonstrated in regard to reform-minded, nationalist intellectuals in Korea during these same years, the very vocabulary of modernity and thus reform that they used—in part to criticize the longstanding political traditions that had brought Korea to its compromised state vis-à-vis a morally suspect Japan—reflected those terms employed by Japanese apologists for their country’s encroachment on the prerogatives of Korean sovereignty. Furthermore, these students, just like their intellectual peers in Korea since the 1890s, embraced an image of themselves and their place among the Korean people that was as elitist as it was public-minded. The revitalization of Korea so that it could strengthen its independence had to involve all the Korean people, of course, but the masses could not reasonably be expected to grasp the proper means of national rejuvenation by themselves.

77. “Taehan hakhoe ch’wijisf,” p. 2. 78. Schmid, Korea between Empires, pp. 113–36. 79. Ibid., pp. 41–47.

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On the surface, the reactions of buraku business and community elites and Korean students during these pivotal years in the formation of the nation-state and its empire could hardly have provided a greater contrast: whereas one group embraced the Japanese nation and sought both recognition of its patriotism and equal treatment from the state and majority society, the other sought to become the vanguard of a nationalist movement of independence from Japan’s imperial interests. To explain the contrast by observing that buraku elites were, after all, Japanese, whereas Korean students in Japan were just that—Koreans—would obscure the enormity of the dilemmas that both groups faced in early twentieth-century Japan. As privileged members of their respective societies, both the buraku bourgeoisie and Korean students in Japan faced similar situations at the turn of the century. Both confronted negative stereotypes: of the communities over which they presided, in the case of the buraku bourgeoisie; of the land and culture from which they came, in the case of Korean students. Both reacted to these negative images and the arrogance of the state and majority society with indignation, while agreeing in part with the disparaging views as they applied to those less fortunate or less educated. Furthermore, both championed the ideals of progress through self-improvement for the sake of their nation, however they conceived of it. The divergent paths taken by each group were not simply the result of choosing which nation one “naturally” belonged to, but came about as each formed different answers to the same fundamental problem: how to restore and maintain a sense of pride and self-worth within a society that denied human dignity to those it imagined as irredeemably different from the majority. Positing oneself as the patriotic and successful interface between majority and minority society, and from that position decrying the hypocrisy of the majority for not practicing what the rhetoric of the emperor-centered nation-state preached was one means of achieving this; asserting one’s special role as the reformer of a nation conceived of as separate from yet equal to Japan— a “Great Korea” on par with the nascent empire of “Great Japan”—was another. Formative and enduring experiences such as education, as well as the language by means of which one primarily experienced and interacted with the world—factors that defined one’s proximity to the culture of majority society— also directed buraku leaders and Korean students toward their respective paths.

ch apter 3 Minorities and the Minority Problem in the 1920s: Threats to State and Empire, and the Liberal Response

During the 1910s, Japan weathered tumultuous changes, both internationally and domestically, that had a powerful influence on its buraku and Korean minority groups. On the most basic level, these years brought about demographic changes, especially for the Koreans. Japanese heavy industry took off during World War I, bringing to Japan a wave of Korean migrants who were both lured by the promise of better wages and repelled by colonial agricultural policies in Korea. In 1911 there were as few as 2,527 Koreans residing in Japan; by 1920, this number stood at 40,755, a sixteenfold increase. Meanwhile, the burakumin, though less influenced by wartime industrialization, experienced the decline of traditional industries and the rise of new ones— developments that transformed the nature of life and work, particularly in buraku communities located within cities or near industrial centers. World War I and its aftermath also had important ideological implications for the relationship between minorities and majority society. On the world stage, the Russian Revolution, the doctrine of national

1. Morita, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankokujin- Chōsenjin no rekishi, table 1, p. 33. The 1911 figure is taken from Home Ministry statistics, while the 1920 figure comes from national census data for that year, which are regarded as more accurate than Home Ministry reports. The Home Ministry reported 30,189 in 1920. In all likelihood there were more Koreans in Japan as of 1911, since the transient nature of the construction industry in which many worked made it difficult for authorities to obtain accurate figures.

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self-determination propounded by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, and Japan’s own call for an international covenant to end racial discrimination offered minority groups new dreams of attaining liberation and a better life. Within Japan and its empire, the Rice Riots of 1918 and the Korean independence movement of 1919 suggested to some that marginalized, colonized, and oppressed people, such as the burakumin and the Koreans, might be capable of upsetting the very foundations of the state if they chose to rise up and show their strength. For the government and other individuals and groups concerned with supporting the state and its empire in particular, such events raised the specter of Russian-style revolutions at home, led by disgruntled and subversive minorities. The entire cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the age, alive with vibrant currents of democratic, liberal, and socialist ideas, proved to be both a heady mix for Koreans and burakumin in search of new answers to their problems, and a source of worry for state authorities and their allies. In essence, the questions facing authorities, commentators on the “minority problem,” and the buraku and Korean minority communities were the same: where did these people belong in Japanese society and what needed to be done to properly place them there? Our exploration of this question and the answers that emerged begins with a detailed look at the everyday social and economic situation faced by burakumin and Koreans during the 1920s, in order to gain a clearer understanding of both the problems that these minorities faced and the nature of their connection to majority society.

The Socioeconomic Landscape: Buraku Communities and Segregation As we saw in Chapter 1, the backgrounds of the people who collectively came to be referred to as the burakumin were varied, but certain taboo notions against specific residential areas— either by dint of an actual historical connection to pre-Meiji outcaste communities or through the later construction of such an image— served to brand those living there as shin-heimin, and later, starting in the 1870s, tokushu burakumin. As new stigmas and stereotypes flourished within the discourse of a national “buraku problem,” movement in and out of these communities may have declined. A Social Affairs Bureau survey of the buraku minority released

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in 1921 recorded a total of 872,720 individuals who were considered to belong to the minority. The vast majority of these, 829,674 individuals, still resided in the 4,890 buraku communities recorded nationwide. That is, based on where the burakumin were living, a half-century after the abolition of outcaste status fewer than one in ten had managed to integrate into majority society. If few had managed to move out, even fewer had chosen to move in: the same survey noted that only 6,489 nonburakumin, or “normal people” ( futsūmin) as the survey categorized them, had settled in buraku communities. The survey is not without its problems, not the least of which is the lack of clarity on how the surveyors determined who was a “legitimate” burakumin— although the use of the term honseki in this connection suggests that family registry documents were used to make the determination. Another problem— one not at all uncommon in prewar social surveys—is that the figures provided by the survey contain discrepancies. In addition to the figure of 872,720 for those whose official place of origin (honseki) was a buraku area and the 829,674 counted as living in buraku communities at the time of the survey (genjū), the figure of 69,370 is listed under a separate category of “those residing outside of the buraku” (buraku-gai kyojūsha). Even if one takes into account the strikingly low figure of 6,489 individuals not of the minority who are recorded as living in buraku areas, this figure of 69,370 for burakumin living outside of the buraku area cannot be reconciled with the figures of either 43,046 (872,720 minus 829,674) or 49,535 (872,720 minus the difference between 829,674 and 6,489), which can be calculated from the other figures given. Although the report of the survey provides no explanation for this discrepancy, based on the figures available we may at least assume that the overall percentage of the buraku minority population living outside of buraku areas fell somewhere between 4.9 and 7.9 percent. While the survey provides no information beyond numbers for the burakumin who moved out of their communities, most would have only managed to do so by concealing their “special circumstances” from their majority neighbors and employers. This was no easy feat, given the degree 2. Naimushō shakaikyoku, “Buraku ni kansuru shotōkei” (Mar. 1921), in Tanikawa, Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei, vol. 25: Buraku (2), pp. 692– 93. 3. Ibid.

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to which personal references and copies of one’s family register were required for buying or renting property, obtaining employment, or getting married. Discrimination in employment was a particularly crucial barrier to social mobility and integration, and it was not simply limited to positions that required a certain degree of education or expertise. Large industrial firms avoided hiring burakumin even for menial labor in factories. Confined to their communities, the vast majority of burakumin were thus still bound to the industries that had sustained them throughout the Meiji period. The same 1921 survey cited earlier found that 48.5 percent of buraku families engaged in some form of agriculture for their livelihood, followed by 15 percent in manual labor (rikieki), 13.3 percent in “miscellaneous occupations” (zatsugyō), 12.2 percent in various mercantile activities (shōgyō), and 8.3 percent in industry (kōgyō). The predominance of agriculture in this survey reflected the fact that the majority of burakumin lived in small, rural communities. Even so, it is highly unlikely that many of these buraku farmers owned much of the land they farmed, and improbable that they could have farmed enough land to make ends meet without some sort of “miscellaneous occupation” as a sideline. As Mihara Yōko’s study of life and labor in the buraku communities of Osaka Prefecture during the 1920s and 1930s has shown, burakumin in that prefecture who were involved in agriculture were tenant farmers at best, if not agricultural day laborers with no claim to tillable fields anywhere. Many burakumin in that prefecture whose occupations would have been recorded under “agriculture” did nothing more than polish rice after it had been harvested by others. The actual occupations that burakumin engaged in reveal the fundamentally labor-intensive, menial, and even pre-modern character of the chief buraku industries that would have fallen under the categories of 4. See, for example, Fukuhara Hiroyuki’s analysis of the impact of discrimination on the labor market of the large Osaka buraku community of Nishihama. Fukuhara, “Tōshi buraku jūmin no rōdō-seikatsu katei,” pp. 106– 9. 5. Naimushō shakaikyoku, “Buraku ni kansuru shotōkei” (Mar. 1921), in Tanikawa Ken’ichi, Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei, vol. 25: Buraku (2), pp. 692– 93. The survey also recorded a small proportion of burakumin involved in fishing (2.6 percent) and serving as government officials (0.1 percent). 6. Mihara, “Suiheisha sōritsu-gō no shigoto to seikatsu,” p. 183.

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mercantile activities, industry, and miscellaneous occupations. A 1918 survey of forty-nine buraku communities in Osaka Prefecture found that “agriculture” (nōgyō), “day labor” (hi-yatoi), and “construction work” (dokata) provided a vital source of income for all of these communities, along with a wide variety of “cottage industry” occupations. The repair and production of footwear, particularly traditional Japanese items such as geta clogs and waraji sandals, was an important industry in forty-one of these communities. In most cases, such as the occupation of getanaoshi found among twenty communities, this involved the menial task of replacing the straps and thong that held the wooden sole of the geta clog to the wearer’s foot. Itinerant peddling (gyōshō) was another prevalent occupation. The wares that buraku peddlers offered for sale included second-hand goods, scrap material, and other odds and ends ( furumono, kuzumono); candies; fruit and vegetables; meat; and even livestock. Peddling provided a livelihood to those in twenty-seven of these communities. Others were engaged in the production of miscellaneous items such as leather and leather goods, straw baskets, brushes, toothbrushes, bricks, and matches. As is often the case, one’s gender determined the kind of work one did as well as the amount one had to do in these communities. Males at all but the highest socioeconomic strata found that opportunities for work in most modern industries were closed to them due to pervasive discrimination. What remained was agricultural labor; work in industries that had a strong association with the burakumin, such as the slaughtering and rendering of animals and the production of leather and leather products; sporadic day labor on construction and civil engineering projects; or coal mining. The cottage industries that produced a variety of inex7. The results cited here for occupations in these communities, found in the Ōsaka-fu kyūsaika Buraku taichō survey of 1918, are tallied from Mihara Yōko’s list of occupations by individual community, in ibid., p. 181. 8. Coal mining was a particularly common source of labor for burakumin in Kyushu, where the mines were often close to the minority communities in which they lived. As Michael Weiner notes, despite the importance of coal as the fuel of Japan’s industrialization, the strenuous, unhealthy, and dirty nature of mine work had caused many Japa nese to regard it as something of an outcaste occupation by the beginning of the twentieth century (Weiner, Origins, p. 51). Buraku women also found work in the coal mines of Kyushu, as well as in textile mills in the Kansai area.

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pensive necessities—from straw sandals to pig hair for use in brushes— and to a lesser extent labor in match factories and mills (which will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 7) were considered women’s work. Given the tenuous nature of work in the male-dominated sphere, however, women were the main, and often the only, breadwinners for their families. A buraku woman’s work life began at an early age— as young as three in many communities—with menial tasks at home. Soon thereafter she might be taken on by one of the wealthier families in the community, often her parents’ own landlord, to babysit children not much younger than herself during the day, lend a hand with the farmwork, and do menial tasks in the home. Marriage brought no respite; only more work to do for her husband’s family, who often gave little thought to her welfare. During the 1920s the nature of labor among the burakumin changed very little. A national survey of buraku communities conducted in 1935 found that the minority workers were engaged in much the same set of occupations as had been the forty-nine Osaka communities highlighted in the 1918 study. The occupational categories are different between the two studies, making a detailed comparison extremely difficult, but aside from the always prevalent categories of “agriculture” and “day labor,” occupations such as “footwear production” and “footwear repair” (hakimono-shoku, hakimono shūri), “peddling,” “leather working” (kawashoku), and “straw weaving” (wara-saiku) appear prominently. These occupations characterized buraku communities elsewhere in Japan as well. In Kyoto’s Yanagihara (also referred to as “Sūjin” by this point), for example, a survey conducted in 1928 found the following occupations to be the most widely practiced among 579 male individuals surveyed: “construction and day labor” (dokata hiyatoi), 28.3 percent; “peddling” (gyōshō), 7.8 percent; “footwear production” (hakimono seizōgyō), 7.4 percent; “sales of miscellaneous products” (sono ta no buppin hanbai), 5 percent; “rickshaw pulling” ( jinrikisha-fu), 4.7 percent; “rag picking” (kuzu hiroi), 4 percent; and “sales of second-hand goods” ( furumono-shō),

9. Kurokawa Midori, “Hisabetsu buraku to sei sabetsu,” in Akisada and Asaji, Kindai Nihon to Suiheisha, pp. 56– 63. 10. Ibid.

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3.9 percent. The situation was much the same for buraku communities throughout Japan, particularly those located in urban areas. There is little evidence to suggest that the buraku minority was faced with the kind of two-tiered system of discriminatory wages that, as we shall see, plagued the Korean minority. But the preponderance of buraku labor in the aforementioned industrial sectors did correlate strongly with lower wages than those earned by most majority Japanese. Table 1 provides wage averages from 1927 for industries that burakumin were typically employed in, versus industries or industrial sectors in which they did not supply the primary labor force. At first glance, one’s attention is drawn to the conspicuously low average wage among jobs in the “majority and buraku” category of industries. This low figure is largely the result of the extraordinarily meager wages paid to the mostly female workforce in the textiles industry, but it also shows the generally exploitative nature of labor in these industries, which brought minority laborers together with those of the most impoverished strata of majority society. Compared to these industries, the average for those dominated by burakumin compares favorably, and in fact even exceeds the average daily wage of 1.46 yen for all industrial sectors, as reported in the same survey. It is important to note, however, that the average for this category of industries is greatly inflated by the inclusion of the leather production industry. Even if we choose to overlook the influence of large, successful enterprises on this industry-wide wage average, we must realize that leather production (as well as leather shoemaking) was a highly skilled occupation engaged in by a small portion of the buraku minority. Aside from subsistence-level agriculture and day labor, then, most burakumin were engaged in small-scale, ad hoc employment activities such as the production and repair of traditional footwear and other nondurable goods, if not trying to eke out a living in

11. Figures for “Sūjin” taken from “VII. Kyojūsha no shokugyō no gaiyō,” in Kyōtoshi kyōikubu shakaika, Furyō jūtaku misshū chiku ni kansuru chōsa, p. 35. The percentages given here are my own calculations. 12. Naikaku tōkeikyoku Senkanki rōdō tōkei jitchi chōsa, vol. 4: 1927— Shōwa 2 nen (2), “Kōjō no bu (ka),” p. 2, “Shokugyō (shōbunrui) oyobi chingin kaikyū-betsu rōdōsha (zenkoku).”

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Table 1: Average Daily Wages by Composition of Labor Force, 1927 (all figures in yen) Majority, few burakumin

Majority and burakumin

Typically burakumin

Metalworking 2.45 Machinery and tool production 2.56 Shipbuilding 2.49

Textiles 0.97 Coal mining (shaft) 1.84

Leather production 2.77 Bone and shell products 0.91 Misc. bamboo products 0.94 Slaughtering, meatpacking 1.22 Traditional footwear production 1.32 Shoe production 1.77

Chemicals

Average:

1.68

2.26

Coal mining (surface) Japa nese umbrella production

1.07

Average:

1.28

1.27

Average:

1.49

source: Naikaku tōkeikyoku hen, fukkokuban kaidai Ikeda Makoto, Senkanki rōdō tōkei jitchi chōsa, vol. 4: 1927— Shōwa 2 nen (2), “Kōjō no bu (ka)”; “Shokugyō (shōbunrui) oyobi chingin kaikyū betsu rōdōsha (zenkoku),” pp. 2, 6, 18, 22, 26, 38, 42, 46, 50; and “Kōsan no bu,” “8— Shokugyō (shōbunrui) oyobi chingin kaikyū betsu rōdōsha (zenkoku),” pp. 26, 30.

even less secure occupations such as the collection of scrap materials or other miscellaneous occupations. This situation certainly did not bode well for the economic, social, and cultural health of most buraku communities. The 1928 survey of Yanagihara cited earlier found 129 individuals with monthly incomes above forty-five yen per month (slightly higher than the monthly income an average wage earner would have earned in the previous year, at 1.46 yen per day), and among them forty-six claimed monthly incomes more than one hundred yen. Even so, this relatively to extremely well-off portion of the community represented only 1.6 percent of its total population at the time: hardly a portrait of wealth in abundance. Grinding poverty and a lack of job security had meant that the vast majority of 13. We must also entertain the possibility that the national labor survey from which these figures were compiled may have overlooked the vast majority of small-scale workshops in which buraku laborers were employed, since the 1927 study only surveyed conditions in factories with 30 or more operatives. See Naikaku tōkeikyoku, Senkanki rōdō tōkei jitchi chōsa, vol. 3: 1927— Shōwa 2 nen (1), p. 1, “Kijutsu no bu.” 14. Kyōto-shi kyōikubu shakaika, Furyō jūtaku misshū chiku ni kansuru chōsa, p. 36. Five individuals apparently had incomes in excess of 500 yen per month. These may well have been the remnants of the Yanagihara buraku elite.

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Yanagihara residents lived in overcrowded conditions in unsanitary, dilapidated housing, which only exacerbated the popular image of Yanagihara and other urban buraku communities as epicenters of all manner of diseases, bodily and social. Despite this grim situation, many burakumin did not lose all hope for a better life for themselves and their families. Such a desire was most evident in an ongoing appreciation of the importance of education for their children. The 1921 national survey of buraku communities found that the enrollment rate of elementary-school-aged children at elementary schools and branch classrooms located in buraku communities was 94 percent, with 84 percent attending regularly. This rate of enrollment was only a few points below the national average for elementary school, which stood at 99.17 percent in the same year. This high enrollment figure pertained only to schools located in buraku communities, where the student body would have been composed entirely of buraku children. The survey also reported that there were only thirty-five buraku elementary school and twenty-seven branch schools operating in buraku communities—a shockingly small number compared to the 3,199 schools in majority communities that burakumin also attended. Unfortunately, the 1921 survey provided no figures for minority enrollment or attendance at the schools in majority communities, but other materials serve to give us some idea of the degree to which children from buraku communities attended school in areas where they shared the classroom with majority children. A 1925 survey of the conditions in thirty-five buraku communities in Aichi Prefecture commented on the state of education in each of these areas. It is difficult to draw conclusions from the descriptions given the lack of a standardized format from one community survey to the next, but the summaries do provide details on levels of attendance, performance, completion of compulsory schooling and advancement to higher levels of education, as well as impressions of students’ overall interest in learning. While only two of these

15. Naimushō shakaikyoku, “Buraku ni kansuru shotōkei,” p. 693. 16. Monbushō, Nihon no seichō to kyōiku, p. 180. Unfortunately, no national figures for actual school attendance rates are provided. 17. “Aichi-ken ka chihō kaizen jigyō chiku chōsa,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 2, pp. 276–303.

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communities contained schools attended exclusively by minority children, high completion rates for compulsory schooling were noted for children from nineteen communities. Of these, at least a few students from sixteen communities went on after graduation to enroll in higher elementary schools (kōtō shōgakkō), junior high schools, high schools, or other institutions of higher education. Twelve communities were described as having very high attendance rates, with students performing on par with their majority classmates. In contrast, absenteeism, early withdrawal from school during the years of compulsory education, and a lack of interest in education were cited in eight communities. In most cases, absenteeism and early withdrawal were the result of economic factors such as child labor and lack of money to pay for educational expenses, rather than a complete lack of interest in education per se. We must note one important caveat to this image of rising education levels among children from buraku communities: women bore an extra burden in supporting their families, but they typically received less of an education than men. Although the Aichi study largely ignores the issue of pupils’ gender in its descriptions of the state of education in the communities surveyed, data on actual school attendance rates by gender for buraku communities in the city of Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, do exist for the years 1912 and 1920 and show a narrowing but persistent gender gap. The 1912 survey found that 58.78 percent of elementary-school-aged boys and 30.81 percent of girls among the minority regularly attended elementary school (compared to 92.07 and 78.85 percent, respectively, among majority children). By 1920, the situation for girls from buraku areas had improved

18. The compilers of these reports apparently did not consider discrimination against burakumin by their teachers and classmates to be a possible factor worth mentioning in connection with buraku truancy and withdrawal from school. Indeed, in many instances, those writing the evaluations indulged in the same sort of discriminatory musings that burakumin may have encountered at school. Hence the evaluation of the state of education in the community of Noda Seko, in spite of claiming that “there is little difference in appreciation of the value of education between normal people (and the residents of the buraku), and the academic performance of the children attending school is good,” went so far as to postulate that few children from the community went on to higher levels of education “most likely due to the prevalence of consanguineous marriages in the community, resulting in very few who possess exceptional intellectual powers” (ibid., pp. 300–301).

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considerably, with 77.09 percent attending school, but boys from these communities still had the advantage, with 90.33 percent attending. Illiteracy, which was by no means unheard of among males from buraku communities, was predictably even more marked among women. Although school attendance among the buraku minority— and especially among women— continued to lag behind that of the majority in many areas, exposure to classroom education in the 1920s and to the views of nation and world transmitted through this medium became an increasingly common, if not always prolonged or happy, experience for buraku children. In many of the large, urban buraku areas, such as Nishihama in Osaka and Yanagihara in Kyoto, the process of molding young minds into those of proper Japanese citizens was a continuation of the process of educating the minority within these communities that began during the Meiji period. Although discrimination and the poverty engendered by it continued to drive a wedge between the buraku minority and the majority, participation in public schooling— one of the most powerful means for social assimilation available to the state— as well as the day-to-day process of partaking of views generated by majority society, gradually brought the buraku minority into ever-closer proximity to the values and concerns of the nation. Whatever they may have felt about the way the majority treated them, most burakumin viewed the world through essentially “Japanese” eyes.

Incursion from the Colony: The Rise of the Korean Migrant Community With the Japanese annexation of Korea in August 1910, the stage was set for the eventual migration of thousands of Koreans to Japan. Not only did the annexation mean that all Koreans were thereafter considered subjects of the Japanese empire, but also the close proximity of the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago made the trip easier and cheaper for Koreans than migration to the metropole was for other colonial populations in different empires. Even so, the annexation did not bring about an immediate surge in the number of Koreans living in Japan. In the first six years of Japanese rule, the number of Koreans in 19. Kurokawa, “Hisabetsu buraku to sei sabetsu,” pp. 58–59.

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Japan grew from 2,527 in 1910 to 5,624 in 1916, figures that hardly suggest a sizable community of Koreans anywhere in Japan. After 1910, “push” forces began to emerge in Korea that would eventually compel much larger numbers to make the trip. Japanese agricultural policy for the new colony sought to make Korea the granary of the empire by opening up new rice fields and introducing new fertilizers and techniques while encouraging investment in land. Low land taxes, high crop yields, and a concentration of land in the hands of wealthy landlords who would cooperate with the colonial government’s agricultural aims were the intended outcomes of the policy, but consolidation also ushered in an age of high land rents and a surge in tenancy. The situation for tenant farmers was bleakest in those regions where agriculture became most commercialized. In the major rice-producing provinces of Kyfngsang and Cholla, where land rents sometimes reached 90 percent of the harvest, tenant contracts turned over at an annual rate of 20 percent. Without the required “pull” on the Japanese end, however, the flow of migrants from Korea to Japan remained little more than a trickle. The Japanese economic boom brought by the outbreak of World War I changed this situation entirely. The sudden expansion of Japanese industry at this time led to a labor shortage, and many enterprises looked to Korea as a source of cheap labor to fill the gap. Japanese coal mines, textile mills, foundries, shipyards, and construction companies began to recruit Koreans with encouragement and assistance from the colonial government. With the exception of those employed in the textile industry, who were mostly young women from rural areas, most Korean laborers arriving in Japan at this time were men from the Kyfngsang and Chflla provinces who usually had no prior experience with industrial labor. Although company recruiting in Korea declined during the postwar economic downturn, as news of the better wages to be earned in

20. Shihōshō keijikyoku, “Nihon shakai undō no genjō” (1928), in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 258. 21. Weiner, Race and Migration, pp. 41–42, 44. 22. Before 1917, large numbers of people did leave the farming areas of Korea, but most of these headed for new agricultural opportunities and burgeoning Korean communities in southern Manchuria and Chientao (ibid., p. 54). 23. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 28–34.

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Japan spread among dispossessed Korean farmers on the peninsula, patterns of chain migration emerged. For many of these migrants, the trip was by no means a permanent commitment. Sojourner patterns of labor migration between Korea and Japan kept the Korean population in flux for much of the 1920s. Between January 1922 and July 1923, for example, 171,792 Koreans entered Japan but 98,954 disembarked for Korea. In 1926, the situation remained much the same, with 102,597 Koreans entering and 71,220 leaving Japan between January and October of that year. Indeed, many Koreans arriving in Japan were by no means “first timers”: a study conducted in 1927 found that 46 percent of those leaving Korea for Japan were doing so for at least the second time. The seasonal ebb and flow of Korean migration no doubt made for a transient population throughout much of the decade, but as the earlier figures suggest, each year the total Korean population in Japan increased by a few thousand. The steady increase in the Korean population remaining in Japan each year led to the appearance of ghettos in some areas during the early years of the 1920s, especially where there were dilapidated and all-but-abandoned dwellings located near construction sites and factories that employed Koreans. Despite the appearance of such communities, however, Korean settlement on a large scale was still a long way off. For much of the 1920s the Korean population in Japan remained transitory and largely male. These characteristics were of course linked: more Korean women in Japan indicated the rising preva24. Ōsaka-shi shakaibu chōsaka, “Chōsenjin rōdōsha mondai,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 343–44. 25. Keihokyoku hoanka, “Taishō 15-nen ni okeru zairyū Chōsenjin no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 233. 26. Keishō nandō keisatsubu, “Naichi dekasegi senjin rōdōsha jōtai chōsa,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 569. 27. An extremely early example was the Korean area that appeared in the town of Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, in 1922. The migrants who established the community had come to work at the Kishiwada Spinning Company, a large employer of Korean women and some men. This ghetto, which occupied a cluster of abandoned residences near the factory, came to be called “Chōsen-machi” (Korea town) by its Japa nese neighbors. See Chōsen sōtokufu, “Hanshin keihin chihō no Chōsenjin rōdōsha,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 412–13.

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lence of migrant families settling throughout the archipelago. Tamura Toshiyuki’s painstaking analysis of the population figures for the “settled population” ( jōjū jinkō) in official surveys of Koreans in Japan reveals that the gradual increase of Korean women regarded as living in “settled” situations—those residing at a fixed address in the same municipality for at least ninety days and not classified as destitute—reflected a general shift from the itinerant lifestyle of all-male labor gangs to longer-term residency for the minority as a whole across the 1910s and 1920s (see Table 2). For most of the 1920s, then, the Korean minority in Japan was highly mobile, predominantly male—82.8 percent male in 1925— and overwhelmingly engaged in some form of manual labor for its livelihood. By the middle of the decade, a full 76.9 percent of the minority (99,807 individuals) was employed in occupations that could be classified as “blue collar,” a figure that far outweighed even the second largest, closely related category of unemployed Koreans, at 16.3 percent (21,214 individuals). The next three categories in order of highest proportion are dwarfed by comparison: “others,” a category containing miscellaneous occupations such as bar and restaurant employees and prostitutes (1.8 percent, or 2,345 individuals); “students” (1.8 percent, or 2,289 individuals); and “merchants and businessmen” (1.7 percent, or 2,150 individuals). When one bears in mind Ken Kawashima’s observation that Korean laborers predominantly found employment—when they could at all—in the dirty, dangerous, and highly exploitative fields of menial construction work and day labor, the true instability of their lives in Japan becomes clear. 28. For the 1925 figure, see Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (I),” p. 59, table I-A, “Zenkoku sōjinkō.” 29. I follow Tamura Toshiyuki’s categories of occupations and adjusted figures for each, based on the Home Ministry’s annual statistics (Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (IV),” table IV-A, pp. 44–45), from which I have calculated the percentages shown here. The original Home Ministry categories were more numerous, but in many cases the point of distinction between different categories was not entirely clear. Also, the categories used often changed from year to year; the nomenclature did not become more or less standardized until 1934. 30. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, esp. chaps. 3 and 4.

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Table 2: Settled Population of Koreans in Japan, 1910–29 (all figures represent the situation as of the end of the year)

Settled population

1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929

Males



Females



Total

241 278 357 419 417 481 695 1,826 2,867 3,633 3,969 5,403 8,744 11,439 17,937 20,519 26,832 38,589 61,963 74,141

76.03 76.16 75.96 75.77 75.68 75.63 75.46 75.39 75.27 75.28 75.14 71.52 70.74 70.15 70.76 66.58 64.72 65.78 65.09 62.46

76 87 113 134 134 155 226 596 942 1,193 1,313 2,152 3,617 4,868 7,411 10,299 14,625 20,073 33,231 44,555

23.97 23.84 24.04 24.23 24.32 24.37 24.54 24.61 24.73 24.72 24.86 28.48 29.26 29.85 29.24 33.42 35.28 34.22 34.91 37.54

317 365 470 553 551 636 921 2,422 3,809 4,826 5,282 7,555 12,361 16,307 25,348 30,818 41,457 58,662 95,194 118,696

Portion of total minority population () 14.11 14.44 14.82 15.21 15.56 15.93 16.34 16.70 17.11 17.07 17.52 20.27 20.69 20.38 21.45 23.73 28.83 34.25 39.98 43.13

source: Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (II),” p. 86, table II-A, “Zenkoku jōjū jinkō.” note: “Settled population” refers specifically to those whom the original Home Ministries surveys recorded as living in the same municipality for 90 days or more, minus those in that category who were found to have no fi xed abode within the municipality concerned, belonged to no identifiable household, or had no means of supporting themselves. See Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (II),” pp. 77– 83, for an explanation of the definitions and calculations involved in his extrapolation.

Koreans established themselves in the Japanese labor market as a source of cheap, expendable labor in the teeth of a worsening economic recession. The result was a two-tiered wage structure, with lower wages paid to Koreans than those paid to Japanese engaged in the same kinds of work. Three factors served to support this system. First and foremost

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of these were the discriminatory stereotypes of Koreans. Employers no doubt justified paying the Koreans less because Koreans were considered unreliable workers who could not match the productivity of Japanese workers. Real differences in terms of skill and training, however, were also a factor. As Nishinarita Yutaka points out, in some industries— such as steel, leather goods, and glass production—Korean migrants with little background in the work at hand probably received lower wages due to actual differences in job performance. Finally, as Kawashima has pointed out, the colonial government in Korea also played an important role in setting lower wages for Koreans being recruited by Japanese enterprises, particularly during the early stage of such recruitment, which occurred during the labor shortage. The governmentpoliced contracts under which Koreans were hired and brought to Japan set their wages lower than the going rate in Japan, thus instituting a “tradition” of ethnically differentiated wages in the Japanese labor market. Table 3, compiled from labor statistics for industries in Osaka Prefecture in 1924, provides an idea of average wage differentials between Korean and Japanese workers for representative skilled and unskilled occupations. While Korean workers in the “unskilled” category earned on average 0.52 yen, or 28 percent, less for a day’s labor than did Japanese workers, for those in “semi-skilled” lines of work the difference in average daily wages was slightly greater, at 0.60 yen, or 32 percent. As striking as daily wage differentials of 28 to 32 percent may seem, the true nature of the earnings gap between Korean and Japanese laborers only comes into view when we compare monthly wages, based on the average number of days worked per month. The situation was particularly marked in regard to male laborers. Among those in the unskilled category, Koreans earned an average of 28.94 yen per month, which was 38.25 percent less than the average monthly income of 46.87 earned by Japanese workers. Likewise for those in the semi-skilled category, Koreans earned only 32.51 yen per month on average, versus 50.86 yen for their Japanese counterparts, a difference of 36 percent. Although calculated from a study of Osaka industries in 1924, these wage differentials correspond to those stated in 31. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 110. 32. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 32–34.

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Table 3: Average Daily Wages for Koreans and Japanese by Occupation and Average Days Worked per Month (Osaka Prefecture, 1924) Average daily wage (yen) Occupation

Average no. of days worked per month

Korean

Japanese

Korean

Japanese

1.80

2.00

18

23

2.00 1.20 1.20

3.50 1.50 1.30

15 20 25

20 28 25

0.50 1.34

1.00 1.86

30 21.6

30 25.2

1.60

2.00

23

27

1.50 1.00 1.10 1.50

2.00 1.50 1.50 3.00

26 26 25 25

26 26 28 28

1.05 1.50 1.20 1.00 1.27

1.50 2.00 1.80 1.50 1.87

28 25 24 28 25.6

30 28 24 28 27.2

Unskilled Labor Construction laborer Dock worker Day laborer Textile mill laborer Domestic servant Average Semi-skilled Labor Leather goods production Steel worker Glass worker Dye worker Electrical machinery production Postal worker Print worker Knit worker Rubber worker Average

source: Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 111, table III-13, “Chōsenjin to Nihonjin no shokushu-betsu nikkyū, ikkagetsu kadō nissū hikaku (Ōsaka-fu, 1924-nen 5-gatsu tsuitachi genzai).” Nishinarita compiled this table from figures given in a 1924 Osaka Prefecture Social Affairs Bureau report. I have adapted Nishinarita’s table by dividing the occupations into separate “unskilled” and “semi-skilled” categories, and provided averages for each.

other studies, and reveal the full impact of the two-tiered system on the economic position of Koreans in Japan from the 1920s onward. In par-

33. Nishinarita, in Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, cites a national survey by the Social Affairs Bureau, also from 1924, claiming that wages for Korean workers range from 20 percent to 60 percent less than those earned by Japa nese labor-

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ticular, the fact that Japanese employers provided Koreans with fewer opportunities per month to earn money than similarly employed Japanese workers illustrates the degree to which Koreans were considered to be a more expendable source of labor than those in the majority. The Korean situation in the Japanese labor market provides an interesting point of contrast to that of the burakumin: whereas the burakumin faced a de facto system of discrimination in employment that severely curtailed the kinds of occupations (and thus earning potential) open to them, Koreans confronted a system of wage discrimination that did not necessarily limit their entry into specific industrial sectors, but did undermine their earning potential in whatever industry they worked. The result was that, while buraku laborers usually earned higher wages than their Korean counterparts in industries that employed both— such as leather goods production, construction, fabric dyeing, and other forms of manual labor—Koreans found work in a wider variety of industries, including those in the mechanized, heavy industrial sector. We must be careful not to overestimate the degree to which Koreans worked in jobs requiring higher skill levels than typical of manual labor; most Korean migrants had little or no preparation for work in modern industries, nor does it appear that more than a third of Korean laborers in Japan were employed in such industries during the 1920s. Even so, the experiences that Koreans could gain from this involvement would have a significant influence on minority organization and consciousness in the 1920s.

ers. Similarly, Edward Wagner’s pioneering work The Korean Minority in Japan, 1904– 1950 cites a Fukuoka District Employment Ser vice study from 1928 in which Korean workers are said to earn “from considerably less to little more than half the corresponding Japa nese wage” (p. 12). Citing similar surveys from the 1920 and 1930s, Michael Weiner concludes that “on average Koreans were paid a third less than Japa nese workers” (Race and Migration, p. 57). 34. A 1924 survey that counted Koreans by occupation found that 20,800 of them, or 36.61 percent of those engaged in some form of labor, worked in heavy industries or others in which a certain degree of technical skill would have been required; see Naimushō shakaikyoku dai’ichibu, “Chōsenjin rōdōsha ni kansuru jōkyō,” in Pak Ky˘ongsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 537–40, “Chōsenjin shokugyō-betsu jinkō shirabe.” A later survey from 1929 found that only 48,364 Koreans, or 25.04 percent of all Korean laborers recorded, worked as factory operatives or in the modern transportation sector; the rest were employed in strictly manual-labor jobs. (See Naimushō keihokyoku, “Shakai undō no jōkyō,” in Pak Ky˘ongsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 96.)

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Korean women who came to Japan to work in the 1920s faced problems similar to those of male workers from the colony, except that they generally worked the same amount of days per week as non-Korean laborers in the same industries. This difference was due entirely to the nature of these industries: Korean women, like Japanese women before them, found work in Japan’s cotton spinning and textile mills, where mechanization and a rigorous production schedule required a large workforce working in shifts throughout the day. As was the case with Korean males in other industries, women were first recruited for millwork during the economic boom of World War I. Wage discrimination against Korean women in the mills was likewise a common phenomenon. Michael Weiner cites a 1924 Korean government-general report on the Kishiwada Cotton Spinning Company—the largest employer of Korean female labor in Japan—that claims Korean women employed there received “much lower” pay than the plant’s Japanese workers. Kim Ch’anjfng and Pang Sfnhi cite similar data from a 1923 Osaka Social Affairs Bureau survey that indicate Korean workers in area mills earned on average about 30 percent less than Japanese workers. Although most were recruited in their early teens, the women themselves were aware of this discrimination; in July 1922, for example, 271 Korean mill workers at the Kishiwada’s Haruki mill went on strike over the discriminatory treatment, which included receiving wages lower than those being paid to Japanese workers at the same mill. Short of such collective action, women’s dissatisfaction with life at the mills manifested itself in high rates of turnover among Korean recruits. Kim Ch’angjfng cites anecdotal evidence from one mill that claims turnover rates for Korean workers were as high as 50 percent during the first six months of their contracts and 80 percent by the end of the first year. 35. Weiner, Origins, p. 59. 36. Kim Ch’anjfng and Pang Sfnhi, Kaze no dōkoku: Zainichi Chōsenjin jokō no seikatsu to rekishi, pp. 122–23. As Kim and Pang admit, however, this figure is complicated by the fact that the survey in question included the wages of male as well as female workers at the mills surveyed. 37. “Kishiwada bōseki Haruki bun-kōjo sōgi shiryō,” July 1922, “Kyōchōkai shiryō riiru 068,” Ōhara dejitaru aakaibusu, available at http://oohara.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/ kyochokai/k068/00505.pdf (accessed on August 4, 2010). 38. Kim Ch’anjfng, Chōsenjin jokō no uta: 1930-nen, Kishiwada bōseki sōgi, p. 28.

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While such turnover rates may have been roughly on par with those of Japanese textile workers, the language barrier and unfamiliarity with Japanese society, the distance from home, and the threat of physical punishment for breaking one’s contract and leaving the mills all combined to make the idea of leaving all the more daunting for Koreans than for their Japanese coworkers, and resorting to it a clearer sign of desperation. Lower wages and other forms of discriminatory treatment at the mill were not the only problems Korean female workers faced: for many, the predatory nature of the recruiting system was the first threat they confronted when they chose to leave Korea to work in Japan’s mills. Again, Kishiwada serves as a representative example of the practices employed by mills throughout Japan. Although the company did some direct recruiting in Korea, for the most part the job of recruiting women from Korean villages was handed over to private contractors, who often made special arrangements with the company in order to achieve the required number of recruits. One such arrangement involved the recruiter receiving in advance the first month’s wages for the workers they recruited, from which they would pay each worker’s travel fees to Japan. This meant that the women arrived at the mill already in debt to the company by at least the travel fees, and sometimes by the remainder of the wages as well, if the unscrupulous recruiter made off with the money. Other recruiters raped recruits or sold some of the Korean women in their charge into prostitution prior to delivering the rest to the mills. Despite the considerably bad reputation that recruiters acquired for such practices, Korean women continued to seek work in the mills from as far away as the colony. To circumvent the notorious recruiting agents, they began obtaining direct introductions to mill operators in Japan 39. As Janet Hunter has pointed out, it is difficult to obtain a clear, general picture of turnover among Japa nese mill workers during the prewar period, due to the paucity and incompleteness of available data. The figure that Kim Ch’anjfng provides seems analogous to the situation among Japa nese millworkers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when between 50 and 80 percent of those employed at cotton mills in the Kansai area broke their contracts within the first year. By the late 1920s, however, annual turnover rates among Japa nese workers appear to have fallen to 33 percent, with the average length of ser vice standing at over two and a half years. See Hunter, Women and the Labour Market, pp. 97– 98.

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through friends and relatives already working at the mill. This form of chain migration came to supply most of the new mill workers from Korea during the 1920s, in spite of the continuing high rates of turnover among those laborers after they commenced work at the mills. Even for the large portion of the minority Korean community that made a living through wage labor, education was undoubtedly an asset. While the vast majority of Korean migrants who experienced any formal schooling in Korea would have most likely received a traditional Koreanstyle education rather than one with a Japanese curriculum, skills such as literacy, even if acquired in Korean rather than Japanese, as well as the abilities and ideas gained through formal education, would have aided Korean migrants in negotiating their way in an alien and often hostile society and economy. Surveys on the educational backgrounds of Korean migrants conducted during the 1920s revealed two important features regarding education. First, most Koreans arriving in Japan had no significant experience of formal education. Surveys of Koreans living in Osaka Prefecture in 1923, the Nagoya area in 1925, and Kobe in 1929 found that the majority of those surveyed—53.8 percent in Osaka, 71.7 percent in Nagoya, and 52.6 percent in Kobe—had never received formal schooling of any sort. The situation was even worse among Korean women; the Nagoya survey, for example, found that 92.4 percent had had no formal schooling whatsoever. These figures clearly reflected, in addition to a traditional Korean aversion to educating women, the suppression of Korean efforts at organized education carried out under the “military rule” (bu-

40. Kim Ch’anjfng, Chōsenjin jokō no uta, pp. 30–42. The increasing prevalence of such arrangements alongside the high incidence of contract breaking among Koreans poses something of a paradox. Without knowing why those who broke their contracts did so it is extremely difficult to comment with any certainty on the matter, but concurrence of these two trends raises the possibility that many Korean millworkers sought higher pay and better treatment at other mills nearby. Job hopping was by no means unheard of among Japa nese millworkers, although the opportunities for doing so probably declined as the Japa nese economy languished in the 1920s. Whatever positive incentives there may have been for Korean women to break contracts, however, in doing so they still had to contend with surveillance and the threat of violent reprisals at the hands of company-hired organizations like the Sōaikai, which will be examined later.

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dan seiji) of the years prior to the March First Movement, when most Koreans migrating to Japan in the 1920s would have grown up. Second, those Korean workers who ended up in semi-skilled kinds of labor had educational backgrounds distinct from those workers who labored in unskilled jobs. A breakdown of Korean workers by occupation and level of schooling, provided in the Kobe survey of 1929, found that among the 1,350 Koreans surveyed who were employed in unskilled labor in construction, 67.9 percent had never received a formal education. Of the remainder, 28.2 percent had attended elementary school ( futsū gakkō) for at least a certain period of time, 3.2 percent had studied at traditional Korean sfdang academies, and 0.7 percent had been enrolled in junior high schools. The situation was quite different among the 805 Koreans employed in semi-skilled, industrial-sector jobs: while 26.5 percent had no formal schooling, 60.9 percent had attended elementary school, 6.5 percent sfdang, and 6.1 percent junior high school. It is important to bear in mind that some jobs were more skilled— or unskilled—than others. The real significance of the somewhat arbitrary distinction between the two labor types as it relates to the differing levels of education is not only that Koreans working in jobs regarded as semiskilled probably managed to qualify for them because of the schooling they had received, but moreover that these jobs brought them into greater contact with Japanese workers and managers alike. The education that these Koreans had received may have even enabled them to absorb new ideas and respond to new situations that arose in the course of such interaction. For the much larger population of Koreans in unskilled jobs, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 4, the way that Korean labor was organized and used in these industries limited their contacts with the Japanese people to the most rudimentary forms of social interaction. This relative isolation from the majority ultimately had an important influence on the degree to which this substantial portion of the Korean minority would assimilate into Japanese society.

41. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 111. 42. Ibid., p. 112, table III-14, “Zainichi Chōsenjin no shokugyō-betsu kyōiku suijun (Kōbe-shi, 1929 nen 11 gatsu matsu genzai).”

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Threats of Dissolution: The Rice Riots and the Burakumin The Rice Riots of the summer of 1918 were a historical watershed. Whatever the motives of those who took part in these incidents, the riots illustrated the gravity of Japan’s economic, political, and social inequalities at the time, and for many served as the herald and symbol of the age of “Taishō Democracy.” Few areas of Japanese society were spared at least some effect from the riots—least of all the burakumin, whose role in the riots was a topic of intense interest to government officials and various commentators in the media. Although evidence from many areas of Japan suggests that buraku communities were the site of riots less often than non-buraku communities were, it is true that some of the largest and most violent urban riots of the summer, such as the riots in Kyoto that started on the evening of August 10, or the Kobe riots which began on August 12, either started in buraku communities or spread rapidly to them. The riots in Kyoto, for example, began in Yanagihara and involved mobs of hundreds of residents who attacked police stations and rice merchants within the community. Conditions in the community only returned to normal after army troops were brought in and community leaders contributed four thousand yen for the purchase of rice to be distributed to every household in the community. In Kobe, residents of the giant buraku community and urban slum of Shinkawa joined other rioters in putting the torch to the offices of the Kobe shinbun newspaper and a major import and export 43. The most comprehensive study available in English of the riots and the motives of the various groups that took part in them at different times is Lewis, Rioters and Citizens. 44. Using data from Osaka Prefecture, which was home to several large urban buraku communities as well as many smaller rural ones, Fujino Yutaka finds that riots occurred in only 23.6 percent of the prefecture’s buraku areas, which is less than the 31.3 percent rate of participation for all communities— buraku and non-buraku—observed prefecture-wide. See Fujino, “Kome sōdō sanka to Suiheisha kessei no jōken,” p. 98. Likewise, Lewis points out that buraku community leaders cooperated with local officials and police in Nagoya to successfully prevent the city’s burakumin from joining the riots. As was the case in buraku communities elsewhere, in Nagoya the decision to join or not to join in the rioting was made by the community as a whole, rather than on an individual basis. See ibid., pp. 124–25. 45. Yamauchi, Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi, kindai-hen nenpyō, pp. 65– 72.

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company, Suzuki Shōten, while groups of burakumin inside Shinkawa attacked rice merchants there, or demanded that they sell their rice at a more affordable price. For the government and its supporters in the realm of social welfare, the specter of buraku involvement in the Rice Riots took on alarming proportions vastly greater than the realities of the situation. The general stereotype of the burakumin as violent, vindictive, and given to antisocial, criminal activities fueled such paranoia. The timing of the Rice Riots, which occurred less than a year after the Russian Revolution, contributed to the fear. Teikoku Kōdōkai leader Ōe Taku, for example, was far from alone in believing that the Russian Revolution was the consequence of a violent protest for bread instigated by starving peasants who had been manipulated by Russian Jews. For Ōe, like many other powerful Japanese, the Russian Revolution served as a terrifying object lesson: a monarchy toppled by the efforts of a subversive minority group. Soon after the disturbance in Kyoto, the view that the riots were the work of burakumin and other malcontents became the official line of the Terauchi cabinet itself. Foreign Minister Gotō Shinpei, who had 46. For a detailed account of the Kobe riots, see Tokunaga, “Toshi buraku ni okeru kome sōdō,” 147– 77. The Shinkawa area was a “modern buraku,” in the sense that an early Meiji period directive had specified the place as a containment area for vagrants whose proper legal domicile could not be determined due to a lack of official family registers. Over time the people in surrounding communities came to regard the new residents as burakumin. In the early twentieth century, the industrial expansion of Kobe brought many new impoverished people to the area in search of affordable housing and work, thus giving rise to slum-like conditions. The boundaries between the original “buraku” community and the later slum were never clearly drawn. 47. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 137. 48. For information on this and other Japa nese beliefs about European Jews during the interwar years, see Goodman and Miyazawa, Jews in the Japanese Mind, pp. 76–105. Japa nese suspicion of Jewish “treachery” against the czar is ironic in light of the destabilizing role many in the Japa nese government and military hoped the Jewish minority in Russia would play during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War. In the aftermath of the fighting at Port Arthur, Japa nese military advisers even encouraged Joseph Trumpeldor, who would later be celebrated as an Israeli national martyr for his defense of Tel Hai against the Arabs in 1920, to preach Zionism and form a Zionist cell in a camp near Osaka where he and other Russian Jewish POWs were held. See Shillony, “Jewish Response to the War,” pp. 394– 95.

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previously served as home minister, urged the prime minister to consider the uprisings as the work of political agents provocateurs acting in association with burakumin and others among the lowest stratum of urban society. High-ranking Home Ministry officials subsequently went on record with similar interpretations of the cause of the riots, adding that the burakumin sought to get revenge on majority society for generations of discriminatory treatment. Home Minister Mizuno Rentarō even asked Ōe Taku to mobilize the Teikoku Kōdōkai to keep tabs on buraku communities and make sure that they were not plotting further disturbances. The police responded as well by cracking down on disturbances in buraku areas with much greater severity than they applied elsewhere; as a result, roughly 10 percent of those arrested for involvement in the riots were burakumin, at a time when the minority comprised barely 2 percent of the total population of Japan. The Terauchi government was quite willing to publicize its official views on the situation, and sought to diminish popular enthusiasm for the riots by making them appear to be a devious plot orchestrated by the despicable burakumin. The press seemed eager to play along, at least in the midst of the turmoil. Papers often portrayed any request for rice at a fairer price or for relief from poverty made by burakumin as if it were the prelude to a riot, and commented on the uncanny calm of buraku communities in which riots had not occurred, as if to suggest that the residents might take to violence at any moment. In addition to such reports, social policy experts and others in positions of importance in the Buraku Improvement Movement added their voices to the litany of buraku depravity and brutality, thus lending more weight to the views of Home Ministry officials. Teikoku Kōdōkai chairman Ōgi Enkichi, for example, characterized the riots as “scenes of much brutal violence on the part of the tokushu burakumin.” He also questioned the view of buraku participation in the riots as arising from poverty alone in light of the “brutality of the arson and murders” that he believed that the burakumin had committed during the rioting. Contradicting himself, Ōgi 49. Fujino, “Kome sōdō ni okeru hisabetsu buraku shudō-ron no seiritsu,” pp. 44– 46, 52. 50. Inoue, Buraku no rekishi to kaihō riron, p. 122. 51. Fujino, “Kome sōdō ni okeru hisabetsu buraku shudō-ron no seiritsu,” pp. 57– 63.

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claimed that the burakumin were “infected with extreme individualism,” but also possessed an unreasoning herd instinct in the face of any treatment they found offensive, which made them pursue the transgressor with “severe and frightening cruelty.” Keiō economist and social policy expert Kiga Kanjū surmised that the reason the burakumin had decided to riot was in order to “plunder other’s possessions and rape women from the ordinary classes [futsū no kaikyūsha no shijo], whom they usually have no way of getting.” For the general reading public, such statements together with the general newspaper coverage of the buraku role in the riots reaffirmed late-Meiji stereotypes of the burakumin, although with a greater emphasis on the supposed violence, cruelty, and vindictiveness of the minority. But no matter how damning the tone of the press, for burakumin who read or heard about these reports such stories suggested that across Japan there were communities just like theirs that were “taking the law into their own hands,” and for reasons that they understood only too well, even if their own community did not participate in the riots. An element of indignation was added to this realization after the riots, when editorials in the press criticizing the Terauchi government’s handling of the riots and its attempts to portray them as a burakumin-led plot began to appear with greater frequency. How individual burakumin may have reacted to these articles is not at all clear, but through the revela-

52. Quoted in ibid., pp. 52, 55, 65. It should be pointed out that not all those involved in groups like the Kōdōkai or working in the employ of the Home Ministry shared opinions like these. In touring buraku communities and giving speeches on the necessity of buraku self-improvement during riots, Ōe Taku and other Kōdōkai members began to see that the local press had distorted the facts about the buraku communities they had visited, and many came to fear the implications of what they realized to be a government/media program of scapegoating the burakumin (p. 54). Likewise, Amano Fujio, who was hired by the Home Ministry to survey the situation in buraku communities during and after the riots, bemoaned the way the authorities sought to make it appear as if only burakumin were responsible for the disturbances, after observing that their actions in the riots were no more dangerous or subversive than those of nonburaku rioters (Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 131). Even so, such voices went largely unheeded. 53. Fujino provides several examples of such editorials in “Kome sōdō ni okeru hisabetsu buraku shudō-ron no seiritsu,” pp. 65– 68. These editorials were for the most part silent on the press’ own role in blaming the minority for the riots.

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tions of government malfeasance some may have recognized that discrimination was not just occurring between neighboring majority communities and their own, nor only being meted out by their own local police and bureaucracy; it was part of the very system of social and political control. In the wake of the Rice Riots, some burakumin seemed to take a more critical view of majority society and its efforts to “improve” the minority. Ōe Taku experienced this firsthand when the residents of a buraku community in Tottori Prefecture refused to allow him to speak in their community during a 1920 Teikoku Kōdōkai lecture tour of the area. Some buraku residents even accused the Japanese dean of the Buraku Improvement Movement of making a living off of buraku contributions to the organization. Editorials such as “Orera wa eta da” (We are the eta), which appeared in the September 14, 1918, edition of the Kii mainichi shinbun, captured this antagonism toward the majority culture: The bitterness we feel for hundreds of years of being persecuted and ostracized from society by being called “eta” or “yotsu” has sunk into the very marrow of our bones, and simply will not disappear even if we are cured of trachoma, save our money, or listen to Buddhist sermons. I myself find it regrettable that some among our fellow burakumin went to such outrageous extremes of barbarous behavior as robbery, arson, and looting in the riots. But apart from such barbarous actions, by what means are we allowed to vent our dissatisfaction and hostility? How are we to escape oppression and persecution?

The Hara government, which replaced the Terauchi government, promised more effective measures for the buraku problem. As part of its 54. Ibid., p. 56. 55. Nami-sei, “Orera wa eta da,” Kii mainichi shinbun, Sept. 14, 1918, in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undō no kenkyū, vol. 2, shiryō-hen, jō, p. 101. “Yotsu” is a discriminatory term for the burakumin used mainly in the Kansai area. From its original meaning of “four” in Japa nese, it is thought that the term came to refer to the burakumin through their connection with the four-legged animals they slaughtered and ate. The reference to trachoma concerns the prevalence of this disease in buraku areas. Ridding buraku communities of the disease by exhorting the burakumin to be more careful about hygiene, urging them to save money, and lecturing to them about Buddhist virtues such as forbearance were all major areas of activity for kaizen groups such as the Teikoku Kōdōkai.

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general policy to increase national unity in the face of the socioeconomic frictions that surfaced in the riots, and to provide a bulwark against the spread of socialist and democratic ideas, the government shifted the focus of its programs for buraku communities from kaizen (improvement), with its emphasis on urging the burakumin to improve themselves and their communities, to yūwa (harmony), a term that suggested the crux of the problem lay in the division and animosity between majority society and the minority. To this end, the government carried out nationwide surveys to determine the conditions in buraku communities and the degree to which their residents were being incorporated into mainstream society through attendance at schools in majority communities and participation in local youth group’s and women’s associations with their majority neighbors. Hara also earmarked fifty thousand yen from the national budget for local improvement—the first budgetary provision of its kind—with forty-three thousand yen of this set aside for promoting buraku improvement projects in those seventeen prefectures with the largest buraku populations. In the end, this government initiative proved to be insufficient for the scope of the problem. Although budgetary allocations for buraku improvement were increased in 1921 to 145,860 yen, that figure represented a mere 3.2 percent of imperial household expenditures and .02 percent of military expenditures for that year, suggesting that it was not a highpriority issue for the government then. In contrast, many within the Kōdōkai felt that as much as ten million yen per year would be necessary to deal with the problem. 56. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 122–28. Also see Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 58– 60. The funds for buraku improvement were managed by the newly created Social Affairs Bureau of the Home Ministry, which was charged with managing the government’s effort to contain and co-opt potentially dangerous social movements. 57. The buraku improvement budgetary figure for 1921 is from Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi. Imperial household expenses stood at 4.5 million yen, while military expenditures amounted to 730,568,000 yen during 1921. See Nippon ginkō tōkeikyoku, Meiji ikō honpō shuyō keizai tōkei, p. 133. 58. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 59. This amount was one of the demands voiced by the rank and file at the Kōdōkai’s second Dōjō yūwakai (sympathy and reconciliation conference), which was held on Feb. 13, 1921, and attended by a list of dignitaries including Prime Minister Hara himself.

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The level of funding was not the only, nor even the main problem, however; a more crucial limitation was the fact that, despite the rhetorical shift from “improving” the burakumin and their communities to fostering “harmony” between them and their majority neighbors, the early yūwa program was not based on a thorough analysis of the causes of anti-buraku discrimination, nor did it introduce any effective means to remedy it. Although some of the funding provided to prefectures was for environmental improvements and establishing health and welfare facilities in buraku areas, the bulk of it was intended to organize local groups to cultivate a new core group of buraku leaders, foster an understanding of hygiene in buraku communities, encourage residents to seek work outside of the community or to migrate to other parts of the country, and increase opportunities for social interaction with majority Japanese. To be sure, some of these measures were of benefit to the limited number of communities in which they were carried out. Yet as with the often-moralistic improvement programs that preceded the Rice Riots, the focus of the yūwa program still remained getting the burakumin to make themselves acceptable to majority society, not solving the problem of anti-buraku discrimination.

More Threats of Dissolution: The March First Movement and the Korean Minority While there were incidents of Korean participation in the Rice Riots, as well as official suspicion of Korean involvement in the absence of any real participation, the Korean community in Japan at this time was still too small and isolated to take much part in the disturbances. The movement 59. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 135. 60. For a brief overview of incidents in which Koreans are known to have been involved, see Yoshioka, “Kome sōdō to Chōsen (1),” pp. 16–22. Yoshioka’s analysis is marred at points by the assumption that Koreans in Japan, as part of a revolutionized proletariat, would naturally take part in the riots, which he along with many other Marxist historians of the early postwar period considered to be one link in a chain reaction of revolutionary movements set in motion by the Russian Revolution of 1917. To this extent, he does not question the accuracy of press reports he cites, in which the presence of Koreans among the rioting mobs or those apprehended by police is given special attention in order to highlight the violence and lawlessness of the riots. For Yoshioka, rather than being an instance of the press mobilizing popular prejudice against

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for Korean independence that swept across the colony in 1919, beginning with the declaration of independence in Seoul on March 1, brought the specter of Korean participation in subversive activities—already very much a part of the general view of Koreans, as noted earlier—before the eyes of the Japanese authorities and public in a much more urgent way. The March First Movement and its aftermath are familiar to students of modern Korean history and Japanese colonial policy. For this study, it is important to recall one pivotal, international current of thought that energized the movement for Korean independence: Woodrow Wilson’s call for respecting the right of national self-determination, first articulated in his Fourteen Point proposal for world peace in a speech before Congress on January 8, 1918, and subsequently brought before the Peace Conference at Versailles. Although Wilson had little intention of dismantling the empires of America or of its World War I allies, the belief that a world power like the United States was willing to throw its weight behind the yearnings for independence of colonized peoples throughout the world had an electrifying influence on many Koreans. Korean nationalists in exile in Shanghai managed to send a spokesperson to Paris to plead their case before the world, and on February 8, Yi Kwangsu and other Korean students studying in Tokyo unveiled a proclamation demanding immediate independence for Korea. Likewise, religious leaders in Korea—in particular Christians, believers of Ch’fndogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way, the successor to the Tonghak faith), and Koreans as a way of dampening enthusiasm for the riots, such reports are evidence of the revolutionary energy of Koreans in Japan at this time. As was the case with the burakumin, it appears that local authorities in urban areas with sizeable Korean populations were quick to suspect Korean involvement in inciting the riots. Upon hearing the news of the riots, for example, Osaka Prefecture governor Hayashi Ichizō “wondered whether the source of the rumors and wild talk [that incited people to riot] didn’t lie with the Koreans.” Local newspapers in Osaka and Kobe similarly played up the presence and violence of Koreans in the riots. See Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 20. 61. See, for example, Baldwin, “The March First Movement.” 62. For the background and details of the drafting and announcement of this declaration, see Weiner, Origins, pp. 133–36. For the details of this document and a critical view of its place in the history of the March First Movement and its relationship to intellectual attitudes toward the question of Korean independence in the years to follow, see Wells, “Background to the March First Movement,” pp. 1–21.

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Buddhists—found encouragement in Wilson’s ideas and the activities of Korean student groups in Japan. Such developments, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the oppressiveness of Japanese rule in Korea, set the stage for the launching of a mass movement for independence. The brutality with which colonial authorities in Japan suppressed the movement is well known today. Newspapers in Japan, however, offered their readers images of the demonstrations that brought to mind the images of Korean violence and subversion propagated ten years earlier, in the wake of Itō Hirobumi’s assassination. Newspapers referred to the peaceful demonstrations in Seoul and elsewhere as “riots” (bōdō) and those who took part in them as “mobs” (bōmin). Articles claimed that these mobs wreaked havoc in Seoul, Pyongyang, and other urban areas, throwing rocks, burning police boxes, and even capturing and beating Japanese police officers, thus forcing the police to fire on them out of fear for their lives. The involvement of Christians and followers of Ch’fndogyo received repeated mention, as did the alleged foreign influence of Western Christian missionaries, who supposedly played a guiding role in the “riots.” Student participation was also featured prominently in these stories, which reported a prevalence of students from Christian schools along with rumors of plots by Korean university students in Japan, suggesting that an educated Korean was a subversive Korean. At the same time, contradictory images of Korean simple-mindedness and superstition appeared in stories about the demonstrations. One article claimed that the Koreans were merely acting on the misguided belief that the recent death of King Kojong was a divine sign that a new age was about to dawn in Korea, and that other Koreans had even naively contacted the government-general in Seoul to find out if the rumors of Korean independence were true. This public recapping of stereotypes did not continue for long. Even though demonstrations and arrests continued throughout most of 1919,

63. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, pp. 276– 77. 64. For examples of the earlier mentioned characterizations of the demonstrations, see the following articles from the Tōkyō asahi shinbun: “Senjin no undō” (Mar. 4, 1919), “Chōsen kakuchi no bōdō” (Mar. 7, 1919), “Urajima no senjin kenkyo” (Mar. 11, 1919), and “Fuzan ni mo sōdō” (Mar. 13, 1919). 65. “Bōdō no naka o tsūka,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, Mar. 8, 1919.

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in the pages of the Tōkyō asahi shinbun, to take one prominent example, stories on the situation in the colony decreased rapidly in both number and length, until finally being reduced to terse news bulletins appearing in the narrow column of print along the fold between pages of the news sheet, where they would be very unlikely to attract much attention. A large part of the reason for this lack of coverage was that the Hara government had instructed the colonial authorities in Korea to implement strict regulations on coverage of the demonstrations, in order to prevent reports from worsening Japan’s image in the American and European press and inciting Koreans outside of the colony to further subversive activity. By coincidence, March 1919 was also when Japan’s proposal for the League of Nations to ban all forms of racial discrimination became a topic of discussion and debate at Versailles. Although one of the prime motives behind this proposal was to prevent the government of the United States from banning Japanese immigration in response to the vociferous anti-Japanese movement in the American west, articles in the Asahi portrayed this as a battle between the forces of moral justice on the one hand and narrow-minded white racism on the other. The Japanese government was already concerned about attempts by expatriate Korean nationalists to influence the thinking of Wilson and other influential delegates at the conference regarding the fate of Korea, and worried more generally about Japan’s image as an imperial power in the foreign press. Having stories of the riots appear prominently on the same page as articles declaring Japan’s moral high ground in trying to rid the world of racial discrimination would have been an irony too great to ignore.

66. The situation was apparently the same in the local press. The Miyako shinbun, a Tokyo area daily, in fact carried no stories on the situation in Korea after the second week in March. 67. Baldwin, “The March First Movement,” pp. 172– 73. 68. See “Korea Appeals to Wilson for Freedom,” New York Times, Jan. 16, 1919, for a report on an appeal telegraphed to Wilson and a lengthy analysis of the Korean situation. The article exemplifies the kind of foreign-press coverage that Japa nese officials were most concerned about. 69. Although the Japa nese delegates at Versailles or those in the government they represented would have had no way of knowing it, even without the precedent of the Katsura-Taft Agreement, developments at the Peace Conference precluded any American

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The Japanese reaction to the March First Movement revealed many of the contradictions inherent in Japanese colonial rule. On the one hand, as many scholars have noted, the dramatic outburst of dissatisfaction with Japanese rule by a large cross-section of Korean society prompted the colonial government to adopt a more conciliatory approach to governance known as “cultural rule” (bunka seiji). While this was in many ways much less brutal than the disparagingly labeled “military rule” (budan seiji) of the preceding period, suspicion of Korean subversion remained: the police force, for example, actually increased in size more than threefold and broadened its distribution throughout the peninsula. On the other hand, despite the imperial rescript issued in the wake of March First, which called for “impartiality and equal favor” (isshi dōjin) and promised “all would be able to reach their station in life, live in peace of mind, and bask equally in the righteousness of Our Imperial rule,” as well as Japan’s own plea before the Versailles peace conference to end barriers to immigration based upon racial distinctions, the government-general of Korea instituted measures to limit the flow of Koreans leaving the peninsula for Japan. support for Korean appeals for independence. The American and European rejection of Japan’s call for an international covenant against racial discrimination, on the one hand, and Wilson’s unwillingness to apply the principle of national self-determination to “settled” colonial situations out of deference to France and Great Britain, on the other, had convinced American delegates at the conference that Japan needed all the colonies it had to provide space for its burgeoning population. See Baldwin, “March First Movement,” pp. 135–40. 70. Eckert et al., Korea Old and New, pp. 283–84. Degree of distribution here refers specifically to the number of police substations— or staffed police boxes. In 1919 there were only 686 of these— a number that mushroomed to 2,495 by the end of 1920. 71. For the rescript, see “Chōsen sōtokufu kansei kaikaku no shōsho,” issued Aug. 19, 1919, and reproduced in Kindai shiryō kenkyūkai, Meiji taishō shōwa sandai shōchoku shū, p. 344. The mea sures instituted by the governor-general were carried out under the ryokō shōmeisho (travel certificate) system, enacted in April 1919, by which Koreans wishing to travel to Japan had to obtain clearance to do so from the police authorities in their area, after which they would receive a certificate to present to the police at the port of embarkation. The system was primarily designed to prevent Korean nationalists and others with connections to the March First Movement from entering Japan. Weiner gives statistics that suggest this system had only a marginal effect on the number of Koreans entering Japan: in 1920, no fewer than 27,497 Koreans entered Japan, com-

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For observers with a critical interest in social policy, the apparent violence with which burakumin and Koreans acted in the Rice Riots and the March First Movement suggested potentially dangerous levels of dissatisfaction with the political and social status quo in Japan and its largest colony. Some, in line with Ōe Taku, feared that if this dissatisfaction were left unchecked, it would eventually explode in a much more devastating uprising. If progressives like Yoshino Sakuzō celebrated such events as indicative of the new tide of liberalism and democracy, state authorities and their supporters feared that the orderly empire that had finally been achieved at the end of the Meiji period was now in danger of collapsing into the deluge, with the burakumin and Koreans responsible for much of the erosion.

In Defense of State and Empire: Kita Sadakichi on Yūwa and Dōka The rescue operation to shore up the ideological foundations of the state and empire was initiated in an unassuming way from an equally unassuming individual: the historian Kita Sadakichi (1871–1939). We have already encountered some of Kita’s ideas about Korea and its historical relation to Japan on the occasion of the annexation, when he likened Koreans to a “weak branch family” and the Japa nese to its “affluent and stable main family.” Kita’s ideas, however, were not meant simply or even primarily to provide a rationalization for empire, nor was he concerned only with Korea. Many of his writings sought to provide a basis for the more thorough incorporation of Koreans, burakumin,

pared to 20,968 in 1919. The increase in numbers is especially revealing of the inefficacy of the mea sure when one considers that from 1919 to 1920 the number of Koreans entering Japan rose by nearly 7,000, whereas the 1919 figure represents an increase of only 3,058 from the total for 1918 (17,910). The system’s ineffectiveness may have been due in part to company-sponsored labor recruitment, which was still a major avenue for Korean labor migration into Japan at this time. Company-sponsorship no doubt eased the way for many to obtain the required certificate. The system was ultimately repealed in 1921, perhaps due to the inherent hypocrisy of limiting the migration of colonial subjects to the metropole while at the same time demanding that the United States accept immigrant laborers from Japan. See Weiner, Origins, pp. 54–56.

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and other minorities on terms that were inclusive rather than coercive. Kita’s concern for groups on the margins of Japanese society may have been influenced by his own childhood experiences. The son of a peasant family in Tokushima, the intelligent and hard-working Kita managed to enter junior high school only to find himself surrounded by the sons of former samurai families who teased him for his humble background and small physique. Whatever personal reasons he might have had for siding with the discriminated, however, Kita’s concern for the place of the Japanese nation in the world and the stability of the state that presided over it motivated much of his scholarly interest in the history of such groups. In regard to the burakumin, for example, Kita declared: Doing nothing [about the plight of the burakumin] not only constitutes a grave lack of compassion for them and disregard for the expressed will of the previous emperor who liberated them, but furthermore is truly inexcusable in light of the fact that such discrimination has not been expunged from among our fellow countrymen even at the very moment when we are urging the world to do away with racial discrimination. Moreover many of these fellow countrymen of ours have come to feel defiant toward society at large as a natural result of the ostracism and oppression they have suffered, or have fallen into debauchery and irresponsibility out of a natural desperation with their plight. This situation has come to pose more than a few obstacles to the preservation and development of our state and society, and is truly a stain besmirching an otherwise well-ruled nation.

Likewise for the Koreans, Kita had the following to say as the independence demonstrations continued to sweep the peninsula: Today, as the problem of national self-determination is emphasized throughout the world, clarifying the ethnic relationship [between the Koreans and the Japanese] is for me a most timely undertaking. This involves namely presenting my beliefs [on the subject] so that they may serve as a reference, not only for administrators and others involved with such matters, but also for the people at large. I believe that this in particular is one of my duties to society as a scholar. 72. Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, p. 120. 73. Kita, “Tokushu buraku no seiritsu enkaku o ryakujo shite sono kaihō no oyobu,” p. 2. 74. Kita, “Chōsen minzoku to wa nan zo,” p. 2.

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Kita was well aware of the implications for minority groups in Japan of international developments such as Wilson’s call for national selfdetermination and Japan’s own proposed ban on all forms of racial discrimination. Through his studies on the ancient history of Korea and its relation to Japan, and the nature of outcaste society in pre-Tokugawa times, he sought to reveal the irrationality of majority prejudices against Koreans and burakumin by explaining that there was after all no meaningful ethnic or racial difference between these groups and the Japanese. While condemning discrimination against them, however, this approach was also meant to deny such groups any grounds for demanding their own rights of national self-determination; by demonstrating their identity with the Japanese people, Kita sought to foreclose such an option. Like many Japanese historians and ethnologists during the early twentieth century, Kita believed that the Japanese were an amalgam of many different racial groups that had arrived in the islands at various points in antiquity. Where Kita differed from other scholars, however, was in how he imagined this process of racial admixture. Kita rejected much of the social Darwinian idea of “survival of the fittest,” whereby stronger races had conquered and enslaved weaker ones to produce the blended race of the Japanese. In its place, he hypothesized that a kinder, gentler process of racial blending and cultural assimilation had taken place under the guidance of a benevolent tenson minzoku (໽ᄿ⇥ᮣ, “people of heavenly ancestry”). Kita did not argue that this group was actually of divine origin, but he did ascribe to it the role of introducing the imperial line to the archipelago and saw it as the unifying cultural and moral presence in prehistoric Japan. Kita claimed that the tenson minzoku originally migrated to Japan from elsewhere in Asia, but as it extended its benevolent influence over less advanced people already residing on the archipelago, it even intermarried with them, thus making the melding process biological as well as cultural. How did Kita fit the Koreans and the burakumin into this picture? In regard to the question of the historical link between the Korean and Japanese peoples, Kita’s dōsoron ideas provided both an explanation of the past and a policy for the future.

75. Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, pp. 122–23.

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Not only did the Japanese people [Nihon minzoku] originally share the exact same essential racial elements with the Korean people [Chōsen minzoku], but in light of the high degree of intermixing thereafter, one could even say that they are in fact of exactly the same people [dōitsu minzoku]. Of course, there may well be differences in the preponderance and degree of distribution of certain essential elements in each of their constitutions, but such is the same as the case in Japan proper; the studies of anthropologists have made clear the existence of regional differences in this regard. As the Japanese and the Korean peoples are one and the same, differences in language, manners and customs, and ways of thinking are merely the result of differences in the level of government since medieval times. Today, both peoples have returned once more to the state of close and deep relations they maintained in remote antiquity, and together comprise a single nation. If the Korean people can gradually assimilate [dōka] in large numbers, changing their language, manners, and customs, and making their way of thinking the same as ours, all distinctions between them and us will be removed, and a single great and harmonious Japanese people [konzen yūwa shitaru ichidai Nihon minzoku] will be realized. Some have criticized radical assimilation policies as being one of the causes of the recent riots. While there may be some merit to this view, evidence of just such a complete assimilation is indeed part of our history.

For Kita, all of Korean culture was thus a rather insignificant “result of differences in the level of government since medieval times,” by which he referred to the prevalent notion that Korea was weak and stagnant due to its long history of subservience to China and misrule by the Korean court. Kita saw Korean values, cultural practices, and even the language itself as superficial traits that could be replaced by their proper Japanese counterparts, precisely because the Koreans were of the same race— or racial admixture— as the Japanese. The importance of racial affinity within the historical blending process that made the Japanese was a key element in Kita’s thinking on assimilation and place in Japanese society. It was also evident in his views of the burakumin. Kita began one of his most influential treatises on the origins of the burakumin this way: The object of this paper is to clarify the position of the so-called “eta” in relation to the Japa nese people [Nihon minzoku]. For convenience of explanation,

76. Kita, “Chōsen minzoku to wa nan zo ya,” p. 12.

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let me start by stating my conclusion: the people originally referred to as the “eta” are in no way ethnically [minzoku-jō] different from those belonging to what is now called the Japa nese people [Nihon minzoku]. The so-called “eta” of the Tokugawa period appeared as the result of a long history of social change, involving individuals who, purely by reason of their occupation or personal misfortune, became part of that development. But although this historical stream ends in a great current called “the eta,” it has its source among people who were not so different from the ancestors of normal people [ futsūmin]. From mountains and valleys here and there those who wondered down luckless paths fell together, and in the end formed the great stream called “the eta.”

Although Kita was not the first scholar to challenge the idea that the burakumin were the descendants of a foreign race, the persuasiveness of the historical evidence he presented in support of his thesis, and his stature as a noted historian, had a tremendous influence on scholarly views of the burakumin. Whatever peoples’ personal beliefs on the subject, in the realms of scholarship and official policy at least, after Kita no one could seriously claim that the burakumin were anything but Japanese. As with his writings on the historical relationship between the Koreans and Japanese, Kita wrote on the burakumin in the belief that discrimination against them would disappear as majority Japanese came to understand the truth about the outcastes’ origins and realize that ra-

77. Kita, “Eta genryū kō,” p. 81. 78. In 1916, for example, the economist Yamamoto Miono argued along essentially the same lines, in his essay “Tokushu buraku mondai,” pp. 223–53. 79. Furthermore, as Kurokawa Midori points out, Kita’s argument that the present social status of a person or group had very little to do with the position their ancestors had occupied in society was a subtle yet powerful attack on the ie system, with its emphasis on the pedigree of family bloodlines (Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 147). In regard to the foreign origins thesis itself, however, it would be a mistake to say that the idea was never heard of again in a public scholarly forum. Most ironically, in the very same issue of Minzoku to rekishi that carried Kita’s argument against the idea of foreign origins, Ōe Taku submitted his own hypothesis that groups of burakumin in the Kinki region were the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Israel (Ōe, “Eta-hinin shōgō haishi no tenmatsu o nobete eta no kigen ni oyobu,” pp. 238–45), and Shimao Sei’ichi, writing on the tōnai outcaste group of Toyama Prefecture, surmised that they were the descendants of kikajin who had come to Japan at some point in the distant past (Shimao, “Etchū Himi-gun no tōnai,” pp. 306– 7).

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cially they were the same as the majority. This did not mean that at the time he saw the burakumin as being the equals of majority Japanese in every way, nor did it mean that he faulted the majority alone for ostracizing them. Again, as was the case in his assessment of the Koreans, Kita claimed that part of the problem was that the burakumin were “a few steps behind the progress of the rest of the world in their lifestyle and ways of thinking,” and called on them to “reflect and realize that it is they themselves who must reform their ways of thinking and living so that these do not differ from those of other people.” As with the Koreans, burakumin were asked to assimilate to the lifestyle of majority Japanese in exchange for acceptance on equal terms: for either group, true “harmony” ( yūwa) required assimilation (dōka). Although Kita never held an advisory position in the Home Ministry or its Social Affairs Bureau, his views shaped these pivotal governmental agencies’ approach toward both minorities in the years to come. Starting during the second half of the Taishō period and continuing into the opening years of the Shōwa, the rhetoric of government policies toward both groups took on a striking similarity. “Yūwa” appeared prominently in policies and slogans aimed at both minority groups, whether in the form of “dōhō yūwa” (harmony among fellow countrymen), in reference to the buraku problem, or “nissen yūwa” (harmony between Japan and Korea)— a slogan of “cultural rule” in Korea after March First that also had currency in Korean minority policy in the metropole. The overlap in minority policies involved more than just the rhetoric of minority incorporation: the bureaucratic rotation of officials through the colonial administration and back into various ministries and agencies within the home government ensured that during their careers, leaders like Terauchi Masatake, Mizuno Rentarō, and Maruyama Tsurukichi had opportunities 80. Kita, “Eta genryū kō,” Minzoku to rekishi, p. 114. 81. Oguma points out that Kita took a disparaging view of Korean nationalist efforts to assert a separate Korean cultural identity, because for him any such claims ran the risk of marginalizing Koreans as a new outcaste group. (Oguma, Tan’ itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen, pp. 128–29). Although discriminated groups such as the burakumin had become ostracized through a combination of bad luck and the misguided policies of the Tokugawa, in his view they contributed to their plight by choosing to lead a different lifestyle, just as the Koreans and other colonized peoples would if they stuck to their traditional ways (pp. 124–25).

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to deal with issues related to the burakumin and to Koreans both on the Korean Peninsula and in Japan.

Philanthropic “Conciliation” in the 1920s: The Dōaikai and the Sōaikai Despite the upheavals of 1918 and 1919, in the aftermath the government did not launch centrally administered programs to deal with the problems posed by either minority. In fact, for much of the 1920s, the officials in charge of dealing with the Korean minority were the local police and a small number of public welfare bureaucrats in cities such as Tokyo and Osaka with growing Korean populations. Similarly for the burakumin, the small amount of funds allocated in the national budget for improvement projects in buraku communities, as mentioned earlier, hardly indicated a rigorous involvement of the central government in addressing the “buraku problem.” In lieu of the state taking a leading role, during most of the decade that followed the government relied on the initiatives of organizations founded and operated by concerned private citizens. To be sure, there was no small amount of official involvement in these organizations: politicians and officials in various levels of government—local, regional, and national—joined them, but always as concerned individuals rather than in an official capacity. In some instances, government funds also helped 82. Terauchi promised to “whip them [the Koreans] with scorpions” in order gain Korean submission to Japa nese colonial rule during his tenure as the first governorgeneral of Korea (1910–16), and then consented to scapegoating the burakumin for the Rice Riots while serving as prime minister. Mizuno Rentarō served as Terauchi’s home minister during the Rice Riots, and then served as inspector-general of political affairs under Governor-General Saito Makoto in Korea (1919–22), before returning to the position of home minister in three successive cabinets (1922–24). Maruyama Tsurukichi served as director of the Home Ministry’s Local Relief Department from 1918 to 1919, in which capacity he had a direct interest in the buraku problem, and even orga nized the second Saimin buraku kaizen kyōgikai, to which he invited Kita Sadakichi to give the keynote speech. From 1922 to 1924 he served as director-general of the police bureau in Korea. Later, from 1929 to 1931, he dealt with the policing of minority rights movements for both groups in his capacity as superintendent of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Bureau. 83. For information on early police initiatives for overseeing the Korean community in Osaka, see Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei sōshiki no kenkyū, pp. 43–48.

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to subsidize their operations. As might be expected of organizations with such individuals among their officers and central membership, their support for the Japanese state and its broad aims in the field of social policy was beyond question. But they still were at times critical of the government or majority society in their analysis of problems facing the minority. There was a marked difference in character on this score between groups dealing with the buraku problem and those concerned with the Korean minority, however— a difference that revealed fundamental differences in how the organizations’ members perceived the meaning and importance of yūwa and dōka for the minority in question. In 1921, Ōe Taku died, further weakening the Teikoku Kōdōkai, which had begun to decline in the face of buraku cynicism and animosity toward the kaizen organization following the Rice Riots. New local groups began to appear at the same time, organized by minority community leaders working with politicians and officials in local government. Yet while the groups gained moral and sometimes material support from the involvement of such representatives of bourgeois majority society, these groups remained autonomous from central and local government. Their founding declarations and platforms seem to indicate that, involvement of local politicians and officials notwithstanding, they took a different view of the nature of the problems faced by the minority than even the most progressive of local governments at the time would have been likely to formulate. A good example was the Shinano Dōjinkai (Shinano Equal Benevolence Society), which was formed in 1920 in the city of Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, by a collection of buraku community leaders, together with a local teacher, a Buddhist priest, and the chair of the Ueda city council. The organization called on the majority to “repent for the various social sins of the past and embrace in their hearts the way of justice, humanity, and sincere patriotism,” while at the same time vowing to bring the minority to a state of “wholesome self-realization.” The inculcation of proper behaviors and values among the minority was still a part of the program, as it had been for kaizen groups such as the Yamato Dōshikai and Teikoku Kōdōkai; but burakumin who had witnessed the public slander of their communities during the Rice

84. Fujino, “Yūwa dantai ‘Dōaikai’ shiron,” p. 16a.

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Riots also felt the majority was also to blame for the present lack of “harmony.” By far the largest and most celebrated group of this kind was the Dōaikai, or “Mutual Love Society,” established in May 1921. The founders of the organization were a small group of men who felt the need to promote true conciliation between burakumin and the majority after witnessing the Rice Riots. Some were burakumin, others not. Like these founding members, those who came to join the Dōaikai were affluent and successful members of their communities. Many were business owners from Kantō area buraku communities, such as those in and around Tokyo’s Asakusa ward. But the individual who came to define the character of the Dōaikai, as both its public face and the driving force behind its success, was the man the founders asked to serve as chair: Arima Yoriyasu. Born in 1884 as the eldest son of a noble family, Arima in many ways came to embody the liberalism and concern for social justice called to mind by the term “Taishō democracy.” Erudite and familiar with the social and political conditions in Europe and America through his travels, Arima was also greatly influenced by the writings of Tolstoy, the Christian social activist Kagawa Toyohiko, and the Marxist scholar Kawakami Hajime. Arima majored in agricultural science at Tokyo Imperial University and took a deep interest in the plight of tenant farmers, eventually leading him to help launch the Nihon Nōmin Kumiai ( Japan Peasants’ Union) with Kagawa in 1922. His concern for the plight of the urban poor was no less great. Aware of Arima’s progressive reputation and the added legitimacy that his educational background and social status would lend their cause, the organizers no doubt saw him as the obvious choice to head the Dōaikai. Arima accepted their offer and threw himself into the work of the organization, often supporting it with his own funds. His enthusiasm for the yūwa organization arose not just from his progressive views of society, however; as a member of the kazoku nobility who would join the House of Peers in 1927, Arima worried that if something was not done soon to check the growing social unrest in Japan caused by poverty and 85. Ibid., p. 19a; Akisada, Kindai Nihon jinken no ayumi, pp. 94– 95. 86. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 153–54.

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discrimination, the imperial institution might suffer the same fate as monarchies had across Europe. Like Ōe Taku and many others, Arima believed that the Bolshevik Revolution had been led by Jews embittered by centuries of persecution. He also recalled years later the shock and dismay he felt upon seeing a picture of the deposed king of Portugal in a London newspaper while visiting there in 1910. The Rice Riots had only heightened his fear that seething popular discontent could someday boil over and threaten Japan’s national polity. Arima was convinced that the only way to avoid this fate was through liberal compromise and consensus building. For this reason, whatever his interest in Kawakami’s ideas, Arima was firmly opposed to solutions involving revolution. Instead he hoped that organizations like the Dōaikai would foster fellowship and mutual understanding of Japanese across lines of class and status difference. As the slogan he coined for the new organization declared: “The Dōaikai is the crucible of love. All who come will combine together in this crucible, in order to create a truly happy universe, filled with love, freedom, and peace.” Despite his concern for the fate of the emperor and kokutai, the Dōaikai under Arima promoted a very different vision of the problem of anti-buraku discrimination and what needed to be done about it than had other groups. The Dōaikai’s commitment to humanism even led it to criticize the state and majority society for insensitivity and hypocrisy in situations where earlier kaizen groups would have expressed patriotic pride. An editorial in the first issue of the Dōaikai’s journal, for example, alludes to Japan’s proposed covenant on racial discrimination at Versailles in making the point that racial discrimination was still an issue at home: For the past few years our government and scholars have cried out to the world for the abolition of racial discrimination. This is a just position to take and as such is perfectly fine, but if one steps back and looks at our country from a dif-

87. Ibid. Arima’s recollections of his career are contained in his memoirs, Shichijūnen no kaisō. 88. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 153–54. Indeed, Kurokawa points out that Arima even advocated doing away with the kazoku nobility as a means of creating a more cohesive society. 89. Quoted in Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 156.

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ferent angle, it is plain to see that such discrimination exists here, too. What a contradictory, unreasonable, and inhuman situation! The unhappiness caused by it is not limited to the tormented alone, but is the misfortune of all our people. It is a sin!

Such open criticism of the government and majority society placed the Dōaikai closer to the Suiheisha in terms of its outlook on discrimination than to groups such as the Teikoku Kōdōkai or even the Yamato Dōshikai. Indeed, after the Suiheisha made its appearance, the Dōaikai embraced the new, autonomous buraku liberation effort, praising it as “a movement whose time has come” and declaring that its platform was one that “not only members of the Suiheisha should uphold,” but “one which should be observed by all of humanity.” Although Suiheisha leaders were not pleased with the endorsement or with the Dōaikai’s suggestion that the two organizations cooperate in combating discrimination— and even accused Arima and his group of propagating ideas designed to co-opt the minority—Arima’s support for the Suiheisha was unflagging throughout its early years, particularly prior to the ascendance of Marxist interpretations of how to achieve buraku liberation in the Suiheisha’s rhetoric. Arima’s continued moral— as well as occasional financial— support of the Suiheisha ultimately convinced its leaders of his sincerity: he was a regular guest of honor at Suiheisha rallies in the 1920s, and maintained close acquaintances with many on its central committee. For the Dōaikai, the solution to the problem of anti-buraku discrimination was to be found through (1) prudent government action to improve the living environment in buraku communities, (2) consciousnessraising among burakumin by the Suiheisha, including its public-censure campaigns against individuals who discriminated against the minority (more on this in Chapter 4), and (3) a similar enlightenment movement among the majority, to be led by the Dōaikai. More than the material improvements to be brought about by government action, Arima emphasized the need for the Suiheisha and Dōaikai to change the values of 90. Yanagita Kizō, “Ippan no minasama ni,” Ai ni michiteru yo o nozomite, no. 1 (Feb. 1922), quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 151. 91. Quoted in Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 172– 73. 92. Fujino, “Yūwa dantai ‘Dōaikai’ shiron,” p. 19b.

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the majority as part of a national moral and spiritual campaign. To this end, the Dōaikai called for a “movement of repentance” (zange no undō) through which the Japanese majority would come to realize the divisive social evil of discrimination and apologize to the burakumin for centuries of such mistreatment. The actual activities of the Dōaikai consisted of drawing attention to the problem of anti-buraku discrimination, particularly within gentrified majority society. Part of this effort involved making concern for the problem look like the endeavor of respectable people. Arima’s own presence at the helm of the organization helped with this effort, and through his connections the Dōaikai came to boast a prestigious list of dignitaries as trustees, including members of the nobility such as Tokugawa Kuniyuki and Konoe Fumimaro, along with various bureaucrats and liberal intellectuals such as Yoshino Sakuzō. The Dōaikai sponsored public lectures on the buraku problem for burakumin and non-burakumin alike, and created a liberal forum for discussing various aspects of antiburaku discrimination, as well as problems of social injustice in general, through the publication of its journal Dōai. Beyond such measures for the enlightenment of the majority, the organization also attempted to change the status quo through legal avenues, by proposing legislation that would have made discriminatory behavior against individual burakumin a punishable offense. For much of the 1920s, the Dōaikai remained the most progressive and influential force in the so-called yūwa movement. Its central position therein was readily evident in the formation of the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei (National Conciliation Federation) in February 1925, which brought together many local yūwa organizations at Arima’s invitation to form a coordinated national movement. The declaration and platform of 93. Umehara, “Kokumin zange no undō,” pp. 2– 7. 94. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 156. 95. Arima presented a bill containing such mea sures to the fiftieth session of the Diet, which convened in 1925, but the bill was not discussed during that session due to vociferous debate over an unrelated piece of legislation. The “petition regarding the thorough implementation of national conciliation projects” (dōhō yūwa jigyō no tettei ni kansuru seigansho) that accompanied the bill was acknowledged by the Diet, however. Arima and others in the Diet launched a movement to reintroduce the bill in the following session, but apparently to no avail (ibid., pp. 174– 79).

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the new federation echoed those of the Dōaikai, including a stated willingness to work hand in hand with the Suiheisha in bringing an end to discrimination against the burakumin, leading a “movement for national awakening” (kokumin kakusei undō), and calling on the government to do more to improve conditions in buraku communities and to outlaw acts of discrimination. While the Dōaikai and the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei were on occasion critical of specific government policies, like the Yamato Dōshikai and the Teikoku Kōdōkai they remained committed to the ideals of the Japanese state and empire. Given the nature of the leadership and membership of these groups, it could not have been otherwise. Such support, however, made the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei liable to government co-optation, and indeed, in July 1927, the Renmei and all of its member organizations ceded their autonomy to a new, Home Ministry–run yūwa initiative called the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai (Central Conciliation Projects Council). Arima was installed as deputy chairperson of the council, but this was in many respects a move designed to draw support for it. The true nature of the council’s outlook on what to do about the buraku problem— and particularly how to interact with the Suiheisha in the process—was intimated through the appointment as chair of the ultra-nationalist bureaucrat and future prime minister Hiranuma Ki’ichirō, a man whom Arima confidentially criticized as having “no experience with the buraku problem, and knowing nothing” about it. After Hiranuma’s appointment, those in the yūwa movement who were critical of government policy would find diminishing acceptance for their views. On the Korean side, the most prevalent organization allied with the state during the 1920s was the Sōaikai, also rendered into English as the “Mutual Love Society.” Despite having a similar name, this organization possessed a very different character from that of the Dōaikai.

96. Ibid. pp. 175– 76. As part of this last demand, the aforementioned legislation presented to the Diet by Arima had been drafted by the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei. 97. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 102–3. 98. Fujino, “Yūwa dantai ‘Dōaikai’ shiron,” p. 23b. 99. The names of the two organizations probably shared a classical Chinese root in the phrase “dōhō sōai” (ৠ㚲Ⳍᛯ), as it was read in Japa nese.

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Founded in December 1921, the Sōaikai was the creation of two successful Korean entrepreneurs, Yi Kidong and Pak Chun’ggm. Both men had been living in Japan for many years prior to its founding. Pak, of whom more is known, immigrated in 1907 after leaving his home in South Kyfngsang province at the young age of sixteen, making him one of a small number of Koreans in Japan at the time. Details of the next decade of his life are sketchy at best; he appears to have followed a trajectory common to many male Korean labor migrants during the 1910s and 1920s—finding work by turns as a day laborer, itinerant peddler of various goods, and finally a ginseng merchant, one of the more profitable trades to be dominated by Koreans during this time. Ginseng appears to have opened the door to economic success for Pak. By 1921 he was in Tokyo, and doing well enough in ginseng, together with his business partner Yi, that the two of them came to be referred to simply as “Misters Boku Shunkin and I Kitō (the Japanese pronunciation of their names), proprietors of the Ikadō in Minami Denba,” in a newspaper article from the end of that year. The same article mentioned that Pak and Yi, along with a group of other Korean merchants in the area, were planning to form a “Japan-Korea Friendship Society” (Nissen shinbokukai). This group seems to have developed into the Sōaikai, which Pak in particular presided over in the years to come. On one level, the Sōaikai functioned much more like a social welfare agency for Koreans in Japan than the Dōaikai did for the burakumin: 100. Matsuda, “Boku shunkin-ron,” p. 42. 101. In ibid., Matsuda claims that Pak found work as a manual laborer in these early years, and suggests that he developed something of a reputation as a brawler at around this time. Police reports from 1916 and 1917 place Pak in and around Nagoya, first as an ink and brush peddler, and then as a ginseng merchant. (From various police files on the activities of Korean students in Japan, in Kang Tfksang, Gendaishi shiryō, vol. 26: Chōsen—2, pp. 5, 12–13.) These reports do not concern Pak himself, but rather the antiJapanese statements of a certain Han Kwangsu, a self-proclaimed anarchist who often stayed at Pak’s residence. Although Han even exclaims in the latter report that he and Pak would soon leave for Manchuria to engage in subversive activities (p. 13), Pak himself appears not to have been the object of police surveillance at this time. Perhaps it was Pak, after all, who supplied the police with much of the information on Han’s antiJapanese statements. 102. “Chōsen ameya ya ninjin-uri ga shihorashii[sic] kuwadatte,” Tokyo asahi shinbun, Dec. 13, 1921, p. 1.

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it provided temporary lodging for Korean laborers and students in the Tokyo area, an employment introduction ser vice, and night school classes in basic Japanese, Korean writing, and moral education. But ser vice to the minority community was not the only, nor even the most important, function of the Sōaikai: ser vice to the state took precedence. From its very inception, the orga nization enjoyed the patronage of high-ranking officials in the colonial administration, who saw the Sōaikai as a means of controlling the Korean migrant population in Japan and showcasing the benefits of colonial rule to metropolitan society at the same time. Such an orientation became evident in the Sōaikai’s actions in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923. In spite of the persecution of Koreans in Tokyo, Yokohama, and surrounding areas following the initial destruction from the tremors, there is no evidence to suggest that the Sōaikai tried to protect Koreans from the violence of local vigilante squads, nor did it ever protest the way the police and military handled the situation in the aftermath. Instead, once the initial chaos had passed and the rumorfueled hysteria had died down, Pak volunteered the ser vices of three hundred Korean workers affi liated with the Sōaikai in clearing the streets of debris and helping to put the city back in order. This display of public-spiritedness was also a savvy public relations move: seeking to divert attention away from the massacres, the Japa nese authorities and press alike extolled this effort as proof that Koreans were loyal and helpful subjects who were cooperating wholeheartedly with the reconstruction effort. 103. Ringhoffer, “Sōaikai,” pp. 57– 62. 104. Kawashima, in Proletarian Gamble, pp. 139–40, cites the memoirs of then government-general Chief of Police Maruyama Tsurukichi to claim that Maruyama secured 300,000 yen in funds for the Sōaikai shortly after the orga nization was established. Other sources similarly claim that Pak and Yi met with Maruyama and Governor-General Saitō Makoto prior to establishing the Sōaikai and received encouragement for their plan, but do not specify the amount of financial support received at this juncture. See Kang Tongjin, Nihon no Chōsen shihai seisaku-shi kenkyū, p. 245. 105. Tsuboe, Zainichi Chōsenjin gaikyō, p. 189. The Sōaikai’s help in the cleanup operation may have had another purpose of greater immediate interest to the authorities: the speedy disposal of thousands of Korean bodies. The Sōaikai’s crews seem to have worked in many areas where a preponderance of Koreans had lived before the earthquake: areas such as Ningyō-cho dōri, Kabutobashi, and Minami-senjū. A Tokyo

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Through such activities the Sōaikai attracted even more support from major figures in the colonial bureaucracy and the home government. In the wake of the killings of Koreans, the government-general, concerned that problems with the Korean community in Japan would lead to unrest among the Korean majority in the colony, was seeking a way to keep closer tabs on the Korean population in the metropole— so a cooperative Korean group like the Sōaikai appeared to be a godsend. By 1930 official patronage had transformed the Sōaikai into a national organization with an estimated 20,000 members, branches in twenty cities, and an impressive headquarters— Sōai Hall (Sōai Kaikan)—built near Tokyo’s largely Korean-populated Honjo district. But while these numbers might seem impressive, it is important to bear in mind that most rank-and-file Koreans would not have been enthusiastic supporters of the organization. Koreans looking for jobs in Japan had to join the Sōaikai just to use its employment ser vice. Likewise, after 1928 Koreans residing in Japan who wished to return briefly to the peninsula often had to turn to the Sōaikai to obtain the re-entry permits that the government required (as part of its attempt to control Korean migration to the metropole). nichinichi shinbun report of September 11, 1923 (“Chōsenjin dantai ga mushō de dōro kōji,” in Taishō nyūsu jiten hensan iinkai, Taishō nyūsu jiten, vol. 6, p. 161) mentions that Pak and Yi themselves directed a group of 100 Korean laborers in the cleanup of Minami-senjū. Years later, during Pak’s 1936 campaign to retain his seat in the Diet, Niikura Fumio extolled Pak’s record of public ser vice at an election rally by stating “after the Great Earthquake, when Mr. Pak went to Kinshi Park to take care of the dead bodies there, the bodies of Koreans,” at which point the ubiquitous police monitor cautioned him to watch his language. See Keishichō, Shūgiin giin sōsenkyō enzetsukai jōkyō hyō (Apr. 4, 1937), reproduced in Awaya and Odabe, Shiryō Nihon gendaishi, vol. 9, p. 200. 106. The Korean government-general awarded the orga nization a sizable plot of land in Taihei-chō, Honjo ward, and 40,000 yen with which to build a new headquarters; see Ringhoffer, “Sōaikai,” p. 49. In addition, the Sōaikai received funds for other purposes, totaling 60,000 yen, from both the Korean government-general and the Social Affairs Bureau of the Home Ministry. See Chūō shokugyō shōkai jimukyoku, “Tokyofu ka zairyū Chōsenjin rōdōsha ni kansuru chōsa,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 442. 107. On sources of post-1923 funding, see Wagner, Korean Minority in Japan, p. 22, and Tsuboe, Zainichi Chōsenjin gaikyō, p. 189. Michael Weiner discusses the history of the re-entry permit system and the debates surrounding it in Origins, pp. 52–56. For a detailed analysis of the Sōaikai’s rapid expansion and reach into nearly every aspect of the lives of Korean laborers in Japan, see Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 141–53.

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This impressive level of control had an extremely coercive side as well, one that made the Sōaikai worthy of Kawashima’s characterization as an “obscene, violent supplement to state power.” The organization was the sworn enemy of Korean socialists, anarchists, communists, and labor unions. During the 1920s and 1930s gangs of Sōaikai strikebreakers regularly turned up whenever labor unrest involving Korean workers occurred, and many of these incidents became extremely violent. The Japanese authorities also generally gave the Sōaikai a free hand in fulfilling its most vital function to the prewar state: that of clamping down on Korean minority radicalism without tying up much of the state’s security and judicial apparatus. According to one contemporary source, the Sōaikai even maintained prison cells in the basement of the Sōai Hall as part of its effort to police the Korean population. Such actions served the interests of capital just as much as those of the state, and this confluence of interests proved to be quite profitable for the Sōaikai. Nowhere was its ser vice to Japanese capital more obvious, and its suppression and control of Korean labor more intense, than in the textile industry. In Kansai area mill towns, the Sōaikai was hired by firms like Kishiwada Cotton Spinning as a kind of labor force management subcontractor. It established offices near mills that employed large numbers of Korean women, a tactic that allowed it to respond quickly to strikes and apprehend women who tried to escape from the dormitories. Violence or threats thereof were a constant feature of such activities. Be108. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, chap. 5. 109. For examples of particularly violent clashes between the Sōaikai and its rivals in a variety of Korean unions and political organizations, see “Bōkan ga suto honbu e nagurikomi,” Tōkyō asahi shinbun, May 22, 1926 (in Taishō nyūsu jiten hensan iinkai, Taishō nyūsu jiten, vol. 7, p. 768), which reports on clashes between Sōaikai strikebreakers and Korean laborers affi liated with the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei during a strike at the Japan Musical Instruments factory in Hamamatsu; a union-sympathetic account of protracted struggles between the Sōaikai and the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei in Kawasaki during 1929 (Kim Tuyfng, “Kawasaki rantō jiken no shinsō,” Senki, July 1929, pp. 77–80); and Weiner’s account of Sōaikai involvement in the breaking of a strike by mostly female Korean laborers at the Kishiwada Cotton Spinning Company’s mill in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, in May 1930 (Weiner, Race and Migration, pp. 171– 74). 110. Kim Chungjong, “Zai-Nihon Chōsen rōdōsha no genjō,” reproduced in Ozawa, Kindai minshū no kiroku, vol. 10: Zainichi Chōsenjin, p. 150.

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yond this, the Sōaikai profited from the practice of arranging “marriages” between the women and male Korean laborers who paid a fee for an introduction. These relationships, which were arranged without the consent or even the prior awareness of the women involved, often amounted to forced prostitution. For their part, mill owners and the authorities turned a blind eye to such practices in exchange for the Korean organization’s continued ser vice in containing and controlling the colonial migrant population. Many previous researchers have characterized the Sōaikai as an organization dedicated to the task of assimilating Korean laborers in Japan to Japanese society. While not inaccurate per se, this characterization rests on statements made by Pak during the 1930s, rather than observations of the Sōaikai’s programs during its heyday in the 1920s. We shall examine the career and ideas of Pak Chun’ggm in detail later, in Chapter 6, but although Pak in all likelihood saw himself as the embodiment of successful assimilation, the Sōaikai itself was far less concerned with transforming Koreans into Japanese than it was with maintaining control over them. When the Sōaikai concerned itself with changing Korean behavior at all, it was only to ensure that the minority would not appear disloyal to the Japanese state or offend the Japanese majority. Manfred Ringhoffer’s own exploration of the group’s educational activities for Korean laborers suggests that rudimentary courses in math, Japanese, and writing hangul were provided to give Korean laborers the bare minimum on which to get by. Hangul was taught so that Korean laborers, many of whom were illiterate in their own mother tongue, could at least exchange letters with their families—hardly a concern of an organization whose primary interest was supposedly promoting assimilation to the Japanese way of life. Japanese language training consisted of phrasebook expressions and drilling in the simple katakana script that workers would need to write their names and read basic forms and instructions; knowledge of hiragana or Chinese characters was deemed unnecessary. Although little is known about the Sōaikai’s curriculum in moral education, Ringhoffer 111. Kim Ch’anjfng, Chōsenjin jokō no uta, pp. 92–104. 112. See Ringhoffer, “Sōaikai,” for an example of such a line of analysis. 113. Ibid., pp. 61– 62.

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suggests that it simply urged Korean laborers to be kind, obedient, and not annoy their Japanese neighbors and co-workers. In its more public activities, the Sōaikai also seems to have been far less concerned with converting Koreans into Japanese than with the less ambitious goal of making them acceptable to the majority. On February 11, 1926, for example, a Sōaikai-organized musical troupe, dressed in traditional Korean costumes, gave a performance of “joyous music, played in Korea on the most auspicious occasions” at an Empire Foundation Day ceremony in Tokyo. This performance showed Korea’s musical heritage to a Japanese audience, but by doing so in the context of celebrating the birth of the Japanese nation, affirmed the rightful place of Koreans therein. How much Pak thought about such issues during the height of Sōaikai activity is difficult to ascertain because no direct statements from him on the matter during those years have been found. Performances of traditional Korean entertainment and night schools’ lessons in how to write in Korean, if not the very idea of a Korean-run organization to “take care of” Korean migrants, seem to suggest that assimilation in the most rigorous sense of the term was not the primary aim of the Sōaikai: Koreans could retain their Koreanness, as long as they did so in a way that would not make them a nuisance to state and society. For both the Dōaikai and the Sōaikai, as for Kita Sadakichi and the Japanese authorities most concerned with minority issues during this period, the idea of yūwa was extremely important. And yet, in comparison to Kita’s understanding of the concept and how to achieve it, the positions of the Dōaikai and Sōaikai on the necessity of assimilation, dōka, to bring about harmony or conciliation, yūwa, were ambiguous. While the Dōaikai leadership spoke exclusively in terms of yūwa, as Kurokawa Midori has observed, a sense of dōka, in which non-buraku and buraku Japanese truly saw one another as equal and the same, was the organization’s ultimate goal. The Dōaikai’s hope was that such a

114. Ibid. 115. “Shiba, Kyūdan, Ueno de shikiten, kyūjō made kōshin,” Chūgai shōgyō shinbun (Feb. 12, 1926), reprinted in Taishō nyūsu jiten hensan iinkai, Taishō nyūsu jiten, vol. 7, p. 166. The Sōaikai’s performance at this event was no doubt facilitated by Maruyama Tsurukichi, who was both its planner and master of ceremonies. 116. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 152–54.

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seamless assimilation would follow once both the minority and majority had achieved a thorough understanding of anti-buraku discrimination as an injustice, and the majority had repented by ridding itself of antiburaku prejudice. For the Sōaikai, by contrast, yūwa was a much shallower concept: questions of “justice” or even “tolerance” did not arise at all. In many ways, its position was closer to that of the Teikoku Kōdōkai than the Dōaikai. Despite their similar names, and the fact that both were part of the system of “imperial democracy” implemented by the government to control popular discontent, the vastly different approaches to the minority problem taken by the Dōaikai and the Sōaikai reflect the relative degree of incorporation into majority society of the minority each group concerned itself with. As we have seen, problems of continuing ostracism and deepening poverty aside, by the beginning of the 1920s burakumin across the socioeconomic spectrum of their communities were connected to the state and majority society through educational experiences and language. The association with the majority was not always a happy one, but it was precisely the closeness of it that made anti-buraku discrimination all the more painful for those who suffered it. The Dōaikai’s emphasis on “justice” and its promotion of yūwa as a profound conciliation between the majority and minority acknowledged this connectedness and sought to make it a mutual embrace within a larger national community. In contrast, the Korean community in Japan in the 1920s was still largely isolated from the Japanese majority. This was especially true during the early years of the decade, but even as the community became more settled, the linguistic and cultural gap separating it from the surrounding majority is one reason why the authorities chose to rely on a minority-run organization like the Sōaikai to manage the Korean “minority problem” for them. It also explains why the Sōaikai sought to promote a very superficial form of “harmony” between Korean migrants and Japanese society, rather than mutual understanding of the kind envisioned by the Dōaikai: for all its overbearing coerciveness, the irony of the Sōaikai was that its approach to controlling the Korean community 117. For the system of “imperial democracy,” see Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, pp. 125–43.

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in Japan essentially accepted the differences between the minority and the majority as extremely difficult, if not impossible, to surmount. Indeed, as Kawashima observes, this position had advantages for both the organization and the state: the Sōaikai obtained from it a lucrative raison d’être, and the state managed to maintain an ethnic division of the working class in Japan, by appealing to the Koreanness of the workers and the “philanthropic” organization charged with taking care of them. These fundamental differences in how the authorities addressed the problems posed by each of these minorities in the wake of the tumultuous events and ideas of the late 1910s would have reverberations in the state’s own approaches to the buraku and Korean communities in the 1930s, when the need to mobilize the human resources of the nation for war would force authorities to deal with both groups in ways that revealed the parameters of full-fledged membership in the Japanese nation.

118. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 153– 60.

ch apter 4 Minority Activism and Identity Politics in the Age of Imperial Democracy

The ideological trends that swept Japan in the 1920s provided marginalized groups such as burakumin and Koreans with new lenses through which to view Japanese society and their place in it. In particular, these new views challenged them to redefine their position in and relation to state and majority society, and gave rise to new minority movements led by activists who were inclined to be critical of majority society and state authority. Picturing themselves as existing outside of both the Japanese state and majority society was one way that activists could envision their identity as minorities, but there were other options that still recognized a connection with at least some in the majority community. Over the course of the decade, minority activists’ interpretations of identity brought them closer to certain portions of majority society, and seemingly to one another as well, through a shift from ethnic to class-based conceptions of group identity. But although this shift produced images of minority identity that were in some ways more analytically rigorous, because they drew on Marxist interpretations of socioeconomic phenomena common to the labor and social movements of the day, the approach it engendered undermined the cohesiveness of the organizations for which such activists spoke. As Andrew Gordon has demonstrated, these movements were inspired by, and very much a part of the culture of, organized protests that offered an ideological critique of the system of imperial democracy that had developed under the rule of the established bourgeois parties after World

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War I. At its most radical, this culture of protest challenged fundamental tenets of imperial democracy such as the right of private property, the morality of empire, and the necessity of the emperor system. Far more often, however, the popular political and social movements of this period were ambivalent on such questions. This ambiguity enabled the culture of protest both to take part in imperial democracy and, ultimately, to be subsumed by it. This was true of minority movements during the 1920s as well, although as we shall see, the common assumption of difference between minority and majority provided a means to formulate positions not available to other labor and social movements. Even so, neither minority ever delineated its difference from the majority so sharply as to suggest that the two communities had no shared interests. Consequently, ambiguities in the positions of these minority movements emerged that, just like those ambiguities contained within the critique of majority social and political movements at this time, opened avenues for their sublimation into more mainstream modes of activism. The activists leading the buraku and Korean minority movements were not the only ones in these communities grappling with the question of what it meant to be a burakumin or Korean in Japan at this time. The rank-and-file members of such organizations, along with the subaltern of each minority that never chose to take part in these movements, formulated their own, sometimes quite different, ideas about their identity as burakumin and Koreans, and the gulf between these views and those of the leadership threatened to weaken support for buraku and Korean movements during the period under examination. These conceptions of minority identity shaped the way Koreans and burakumin would interact in the 1920s as they came into contact with one another. This was particularly true on the level of their respective movements; it was here that the ambiguities of the minority critique of imperial democracy had their biggest influence on how Koreans and burakumin viewed one another. Even on the everyday, subaltern level, however, minority views of self and society, as well as majority views of both groups, influenced minority interactions as Koreans gradually

1. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, esp. pp. 125–233.

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began to move into the same industries and even the same communities as the burakumin. The nature of these interactions, and how minority views of self and place in society influenced them, will be examined in Chapter 7. As mentioned in the Introduction, many researchers of the Korean and buraku minorities during the prewar period have described the character of their movements as essentially proletarian and, in the case of the Korean minority community in particular, fervently opposed to Japanese colonial rule. To do so is not wrong per se; most Koreans and burakumin in prewar Japan were clearly working class, and the movements that arose to represent them certainly understood this fact. Likewise, activists among the Korean minority were all too familiar with the constraints imposed on Koreans everywhere by Japanese colonial rule, and never lost sight of the ultimate goal of independence. Yet to characterize these minority social movements as always and uniformly proletarian or ethnic nationalist runs the risk of overlooking how activists, in their search for greater support and more effective solutions, variously imagined who these minorities were and how they related to state and society at large. Such a characterization would also ignore how views of minority identity varied between the leadership and rank-andfile members. The examination that follows does not deny the importance of Marxist ideas about class, exploitation, and imperialism for these movements and these activists. It does, however, explore how notions of class and other components of minority identity— such as ethnic nationalism and even patriotism for Japan—influenced them. What becomes clear is that Marxist explanations of social inequality affected the identity views of both groups in strikingly similar ways by the end of the 1920s, and gave rise to opportunities and problems of a very similar nature for Koreans and burakumin involved in radical social movements. In addition, the rank and file of these movements imagined their identity as minorities in ways that often had little to do with those voiced by the leaders of these movements. What were these conceptions, and how did they differ from those of movement leaders? These questions, as well as how the gap between these different views of minority identity affected the development of buraku and Korean movements during these years, will be explored here.

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Ethnic Nationalism and Its Limitations: The Burakumin and the Suiheisha in the Early 1920s The Suiheisha burst onto the stage of modern Japanese history on March 3, 1922, when approximately seven hundred burakumin gathered in Okazaki Public Hall in Kyoto. There they heard the following declaration: Tokushu Burakumin throughout the country, unite! Long-suffering brothers: In the past half century, the undertakings on our behalf by so many people and in such varied ways have failed to yield any favorable results. This failure was divine punishment we incurred for permitting others as well as ourselves to debase our own human dignity. Previous movements, though seemingly motivated by compassion, actually corrupted many of our brothers. In the light of this, it is necessary for us to organize a new group movement by which we shall emancipate ourselves through promoting respect for human dignity. Brothers! Our ancestors sought after and practiced liberty and equality. But they became the victims of a base, contemptible system developed by the ruling class. They became the manly martyrs of industry. As recompense for tearing out the hearts of animals, their own warm, human hearts were ripped out. They were spat upon with the spittle of ridicule. Yet all through these cursed nightmares, their blood, still proud to be human, did not dry up. Yes! Now we have come to an age when man, pulsing with this blood, is trying to become divine. The time has come for the victims of discrimination to hurl back labels of derision. The time has come when the martyr’s crown of thorns will be blessed. The time has come when we can be proud of being eta. We must never again insult our ancestors and profane our humanity by slavish words and cowardly acts. Knowing well the coldness and contempt of ordinary human society, we seek the warmth and light of true humanity. From this the Suiheisha is born. Let there be warmth and light among men!

2. Attendance figures for the inaugural meeting vary widely. Ian Neary claims that 3,000 attended (Political Protest and Social Control, p. 50), whereas Inoue Kiyoshi provides a figure of 2,000 (Buraku no rekishi to kaihō riron, p. 139). The more conservative figure of 700, however, as Moriyasu Toshiji of the Osaka Human Rights Museum points out, seems much more trustworthy given its source, the local Chūgai nippo newspaper, which had a reporter there to cover the event firsthand (Miyazaki, Kindai no naraku, p. 82). 3. This is DeVos and Wagatsuma’s translation of the declaration, from their book Japan’s Invisible Race, p. 44. I have substituted “Suiheisha” for their use of “the Levelers’

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Many researchers have recounted the story of the birth and meteoric rise of the Suiheisha, so we need not concern ourselves with the chronological details here. The initial plans for the new organization were laid by three young burakumin from the community of Kasuyabaru in Nara Prefecture: Sakamoto Sei’ichirō (1892–1987), Kiyohara Kazutaka (1895– 1970, known by his pen name of Saikō Mankichi), and Komai Kisaku (1897–1945), who were joined on the eve of its launch by a buraku youth from Fukushima Prefecture by the name of Hirano Jūkichi (1891– 1940, pen name Hirano Shōken). Soon thereafter men such as Matsumoto Ji’ichirō (1887–1966) and Takahashi Sadaki (1905–35) joined and eventually played pivotal roles in leading the Suiheisha. Had most of these men been born a decade or two earlier than they were, they might have chosen to dedicate themselves to the activities of groups like the Yamato Dōshikai or the Dōaikai, with their largely bourgeois membership and focus on autonomous buraku improvement as the key to ridding society of its prejudices against the minority. Most of them came from well-to-do buraku families, and all attained a considerably high level of education. Sakamoto’s family ran a prosperous business producing nikawa, an adhesive substance made from animal carcasses, which enabled him to attend a technical school in Tokyo. Saikō was the son of a Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist priest who was also one of the community leaders. His talents as an artist and his family’s support made it possible for Saikō to study Western painting in Tokyo. Likewise, Komai Kisaku came from the family of a wealthy lumber merchant, and at one point had set his sights on becoming a lawyer. Matsumoto Ji’ichirō’s father founded the Matsumoto-gumi construction firm in 1911, which grew to become a major enterprise in the field. Unlike the others, Takahashi Sadaki’s father was not a burakumin, although TakaSociety” (the English translation of the name used by the Suiheisha itself ), to avoid confusion. 4. The most complete account in English is Ian Neary’s in Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-War Japan, pp. 63– 74. 5. Entry for “Sakamoto Sei’ichirō,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 382. 6. “Saikō Mankichi,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 362. 7. “Komai Kisaku,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 350. 8. “Matsumoto Ji’ichirō,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 999.

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hashi claimed that his mother was. His father was an official of the Oita prefectural government. Takahashi entered Tokyo University of Commerce (the present-day Hitotsubashi University), but dropped out in 1922 to join the Suiyōkai of Yamakawa Hitoshi, and then the Japan Communist Party. Two early leaders of the Suiheisha, however, were exceptions: one in terms of class background, the other in terms of age. Hirano grew up in poverty and received no formal education beyond elementary school. Even so, the fact that he managed to support himself as a typesetter after settling in Tokyo, and went on to author numerous articles in publications of the Suiheisha and other organizations, suggests that he managed to attain a high degree of literacy. Minami Umekichi was also an outlier. Born in 1877, he was at least ten years older than the other leaders, although much more similar to them in wealth than was Hirano. Minami was a member of the Yamato Dōshikai, but left it at age forty-four to help found the Suiheisha. That Minami was elected the first chairperson of the Suiheisha at the inaugural meeting, and maintained the organization’s headquarters in his home in Kyoto for the first two years, suggests the degree to which the younger leaders, together with the assembled delegates in attendance at Okazaki Public Hall, felt it advisable to turn to a “senior” member of the minority community with ties to the kaizen movement to serve as the central figure of their organization. Although many of the Suiheisha’s leaders had a middle-class background similar to that of burakumin involved in kaizen and yūwa groups, the character of the Suiheisha rank-and-file membership set it apart

9. Takahashi Sadaki,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 647. . “Hirano Shōken,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 873. Hirano is one of the most enigmatic figures in the early Suiheisha; largely because of the way his ideological position seems to defy convenient categorization for appearing by turns to espouse anarchism, minority ethnic nationalism, and Japa nese nationalism. For Hirano’s own account of his life prior to joining the Suiheisha, see “Suihei undō ni hashiru made,” Dōai, June 1926. For analyses of Hirano’s thought, see Kinoshita, “Hirano Jūkichi (Shōken) ni tsuite.” Miyazaki Manabu provides an insightful juxtaposition of Hirano’s and Takahashi Sadaki’s lives and views of the causes of anti-buraku discrimination in Kindai no naraku, pp. 363–443. . “Minami Umekichi,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 1013.

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from these earlier organizations. The Suiheisha drew support largely from poorer burakumin. Such differences between the leadership and the rank and file had parallels in other social movements of the time: much the same situation had prevailed in the early years of the Japanese labor movement, where one need look no further than the nature of the leadership and rank-and-file membership of the Yūaikai to find an apt comparison. As we shall see, the situation was similar for groups organized among the Korean minority. How did the early leaders of the Suiheisha conceive of their identity as burakumin? The text of the Suiheisha Declaration quoted earlier suggests some answers to this question. Most previous researchers characterize this statement like Neary, who writes that it demonstrates “the rhetoric of class struggle mingled with the imagery of the poet and student of religion.” Religious imagery of a sort is certainly there: the declaration describes a “man . . . trying to become divine” and “the martyr’s crown of thorns.” The text also suggests the idea of class struggle— especially by paraphrasing of the Communist Manifesto in its opening line—but the only overt reference to class is the “base, contemptible system developed by the ruling class” under which the burakumin “became the manly martyrs of industry.” More than featuring references to class and capitalist exploitation, the declaration abounds in invocations of the heritage of the burakumin as a specific group, separate from society at large. Even if we leave aside the generic reference to “brothers,” which is kyōdai (‫ܘ‬ᓳ) in the original rather than the more overtly 12. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 174. 13. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 69. Neary also claims that Saikō and Sakamoto were greatly inspired to embrace the idea of class struggle by the young Marxist scholar Sano Manabu, first through reading his essay “Tokushu burakumin kaihō-ron” in the July 1921 issue of Kaihō, and then through a meeting with him in Tokyo (p. 64). But while the influence of Sano’s essay on the two was certainly an important factor in their decision to form a group like the Suiheisha, Sano’s view of the burakumin in this essay pictured the minority as something more than just a subgroup of the Japa nese proletariat. Although he drew largely on Kita Sadakichi’s ideas in discussing the history of the burakumin, Sano likened their situation to that of “the misfortunes of the Jews, the Sinn Fein Party, the people of India, [and] the Negroes,” and criticized the hypocrisy of Japan’s proposal for racial equality by claiming that “we must first see to the liberation of the Koreans and the eta people (eta-zoku), who have suffered one-thousand years of racial animosity (shuzokuteki hankan).”

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nationalistic dōhō (ৠ㚲, also translated as “brethren”), references to “our ancestors,” their traditional occupation of animal rendering, the admonition to “never again insult” them, and the call to take pride in being “eta” all imagine the burakumin as a group with a history, ethnic heritage, and name separate from those of majority Japanese. Similarly revealing of this strong ethnic nationalism in the Suiheisha at the moment of its birth were the cheers of “Long live the eta, long live the Suiheisha!” (“Eta banzai, Suiheisha banzai!”) that ended the inaugural rally. To a certain extent one could see in this use of the label eta, which since the early Meiji period had been a bitter term of abuse in the eyes of many burakumin, a strategy of rhetorical deployment common to the identity politics of minority rights groups: the group simply took a loathsome label of derision applied to it by the majority and turned it around to make it a symbol of the group’s bitter determination to oppose such discrimination. Much the same could be said of tokushu burakumin, which appeared in the declaration even though the first of the new organization’s resolutions stated, “If anyone is insulting to us in either word or deed using such names as tokushu buraku or eta we will thoroughly censure the offenders.” Yet even though the rhetoric was pro-burakumin, many members of the 14. The original Japa nese text used here for reference appeared in the Suiheisha’s early organ Suihei 1, no. 1 (July 1922): 27. 15. Ibid., p. 28. 16. The most immediately apparent parallel is the use of the notorious racist epithet “nigger,” and its variant “nigga” as terms of group self-reference among African Americans. There are differences between African Americans’ use of these terms and the Suiheisha’s use of eta, however. While African Americans have used “nigger” as a means of building a politicized solidarity around a detested slur, the term and the stereotypes of violent, disruptive behavior associated with those to whom it was applied were also embraced in some contexts as a means of challenging the prevailing culture of white supremacy, as in the image of the streetwise, anti-establishmentarian image of the “bad nigger” character in the works of Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and blaxploitation films such as Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. (See Asim, The N Word, pp. 150– 95, for a discussion of the emergence of the “bad nigger” character in African American literature and film.) Suiheisha activists do not appear to have deployed stereotypes of the buraku capacity for violence to similar purposes. In any case, the use of the term eta gradually disappeared from the orga nization’s rhetoric in the years to follow, although it remained in the text of the declaration until the Suiheisha was disbanded in 1942. 17. Quoted in Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 69.

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minority community took offense at the Suiheisha’s cavalier language, revealing, albeit ironically, a strong dissatisfaction with such discriminatory terms at the grassroots level. Police in Kyoto reported in the aftermath of the meeting that residents of buraku communities in the city had formed pacts to keep the Suiheisha out of their neighborhoods. In Osaka as well, residents of the burgeoning buraku community of Nishihama held rallies to protest the Suiheisha’s flagrant use of such terms of abuse. A look at early Suiheisha speeches and proclamations also suggests that for many of the leaders, terms like tokushu burakumin and eta represented more than just hated labels around which to solidify minority indignation with discrimination and oppression. This was very much the case with Hirano Shōken even prior to the launching of the Suiheisha. When the Teikoku Kōdōkai held its second “Sympathy and Conciliation Convention” (Dōjō yūwa taikai) on February 13, 1921, Hirano heckled the speakers and plied the audience with a leaflet he had prepared entitled “A Call for a National Self-Determination Corps.” This was an appeal to burakumin at the conference, whom the leaflet referred to as “our people [waga minzoku], possessed of originality and imagination,” to “join together to be liberated from the cruel treatment of centuries and strive to build a new society of freedom and equality.” The phrase “our people” also appeared in revealing contexts in the record of the inaugural meeting. One speech declared, “Out of the war and chaos in Europe, the clanging of the morning bell of national self-determination has roused our people [wareware minzoku],” demonstrating that, as with Hirano’s leaflet, the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination that had fueled the aspirations of oppressed peoples worldwide in 1919 was still very much on the minds of many of the organization’s leaders. 18. Kyōto-fu keisatsu-bu, “Suiheisha jōsei ippan,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 32. 19. See the police report on two anti-Suiheisha rallies held in Nishihama on Aug. 5 and 6, 1922, published in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, supp. vol. 1, pp. 664– 66. Although the report claims a total of 2,500 in attendance for both rallies, it also characterizes the crowd as “not being particularly moved” (kandō o ataetaru moyō nashi) by the speeches. 20. “Minzoku jiketsudan geki,” in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 2, pp. 120–21. 21. “Minzoku jiketsu no gyōshō,” Suihei 1, no. 1 (July 1922): 24.

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This seemed to be the case with some of the rank and file as well. In a letter to the editors of Suihei, one Tamano Shūkichi of a buraku community in Mie Prefecture declared, “It is the sixty-million or more [sic] of the Yamato people (yamato minzoku) who are to be despised, and the three-million [sic] of us tokushu burakumin who should rise up!” The popular belief that the long-persecuted Jews had instigated the Russian Revolution also provided many early Suiheisha activists with a suggestive historical example after which to pattern their own movement. This sentiment surfaced as late as 1924, during a debate at the third national conference over whether the Suiheisha should recognize the Soviet Union (which Japan had yet to do). Yamada Konojirō, an eighteenyear-old delegate from Nara Prefecture, declared, “Just as Marx said that the proletariat have no homeland, so the eta have no homeland. We must recall the perfection of humanity and recognize the Jewish state.” Sekiguchi Hiroshi points out that based on this interpretation of the Russian Revolution and in anticipation of achieving the same in Japan, early Suiheisha leaders patterned the executive structure of their organization after that of the revolutionary government in Russia. This same belief in the revolutionary potential of the burakumin as a group that, like the Jews of Russia, had been hardened through centuries of discriminatory treatment was also observed among local Suiheisha leaders. A report from the Yamato Dōshikai in 1923 expressed shock at the opinions of Suiheisha branch leaders in Osaka and Kyoto, many of whom

22. “Jihatsu shūdan undō hankyō,” Suihei 1, no. 1 (July 1922): 82. Tamano’s population figures are by no means accurate for either “group” at this time. Despite his claim that the “Yamato people” numbered over sixty million, census figures for 1920 only record 55,963,000 individuals in Japan total; see Zaidan hōjin Yano Tsuneta kinenkai, Nihon kokusei zue—2000/2001-nen ban, p. 47, table 5-3. The figure of three million for the buraku population was a standard expression in the songs and slogans of the Suiheisha, but was based on no real demographic evidence. A 1921 survey by the Home Ministry Social Affairs Bureau recorded only 829,674 residents in 4,890 buraku communities nationwide, although these figures may well have been low. See “2—Hisabetsu buraku (dōwa chiku) no jinkō nado no sui’i,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, pp. 1242–43. 23. Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 76. 24. Sekiguchi, “Suiheisha sōritsu to minshū—Nara-ken no jirei kara,” in Akisada and Asaji, Kindai Nihon to Suiheisha, p. 118.

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seemed to entertain the idea that through the Suiheisha the burakumin would come to rule Japan in a few years’ time. The opinions of the rank and file within the new organization are harder to discern, but it appears that even if they did not conceive of themselves as racially different from majority Japanese, many came to embrace the movement out of a belief that a deep divide separated the burakumin and the majority. Through its commitment to, in the words of the Suiheisha Declaration and its first resolution, “hurl[ing] back labels of derision” by “thoroughly censur[ing] the offenders,” the Suiheisha urged burakumin to view their relationship to majority society in terms that were often adversarial and antagonistic. Indeed, much of the early success the movement enjoyed in mobilizing burakumin and forming new chapters in their communities seems to have been due to such a worldview. Early on, Suiheisha organizers made a point of plying the audience with alcohol before meetings and then riled them up with speeches to the point where the obligatory police moderator would order the meeting closed, thus igniting a riot. As organizers spoke of the pain and injustice of discrimination in these meetings, they were often greeted with spontaneous shouts of “let ’em have it!” ( yareyare) and “we don’t need their sympathy!” (dōjō wa iranu). The reference to “sympathy” in this context revealed many burakumin’s dissatisfaction with the approach taken by buraku kaizen movements such as the Teikoku Kōdōkai. Whereas the Kōdōkai had urged the burakumin to rid themselves of poverty and filth in order to free themselves from the conditions that had, in their view, led to discrimination, the Suiheisha turned this logic around, claiming that the poverty and filth of the burakumin were products of discrimination, not the causes of it. The blame for discrimination rested squarely on the shoulders of the majority, not the buraku minority. This “liberating” view of the burakumin’s plight attracted many burakumin to the movement, and the sense of empowerment and animosity toward the majority it engendered were revealed in the “thorough censure campaigns” (ᖍᑩⱘ ㋒[ ㋎] ᔒ䮬ѝ, tetteiteki kyūdan tōsō) that local Suiheisha branches launched against individuals who discriminated against burakumin in 25. Ibid., p. 119. 26. Ibid., pp. 114–17.

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word or deed. Although the Suiheisha claimed that the guilty individual would become a better person through the process of reflecting on his or her actions and apologizing sincerely, the bitterness of the emotions that surfaced in such campaigns sometimes exploded into vindictiveness and violence on the part of the Suiheisha rank and file. While novel in its program and appeal to poorer burakumin, the Suiheisha movement was shaped by historical factors that had helped to create a sense of minority empowerment in opposition to the majority. The kaizen movement, for example, though very different in its approach toward discrimination than the Suiheisha, had made burakumin aware that the “problem” of their way of life had already become recognized as a matter of national importance. Their experience of the Rice Riots and the Terauchi government’s attempt to blame the burakumin for them added a further sense of injustice to this scrutiny by the state and majority, and impressed on burakumin the extent to which their problems were shared by buraku communities throughout Japan. The Suiheisha capitalized on the traditional cohesiveness that this “outsider” status had engendered by usually recruiting on a community basis rather than canvassing individual burakumin. This approach helped the group cultivate the resolve necessary to confront discriminatory treatment at the local level. Yet despite the sense of separation from the majority, however envisioned, and the fact that the Suiheisha barred non-burakumin from joining the movement, appeals to patriotism were also a significant part of the movement’s rhetoric during the early years, especially in regard to the throne. Speaking at the inauguration of the Kantō Suiheisha in 1923, Kurisu Shichirō claimed that the duty of all Japanese subjects was to rid society of anti-buraku discrimination, and that those who persisted in their prejudice were guilty of the most extreme disloyalty. Why should we, as children of the same emperor, be subjected to discriminatory treatment? This is obviously an outcome of the mistaken policies of the Tokugawa bakufu, but His Majesty the Emperor Meiji took notice of this unforgivably misguided system, and graciously declared that the old evils be 27. For an insightful discussion of the relationship between the rhetoric of autonomous buraku kaizen groups such as the Yamato Dōshikai and that of the Suiheisha, see Sekiguchi, “Kaizen undō to Suihei undō no ronriteki renkan,” pp. 75– 95.

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rejected and replaced by the way of justice. Dedicating oneself to the fulfillment of these blessed words should be the true duty of every subject. And yet, what is the attitude of the majority of people? Are they not ignoring these precious, blessed words and discriminating against us?

In invoking the spirit of the Meiji emperor and the idea that he himself had decreed the abolition of pariah status, Kurisu was availing himself of the same rhetorical strategy used by the Yamato Dōshikai and even the Japanese state itself. This turning of the symbols and rhetoric of state authority to one’s own purposes in order to claim the moral high ground was of course nothing new. Gordon has explored similar tactics in the ideology of the “crowd” in the urban politics of the post-RussoJapanese War period, and Suzuki Masayuki has likewise observed it in the rhetoric of the Japanese labor movement in the early 1920s. Invoking the name of the emperor in opposition to those in power was a common tactic in the ideological arsenal of social and political movements and protests from 1905 onward. In fact, Suiheisha activists repeatedly appealed to the ikkun banmin ideal during the early years of the movement to accuse the bigoted majority of an unforgivable lack of respect for the imperial will, while at the same time casting the buraku minority as model subjects. And yet this was not necessarily or even primarily an insincere or instrumental use of patriotic language; many in the movement indeed seemed to remember the Meiji emperor with fondness and gratitude. On the evening of August 23, 1923, for example, the newly formed Suiheisha chapter in Higashi Shichijō (formerly Yanagihara), Kyoto, held a lantern procession to Momoyama Mausoleum—the resting place of the Meiji emperor—to pay its respects on the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of pariah status. The following year, on July 28, the Kyoto Prefecture’s Suiheisha organized a similar procession to Momoyama, on the eve of the twelfth observance of the emperor’s death, in which two thousand Suiheisha members took part. This sense of gratitude extended beyond the person of the Meiji emperor to his descendents. An October 5, 1922, rally to

28. Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 70. 29. Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy; Suzuki Masayuki, “Kindai tennōsei no kokka keitai to kaikyū tōsō,” pp. 4–27.

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launch a Suiheisha branch in Ishigami, Nara Prefecture, attended by leaders like Saikō, Hirano, Kurisu, and others, concluded with three banzai cheers for “their Majesties the Emperor and Empress,” “the tokushu burakumin,” and “the Suiheisha,” in that order. A banner outside of the meeting hall declared, “Those who oppose the Suihei movement are traitors!” (Suihei undō no hantaisha wa kokuzoku nari). Perhaps no incident demonstrated more vividly the early Suiheisha’s capacity for blending minority separatist nationalism with loyalty to the central figure of the Japanese nation than the aborted Suiheisha plan to “guard the throne” (kyūchū goei) by escorting the emperor back to Kyoto, and away from the chaos of Tokyo, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The idea, hatched by Minami Umekichi, chairman of the central committee at the time, was that the emperor would then become the centerpiece for a buraku revolution led by the Suiheisha. If the Suiheisha’s nationalism demonstrated the impact of majority norms and values on the minority, this influence was even more noticeable in regard to its position on women’s issues. As an organization born in the same atmosphere of liberal social movements that simultaneously gave rise to groups like the New Woman Association, which advocated for the liberation of women, the Suiheisha could hardly have ignored completely the problem of women’s position in society. Women were in fact a visible and vocal part of the movement from its inception; the inaugural meeting in Kyoto on March 3, 1922, featured a rousing speech by Okabe Yoshiko, who exhorted the “mothers of Spartan warriors” and the “daughters like Joan of Arc” from the buraku community to come forth and join that Suihei movement. In the wake of the movement’s launching, other buraku women, such as Nakanishi Chiyoko, took a leading role in organizing buraku communities in their area to form Suiheisha chapters. The nascent organization also publicized in its earliest

30. For these and more examples of the kind, see Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, pp. 42–49. 31. Sekiguchi, “Suiheisha sōritsu to minshū,” pp. 119–20. 32. Suzuki Yūko, Suiheisen o mezasu onnatachi, pp. 27–28. 33. Ibid., pp. 41–43.

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publications the involvement of women and the problems of discrimination that buraku women faced in majority society. The enthusiasm of female activists and the desire of the organization’s male leadership to bring as much of the minority as possible into the Suiheisha resulted in the unanimous approval of a motion to establish a National Women’s Suiheisha (Zenkoku fujin Suiheisha) at the second annual meeting held on March 3, 1923. The adoption of this proposal, brought forward by Sakamoto Kazue (wife of Sakamoto Sei’ichirō), led to appearances by female speakers such as Sakamoto, Okabe, Nakanishi, and many others at rallies in buraku communities across Japan, where they shared the podium with many of the male leaders of the movement. Women’s groups began to form within local Suiheisha chapters as a result of the attention that these female speakers brought to the issue of anti-buraku discrimination as a problem for women as well as men. The third annual meeting likewise saw the adoption of a follow-up proposal to develop the women’s Suiheisha more thoroughly, resulting in the subsequent establishment of prefectural and regional women’s organizations in Fukuoka, Mie, and throughout the Kantō area. In addition, the measure also called for the publication of a “women’s column” in the newly created Suihei shinbun. It might be tempting to see measures like these as evidence of the Suiheisha’s support for a feminist interpretation of the problem of antiburaku discrimination. And to be sure, buraku women activists who 34. The first issue of the journal Suihei, published in July 1922, contained two articles relating to buraku women: “A Letter from a Woman in Mental Anguish” (“Yūmon no onna kara yoseta tegami,” pp. 84–86), which is an article reprinted from the Asahi shinbun in which the author tells of her experiences of discrimination in school and a friend’s suicide after being divorced by her husband when her background came to light; and a letter submitted directly to the Suiheisha by one Nishioka Itoko, a burakumin from Osaka’s Nishihama area who had been forced to break up with her commonlaw husband at his family’s urging, because they feared that his relationship with a buraku woman would hurt their other son’s chances of finding a suitable marriage partner (“Kakan nai hokori,” pp. 86–87). The second issue, published in November of the same year, carried the first part of a short story entitled “The Fate of a Cursed Woman,” about a buraku girl whose family is forced to sell her into prostitution out of extreme poverty; see S-H sei [pseudonym], “Norowareta onna no unmei,” pp. 106–14. 35. Suzuki Yūko, Suiheisen o mezasu onnatachi, pp. 11–12; Kurokawa, “Hisabetsu buraku to sei sabetsu,” pp. 55–56, 64.

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devoted their energies to the National Women’s Suiheisha brought feminist perspectives to their view of discrimination. Yet the articles that appeared in the “women’s column” of the national paper seldom ventured beyond emphasizing the need for women to join the Suihei movement and reiterating the central tenets of the Suiheisha declaration. The first edition of the column, which appeared in the inaugural June 1924 edition, called on women of the minority to take part in the movement in whatever capacity they could—“even if it is not in the same way as men.” The next edition’s column picked up on the Suiheisha tenets of taking pride in “being eta” and rejecting the patronizing “sympathy” of majority society, through the story of a bourgeois majority family who made a great show of their supposed liberality and humanitarianism in allowing their college-educated son to marry a buraku woman who had worked as a domestic servant. The third article to appear in the column went the furthest by far in voicing a feminist critique of the situation faced by the vast majority of buraku women. The writer, identified only by the pseudonym “Kei,” pointed out that owing to the prevalence of discrimination against burakumin in employment outside of their communities and the haphazard nature of the work that men typically found as a result, it was buraku women who were the real breadwinners for their families, through the ad hoc jobs that they took on to make ends meet. Despite their vital economic role, however, “Kei” wrote, women found themselves regarded as little more than indentured servants by both their husbands and in-laws. Men in the buraku community certainly suffered the effects of discrimination, but it was the women who paid the price for it. The author then turned to a criticism of the Suihei movement itself: For this reason, I would first of all like to implore the men of our buraku community to do some soul-searching (although I wouldn’t say that this applies to all of them equally). Among those who understand that we are insulted for being burakumin and know the frustration of being oppressed, who adore humanity and take part in a movement of love for humankind, are there not some who look upon their wives, sisters, and mothers at home as being less intelligent than men simply because they are women? Are there not those who look down 36. “Suiheisha no shimaitachi e,” Suihei shinbun, no. 1 (June 20, 1924). 37. “Buraku shimai e,” Suihei shinbun, no. 2 (July 20, 1924).

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upon women as parasitically living off the strength of men, and insult them for it? If there are, I believe that such people do not qualify to take part in the Suihei movement.

The writer closed by questioning the degree to which the Suiheisha was earnestly concerned about alleviating the problems that buraku women faced as women in their own communities. It seems that such doubts were justified. The women’s column would appear just one more time in the pages of the Suihei shinbun before disappearing for the remainder of the publication’s run. Although activists in the National Women’s Suiheisha continued to publish their views in regional journals and newspapers sympathetic to tenant farmers’ unions and the Suiheisha, the chance for a national forum on issues facing buraku women disappeared with the column. Furthermore, despite the call to expand and develop the National Women’s Suiheisha at the third annual convention and subsequent calls to reinvigorate it from 1926 onward, the organization waned rapidly during the latter half of the 1920s. Several factors led to the decline of the National Women’s Suiheisha. For starters, we must bear in mind the historical context: during the latter half of the 1920s, increasing police suppression of leftist movements in general took their toll on rank and file membership in the larger Suiheisha, a trend that certainly would have affected the women’s Suiheisha

38. “Buraku fujin no tachiba kara,” Suihei shinbun, no. 3 (Aug. 20, 1924). 39. The final column, also titled “Buraku fujin no tachiba kara,” appeared in Suihei shinbun, no. 5 (Oct. 20, 1924). This article criticized “bourgeois” feminists for their class prejudice against proletarian and buraku women alike, showing the rising influence of class-based ideas about the movement and the place of the minority in Japa nese society. Publication of the Suihei shinbun continued, with periods of hiatus due to the orga nization’s inability to cover costs through membership dues and increasingly frequent police suppression, until August 1940. 40. One notable example was the Aikoku shinbun, which served as the de facto organ of both the Suiheisha and the Japan Farmers’ Union in Mie Prefecture. See Kurokawa, “Hisabetsu buraku to sei sabetsu,” p. 65. 41. Ibid., p. 56. Kurokawa notes that the National Women’s Suiheisha was reorganized into the “women’s section” (fujin-bu) in 1928. The change was carried out in line with a structural reorga nization of the Suiheisha, but it did not reverse the declining activity in the women’s section.

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as well. Other factors, however, were more unique to the experience of buraku women. The first of these was a fundamental difference in the kind of discrimination experienced by women’s Suiheisha organizers, on the one hand, and the rank and file on the other. Leading activists such as Takahashi Kurako, Itowaka Ryūko, and Nakanishi Chiyoko, who were relatively privileged among the burakumin and so had greater contact with the majority culture, wrote and spoke eloquently about experiences of discrimination at the higher schools for girls or in marriage to commoners, but most buraku women could not easily relate to such experiences. For most buraku women, whose lives were largely confined to the buraku minority and their local communities, the most pressing problems were different: lack of educational opportunity due to traditions that placed no value on schooling for women, and overwork, exploitation, and mistreatment at the hands of husbands and in-laws. Such women found little to identify with in many of the writings and speeches of the leading figures of the women’s Suiheisha. Yet an even greater limitation to the promotion of a women’s voice in the movement may have lay in the attitudes and expectations of the Suiheisha’s male leaders: to what degree was the organization’s leadership prepared to support a thorough feminist critique of the various forms of discrimination faced by buraku women? In her groundbreaking study of the women’s Suiheisha, historian Suzuki Yūko asked Sakamoto Sei’ichirō to explain why he and other leaders had backed the creation of a women’s organization. Sakamoto recalled that the impetus for the proposal had come from an observation that he and others had made while attempting to organize local buraku communities: the women often seemed to be holding the men back from joining such a “radical” group. In order to facilitate greater community support—meaning primarily the support of the male heads of households— organizers needed to win over the

42. Ibid. 43. An early example of this kind of story involving a buraku woman’s personal experience of discrimination was the aforementioned “Letter from a Woman in Mental Anguish,” published in the first issue of the journal Suihei. See also Takahashi Kurako, “Kurushimi no naka kara ai to jiyū no tame,” originally published in Jiyū 1, no. 1 (July 1, 1924), reproduced in Suzuki Yūko, Suiheisen o mezasu onnatachi, pp. 17–22. 44. Kurokawa, “Hisabetsu buraku to sei sabetsu,” p. 71.

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women as well. The best way to do this, they soon realized, was to have women speakers and a women’s group of some sort. Women’s involvement was, in other words, not a goal in itself; instead it was considered a means to ensure more male participation. The early Suiheisha played an undeniably important role in transforming how those who joined it thought about their plight in and relationship to Japanese society. Giving burakumin a moral basis from which they could “be proud of being eta” and “hurl back labels of derision” that had for so long denied their basic humanity was for many an emancipatory affirmation of their human dignity. And yet, as revealed in the way it approached the problems of discrimination facing buraku women and in the way it simultaneously deployed symbols of modern Japanese nationalism and ethnic separatism, there was an opportunistic and reactive quality to the early Suiheisha’s critique of the problems of discrimination in Japanese society. During the heady early years of the Suiheisha, when the organization was growing rapidly, such contradictory and opportunistic characteristics were probably of little concern to rank-and-file members and leaders alike. While many seemed to claim a separate “national” identity for the minority, however defined, for most this was simply motivated by an attempt to draw on the energy they observed in anti-colonial movements for national self-determination in the wake of World War I. As Kurokawa points out, few seriously considered the deeper implications of such a stand for their position in Japanese society, nor were most ideologically committed to it. The ambiguity of the Suiheisha’s claims to a separate identity were evident in its fervent patriotism and loyalty to the emperor, described earlier, its near total lack of support for movements against Japanese colonialism, and its vehement reaction to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively barred all Japanese immigration to that country. Most in the Suiheisha at this time had yet to formulate an

45. Suzuki Yūko, Suiheisen o mezasu onnatachi, p. 60. 46. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 176. 47. The Suiheisha reacted to the 1924 Immigration Act by presenting a formal letter of complaint to the U.S. ambassador to Japan, and with a palpable sense of moral outrage in the statements from the movement’s leaders and rank-and-file members alike. Minami Umekichi even advocated going to war with the United States over this insult

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appreciation of the causes of discrimination that went beyond the social Darwinist view that different races or ethnic groups would naturally clash and seek dominance over one another, or that acknowledged differences in the way discrimination was experienced within the minority across gender lines. Consequently, its approach offered no real foundation for building a solid critique of discrimination as a social and economic phenomenon affecting more than just the burakumin, who were conceived of as a homogeneous group.

Early 1920s Korean Organizations and Views of Minority Identity During the early 1920s, the minority Korean experience in Japan was powerfully shaped by particular demographic characteristics. As we have seen, the Korean population in Japan remained highly itinerant and predominantly male throughout the decade. Most of these single Korean men were laborers in the construction and public works sectors, followed by those who were unemployed or had no known occupation. While laborers and the unemployed were obviously a very important part of the minority community, and thus played a major role in social movements among the Korean minority during the prewar period, students— who as a group never amounted to more than 2 percent of the minority population during the early 1920s—provided an even more vocal source of activism, and in many ways helped to shape the Korean labor movement that would also arise during this period. In the wake of the Korean annexation, these students, and those who followed them to Japan after 1910, continued to characterize themselves as the vanguard of a national self-strengthening movement, although the challenge this new movement faced was much more daunting than the previous objective of maintaining independence. Particularly at this point in the history of world imperialism, when examples of colonies that had succeeded at liberation were scarce, the to Japa nese honor, while Hirano Shōken saw a silver lining in the uproar: majority Japa nese were now in a better position to reflect on the effects of discrimination since they could see things from the victim’s standpoint, and the burakumin could take it upon themselves to act as Japan’s representatives in decrying white racism, since they were the only people in Japan untainted by prejudice. See Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, pp. 56–58.

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problem of how to achieve such liberation was monumental indeed. The outbreak of World War I seemed to offer hope, however, as Korean students in Japan, along with exiled nationalist leaders in China, began to consider the opportunities that the international politics of global conflict might yield. Some, for example, anticipated that China and Germany might unite in a war against Japan if Germany and its allies were to prevail in the European war. (Japan had already angered the governments of both countries by allying itself with Great Britain against Germany and by issuing its imperious Twenty-One Demands to the Chinese.) With Japan’s defeat in this hypothetical war, they surmised, the road would be opened to Korean independence. Others believed that a coming war between Japan and China over the Twenty-One Demands would draw the United States in on the side of the Chinese, resulting in Japan’s defeat and Korea’s liberation. The end of the war brought neither of these scenarios to pass, but in the aftermath Korean students found new hope in Wilson’s call for national self-determination. Believing that they had found a world military power committed to championing the desires of the colonized—no matter who the colonizer might be—Korean students in Tokyo began to discuss ways of bringing international attention to the plight of Korea. These discussions resulted in the formation of the Zen-Chōsen Seinen Dokuritsudan (All-Korea Youth Independence Corps), which unveiled its own declaration of Korean independence in Tokyo on February 8, 1919. Authored by the future novelist Yi Kwangsu, the declaration framed Korean national identity in the following terms: Our people, who possess a history that has endured for four thousand three hundred years, are truly one of the oldest civilized peoples in the world. Although Korea has, since the Period of the Three Kingdoms, frequently served China, this was no more than a diplomatic formality agreed between the rulers of the two countries. Korea was the nation of the Korean people and at no time did she ever relinquish her status as a unified state or fall under the actual domination of a foreign state.

48. Weiner, Origins, pp. 127, 129. 49. For an in-depth examination of the unveiling of this declaration, see ibid., pp. 133–36, and Wells, “Background to the March First Movement,” pp. 11–14.

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The declaration went on to describe the modern history of relations between Korea and Japan, the injustice of Japan’s claims to sovereignty, and the brutality of its rule. It concluded with a dire assessment of Korea’s future under continued Japanese rule: Both publicly and privately discrimination between Koreans and Japanese on the basis of superior and inferior is built up. Since our people receive an education inferior to that offered to Japanese residents, the Korean people will be reduced to remaining the slaves of the Japanese forever. History is revised and our sacred historical and racial myths and prestige are being eradicated.

The language that the declaration employed spoke directly to the idea that Wilson had put before Versailles at around the same time. Far from being a call to the Korean people for popular resistance to Japanese rule, the members of the All-Korea Youth Independence Corps hoped that the document would stir the conscience of world powers such as Great Britain and the United States and win their moral and diplomatic support for Korean independence. There were strong elements of elitism and opportunism in the group’s appeal: many members, including Yi himself, in fact took a dim view of Korean tradition and its former political and cultural subservience to China, and moreover, had little faith in Korea’s “sacred historical and racial myths and prestige.” As Kenneth Wells has pointed out about these students, most were Christians who had converted to the religion precisely because they saw in it the key to establishing a culture in Korea strong enough to sustain national independence. They found little if anything of redeeming value in the Korean traditions at hand. Almost any hope of support from the great world powers was dashed in the wake of the March First Movement: Japan’s brutal suppression of the movement spurred no response from these governments. Many of the student leaders from the pre-1919 period left Japan at around this time. The student leaders who replaced them came to find new allies, this time within Japan, in the social and intellectual movements that characterized the age of imperial democracy. Yoshino Sakuzō, who had voiced

50. This excerpt, and the previous one quoted, were taken from the complete translation of the declaration in Weiner, Origins, pp. 219–24. 51. Wells, “Background to the March First Movement,” pp. 10–13.

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criticism of Japan’s assimilation policies in Korea even prior to the events of the spring of 1919, welcomed Korean students to a meeting of his Reimeikai on March 19, and the Shinjinkai at Tokyo Imperial University likewise voiced its support for the Korean people—without going so far as to demand independence for them, however— and eventually welcomed two Korean students into its ranks. More than to the liberals, however, Korean students were drawn toward Japanese anarchists and socialists. The idea of liberation promised by their ideologies appealed to Korean students who felt that the Korean people had been ignored by the liberal, democratic states. As many as thirty Korean students may have participated in Sakai Toshihiko’s Cosmos Club, formed in 1921, and police noted with rising anxiety the radical tone of the speeches Koreans made at these meetings. On the anarchist side, Ōsugi Sakae exerted considerable ideological influence over students such as Pak Yfl. In November of 1921, the Kokutokai (Black Wave Society) was formed by a group of Korean students of various radical ideological persuasions to serve as a Korean study group for socialist ideologies. As was the case with the Japanese Left at this time, the Kokutokai soon split along anarchist and communist lines, but for both factions it was ultimately “the people” of Korea who would provide the driving force of Korean liberation, however it was conceived. 52. Yoshino’s first criticism of Japa nese colonial policy in Korea came in 1916, in an essay containing his reflections on a trip through Korean and Manchuria (“Man-kan o shisatsu shite,” Chūō kōron [June 1916]). Yoshino’s criticisms of Japa nese policy in Korea are outlined in Peattie, “Japa nese Attitudes toward Colonialism,” pp. 105–8. It should be noted in passing that Yoshino, while supporting the Korean struggle against colonial oppression on moral grounds, stopped short of advocating independence for Korea. Instead, he called for Korean self-rule and greater representation within the Japa nese empire. The details of the March 19 meeting of the Reimeikai, to which Kim Uyfng, Paek Nam’un, and six other Korean students were invited, can be found in Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, pp. 23–24. The two Koreans for whom membership in the Shinjinkai has been confirmed were Kim Chunyfn, the first to join in the immediate aftermath of March First, and Kim Tuyfng. For details on them and the Shinjinkai’s position on the March First Movement, see Henry Smith, Japan’s First Student Radicals, pp. 54, 294. 53. Naimushō keihokyoku, “Chōsenjin kinkyō gaiyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 144. 54. Naimushō keihokyoku hoanka, “Taishō 15-nenjū ni okeru zairyū Chōsenjin no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 209.

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How these radicalized students envisioned the subaltern of their own minority in Japan reveals much about the positions taken by Korean student activists on the question of minority identity. In this regard, the speeches made by several students at a meeting to protest the torture and murders of Korean laborers in the so-called Shinano River Incident of July 1922 are instructive. The incident came to light when farmers downstream from the construction site of the Shinetsu hydraulic power plant in Niigata Prefecture discovered the bodies of several Korean laborers along the riverbank. Subsequent investigations by the Yomiuri Shinbun, the Korean newspaper Tonga Ilbo, and the Zai-Tōkyō Chōsen Ryūgakusei Gakuyūkai (Fellowship Society of Korean Students in Tokyo) revealed that the Ogura-gumi construction firm had been severely mistreating the six hundred Korean laborers brought over to work on the project, subjecting them to virtual slavery. Those who tried to escape or refused to work due to illness or malnutrition were routinely beaten and tortured by their Japanese supervisors, who attempted to dispose of the evidence by throwing the bodies of those who died from the abuse into the river. Police records of the speeches made at the protest meeting held on September 7 document the speakers’ interpretations of the situation. Chfng Unhae pointed out “these [laborers] are proletarians (musansha), but they also put up with much violence due to the prejudice against them as Koreans,” adding, “this is not just a problem for us Koreans alone—the Japanese proletariat cannot look upon this as something that has nothing to do with them.” Pak Yfl decried the “evil system” that had permitted such conditions to persist as “the result wrought by the existing capitalistic social structure, which needs to be destroyed at its very roots.” Shin Yfngu declared that “the two choices facing us proletarians are to either resist the bourgeoisie at every turn or else die, and this is simply a problem of strength. We must join forces and collide with the ruling class.” Kim Sangdu added, “The devil that sucks the blood of

55. For details of the incident, see Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiryoku, pp. 212–13, and Satō Yasuji, “Niigata-ken Nakatsugawa Chōsenjin gyakusatsu jiken (1922-nen),” pp. 59– 96. On the investigation into the incident, see Satō and also Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, pp. 67– 69. Satō points out that the name of this incident is somewhat of a misnomer, since the construction project was actually upstream on the Nakatsu River, which is a tributary of the Shinano River.

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your brothers and sisters and leaves our brethren [dōhō] by the side of the road to starve to death is the bourgeoisie.” Far more so than for the Suiheisha at this time, the influence of classbased ideologies and the Japanese sources through which these were transmitted had a formative influence on the way in which Korean student activists viewed their minority. This was quite natural, in light of Korean students’ interest in the intellectual currents surrounding them at this time. What should be borne in mind is that, despite the large socioeconomic gulf that separated these largely yangban students from the kinds of Koreans who became laborers in Japan, they still referred to workers as “our brethren” whose class enemy was the bourgeoisie, and included themselves among the ranks of the “proletarians.” Korean student activists claimed that Koreans in Japan were laborers, and as such part of a global working class that shared affinities with Japanese workers that the latter needed to recognize. Even so, they maintained some sense of a distinction between the two. Chfng Unhae’s comments underscored the value that activists attributed to a specifically Korean experience of both oppression and empowerment, as did the titles of many of the newspapers that students produced during these years, such as Chōsen seinen (Korean youth), and Pak Yfl’s anarchist Futei senjin (໾Ǚ冂Ҏ, the stalwart Korean)—which could alternately be read as “the unruly Korean,” a common derogatory phrase of official origin that evoked images of Korean disloyalty and subversion. The idea that Korean and Japanese laborers needed to understand one another and find common cause in combating exploitation naturally attracted student activists to the idea of having Koreans in Japan take part in the labor movement. To this end they took the lead in organizing labor unions for their underclass “brethren.” The first such unions were the Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai (Tokyo League of Korean Labor), established in November 1922, and the Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai

56. Senkō hiotsu, “Dai-627-gō.” This document appears to have been a record of the meeting compiled by the police force of the government-general of Korea. 57. The title employed a play on words in which the Japa nese word for “stalwart,” futoi (໾Ǚ), was glossed along the side with “ futei” (ɝɎȬ), which is how the word futoi would be pronounced in Japa nese working-class brogue. It thus becomes homonymous with the word for “malcontent” (ϡ䗲, futei).

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(Osaka League of Korean Labor), founded the following month. Both were the creation of Korean student activists inspired by communism such as Paek Mu, Kim Chongbfm, and Kim Yaksu; Japanese champions of the rights of the oppressed such as Fuse Tatsuji and Kuroda Hisao; and, particularly in the case of the Osaka League of Korean Labor, the Japanese labor organizer Nishio Suehiro and others involved in the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei (Japan Federation of Labor). The similarities between these two organizations did not end with their names and ideological orientations; their platforms also echoed each other. The Tokyo federation’s platform promised to “advance the Korean labor movement internationally, and bring about the absolute victory of the proletariat classes of the world,” while the Osaka group pledged to “secure victory in the class struggle” and “establish the right to life of the working class.” The Tokyo group further pledged to bring about “the promotion of class consciousness and security of employment among Korean laborers in Japan,” whereas the Osaka union swore to “destroy the system of capital that wrings the very sweat and blood from our bodies, and construct a new society based upon the producers.” Clearly, the language of class featured prominently in both of these documents. Equally noteworthy, there is no mention of the Korean people as a separate ethnic group, or of Korean independence. Nishinarita Yutaka’s suggestion that direct references to the problem of Korean independence were left out in an attempt to avoid police suppression may explain in part this choice of rhetoric. But we must also bear in mind the influence of an identity politics centered on socioeconomic class rather than ethnicity. “The Korean people” were no longer the focus of these organizations; instead their central interest was “the Korean labor movement” or “Korean laborers in Japan.” As Kim Yaksu wrote in regard to the rise of these unions, “Until today, it has usually been the case that the movement of certain [Korean] students has dominated the Korean movement in Japan. From here on, however, the movement will

58. For the details of the events leading to the formation of these two unions, see Weiner, Origins, pp. 106– 7. 59. Quoted in Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 142. 60. Ibid.

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follow the dictates of the vanguard of the actual proletariat.”  Kim no doubt envisioned the “vanguard of the proletariat” as working toward the liberation of Koreans from Japanese colonial rule, but the phrase did not suggest that this goal would be a priority, nor did it imply anything specifically “Korean” about the vanguard. The reconfiguration of Korean identity into one that was fundamentally proletarian subtly altered the aims of the movement and its relations with the Japanese majority. This transformation also demonstrated how far Korean student leaders had moved from the calls for national self-determination that had characterized leaders’ ideas only a few years before. Kim Chongbfm expressed this new mindset in an appeal and warning to Japanese laborers after the establishment of the Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai. In the past, most Koreans believed that all of the Japanese were our enemies. And yet, enlightened Korean workers and others of the proletarian class have come to realize that this was a misunderstanding, and have declared that they will join together with you in solidarity and take a stand on the front lines in the battle for the abolition of all class distinctions. . . . You, who are in exactly the same situation [as us], surely must answer this call. By doing so, the clashes between Japanese and Korean laborers that have occurred until now will naturally disappear, together we will gain victory in the struggle for liberation of the proletarian class, and true peace, equality, and freedom will come about for the first time in the world history of the human race. If by some chance, however, you resist this and continue to harbor the same feelings of racial superiority that have deluded you until now, thus looking down upon or otherwise rejecting Korean laborers, it should be as plain as day to you that they will then become the tools of the capitalists and wreck havoc on the battle lines of your labor movement. Wise laborers of Japan! Join in union with your fellow workers and comrades-in-arms the Korean laborers, and rise up in struggle against your common enemy!

Although the portion of Kim’s article that precedes this passage delineates how Korean laborers wound up in Japan as result of dispossession at the hands of colonial administrators and their Japanese capitalist 61. Kim Yaksu, “Chōsen rōdō kaikyū no shinkō undō,” Rōdō shinbun, Dec. 5, 1922, quoted in Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, p. 70. 62. Kim Chongbfm, “Ōsaka Chōsen rōdō dōmeikai ni taisuru kansō.”

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allies, he never explicitly states what Korean laborers in Japan hoped to gain from the “victory in the struggle for liberation” to be enjoyed by the Korean and Japanese proletariat alike. This was no doubt in part a means of avoiding deletions of “inflammatory” text by the government censor, but the lack of explanation as to what “liberation” meant for Korean laborers, or for Japanese laborers, confused the issue. Was destruction of the system of capitalist exploitation their primary goal, or would they opt for Korean independence if it could be more easily obtained by means other than class war? Furthermore, by stating that Japanese and Korean laborers are “in exactly the same situation” and threatening that the Koreans would “wreck havoc on the battle lines of [their] labor movement” if Japanese laborers should continue to discriminate against them, Kim suggests that the interests of the two groups were in fact identical, with the destruction of the capitalist system taking precedence over the problem of Korean independence. Although the students felt an affinity with Korean laborers in Japan, their attempts to awaken class consciousness among such laborers and organize them in unions met with little success during the early 1920s. As late as 1925, fewer than two thousand of the estimated 100,000 Korean laborers in Japan had joined unions like the Tokyo and Osaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai. The roving nature of Korean labor gangs certainly did not help the lengthy process of forming the proper bonds of trust necessary for union building, and students proved themselves to be very ineffective at explaining how Korean laborers fit into the struggle against the bourgeoisie in a way that those workers could readily comprehend. Newspapers published by Korean activists and labor organizers during the early 1920s illustrated this problem. Many publications, such as Pak’s Futei senjin and even the Tokyo Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai’s organ Rōdō dōmei (Labor alliance), appeared entirely in Japanese. Even those

63. Weiner, Origins, p. 108. 64. Issue no. 2 of Futei senjin can be found in the collection of Korean minority related materials at Ōhara shakai mondai kenkyūjo (request no. “senzen 857-1”). I have not found this edition or any other reproduced in any published collection of source materials to date. Extant issues of Rōdō dōmei are reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsen mondai shiryō sōsho, vol. 5: Zainichi Chōsenjin undō kankei kikanshi (kaihō-mae), pp. 32–36.

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that appeared in Korean, such as Cheokhudae (Reconnaissance troops), published by the communist student group the “North Star Society” (Hokuseikai, founded in April 1923) or the Daejung sinmun (People’s news) produced by its successor the January Society (Ilwol-hoe in Korean, Ichigatsu-kai in Japanese), featured hangul text that was usually heavily peppered with terms and phrases rendered in Chinese characters. (This at a time when as many as half of the Korean men living in Osaka could not understand even simple spoken Japanese, and more than this number were illiterate in Korean as well.) Student appeals to working-class solidarity and mutual respect between Korean and Japanese laborers were much more likely to reach the eyes and ears of those Koreans and Japanese like themselves than the laborers on whose behalf they wrote and spoke. And what of those Korean laborers? As the demographic data presented in Chapter 3 indicate, the Koreans who came to Japan to work in the 1910s and 1920s led a largely itinerant lifestyle. Furthermore, even those who found settled employment in a mine or factory rather than as part of a roving construction crew lived in situations that were more or less segregated from the Japanese. Faced with the uncertainties that arose from their vulnerable position at the bottom of the labor market in a country whose language and customs most did not understand, they formed organizations for mutual aid and support. In many ways these functioned like traditional Korean ke associations: a group of laborers would pay “dues” into a pool that would be used to help out a member who had fallen on hard times. Many of these groups were found among construction workers in hanba work gangs, and Korean factory workers living in the Korean-run boarding houses of Osaka, Tokyo, and other urban areas. The construction-worker groups were led by the labor 65. Extant issues of Sekkōtai are reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsen mondai shiryō sōsho, vol. 5: Zainichi Chōsenjin undō kankei kikanshi (kaihō-mae), pp. 20–31. For a reproduction of Taishū shinbun, see pp. 367– 96. 66. Weiner, Origins, p. 74. Here Weiner quotes from a survey conducted in Osaka during 1923, which found that “more than 50 of the men and 80 of the women” could not even comprehend the Japa nese language, and 15,000 out of the 18,000 surveyed had either no knowledge of written Korean, or had not completed more than three years of formal schooling in Korea. 67. Kim Jungmi, “Wakayama,” p. 87.

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boss, or hanba-gashira, who required all the men under his charge to join. Groups of Korean factory workers, meanwhile, were presided over by the proprietor of the boarding house. While there were opportunities for exploitation and control in this arrangement, hanba-gashira and boarding-house proprietors were not solely, nor even primarily, interested in fleecing their workers and boarders through these organizations. Instead they were themselves Koreans who had lived in Japan long enough to master the language, amass the capital for their businesses, and cultivate a wide range of contacts among Japanese contractors and factory owners from whom they could solicit contracts or to whom they would introduce new laborers from among recent immigrants. Positioned between Japanese capital on the one hand and Korean labor on the other, their interests were never dominated by either: while they needed to please their Japanese connections, they also had to maintain a certain level of satisfaction among the Korean laborers under their charge in order to do so. The small size of these groups— as late as 1935, a full 42 percent of such groups in Osaka Prefecture had fewer than fifty members and 79 percent had less than one hundred members— may have reduced the potential for exploitation through frequent personal interactions among the leaders and members. Trying to probe what these groups thought about their identity as Koreans is not easy given the lack of available materials. As both Tonomura and Nishinarita have pointed out, however, it is misleading to follow the categories of “conciliatory fellowship type” ( yūwa shinboku-kei) and “ethnic nationalist type” (minzoku-kei) used by the Home Ministry in its surveys; since there were no set criteria used in making the distinction, a given group could fall into either category based simply on the guesswork of the local police filing the report. The names of the Korean groups, however, suggest something about their nature and outlook. Police records note that labels such as shinbokukai (fellowship society), kyōjokai (mutual aid society), and kyōsaikai (mutual benefit society) appeared in the names of many. Many groups used terms such as 68. Tonomura, “Shinboku fujo dantai,” pp. 112–13. 69. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 141. 70. Tonomura, “Shinboku fujo dantai,” p. 106; Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin, p. 137. In English, see Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 74–84.

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Chōsen[ jin] (Korea[n]), uri (“our” in Korean, rendered in katakana in the Japanese) or chōyō (ᳱ䱑, “morning sun,” with the first character being the same chō as in Chōsen), suggesting a sense of national identity in contrast to (although not necessarily opposed to) Japanese identity. The names of others, however, incorporated a phrase indicative of a specific region in Korea where their members had immigrated from, signifying a focus on regional rather than national identity similar to the kenjinkai found among Japanese immigrants to the Americas. There were also many Christian organizations of this type, which sought to convert Korean workers (and often students as well) to the religion through fellowship and mutual welfare. Whatever concerns the authorities might have had regarding these groups, most were neither overtly opposed to Japanese rule of Korea nor conspicuously supportive of the empire. They served primarily to help Korean laborers weather the hardships of life in Japan, and secondarily to promote the cultivation and betterment of these laborers, so that they would be more acceptable to their Japanese neighbors. In the latter regard, they shared certain concerns with the Sōaikai, although none operated on a scale or enjoyed the official patronage that the Sōaikai did; nor did they concern themselves with controlling the minority and combating “unsound” influences through coercive force. The Kyōto Chōsenjin Rōdō Kyōsaikai (Ҁ䛑ᳱ冂Ҏ࢈‫⏜݅ڡ‬Ӯ, Kyoto Korean Labor Mutual Benefit Society) in Kyoto and the Chōsenjin Rōdō Saishinkai (ᳱ冂Ҏ࢈ ‫⏜ڡ‬䘆Ӯ, Korean Labor Tribute Society) of Hyogo Prefecture, both established in 1920, provide illustrative examples. The Kyoto group’s aims and goals consisted of “promoting fellowship and mutual aid in times of trouble among Korean laborers living in Kyoto, proving introduction to employment opportunities, and encouraging voluntary saving and intellectual development among such laborers in order to increase their well-being and prosperity.” Likewise, the Hyogo group listed among the activities it promoted enrichment of knowledge, improvement of moral character, encouragement of hygiene, introduction

71. Tonomura, “Shinboku fujo dantai,” p. 108. 72. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin, p. 136. 73. Quoted in ibid., p. 139.

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to employment, encouragement of personal savings, and mutual aid in times of difficulty. These objectives were clearly in accord with the concerns and interests of the Koreans who established such groups. The Chōsenjin Rōdō Saishinkai, for example, was founded by Kim Yfngdal, a ginseng merchant in Kobe of yangban lineage; the boarding-house proprietor Yi Uisgng; and Chfng Segwan, a factory operative at Kawasaki Shipbuilding who had formerly served in the colonial police force in Korea. Such men represented a rising minority bourgeoisie that was similar in many ways to the buraku community leaders examined in Chapter 2. Their greater degree of interaction with the surrounding majority made them understand some of the reasons for the majority’s prejudice against the Korean underclass in Japan. Some may have even come to empathize with such views in part. Yet the realization that they themselves could never fully escape identification with it in the eyes of the majority gave them an incentive to improve the image of that underclass as best they could. Just as with Japanese labor organizations such as the Yūaikai, the groups that formed to bring Korean laborers together to contemplate the problems facing them may have encouraged their critical consciousness. Koreans belonging to a fellowship organization known as the Chōsen

74. Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 23. 75. Ibid. Kim Yfngdal took part in establishing a variety of yūwa organizations in Kobe after this, investing considerable sums of his own money in them, and seems to have had enjoyed close relations with high-ranking police and government officials in Kobe due to his wealth, philanthropy, and position in the Korean community. His earnings from the importation and sale of Korean ginseng may have been considerable. A survey by the Social Affairs Bureau of the Kobe municipal government in 1927 recorded a ginseng merchant with a monthly income of between 500 and 600 yen; although the individual was not named, it may well have been Kim. (Kobe shiyakusho shakaika, “Zaishin hantō minzoku no genjō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 612.) Despite such an upstanding leadership, and the fact that the organizers expressed a particular interest in forming a “wholesome” group that would not provoke the suspicions of the authorities, the Saishinkai still managed to alarm police with the design of its insignia: a Korean t’aeggk at the center of a fivepointed star. To the vigilant and suspicious author of one police report, this symbolized the idea of Korea gaining its independence with American help. (Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 25.)

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Dōshikai (Society of Fellow Koreans) participated in the second May Day demonstrations held in Kobe in 1922, and during the following year’s celebration members of the Christian labor fellowship group the Kobe Chōsen Rōyūkai (Kobe Korean Laboring Friends Society) participated, although they marched as individual demonstrators rather than as representatives of the group. There is also evidence to suggest that Koreans involved in such fellowship organizations, including those who could be regarded as officers in them, joined more radical Korean labor unions as these began to emerge. The growth of the Korean labor movement that would characterize the final years of the 1920s and continue into the 1930s was greatly supported by the increased critical awareness of laborers such as these. Before leaving the subject of Koreans in the early 1920s, we must acknowledge the significance of the massacre of Koreans in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923. Many of the details of the brutality unleashed on Koreans by the police, army, and the ubiquitous “self-policing” vigilante groups known as jikeidan, which were formed in response to official orders to the populace, have been well documented by many scholars. A universally accepted figure for the numbers of 76. Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, pp. 28, 30. Nothing more is known about the Dōshikai after this incident. The Rōyūkai was established in the summer of 1922 by a collection of Korean and Japanese Christians. In addition to the names of many Japa nese clergy in Kobe, the list of the group’s trustees contains the names of social affairs officials in the municipal and prefectural governments. Only two of the names listed belong to Koreans, both described as “businessmen” ( jitsugyōka). 77. Horiuchi (Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 25) points out that one Pu Chongyfl, who had been an officer in the Chōsenjin Rōdō Saishinkai, went on to become one of the leaders of the Kobe Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, an affiliate of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei discussed later. Likewise, Tonomura reveals that a Korean labor foreman (oyakata) named Yi Hyangu, who was the central figure of a mutual aid group known as the Senjin Yūwakai (冂Ҏট੠Ӯ), also served as an adviser to the Kobe Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai. Many other Koreans involved in such fellowship groups in the Kobe area during the early 1920s also took part in the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, as well as the leftist consumer unions that will be described in the next chapter. See Tonomura, “Shinboku fujo dantai,” pp. 115–18. 78. Weiner (Origins, pp. 164–200) provides the most thorough analysis of the massacre in English. In Japa nese, the work of Kang Tfksang remains perhaps the most comprehensive on the massacres. His Kantō daishinsai represents the distillation of Kang’s many years of research into the details of the killings. Yamada Shōji has written

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Korean lives lost has never been arrived at, however: estimates in the aftermath of the massacre ranged from the unrealistically low figure of 243, produced by a Ministry of Justice inquiry, to the shockingly high total of 6,415 deaths, which came from a survey conducted by a group of Korean students in Japan for the pro-independence newspaper Tongnip sinmun, published in Shanghai. The massacres occurred in the context of rumors that Koreans were poisoning wells and committing acts of organized violence against Japanese—rumors that had spread throughout the most devastated portions of Tokyo and Yokohama by the end of the second day after the quake. While the police provided an important catalyst for the hysteria by accepting and spreading unsubstantiated reports of Korean uprisings, the ease with which all manner of inconceivable rumors of Korean insurgency and treachery were accepted and passed along at various levels, without any attempt at verification, indicates that civilians, police, many articles on how the massacres were reported and how responsibility for them was dealt with in their aftermath. See Yamada, “Kantō daishinsai Chōsenjin bōdō ryūgen o meguru chihō shinbun to minshū,” Zainichi Chōsenjinshi kenkyū, no. 5, pp. 57– 73; “Kantō daishinsaiji no Chōsenjin gyakusatsu jiken saiban to gyakusatsu sekinin no yukue,” Zainichi Chōsenjinshi kenkyū, no. 20, pp. 76– 97; “Kantō daishinsai Chōsenjin gyakusatsu to Nihonjin minshū no higaisha ishiki no yukue,” Zainichi Chōsenjinshi kenkyū, no. 25, pp. 30–38; and “Kantō daishinsaiji, Chōsenjin gyakusatsu jiken no kokka sekinin to sono inpei katei” (parts 1 and 2), Tōitsu hyōron, nos. 403–4, pp. 92– 99, 104–11. 79. Kang Tfksang reproduces the findings of these and two other surveys conducted at this time, along with calculations of Korean casualties reported in various Japa nese newspapers, in Kantō daishinsai, pp. 215–20. These totals are for the Tokyo area and its surrounding prefectures. In addition to the surveys and estimates given earlier, Yoshino Sakuzō’s independent survey claimed that a total of 2,711 Koreans had been murdered, including two as far away as Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture, while a survey conducted by the right-wing Kokuryūkai declared the total number of Korean deaths in Tokyo Prefecture alone at 722. Although the government figures are obviously unrealistically low, the students’ survey also appears to be quite inaccurate. According to Tamura Noriyuki’s revised statistics for Korean populations by year and prefecture during the pre-1945 period, the total population of Koreans in the seven Kantō area prefectures surveyed by the students as of December 1922 stood at only 6,102 individuals. (Calculated from population figures by prefecture, in Tamura Toshiyuki, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō [I],” p. 62.) Even if the minority community experienced rapid growth during the first eight months of 1923, a casualty figure higher than the previous years’ total population seems untenable.

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military officers, and government officials alike all found the idea of Korean criminality, violence, and subversiveness perfectly believable given commonly held stereotypes. In the aftermath of the massacres, critics of the government, especially socialists and labor activists, tried to make sense of this outpouring of bloodlust by blaming the authorities. On one level this charge was quite valid: the police had after all lent credence to many of the stories of Korean uprisings and had created the rumor that Korean malcontents were acting in tandem with socialists, just as they had taken a hand in the murders of the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and many socialist labor leaders including Hirasawa Keishichi. The army had done its part as well. Not only had army officers taken part in the murders of Ōsugi, Hirasawa, and the others, but in many instances whole regiments had carried out the slaughter of defenseless Koreans trying to flee the lawlessness of the city. The Narashino cavalry regiment’s machine-gunning and bayoneting of Korean refugees at Kameido on September 2 was just one of many such incidents. Yet for Koreans who survived the mayhem or heard about it from those who did, it was the brutality of the civilian “self-policing” jikeidan groups in pursuing hapless Koreans that left the most indelible impression. Composed largely of elements from the urban underclass, the jikeidan presented Koreans caught in the devastated areas, and even areas outside of the destruction, with the omnipresent threat of sudden, violent persecution. Far from simply acting on the orders of the police and army, these vigilante groups took an enthusiastic hand in the beatings and killings. Some even seemed willing to challenge the authorities in persecuting Koreans, especially after September 4, when the Home Ministry instructed local police to crack down on jikeidan lawlessness and offer protective custody to any Koreans seeking it. Vigilante groups in many areas demanded that police hand over such Koreans, or attacked police stations in which Koreans were held and killed the hapless inmates. In the case of the army slaughter of Koreans at Kameido, 80. Kang Tfksang, Kantō daishinsai, pp. 173– 76. 81. Weiner, Origins, p. 179. The worst incidents of this type occurred in Honjō and Jinbohara, Saitama Prefecture, where at least 200 Koreans in protective custody were killed. The postwar Korean minority leader Sin Hongje later recalled the frightening

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Japa nese passengers on the trains from which the unfortunate Koreans had been dragged cheered the troops on with shouts of “Banzai,” “Traitors,” and “Kill all the Koreans!” In the aftermath, most Korean activists seemed to adhere to the standard interpretation offered by the Japanese Left for such behavior, namely that the Japanese masses had been duped by the imperialist policies of the ruling class into directing their anger at the Koreans instead of their real oppressors. For those who held to such an interpretation, proving that the authorities had played a central role in disseminating and even starting the rumors became a pivotal point of argument. But for Koreans who witnessed the carnage committed largely by ordinary, working-class Japanese, such arguments and explanations must have seemed superficial, if not beside the point. The experience of the Korean massacre of September 1923 would linger in the memory of the Korean community for decades and convince many Koreans in Japan of the wisdom of “sticking to their own kind” rather than putting themselves at the mercy of Japanese prejudice.

The Impact of the Class Argument in the Late 1920s: The Rise of the Suiheisha “Dissolution Faction” By the middle of the decade, a class-based appreciation of buraku identity came to the forefront of Suiheisha interpretations of the problems facing the minority, as the movement groped for a more effective way to night he spent in protective custody at a police station in Yachimata, Chiba Prefecture, during which jikeidan representatives tried to threaten police into handing over the Koreans under their protection, and when this did not work, attempted to break into the jail cell through the outside wall of the building. (Sin, “Rekishi ni oten nokosu na! Kono sangyaku,” in Kgm Pyfngdong, Kantō daishinsai Chōsenjin gyakusatsu mondai kankei shiryō, vol. 4: Chōsenjin gyakusatsu ni kansuru shokuminchi Chōsen no hannō, p. 304.) 82. Weiner, Origins, p. 177. 83. See, for example, an article in the Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai organ Rōdō dōmei by the socialist lawyer Yamazaki Kesaya, in which he argues that the rumors must have been created by those in the central government as a means of refocusing popular animosity on an easy scapegoat, so as to prevent another situation like the Rice Riots from occurring. See Yamazaki, “Ryūgen higo no shingenchi,” Rōdō dōmei, no. 2 (Feb. 20, 1924), reprinted in Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsen mondai shiryō sōsho, vol. 5: Zainichi Chōsenjin undō kankei kikanshi (kaihō-mae), p. 32.

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deal with discrimination and preserve the organization. Despite the enthusiasm that had surrounded the Suiheisha after its inauguration, many rank-and-file members, especially the youngest of these, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the group’s main weapon against discrimination: the “thorough censure” or kyūdan campaign. Although these usually did result in a written apology from the offending individual, critics charged that these usually vociferous mass campaigns also reinforced stereotypes of burakumin as clannish, violent, and vindictive. Against the haphazardness and inefficiency of such an approach, Marxism appeared to many to offer a more rational method for realizing liberation from discrimination. The establishment of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) only four months after the Suiheisha and the influence it began to exert on intellectuals and the labor movement in Japan further contributed to this faith in the veracity of Marxist doctrines in solving general problems of social injustice, including discrimination. Finally, many of the Suiheisha rank and file no doubt found the idea of the proletariat attractive, since they too suffered from a grinding poverty that was both a cause and a result of their ostracism from mainstream society. The group that took the lead in bringing a rigid class consciousness to bear on the buraku problem was the Zenkoku Suiheisha Seinen Dōmei (National Suiheisha Youth League), formed in November 1923. The leader of this group, Takahashi Sadaki, had joined both the Suiheisha and the JCP as soon as these groups were launched, before he himself had even turned twenty. Through the Zenkoku Suiheisha Seinen Dōmei, Takahashi set out to combat the theoretical chaos he saw in the social analysis of the early Suiheisha. The groundwork he laid for a Marxist analysis of anti-buraku discrimination would remain the most accepted and authoritative appreciation of the buraku problem for those in the movement throughout the rest of the prewar period, and much of the postwar period as well. Takahashi’s Tokushu buraku issen-nenshi (The one-thousand-year history of the special hamlet), published in 1924, (reprinted in 1968), contained the most concise statement of his views. Takahashi borrowed heav-

84. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 187–89.

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ily from Kita Sadakichi’s research on the origins of the burakumin to argue against the idea of a separate racial or ethnic identity for the minority. For Takahashi, the burakumin arose as the aggregate product of a thousand years of social transformation, during which the ruling classes created a class of senmin in order to give the lower classes a convenient pariah to despise, and thus keep them from venting their frustrations on those above them. Despite the abolition of pariah status, this system of social control remained, in Takahashi’s view, because status discrimination was one of the feudal remnants of the incomplete bourgeois revolution that was the Meiji Restoration. Takahashi claimed that Japanese capitalism relegated the burakumin to perpetual pariah status by propagating notions of their inferiority among the proletariat and petit bourgeoisie, thus dividing groups that would otherwise naturally align to overthrow the ruling class and its system of capitalist exploitation. Even though he saw the burakumin as the product of a long history of class exploitation, Takahashi did not go so far as to claim that they were just another part of the proletariat. He understood that burakumin suffered discrimination at the hands of the proletariat in Japan as well as exploitation by the ruling class. Echoing Takahashi’s position, the Seinen Dōmei organ Senmin explained the relationship between the burakumin and the proletariat at large in the following way: Sometimes one hears criticism from those who have forgotten the mission of the Suiheisha that we should dissolve it into the larger proletarian movement. This would be an extreme mistake. We are burakumin as well as proletarians, so our liberation depends on the eradication of these two kinds of discrimination. Therefore, from the standpoint of absolute liberation, we burakumin must join the army of the proletariat. But this does not mean that we should quit the Suiheisha in doing so. Rather, we must get rid of the old, superficial way of thinking which takes the Suiheisha to be nothing more than a movement for the eradication of discrimination, and in its place realize that the Suiheisha has a role to play in the in the larger proletarian movement.

85. “Suihei mondō,” Senmin, no. 7 (Aug. 15, 1924), quoted in Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, p. 110. Much like Pak Yfl’s use of the term “ futei senjin” as the title for his magazine, the Seinen Dōmei took the historical term senmin (䊸⇥), or “base people,” and turned it into its much more laudatory homonym 䙌⇥, “the chosen people.”

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By the beginning of 1926 the Seinen Dōmei had achieved considerable leverage within the Suiheisha. In part this was due to the youthful energy and enthusiasm of individuals like Takahashi, which many of the original leaders welcomed. The rising influence of these young members was also a reflection of the prevalent dissatisfaction among many of the rank-and-file membership with the often arbitrary manner in which leaders like Minami Umekichi had run the Suiheisha; one of the Seinen Dōmei’s main complaints about the members of the central committee was that the Suiheisha needed to operate in a more democratic fashion. The youths’ promise to focus greater attention on the problems caused by chronic poverty in buraku communities also won them the support of many in the minority who appreciated such a commonsense approach. Support for the Seinen Dōmei did not necessarily mean support for its class-based program, however. Although the group managed to dominate the agenda at the fourth national conference, held in May 1925, many of their more ideologically motivated proposals for the Suiheisha were either ignored or voted down by the delegates. A proposal to offer “political education” to burakumin in preparation for universal suffrage for men was accepted only after much debate, but a plan to have the Suiheisha join labor organizations in forming a deliberative organization to prepare a proletarian political party was scrapped due to criticism from members who claimed that the Suiheisha was a “spiritual movement” whereas organized labor was nothing more than an effort to promote the economic interest of a single social group. Others charged that joining hands with such organizations would only endanger the Suiheisha by bringing it into an alliance with socialists. The Seinen Dōmei’s increasing influence in the Suiheisha also created divisions within the organization that resembled the “ana-bol,” or anarchist versus communist, fissures that had divided the labor movement a few years earlier. On May 15, 1925, in the wake of the fourth national conference, members alarmed at the rising influence of the Seinen Dōmei established the Zenkoku Suiheisha Jiyū Seinen Renmei (Suiheisha Free Youth League) to counter the Marxist youth group’s leverage. Their anxiety over the direction that the Suiheisha seemed to be headed 86. Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, pp. 115–16. 87. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

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was all but confirmed in September of that year, when the Zenkoku Suiheisha Musansha Dōmei (National Suiheisha Proletariat Alliance) was founded under Takahashi’s direction to steer the Suiheisha in a direction more favorable to the dictates of the JCP, and the Seinen Dōmei dissolved into the JCP’s Communist Youth League. On one level the conflict that unfolded between the Seinen Renmei and its supporters and the Musansha Dōmei and its sympathizers concerned the problem of control: should the Suiheisha be an independent federation of local groups that would each have a large degree of autonomy from the national organization, or should it work in close contact with the JCP and serve its interests? Related to this question of control, yet on a deeper level, a debate unfolded between the two sides about the orientation of buraku identity. The Musansha Dōmei, which led the push for Suiheisha involvement in the formation of the Nōmin Rōdōtō (Farmer-Labor Party), had shifted to a “proletariat first” position from the “proletariat yet burakumin” understanding of the minority, a shift that required a redefinition of who counted as a burakumin. The founding declaration of the Musansha Dōmei made its position on the matter plain: “The propertied burakumin (such as landlords, money-lenders, and large-to-medium-sized business owners) share no class affinity with us, and some of them are decidedly antagonistic [toward us]. We must remember that these gentrified, propertied burakumin [shiminka seru yūsan burakumin] are an active obstacle to our struggle for liberation. . . . The mark of the tokushu burakumin has disappeared from their foreheads.” The Seinen Renmei did not take issue with the idea that the burakumin shared a class affinity with the rest of the proletariat, nor did they see anything wrong with joining hands with proletarian organizations in order to promote the economic interests of the class as a whole. They balked at the idea of supporting the political parties of the proletariat, however, out of concerns that went deeper than that of autonomy or maintaining control over their own movement. Seinen Renmei leader Koyama Montarō explained the group’s reasoning on this point, when arguing against a proposal made at the fifth national conference (May 88. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 97. 89. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 192.

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2–3, 1926) to commit the Suiheisha to supporting a future proletarian party: We are proletarians who will press forward under a class consciousness called eta, so while it is a matter of course that we should take part in economic movements, it does not mean that we need to go beyond this by taking part in political struggles. This is because if we, as the buraku proletariat, pledge ourselves to liberation and make rapid progress toward this goal, the capitalist system will naturally collapse, so we shouldn’t feel any obligation to get involved in political movements. Even if, for argument’s sake, we were to adopt such a policy and representatives [to the Diet] were indeed elected from the proletarian class, it is certain that we could not count upon them for our own liberation. . . . Where there is power there are sure to be rulers and ruled. Viewed in this way, it is clear that we burakumin cannot expect our liberation to come about through politics, and so I feel we have no choice but to oppose this proposal.

Koyama implied more than just the standard anarchist critique of political movements in this statement; not only would the proletariat become the exploiters of others should they gain political power, but also, he warned, those who would be exploited in such a situation would be none other than the burakumin. Like Koyama, many among the Seinen Renmei and their supporters agreed with much of the class-based analysis that attributed proletarian qualities to the burakumin. But whether out of the realization that the proletariat of the majority was just as likely to discriminate against burakumin as the bourgeoisie, or from some other attachment to group affiliation over class affiliation, they resisted the idea that the buraku minority could be seamlessly dissolved into the proletariat. Such was the significance of Koyama’s “class consciousness called eta” and the Renmei’s promise to base the movement “upon the foundation of our steadfast consciousness as eta.” It also suggests that the Seinen Renmei’s allegation that Takahashi Sadaki was not actually of buraku background—which was accepted by the Suiheisha central committee and approved by the majority of delegates at the fifth national meeting, thus leading to his expulsion from the movement—may have been motivated as much by a “buraku first” conception of the 90. Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 140. 91. Quoted in Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, p. 166.

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movement as by the simple desire to remove a powerful rival from the Suiheisha. Yet as Koyama’s reference to “a class consciousness called eta” reveals, class had become an important part of how leading activists on both sides of the “ana-bol” fault line in the Suiheisha conceived of buraku identity. Indeed, the only activists who rejected the validity of the class argument entirely were leaders like Minami Umekichi and Hirano Shōken, who had been purged from the central committee in 1924 for their involvement in the so-called Spy Incident and went on to form groups such as the Kantō Suiheisha and the Nippon Suiheisha. These two groups opposed the leftist trend in the original Suiheisha, and emphasized patriotism and the duty of all Japanese citizens to revere the “imperial will” expressed in the Meiji emperor’s abolition of pariah status. They hoped that this effort would be a way of reclaiming a “pure 92. The allegations of Takahashi’s non-buraku background were raised at the first meeting of the Seinen Renmei, on May 15, 1925, and submitted for investigation to the Suiheisha central committee at the sixth national meeting. The central committee concluded that there was indeed no evidence to prove that Takahashi was even part burakumin. (See ibid., p. 167, and Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 126.) The question of Takahashi’s actual background is something of a mystery. Takahashi’s own claim was that his real mother was a burakumin, but his father, a local official from a former samurai family, divorced her upon learning of her background and subsequently remarried, although he did not disown his son from the first marriage. Takahashi never bothered to defend himself against the Seinen Renmei’s charge, since he had already left Japan to study at the Lenin Institute in the Soviet Union prior to the sixth national meeting. 93. The “Spy Incident” involved Hirano’s unintentional leaking of the details of a Suiheisha plot to assassinate Prince Tokugawa Iesato. In 1924, the Suiheisha had called for the heir of the Tokugawa family to resign from the House of Peers in order to take responsibility for the system of hereditary discrimination that his ancestors had instituted. When Tokugawa refused even to meet with Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, Minami Umekichi, and other Suiheisha representatives, they apparently discussed the possibility of assassinating the prince. Hirano mentioned this idea to his friend Tojima Tetsuo, the editor of the Dōwa tsūshin, a daily news sheet that published sympathetic news stories on the Suiheisha, Korean independence, and social movements in general. Tojima, as it turned out, was operating as a police informant, and in July 1924 Matsumoto and two others were arrested. In December, Hirano was officially purged from the Suiheisha, and Minami was forced to resign from both the chairmanship and the orga nization as a whole so as to take responsibility for the debacle. See Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 92– 94 for further details on the incident.

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Suihei movement,” in which the spiritual mission to enlighten the majority and realize the ideal of “all the people under one sovereign” (ikkun banmin) would finally be achieved. By the late 1920s, no one in the Suiheisha was claiming publicly that the burakumin were ethnically anything other than Japanese. The Suiheisha survived the rest of the decade, despite increasingly bitter factionalism, primarily because police suppression of the pro-JCP faction kept the balance of power within the central committee in a state of flux, and because attrition among the rank-and-file membership and major incidents of anti-buraku discrimination required a closing of ranks to be dealt with adequately. The underlying problem that had been introduced into the movement with Takahashi’s Marxist analysis of the burakumin and their situation—whether the burakumin were best viewed from a “proletariat first” or a “buraku first” standpoint—had yet to be resolved. The common terms in the debate, however, showed how far the Suiheisha had moved in just a few years from its initial rhetoric of “taking pride in being eta.” Both communists and their adversaries in the movement added very little of permanent or even positive value to conceptions of buraku identity. For the JCP-allied faction and its sympathizers, the burakumin were a “feudal remnant” of Japan’s incomplete bourgeois revolution. According to this view, anti-buraku prejudice, and with it all vestiges of the burakumin as a separate group in Japanese society, would disappear with the destruction of the capitalist

94. For information of the ideology of these groups, see Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisō shiteki kenkyū, pp. 135–58. 95. The general roundup of communists on March 15, 1928, netted twenty of the Suiheisha’s leading activists. Neary points out that only 100 delegates attended the sixth national meeting, held in Hiroshima during December 1927. The attrition in the movement was in no small part due to the lack of orga nization arising from constant infighting between factions at the center (Political Protest and Social Control, p. 129). Incidents that pulled the Suiheisha together in censure campaigns involved acts of discrimination by government officials or the military. The most significant of these was the Fukuoka Regiment Incident of 1926, in which discrimination against buraku recruits in the Fukuoka army regiment sparked a massive protest movement by the Suiheisha. In the course of the censure campaign, Matsumoto Ji’ichirō was arrested and convicted on the trumped-up charge of plotting to bomb the regimental headquarters, and was not released from prison until 1931.

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system by the proletariat. To make that victory possible, however, burakumin first had to meld seamlessly with the general proletariat. This faction’s opponents in the Seinen Renmei did not question the premise that discrimination, and thus a sense of the burakumin as separate from the majority, would vanish with the overthrow of capitalism; they believed, however, that a separate buraku organization was needed to educate the majority proletariat so that such a melding could occur, and to protect the interests of the minority until that time. Even those who opposed the whole idea of the necessity of class conflict, and sought instead a return to a “pure Suihei movement,” believed that the burakumin would disappear as a distinct group once a true national unification of hearts and minds was achieved under the emperor. Given the views of the JCP-aligned faction, the very existence of an organization exclusively for burakumin began to seem like an impediment to the mission of effective class struggle. Asada Zen’nosuke and Kitahara Taisaku, neither of whom were JCP members at the time, but both of whom were strongly influenced by the communist faction of the Japanese labor movement, reached this conclusion in 1931. Based on his reading of the JCP’s “Draft Political Theses” of 1931, which called for a rapid revolution led by a unified proletarian movement, Asada decided that the Suiheisha had become an obstacle to buraku participation in the revolutionary struggle that was soon to unfold. Acting on this understanding of the situation, Asada, Kitahara, and others drafted a “Proposal for the Dissolution of the National Suiheisha” (“Zenkoku Suiheisha Kaishō no Teigi”) to distribute at the tenth national meeting in December. The document began by succinctly summing up the problems of the movement as the authors saw them: For the past ten years, the National Suiheisha has fought under the flag of liberation for the burakumin. And yet, the laborers and farmers of the buraku have come to see that the liberation of the buraku cannot be assured through the struggles of the Suiheisha. Without the liberation of the proletariat, the liberation of the burakumin is impossible. Therefore, only the active participation of 96. For details on the Fifth Profintern Conference and the JCP Draft Theses of 1931, see Beckman and Okubo, Japanese Communist Party, pp. 197–205. For the details of Asada’s interpretation of these, see Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 155–56.

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buraku farmers and laborers in the proletarian [movement] will provide the fundamental condition for the liberation of the burakumin from the feudal and semi-feudal status relationship. For this reason, the National Suiheisha must immediately dissolve its status-based organization and capabilities for struggle [tōsō kinō] into a class-based organization.

The proposal not only claimed that the Suiheisha diverted energy away from the proletarian movement; it also accused the organization of being a reactionary element due to the present composition of its membership. The Suiheisha movement was conceived of by the buraku petit bourgeoisie as a bourgeois democratic movement, in which a wide range of the buraku masses took part. The National Suiheisha is a mass movement brought together by status. This means that various classes whose interests do not coincide comprise the Suiheisha by dint of sharing the same social status. The ties that bind this collection together are shared status interests and status consciousness. Thus, common class interests and class-consciousness [between those within the movement and outside of it] are obliterated by these ties. Such a status-based organization necessarily claims, “All burakumin are brothers.” At the same time, this becomes the basis for the social-status conscious, exclusivist Suihei ideology [mibun ishiki, haigaishugiteki Suihei-shugi] that claims, “All of the majority [ippanmin]—laborers, farmers, capitalists, and landlords alike— are our enemies.”

The class-based view of society that Suiheisha activists had originally turned to in order to solve the problems faced by the Suiheisha, when taken to this analytical extreme, called for the very dismantling of the Suiheisha, and with it any conception of the burakumin as people with their own group identity different from that of the proletariat. The irony of the situation, however, seems to have been lost on the members of the “Zenkoku Suiheisha Kaishō Tōsō Iinkai” (National Suiheisha Dissolution Struggle Committee), which formed around Asada, Kitahara, and other like-minded activists following the tenth national meeting. To what extent their views were supported by the Suiheisha rank and file is open to question. On the one hand, police reports on the Suiheisha for 97. Zenkoku Suiheisha Kyūshū rengōkai jōnin rijikai, “Zenkoku Suiheisha kaishō no teigi,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 592. 98. Ibid., p. 593.

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1932 claim that fifty-one local chapters, with a combined membership of 4,396, supported the Kaishō Tōsō Iinkai, while on the other hand, the central committee was described as low on funds, riddled with factionalism, and involved in no activity worth mentioning. More significant, perhaps, are the numbers of rank-and-file members who left the whole dissolution question aside and simply quit the orga nization. Police surveys found 53,328 members in 398 branches as of October 31, 1929; by December 1, 1932, these numbers had declined to 47,724 members in 378 groups— a decline of 10.5 percent in just over four years. During this decline, the Suiheisha managed to remain in existence largely through the personal funding and willpower of its chairman, Matsumoto Ji’ichirō.

For Ethnic Community or Class Struggle? The Korean Labor Movement As we have seen, a strong attraction to the idea of the international proletariat had been a significant part of Korean activist views since the early 1920s. This was clearly a result of their tutelage under Japanese socialists and labor unionists, and despite the shock of massacres right after the Great Kantō Earthquake, close ties between Japanese and Korean activists endured. In fact, the Great Kantō Earthquake also increased the total Korean population in Japan, as new migrants flooded in from the peninsula to find work in the burgeoning labor market created by large-scale reconstruction projects in the Kantō area. The surge in the laboring population among the minority led to renewed organizational activity. In February 1925, the Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, and ten other Korean labor unions from the Kantō and Kansai areas formed the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei (Federation of Korean Labor in Japan), with a total membership of eight hundred. As its name suggests, the new group 99. Police report from 1932 in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, pp. 610, 612. 100. Ibid., pp. 435, 609. . Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 158. 102. Kajimura, Kajimura Hideki chōsakushū, vol. 6: Zainichi Chōsenjinron, pp. 85–86.

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was organized to serve as a Korean partner organization to the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei. Even the platform of the Korean union was strikingly similar to that of the Japanese Sōdōmei, and as such made no mention of Koreans, nor the question of national liberation. This absence of overt appeals to Korean national identity may have simply been the result of the initial organizational influence of the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei, however: police records mention that labor unions affiliated with the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei unfurled anti-imperialist, pro-independence slogans along with rallying cries for the proletariat in general at May Day demonstrations that same year. In the wake of the first split of the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei, in April 1925, the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, while keeping its original name, aligned itself with the left wing of the Japanese union, which was reorganized as the Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai (Japan Council of Labor Unions). While maintaining a concern for class issues, the Korean organization gradually began to consider problems specifically facing Korean laborers in Japan. The platform inherited from the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei was extensively revised at the third national conference, held in April 1927. The new platform promised to “develop political struggle under the guiding spirit of the Korean proletariat and bring about national liberation [minzokuteki kaihō],” “organize the as yet unorganized Korean laboring masses throughout Japan,” and bring about “international solidarity with the Japanese proletarian class.” At the same conference, the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei leader Ch’oe Un’gwfn explained the need to maintain a separate labor organization for Korean workers in Japan: Although the place and object of the struggle may be the same, since Korean laborers more than Japanese laborers are singled out for particular mistreatment it is still not possible to have them participate directly in Japanese labor 103. Aside from the almost identical names and platforms of the two organizations, officers of the Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei, Osaka Federation such as Nishio Suehiro had, since the launching of the Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, played a formative role in the Korean labor movement through the establishment of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei (Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, pp. 142–43). 104. Naimushō keihokyoku hoanka, “Taishō 14-nenjū ni okeru zairyū Chōsenjin no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 168. 105. Ibid., pp. 169– 71. 106. Quoted in Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 143.

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unions. Moreover, since the majority of us [Korean laborers] are still nonconversant in the [Japanese] language, have not acquired much knowledge, and have different customs and feel some sense of emotional discord [with the Japanese], as well as having many other predetermining conditions upon us, it would be extremely difficult for us to share the same organization with Japanese laborers. Therefore, for the time being, each should maintain their own separate union. The Chōsen Sōdōmei [sic] will organize and train all Korean laborers in Japan. Even those Korean laborers that have already been incorporated into the Japanese labor union of the production force at a particular factory should become the responsibility of the [Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō] Sōdōmei, or else be reorganized as such. Since the struggle waged by Korean laborers in Japan against Japanese capitalists is required to address the issue of ethnic discrimination [mizokuteki sabetsu] in its points of emphasis and slogans, rather than labor-management relations alone, our organized activity, and thus our union movement itself, must not take such special circumstances lightly.

For Ch’oe, the prevalence of discrimination in the workforce— manifested in inferior working conditions, lower wages, and more frequent arbitrary firings for Korean laborers than their Japanese counterparts— was a powerful justification for the existence of a separate labor organization for Koreans. He also alluded to anti-Korean prejudice among Japanese workers and cited the insufficient degree of assimilation of Korean laborers to the Japanese proletariat as factors that required a separate, Korean union, at least “for the time being.” Yet although Ch’oe was certainly not making an argument for assimilation per se, he pointed to nothing that Korean laborers could take pride in as Koreans. This was also true of the declaration adopted at the third meeting. While calling for the liberation of Korea from Japanese colonial domination, it also referred to the Korean people as “the small and weak Korean nation” (Chōsen jakushō minzoku) and, after recounting the prejudice and exploitation that Korean laborers had encountered in Japan, concluded, “Our status is that of ethnic wage slaves called the Korean people” (wareware no mibun wa Chōsen minzoku to iu minzokuteki chingin dorei de aru). The text of the declaration was a well-crafted overlapping

107. Quoted in Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, p. 117. 108. “Shiryō (3): Zainihon Chōsen rōdō sōdōmei dai-san kai taikai— Sengen, kōryō, kiyaku,” Zainichi Chōsenjinshi kenkyū, no. 1 (Dec. 1977): 96– 97.

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of a Leninist critique of imperialism and descriptions of migrant adversity with which any Korean laborer in Japan would have identified. The author’s intent was no doubt to kindle a sense of moral indignation at the injustice of Japanese empire and colonial rule and the discrimination and exploitation these gave rise to. Although it may well have achieved the desired effect in this regard, the description of Koreans revealed how much the outlook of Korean leaders had changed since the student-run discussions in the years leading up to the March First Movement. Much as we saw with Suiheisha leaders’ views of the burakumin at the end of the 1920s, the view of Korean laborers espoused by their union leaders underscored the influence of a class-based view of the minority on the question of how that minority differed from the majority. If status and status discrimination were “feudal remnants” that prevented the burakumin from becoming an undistinguished part of the proletariat, Korean ethnicity and ethnic discrimination prevented Korean laborers from doing the same. Whatever the rank-and-file members of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei thought about the union platforms and explanations of their union’s leaders, Korean laborers enthusiastically supported groups affiliated with Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei. Starting from the eight hundred Koreans involved in affiliated unions at its founding in 1925, total Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei membership expanded to 23,500 by the end of September 1929. Nishinarita Yutaka’s analysis of membership figures highlights the degree of support among the Korean community. The total membership of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei in 1929 represented 12.2 percent of the total population of Korean laborers in the eight prefectures where affiliate unions existed. In Osaka Prefecture alone, the Sōdōmei-affiliated Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai boasted a membership of 17,700, or 37.8 percent of the prefecture’s enormous population of Korean laborers. The success of these unions in gaining the support of Korean laborers seems to have been the result of a change in orientation away from the student-centered, intellectual approach of the nascent Korean labor unions

109. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 144.

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of the early 1920s to one centered on the interests and concerns of Korean laborers. Police reports for 1926, when after only one year in existence the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei had grown to 9,900 members, outline some of the Sōdōmei’s popular activities. The national organization published a newspaper, Chosfn nodong (Korean labor) and educational materials on the labor movement, all of which were written completely in the more accessible hangul script, rather than Japanese or Korean text with Chinese characters. Aside from organizing strikes, local groups established consumers’ unions (shōhisha kumiai) in communities of impoverished Korean laborers, and even brought the weight of the union to bear in housing disputes between Korean laborers and Japanese landlords. The popularity of such activities reveals that Korean laborers in Japan were concerned first and foremost with everyday issues of getting by in Japan, but that they were also interested in learning more about the movement they were part of and the society in which they lived. Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the gap between how the goals and values of the movement were envisioned by the rank and file and local organizers of affiliated unions, on the one hand, and the central leadership of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, on the other, than the fact that the federation suddenly disbanded in December 1929, after three years of unabated growth. Much like the case with the call to dissolve the Suiheisha, at issue was the proper relationship between the Korean labor movement in Japan and the Japanese labor movement, as interpreted from the vantage point of the international communist movement. The Fourth Profintern conference in 1928 had declared that the situation in Japan required the centralization of all labor unions under JCP influence, so the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei was advised 110. Naimushō keihokyoku hoanka, “Taishō 15-nenjū ni okeru zairyū Chōsenjin no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 217–19. 111. Although these activities would have appealed to women as well as men in Korean communities, it is important to note that the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai was not very active in recruiting female workers to be members of the union. Even in the textile and cotton spinning industries, which as we have seen employed Korean women from early on in the interwar period, the Korean union’s activities consisted of supporting female strikers with material aid and protection from harassment by management, police, and the Sōaikai.

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to dissolve into the Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai. After the outlawed Hyōgikai was reorganized as the Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Zenkoku Kyōgikai (Zenkyō for short), the leaders of the Korean federation prepared to comply with the Profintern’s advice. The initial appeal to this effect was issued in November, in a manifesto authored by Kansai area leader Kim Hoyfng and bearing the names of the prefectural organizations in Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, and Aichi. The document criticized the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei for its lack of a clear, thoughtful method for organizing Korean labor (since the Sōdōmei had lumped laborers together irrespective of the industrial sector they worked in), and accused it of being a nationality-based organization that went against the dictates of the principles of “one industry, one union.” Furthermore, ignoring Ch’oe Un’gwfn’s observations of just two years before, it claimed that there were too few Korean laborers to make strikes against discrimination work, and that a separate and essentially ineffective Korean union only compromised the labor movement at large. The manifesto did not address the question of how anti-Korean discrimination should be dealt with in lieu of a Korean union. Naturally, many Koreans in the Sōdōmei were opposed to dissolution. Despite its name appearing on the manifesto, for example, the Hyōgo-ken Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai (Korean Labor Union of Hyogo Prefecture) did not officially disband until May of the following year due to strong opposition among its officers. Kim eventually had to visit the 112. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, pp. 144–45. 113. Iwamura, Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, p. 182. In regard to the motives behind dissolution, Kawashima only notes that the union leadership “argued for . . . dissolution (kaitai) and incorporation (gōdō) into Zenkyō partially on the grounds that it needed to find a better means to defend against what it called ‘specific forms of repression’ ” (Proletarian Gamble, p. 132), particularly in the wake of the violent clashes of union workers and Sōaikai operatives during the “Kawasaki Incident” in the spring of 1929. While the threat of repression and the desire to seek allies to defend against it were pragmatic concerns, this explanation eschews the broader question of ethnic versus class affiliation that was on the minds of union leaders at the time. Without taking this question into account, it is difficult to see why they would have advocated dissolution at a point in time when, despite violent clashes with the Sōaikai, the Korean union was continuing to grow, nor is it clear why these leaders would have seen the Japa nese communist labor movement as an obvious place to seek refuge from repression.

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branch office in Amagasaki and demand that the union follow the decision of the national organization. He even presented the officers with a statement of dissolution that he had authored himself, in which the Hyogo union pledged to “give life to the principle of ‘the proletariat have no national borders’ [puroretariya ni kokkyō nashi] just as it is in the struggles and organizational practice” of Zenkyō. For the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei and the Suiheisha alike, the late 1920s were years of greater incorporation into the social movements of majority society. To some extent this had been the case throughout the decade for activists within the Korean minority, who had formed strong bonds with Japanese socialists and labor activists—bonds that had shaped the platforms of their movements in significant ways. Even for the leaders of the Suiheisha, who had begun their movement by sampling from various ideologies without committing themselves to any one in particular, starting in the year 1925 a contested but steady progression toward a view of buraku identity occurred that placed class issues above all other attributes, increasingly blurring any lines separating it from the general proletariat. Although this trajectory, shared chiefly among the leadership of both minority movements, revealed a gravitation toward the working class of the majority and a concurrent separation from ethnic conceptions of group identity, we should bear in mind that in many leftist interpretations of the day, class and ethnicity were not necessarily considered mutually exclusive standpoints from which to engage in struggles against domination, exploitation, and discrimination. No less an authority than Lenin himself had on occasion stressed the importance of national self-determination in resistance to the imperialist ambitions of capitalism, and socialists involved with minority movements in other countries also appealed to ethnic and racially based identities. In her 114. Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōsenjin rōdō undōshi, pp. 80–82. 115. The most well known of Lenin’s works that touch on the subject is of course “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline” (1916). For even more direct commentary from Lenin on the question of self-determination, including his criticism of communists who deny that the concept has any relevance in Marxist thinking, see “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914) and “The Discussion of Self-Determination Summed Up” (1916). These essays are reproduced in V. I. Lenin, National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism: Selected Writings by V. I. Lenin.

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examination of the New Negro movement in post–World War I America, Barbara Foley has observed that American communists’ and socialists’ commitment to the ideal of national self-determination helped turn African American radicalism away from the pursuit of a racially integrated proletarian movement to overthrow capitalism toward a minority nationalism that sought to defi ne the “New Negro” in cultural terms. In interwar Japan, most liberals and socialists among the majority shared a similar belief that, in order to be liberated, oppressed minorities needed to have self-determination. In spite of this, Korean and buraku activists moved in the opposite direction. For both, the initial inspiration for their activism came from the idea of national self-determination, but was replaced by a commitment to proletarian class struggle as the only viable means of achieving minority liberation, however conceived. For the Korean activists, the disillusionment of early student leaders with the outcome of Versailles led later activists to embrace a more radical and “scientific” program, one that did not rely on support from the major European powers to achieve Korean liberation from colonial oppression. For those at the helm of the Korean labor movement, classbased approaches to combating capitalist exploitation, made all the more oppressive by ethnic discrimination, placed a premium on strength in numbers and, ultimately, a higher degree of coordinated action between Korean and Japanese laborers than their continued segmentation along ethnic lines could guarantee. As we have seen, the founders and leading activists in the Suiheisha traveled a very similar path. For them too, initial support from majority intellectuals on the Left generally came in the form of statements on the buraku problem as an ethnic problem, couched in terms of selfdetermination. Even prior to the inauguration of the Suiheisha, the influential Marxist thinker Sano Manabu likened the buraku situation to that of “the misfortunes of the Jews, the Sinn Fein Party, the people of India, [and] the Negroes,” and called for “the liberation of the Koreans and the eta people [eta-zoku], who have suffered one-thousand years of

116. Foley, Spectres of 1919.

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racial animosity [shuzokuteki hankan].” The early adoption of such rhetoric among Suiheisha leaders, problematic as it was at points, seems an obvious choice in light of the attention paid to the idea of selfdetermination at the time and the confrontational position that the new organization staked out for itself vis-à-vis the government and the avowed patriotism of earlier kaizen and yūwa groups. The subsequent shift to viewing the burakumin primarily in proletarian terms occurred for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was some leaders’ desire to adopt a new approach to the problems of discrimination and social inequality, one with a sounder theoretical basis. In this aim, they shared much with those Korean activists who came to see support for the proletarian struggle in Japan as the surest path to liberation from both class exploitation and colonial domination. For buraku activists, however, whatever liberation would come through joining hands with the movement of the proletariat lay in a fuller, more equal incorporation into Japanese society, rather than independence from it. In both movements, the view from the rank and file was much less theoretically inspired, and less sanguine about the prospects of joining the proletarian movement. From their perspective, they were being asked to cede their autonomy not to the conceptual, “borderless” proletariat of Marxist ideology, but specifically that portion of it which surrounded them: the majority Japanese working class and their unions and movements. In light of the prevalence of discrimination against both Koreans and burakumin on all levels of Japanese society, for all but the most ardent believers in the revolutionary nature of the proletariat the very thought of this may have seemed a risky venture indeed. Hence activists opposed to joining the general proletariat in its political movement, such as the aforementioned Koyama Montarō of the Suiheisha Seinen Renmei, warned that the minority had little to gain and everything to lose by participating in such struggles. Although their reasons are not as clear, there were those among Korean activists, such as the officers of the Hyōgo-ken Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai, who may have balked at the thought of entrusting the majority proletariat to work for the best interests of 117. Sano, “Tokushu burakumin kaihō-ron.” In his book Political Protest and Social Control (p. 64), Neary mentions that Saikō Mankichi and Sakamoto Sei’ichirō met with Sano shortly after this article was published.

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minority. Indeed, these movements had attracted many rank-and-file members not with their theoretical rigor in analyzing the causes of discrimination nor with their practical effectiveness in combating it, but rather with rhetoric that encouraged members to accept and be proud of their minority status, and a social “space” in which the resulting sense of empowerment could be shared. For these members in particular, voluntarily vacating that space and seeking acceptance and support among the majority required a tremendous leap of faith.

ch apter 5 The “Minority Problem” in Japan’s “New Order”: State Minority Policies and Mobilization for War

The global depression that began at the dawn of the 1930s and the military entanglement in China that Japan began in 1931 set in motion political, economic, and social forces that affected the buraku and Korean minorities just as much as the majority society. Whereas philanthropic “conciliation,” coupled with constant surveillance and periodic police suppression, had been the primary modes of dealing with burakumin and Koreans during the 1920s, as Japan descended further into a military quagmire in China and into diplomatic isolation from much of the rest of the world, the state called for a “total mobilization” of the nation and all its resources—human and otherwise. An important part of this effort was to convert everyone, including minorities, into loyal, cooperative subjects who would contribute to the war effort and not be a burden to the state in its time of unprecedented crisis. The human dimension of “total mobilization” was in essence a renewed emphasis on the old slogan of ikkun banmin, the idea of one familial nation, with the emperor as father and the subjects as his children. But the promise of “impartiality and equal favor” (isshi dōjin)— another state slogan—that was extended to Japan’s colonial charges and others, like the burakumin, who had been conceived of as not fitting the mold of the “proper” imperial subject, stood in uneasy relation to this ikkun banmin ideology. The organic, familial nature of this conception of the nation assumed cultural affinities among the emperor’s subjects and seemed to point to certain integral ethnic and racial bonds underlying Japanese culture. As an ideology, it was ill-equipped to accommodate

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diversity among the so-called banmin. During the age of imperial democracy, the state had not applied the ikkun banmin ideology to the minority question in a rigorous way. Instead, while acknowledging the problem of discrimination, the concept of yūwa, whether expressed as nissen yūwa in regard to the Koreans or dōhō yūwa in regard to the burakumin, was used. Both the progressive Dōaikai and the authoritarian Sōaikai had operated on the principle that such “harmony” and “conciliation” between majority and minority, albeit conceived of in very different ways by each orga nization, would somehow foster true unity. Yet there was little question as to who would be asked to assimilate to whom in order to achieve this harmony and unity. As noted in the discussion of Kita Sadakichi’s ideas, the prevalent, informed belief was that yūwa, conciliation, necessitated dōka, assimilation of minorities to the Japanese majority. As the climate of national emergency in the 1930s demanded increasingly greater degrees of social and ideological cohesion, the emphasis of the state’s minority policies shifted from yūwa to dōka, replacing nissen yūwa with “naisen ittai” (‫ݙ‬冂ϔԧ, the unity of the interior and Korea) at home as well as in the colony, and recasting “dōhō yūwa” as “kokumin ittai” (೑⇥ϔԧ, “unity of the people”) in regard to the burakumin. The policies that emerged during this shift had a profound effect on Koreans and burakumin, and influenced the way that many in these minorities came to view themselves and their position in Japanese society. Yet while the aim of state policies toward these two groups was the same regarding assimilation and incorporation into the war effort, the content of those policies and the ways they were implemented differed significantly between the groups— and were of enormous significance for how Koreans and the burakumin reacted to state and society in the 1930s and beyond. They also influenced the manner in which minorities interacted with one another during these crucial years.

A Worsening Socioeconomic Climate for the Burakumin If the 1920s had been lean years for buraku communities across Japan, the depression of the 1930s brought truly dire conditions to them. While

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most burakumin continued to engage in farming as their main source of income, government surveys conducted in 1931 reveal how difficult a life this was. “Although farming villages in general are faced with hard times today and are pleading for relief,” one report put it, “even more hard pressed than these are the hundreds of thousands of farming households in buraku communities scattered across the country.” This was due in part to a lack of ownership of the land: whereas among majority farming households 31.07 percent owned all of the land they tilled and 42.21 percent lived off the harvest from a combination of owned and rented lands, for buraku farmers these figures stood at only 16 percent and 31 percent, respectively. With 53 percent of buraku farmers working entirely on rented land, versus only 26.53 percent of majority farmers, moreover, tenancy rates were twice as high among the minority. Furthermore, minority land holdings were much smaller than those of the majority, with the average area of land held by burakumin amounting to little more than one-eighth the average among majority landowners. The various industrial and proto-industrial occupations that had provided vital additional income to buraku farming families, and were a major source of employment for those in urban communities as well, were even harder hit. By 1932, those engaged primarily in these occupations were in fact worse off than burakumin who eked out a living as farmers. Reliable wage figures for such occupations during the preceding decade are not available, so a comparison of the relative economic position of those engaged in these occupations across the decades is not possible. Somewhat detailed statistics on monthly wages in typically buraku-dominated occupations at the beginning of the 1930s, however, underscore the precariousness of the situation that such workers faced (see Table 4).

1. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Keizai kōsei e no michi,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 78. 2. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Buraku sangyō keizai gaikyō,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 2, p. 1115. 3. Ibid., p. 1111. 4. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Keizai kōsei e no michi,” p. 78.

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Table 4: Average Monthly Wages for Buraku Occupations, 1930–32 (all figures in yen) As main occupation Industry

Male

Shoe manufacture Traditional footwear production Shoe and footwear repair Bamboo products, basketry Peddling of various goods Day labor

50.00 20.20 19.93 20.54 24.64 20.02

Female

12.20 11.59 10.45 15.22 12.47

As sideline Male

Female

–

–

10.53 10.23 11.34 16.59 14.13

6.90 7.63 6.45 11.36 6.87

source: Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Buraku sangyō keizai gaikyō,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 2, pp. 1130, 1135, 1138, 1148, 1153, 1159. All figures are regional rather than national averages, in most cases representing wage averages for these occupations among burakumin in the Kansai and/or Kantō areas. Inexplicably, no wage figures are provided for burakumin in the tanning or leather goods industries. note: Wage averages for shoe manufacture refer only to the situation in the Osaka buraku community of Nishihama. Although no wage differentials were provided for male and female workers, the survey noted that the workforce was predominantly male: 655 men versus only 35 women. A separate category of sideline wages was not reported for this industry.

Monthly wages like these provided the vast majority of burakumin who earned them with little in the way of economic security. A comparison of annual income and expenditures for the burakumin living in ten buraku communities located in Osaka and nine surrounding prefectures with those of the majority population found that the average household among the minority earned a total of 404 yen annually, which was less than a fourth of the 1,673 yen income average recorded for majority households. In terms of expenditures, the burakumin appeared to fare better than their majority neighbors, however; buraku communities continued to offer an extremely low cost of living. Whereas average annual expenditures for majority households stood at 1,703 yen, resulting in a deficit of 30 yen per year, buraku households spent only 392 yen per year on average, leaving a surplus of 12 yen. But the compilers of the report admitted that the figures for buraku expenditures were probably higher than recorded: the original survey apparently failed to take note

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of certain expenses, such as business-related expenditures, that comprised roughly 42 percent of majority expenditures. A survey of eight buraku communities in the Kantō area appeared to bear this suspicion out: 50 percent of the residents were found to be carrying debt amounting to 500 yen or less, while another 12 percent had accumulated even higher levels of debt. Residents of these communities might have slid even further into debt except that they had very little in the way of property to use as collateral. The same survey revealed that 72 percent had property amounting to less than 500 yen in value, and 28 percent possessed nothing of monetary value to speak of. A variety of factors had combined to force the buraku economy into such a position. Government reports cite similar weaknesses in almost all industries employing large numbers of buraku laborers. These weaknesses included insufficient investment capital, inefficient management and production techniques, excessive competition that undercut profits and wages, and a lack of cooperation and organization in the acquisition and allocation of resources. In addition to these endemic problems, competition for jobs from workers outside of the minority community increasingly destabilized the position of buraku laborers within industries that had all but guaranteed them employment before. This was especially true of work in menial, day-labor positions, which were a vital source of primary and secondary employment for burakumin. The depression of the 1930s forced many majority laborers to turn to day labor in order to save themselves from complete destitution. This majority influx came during a period of growing competition for jobs from Koreans, who had become an increasingly significant source of expendable labor since the early 1920s. The effects of such encroachment on the burakumin were already severe by the beginning of the 1930s. National statistics on unemployment rates among day laborers by ethnic and social background do not exist,

5. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Buraku sangyō keizai gaikyō,” supp. vol. 2, p. 1175. 6. Ibid., p. 1166. 7. For example, see evaluations of problem areas in the leather industry (ibid., p. 1126), shoemaking industry (p. 1130), traditional footwear (p. 1136), and bamboo products and basketry (pp. 1138–39).

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but figures from surveys in Kanagawa and Mie prefectures show that 22.3 percent of majority Japanese day laborers and 24.3 percent of Korean day laborers in these prefectures were unemployed in 1931. As high as these rates were, they paled in comparison to the unemployment rate among buraku day laborers, which stood at a staggering 52.8 percent. To be sure, buraku day laborers were vastly outnumbered in the labor markets of these two prefectures—with only 1,644 burakumin competing with 10,123 Koreans and 75,572 majority Japanese for jobs in this sector. A more significant factor, however, was discrimination. As employers of day labor found a much larger pool of non-buraku laborers to draw from, the burakumin appear to have wound up at the bottom of the employment pile. The compilers of the survey explained: In regard to day laborers from the buraku, although employers will hire them in situations where no other suitable day laborers can be found, under circumstances like the present, in which the number of day laborers is increasing due to unemployment [in other sectors] and [the influx] of Korean laborers, there is a tendency among employers to avoid buraku day laborers. From the standpoint of wages, some employers even declare, “it is better to hire Koreans than burakumin.”

In spite of poverty and unemployment, burakumin in the 1930s appear to have maintained and even advanced the levels of education their children received, in comparison to the preceding decade. By 1932, ten buraku communities surveyed in the Kantō area, for example, could boast a 99.4 percent average enrollment rate among elementary-schoolaged children, with 91.4 percent attending school on a regular basis. Although it is unclear whether these figures were entirely representative of trends among buraku communities nationwide, they were on par with the national average enrollment of 99.56 percent recorded for 1932. Gains may have occurred in the rate of advancement to educational levels beyond the compulsory years as well, though burakumin still lagged behind their majority peers. A survey in Okayama Prefecture found that while 17.1 percent of majority children graduating from the compulsory 8. Ibid., p. 1155. 9. Ibid., p. 1156. 10. Ibid., p. 1168. 11. Monbushō, Nihon no seichō to kyōiku, p. 180, attached table 3, “Gimu kyōiku no shūgakuritsu (ruinen).”

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lower elementary school ( jinjō shōgakkō) ended their formal school education at that point, for buraku children the figure was 25.6 percent. Yet of those children who did continue, just 68.9 percent of majority children went on to attend higher elementary school, and 14 percent to even higher levels of education, whereas for the minority these figures stood at 70.8 percent and 3.4 percent, respectively. Before concluding that by the early 1930s the buraku minority had come close to achieving parity with the majority in terms of attaining a basic level of education, we must recognize the limitations of the data available. In both the Kantō area and Okayama prefecture surveys cited earlier, only a handful of communities were surveyed. Furthermore, despite the high percentage of school enrollment found in the buraku areas studied, the Kantō survey gave no figures for the rate of completion of the compulsory curriculum. Likewise, the Okayama survey focused only on the situation of buraku students who had completed compulsory education, but provided no data on what percentage they were of the total number of buraku children entering lower elementary school. It is plausible that many children from buraku communities never completed a rudimentary education, owing to problems of discrimination at school and economic hardship at home. A survey of buraku communities in Gifu Prefecture, conducted in 1930, seemed to bear these suspicions out: one buraku resident per every 1.8 minority households across the prefecture was found to be illiterate. But although the minority continued to receive less of an education than the majority, the available figures suggest that some level of formal schooling had increasingly become a part of the buraku experience starting in the 1920s. What happened during the latter half of the 1930s and beyond is far from clear given the lack of surveys conducted during these years. But it does seem plausible that an experience of formal schooling, and with it the absorption of normative values and a state-promoted worldview imparted to all Japanese children, had become common among the minority by the middle of the 1930s. 12. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Buraku sangyō keizai gaikyō,” p. 1169. 13. Ibid. The report did not provide an analysis of the composition of illiterate burakumin by age, but illiteracy rates were likely to be higher among the elderly, and among women of any age group.

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Although statistics on the minority during the war are practically nonexistent owing to the lack of studies conducted, anecdotal evidence suggests that the general shortage of labor in Japan also mobilized the buraku community to an extent never seen before. One survey from 1931 found that prior to the beginning of Japan’s military entanglement in China, only 3.6 percent of burakumin in ten Kansai area communities worked outside of the minority community, usually in seasonal “dekasegi” jobs away from home. A separate survey in the Kansai area, also from 1931, found that despite official encouragement of migration to Hokkaido, only 0.227 percent of the population in selected buraku communities in the region had in fact settled there. The war in China had a slight effect on this situation. The establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo opened up opportunities for emigration, and the government and military hoped to use this as a means of easing the plight of poor tenant farmers in Japan and improving the security of the Manchurian countryside by dotting it with Japanese agricultural settlements. Encouraging buraku farmers to emigrate to Manchuria was thus a part of a wider program, aimed at majority tenant farmers, that began in 1936—with the urging of the burakumin initiated in 1938. This option was never as popular with the minority community as the authorities in charge had hoped it would be. In fact, a survey of 1,526 buraku communities located in thirty-one prefectures, conducted in 1939, determined that only 432 residents out of a total sample population of 410,491, or a mere 0.1 percent, had chosen to emigrate to Manchuria. More attractive to the minority were official programs designed to shift buraku laborers into industries producing war matériel or other products of particular importance. A total of 19,696 burakumin, or 4.8 percent of those surveyed, availed themselves of such opportunities. 14. Ibid., p. 1163. 15. For details on the wider emigration program, its objectives, and development, see Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis, pp. 345–49. 16. Total numbers of those surveyed in this study were calculated from the totals given for burakumin by occupation in Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Yūwa jigyō kankei chiku sangyō narabi ni shokugyō tenkan jōkyō,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, pp. 574– 77, “(1) shitsu, kyūgyōsha narabi ni yōten gyōshokusha jōkyō.” Totals for numbers of Manchurian immigrants and transferred workers found in this study are taken from Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 265, table 10, “Zenshoku-betsu tengyōshokusha, Manshū imin shasū.” Although Fujino extrapolates these figures from

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Yet as these small numbers suggest, most of the minority remained segregated from the rest of society, with few avenues to escape the poverty imposed on them. The situation for many, in fact, grew increasingly desperate as the pursuit of the war strained the already exhausted buraku economy. In 1938, the government introduced regulations on the distribution of raw materials vital to the war effort. Among these was leather, the supply of which was diverted away from small-scale enterprises producing goods for the domestic market, toward cartels that produced boots and other equipment for military use. This measure, along with the abrupt end of imports of inexpensive leather from China due to the outbreak of the war, devastated the leather-related industries that had once been some of the most lucrative for the minority, since very few burakumin worked in the major enterprises that enjoyed privileged access to leather. By 1939 this development had led to high unemployment rates among buraku laborers in sectors with anything to do with leather: 5 percent in tanning, 12.7 percent in shoe manufacture, 28.9 percent in the manufacture of other leather goods, 29.6 percent among leather merchants, and 40 percent of those employed in shoe repair. The weakening of the buraku economy was also observed to a similar extent in sectors such as traditional footwear manufacture, where unemployment rates as high as 35.5 percent were recorded. Increased military spending in the 1930s thus failed to improve the buraku economy in any way, and in fact contributed to the decline of buraku involvement in traditional mainstay industries such as leather. In the face of such economic devastation and the small scale of official programs to integrate buraku laborers into the majority workforce, burakumin seeking to escape their predicament were left to either abandon the world they knew for a “new life” on the isolated frontiers of Manchuria or, for young males, to enlist in the military prior to receiving the inevitable draft notice. Neither option did much for the community as a whole. By the final years of the Pacific War, the sole ameliorating factor, for burakumin willing to let themselves think in such terms, was that

the same 1939 study, he points out that the totals given therein for numbers of immigrants and those transferred to other occupations contain calculation errors. For this reason, I have chosen to use the figures provided by Fujino. 17. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 261– 62. 18. Ibid.

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the destruction wrought by air raids and the exhaustion of the Japanese economy had reduced most majority Japanese to a level of existence that was little better. Indeed, this state of affairs brought about new opportunities for integration, as we shall see in Chapter 7, but only out of a necessity brought about by the turmoil of defeat. Neither this, nor the mobilization of “one hundred million hearts beating as one” (ichioku isshin) that preceded the disillusionment of defeat did much to mitigate the discrimination that the burakumin faced.

Socioeconomic Features of the Korean Minority: A Population in Motion Despite the onset of the global depression of the 1930s, Koreans continued to arrive in Japan in increasing numbers. The national census of 1930 documented 418,989 Koreans in Japan proper, which was only 0.65 percent of the total population for that year. By the next national census, in 1940, the Korean population in Japan had almost tripled in size to 1,241,178, which represented 1.7 percent of the total population living on the Japanese islands. Although identifiable Korean communities emerged in the 1920s, they still composed a rather transient population at the beginning of the 1930s, and remained so to a considerable extent throughout the rest of Japan’s period of rule over Korea. Home Ministry statistics on Koreans arriving in and embarking from Japan in 1930 show that 14,084 more Koreans left Japan than entered it (141,860 leaving versus 127,776 entering). Although such an exodus of Koreans from Japan was a rarity during the colonial period—1930 was in fact the only year after 1917 and prior to 1945 in which the numbers of those going surpassed those coming— at no other time between 1925 and 1944 did the number of Koreans leaving fall below 56 percent of those entering Japan.

19. Korean population fi gures for the 1930 census are from Morita, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankokujin- Chōsenjin no rekishi, table 1, p. 33. The total population in Japan was 64,450,000 in 1930, and 71,933,000 in 1940. See Sōmushō tōkeikyoku tōkei kenshūjo, ed., Nihon tōkei nenkan, Heisei 14-nen, table 2-1, “jinkō no suii,” p. 32. 20. Figures are from Morita, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankokujin- Chōsenjin no rekishi, table 3, p. 35. All calculations of percentages are my own. The lowest percentage of

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By the 1930s, however, the trend was shifting toward long-term residence. Figures for Koreans living in settled situations for the years 1930 through 1945—with a “settled situation” defined as one where a person lives for ninety days or more in a self-supporting household at a fixed address— confirm that the trend of the 1920s continued during this decade (see Table 5). With the exception of the Pacific War years, the increase in the percentage of the settled Korean population in Japan clearly rose as the proportion of settled males to females drew closer to parity. Official surveys from the 1930s suggest that many of these households were indeed comprised of Korean families: a 1936 study of Koreans living in Kobe revealed that 56.5 percent of those surveyed were fifteen years of age or younger. Similar findings were reported in other major cities. In metropolitan Kyoto, for example, a 1935 survey of the minority found that 10,573 individuals were less than fifteen years of age. Of these, only 3,911, or 37 percent, had been born in Korea, while the rest had been born in Japan. The portion of those born in Japan increased as one limited the sample to even younger ages, providing a further indication of the rising phenomenon of young Korean families settling in Japan: among the 6,386 Korean children six years old or younger in the Kyoto survey, a mere 857 (13.4 percent) had been born in Korea, while 5,528 (86.6 percent) had been born in Japan. Most revealing of the shift toward settlement in Kyoto, perhaps, was the fact that 95.1 percent of the children born in Japan had been born in Kyoto itself. Linked to these demographic trends was a subtle shift in minority attitudes toward life in Japan, as increasing numbers of Koreans in Japan entertained the idea of settling there permanently. A survey of Korean

returnees to arrivals (57 percent) was recorded in 1933 (198,637 arrivals versus 113,218 returnees). After 1930, the highest percentage of returnees to arrivals was 97.7 percent, recorded in 1936 (115,866 to 113,162). 21. The seemingly anomalous dip in the settled population from 1941 through 1945 can be explained by noting the corresponding decline in the portion of settled females during these years: the figures from 1941 reflect the effect of the massive importation of Korean labor conscripts—the vast majority of them male—that began late in 1939. It is unclear whether Korean labor conscripts would have been classified as living in “settled” situations under the usual terms of the definition. 22. Cited in Weiner, Race and Migration, p. 147. 23. Cited in Hur, “Senzen Nihon no hinkonsha kyūsai to zainichi Chōsenjin,” p. 79.

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Table 5: Settled Population of Koreans in Japan, 1930–45 (all figures represent the situation as of the end of the year)

Males



Females



Total

Portion of total minority population ()

92,336 102,795 142,890 173,829 207,827 268,443 293,673 319,332 341,252 401,030 491,951 577,218 642,727 685,247 730,556 736,967

64.75 61.38 59.72 59.19 59.24 57.70 57.30 57.19 56.59 56.61 57.70 57.76 58.47 59.23 58.74 59.20

50,271 64,671 96,357 119,858 143,020 196,797 218,846 239,021 261,773 307,378 360,650 422,120 456,515 471,678 513,156 507,910

35.25 38.62 40.28 40.81 40.76 42.30 42.70 42.81 43.41 43.39 42.30 42.24 41.53 40.77 41.26 40.80

142,607 167,466 239,247 293,687 350,847 465,240 512,519 558,353 603,025 708,408 852,601 999,338 1,099,242 1,156,925 1,243,712 1,244,877

47.84 53.80 61.26 64.37 65.25 74.36 74.22 75.90 75.39 73.67 71.62 68.02 67.64 64.08 65.41 63.23

Settled population

1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

source: Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (II),” p. 86, table II-A, “Zenkoku jōjū jinkō.”

residents in Tokyo, conducted in 1928, found that less than a third wanted to stay in Japan indefinitely, whereas a follow-up survey conducted in 1935 found that 67.4 percent of Koreans with households expressed a preference for staying in Japan permanently, as did 46.6 percent of single Koreans. Likewise in Kyoto, a survey conducted in 1935 and 1936 found that an overwhelming 88.1 percent of Koreans surveyed hoped to reside permanently in Japan. This shift in opinion, along with the increase in the number of females within the settled Korean population and the number of children, were all indicative of a new phase in the development of the Korean minority community in Japan. As male 24. Cited in ibid.

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laborers called their wives over from the colony to join them, the minority rapidly lost the “dekasegi” character that had defined it for much of the 1920s. Concurrent with these changes was an increase in the visibility of the Korean minority. Although Korean settlements known variously as Chōsen-machi (Koreatowns), Chōsen( jin)-barakku (Korean barracks), or Chōsen( jin)-buraku (Korean hamlets) had existed in certain areas since the early 1920s, and some, such as the Ikaino area of Osaka or Tokyo’s Honjō ward, were already home to burgeoning Korean populations by the latter half of the decade, from the early 1930s on such ghettoes dotted the urban landscape of Japan, inevitably where living conditions were the worst. The conditions in these communities were desperate: overcrowded, dilapidated housing and a conspicuous lack of adequate sanitation facilities and access to clean drinking water were the norm. Widespread housing discrimination against Koreans and the extremely low wages they earned combined to produce such conditions; indeed, as Kawashima has pointed out, it was precisely the widespread practice of housing discrimination that forced Koreans to erect dwellings on nonresidential land outside of the law, thus lowering their cost of living even further. This in turn simultaneously made it possible for them to “get by” on lower wages, since they faced a lower cost of living, and made it appear to uninformed observers that such an existence suited them. To most Japanese, the prevalent chaos, lack of sanitation, and poverty of these areas were simply further proof that Koreans were incapable of taking better care of themselves. As it had been in the preceding decade, the Korean community in the 1930s remained a predominantly laboring population. The shifting categories of job classifications that appeared over time in police surveys of the minority, as well as frequent inaccuracies in the actual tabulations involved, complicate the task of breaking down the Korean minority by occupation across time, but Table 6 provides a fairly reliable overview. Despite the gradual decline in the proportion of laborers within the minority population as a whole, as late as 1940 they still constituted 42 percent of the total Korean population in Japan. As in the previous

25. Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, p. 126.

99,807 (76.85) 178,852 (60.00) 288,111 (46.05) 501,628 (42.14)

21,214 (16.33) 71,148 (23.87) 223,891 (35.78) 425,947 (35.78)

Unemployed 2,150 (1.66) 10,863 (3.64) 35,439 (5.66) 68,993 (5.80)

Merchant 236 (0.18) 398 (0.13) 1,205 (0.19) 3,589 (0.30)

Professional/ specialist 2,289 (1.76) 9,916 (3.33) 51,624 (8.25) 150,306 (12.63)

Student 2,345 (1.81) 24,228 (8.13) 19,079 (3.05) 30,543 (2.57)

Miscellaneous

1,119,444

625,678

298,091

129,870

Total population

source: Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (IV),” pp. 44–45, table IV-A, “Shokugyō-betsu zenkoku jinkō.” note: Tamura’s original reports provide data for “agriculture and fishery workers” and “prisoners” as well. Neither represented a significant proportion of the minority population at any point between 1910 and 1945, but their omission from the table above accounts for the discrepancy between the figures given for “total population” and the sum of the figures in the six categories listed in any given year. In addition, the reader will see that the “Total population” figures provided for 1930 and 1940 do not correspond to the figures that were given in the national censuses of 1930 and 1940, cited earlier. The discrepancy arose from different data collection methods used by the Home Ministry and the Census Bureau. Although the Census Bureau figures for total population of the minority are widely regarded to be more accurate (see also Morita, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankokujin-Chosenjin no rekishi, pp. 155–56), the Home Ministry surveys contain the only available data on numbers of Koreans involved in specific kinds of occupations.

1940

1935

1930

1925

Laborer

Table 6: Koreans by Occupation Type, 1925–40 (persons ( of total))

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decade, some of these laborers could be regarded as semi-skilled, but a far greater number were engaged in unskilled, manual labor of the kind that brought them into direct competition for jobs with the lowest strata of Japanese society, including the burakumin. And while they fared somewhat better than the burakumin in that labor market, the figures also suggest that times were hard for the Koreans as well, though the categories of unemployed were never well defined: the steadily rising proportion of those in the “unemployed” category contained individuals in two sub-classifications: mushokusha (⛵㙋㗙), or those with no particular occupation, and shitsugyōsha (༅ὁ㗙), meaning those who had lost their jobs. The boundary between these was never clear in the surveys, nor were separate tallies of each provided, but the former probably contained many Koreans— such as very young children, the elderly, and married women who did not work in a defined occupation outside of the home—who were not regarded as employed in any way. Consequently, the rising proportion of “unemployed” must be seen as partially indicative of the increasingly settled nature of the minority community during these years. Even so, the figure most certainly reflects high rates of real unemployment among Koreans of working age as well: even as early as 1928, for example, the workforce on seasonal unemployment relief construction projects was discovered to be 54 percent Korean. Their increasing numbers, apparent willingness to work for impossibly low wages, and supposed ability to endure poverty and deplorable living conditions with aplomb— attributes that were interpreted neither as fortitude nor as the result of discrimination and exploitation, but as a complete lack of concern or will to improve their lot— along with the persistent “Koreanness” of the lifestyles they led in these expanding minority settlements, all led unsympathetic observers, of which there were many, to view Korean labor migrants as a triple threat to majority health, public morals, and job security in an enfeebled economy.

26. Wagner, Korean Minority in Japan, p. 16. 27. There is some disagreement among scholars over the extent to which Korean labor in the late 1920s and early 1930s undermined the position of Japa nese workers. Wagner (ibid.) claims that “by working for impossibly low wages,” the influx of Koreans “cause[d] an increase in unemployment among Japa nese.” Weiner, by contrast, argues that separate labor markets existed for Korean and Japa nese laborers. Koreans

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In examining the socioeconomic composition of the Korean minority across this fifteen-year period from 1925 to 1940, one more trend that appears is the rising proportion of those in the “merchant” category. From a mere 1.66 percent in 1925, the proportion of the minority engaged in economic activities in this category increased more than threefold to 5.8 percent of the minority by 1940. Among those classified as merchants by the surveys, most were in all likelihood itinerant peddlers of candies, used goods, and scrap material, whose earnings were probably not much better than those of Korean day laborers. A fortunate few, however, like the previously mentioned Sōaikai leader Pak Chun’ggm, became truly prosperous and well-connected minority entrepreneurs. They, along with the small group of professionals and specialists recorded in these surveys and even the occasional Korean laborer, gradually came to epitomize what it meant to be a “successful” Korean in prewar Japan. As we shall see in Chapter 6, this small but influential Korean bourgeoisie would come to occupy a problematic position between the realms of mainstream Japanese society, upon which so much of their success depended, and that of the Korean minority from which they had sprung. The increasing proportion of those classified as “students” during this period might lead one to assume that during the 1930s an increasing percentage of Koreans attended Japanese schools. In some sense this

were always viewed as an expendable workforce by Japa nese capital, such that in economic hard times they would be the first to lose their jobs, in order to make room for Japa nese workers now willing to work for reduced wages. The only Japa nese with whom Koreans came into direct competition, according to Weiner, were those at “the bottom end of the Japa nese labour market” (Weiner, Race and Migration, pp. 131–32). In his analysis of the 1930s Unemployment Emergency Relief Programs, furthermore, Ken Kawashima has revealed how the state actively undermined the position of Korean workers in the day labor market, as well as weakening the prospects for inter-ethnic solidarity among Korean and Japa nese workers, through different systems of job placement and contracts for Korean and Japa nese job seekers. This state manipulation of the day labor market kept wages for Koreans artificially low, while protecting Japa nese day laborers from having to compete directly with Koreans for jobs (Kawashima, Proletarian Gamble, pp. 175–203). 28. The Japa nese title for the category was “gakusei, seito.” The former term refers specifically to those enrolled in post-secondary institutions such as universities and advanced trade schools, while the latter designates children and youths in primary and secondary schools.

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was true: as we shall see, Koreans in Japan did take a special interest in the education of their children. But this interest did not result in a dramatic rise in enrollment of Korean children in Japanese primary schools; instead it led to the appearance of small, Korean-run night schools hidden within the Korean communities of Japan’s metropolises. Although such schools often included a certain amount of Japanese language education in the curriculum, on the whole the language of instruction was Korean. And since these schools were not officially recognized, students enrolled at them fell outside of the category of “students” in government population surveys. Data provided in local surveys conducted in the latter half of the 1930s offer evidence of how limited was the involvement of minorities in the Japanese education system. A 1935 survey of Koreans living in Yokohama found that, of those fourteen years and older, only 23.06 percent had any experience of formal education at all, either in Korea or Japan. During that same year, a survey of the educational levels of the heads of Korean households in the city of Kobe found that 55.11 percent had no formal schooling whatsoever. Among Koreans between the ages of seven and seventeen residing in Kyoto during 1935 and 1936, 44.3 percent had never attended elementary school, 47.6 percent were enrolled, 5.4 percent had graduated, and 2.6 percent had dropped out. By the end of the decade, despite a government push to achieve complete enrollment of Korean children in elementary school under the Kyōwakai assimilation program, discussed later, surveys revealed that 26.6 percent of those at compulsory school age still had never attended a Japanese school. Low enrollment figures such as these were indicative of how isolated the minority was from majority society. Another barometer of the degree to which Koreans interacted with Japanese society and assimilated to its culture and values during this

29. Yokohama-shi shakaika, “Chōsenjin seikatsu jōtai chōsa,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, p. 925. 30. Kyōto-shi shakaika, “Shinai zaijū Chōsen shusshinsha ni kansuru chōsa,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, p. 1200. 31. Naimushō keihokyoku, “Shakai undō no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 363. The survey found 176,559 children of compulsory school age nationwide, 47,046 of whom were not enrolled at elementary school.

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period is the rate of Japanese-language proficiency among the minority. In 1935, Home Ministry surveys revealed that 35.65 percent of the Korean minority was entirely incapable of understanding Japanese and an additional 36.32 percent had achieved only limited comprehension of the language. By 1942, the situation had improved slightly, but even so, 27.30 percent remained entirely incapable of understanding the language of the majority and 36.95 percent still had difficulty in doing so. Even as Japan plunged into a war that, in the eyes of its leaders, required the complete cooperation of the entire population of both metropole and its colonies, more than six out of every ten Koreans living in Japan remained hindered by the language barrier. As with the buraku minority, the Koreans were profoundly influenced by the policies of the Japanese government during World War II. This was observed most notoriously in the sudden growth of the Korean population in Japan due in large part to wartime policies of labor conscription. Instituted in July 1939, the National Labor Conscription Order (Kokumin chōyōrei) brought an estimated 724,787 Koreans into the mines, factories, and worksites of Japan by 1945 under conditions that many postwar scholars have referred to as “forced migration” (kyōsei renkō) 32. Calculated from figures presented in Naimushō keihokyoku, “Shakai undō no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, p. 40, as well as “Zairyū Chōsenjin kyōiku teido shirabe (Shōwa 10-nen matsu genzai),” and “Shakai undō no jōkyō” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 88. The categories in the original tables break down the surveyed population by level of educational attainment, with each of these categories further subdivided into kokugo seitsū (“proficient in the national language [i.e., Japa nese]”), dō yaya kaisuru mono (“those somewhat able to understand [Japa nese]”), and dō mattaku kaisezaru mono (“those completely incapable of understanding [Japa nese]”). Since one of the main categories provided by the tables is for monmōsha (illiterates), these subcategories appear to refer specifically to the ability to speak Japa nese rather than read and write it. It should be noted that the figures provided in the original tables, and thus the percentages generated from them, contain discrepancies, which are apparently due to calculation errors made by the original compilers. For example, although the total for all three of the subcategories in every category of educational attainment (e.g., the total number of individuals surveyed) should be 588,040 in the case of the 1935 survey, the original table contains a figure of 591,040 for the total number surveyed. The 1942 survey errs in the opposite direction: the table notes a total survey population of 1,404,848, whereas the sum of the subtotals given for each of these categories is 1,421,321. I have used the revised totals in calculating the percentages given here.

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or “forced labor” (kyōsei rōdō). Even for Koreans who had already settled in Japan, the general mobilization of Japanese society for war resulted in government initiatives to erase all vestiges of a separate, Korean ethnic identity and turn the minority into “proper Japanese.” This policy, described later, was about as unpopular with Koreans in Japan as was a kindred policy with the colonized masses in Korea. Both labor conscription and the state’s heavy-handed assimilation policy left bitter memories that after the war were expressed in a renewed embrace of what it meant to be Korean. As the tide of war turned decidedly against Japan, Koreans suffered the same hardships of loss, devastation, and famine as their non-Korean neighbors. This was especially true of those living in the large Korean ghettoes of major cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe. The massive bombing raids on Japanese cities made no distinction between majority and minority, and Koreans, burakumin, and majority Japanese alike often lost everything in the firestorms that followed. Although some Koreans, as we shall see in Chapter 6, reacted to Japan’s increasingly desperate position in ways that were different from those of their Japanese neigh33. Figures for conscripts are from Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 256, table VII-5, “Chōsenjin rōdōsha no tai-nichi dōinsū.” “Forced migration” refers to practices ranging from state-sponsored kidnapping, at its most shocking extreme, to subtler forms of official and psychological coercion of Koreans on the peninsula to sign labor contracts and make the trip to Japan. “Forced labor” refers to the conditions of virtual slavery that many Korean labor conscripts worked under after arriving in Japan, characterized by such practices as being confined to housing on or near the worksite and placed under strict surveillance even when not on the job; having their wages invested in mandatory “savings plans” set up by the company they worked for; and the extension of labor contracts by management without the laborer’s consent. These characterizations are by no means mutually exclusive, of course. As this study focuses on the experience and identity politics of Koreans who established residence in Japan prior to this labor mobilization mea sure, I dispense with a lengthy treatment of the program and of the usually brutal treatment suffered by Koreans brought to Japan under it. For an overview of war time Korean labor conscription policy and practice in English, see Weiner, Race and Migration, pp. 190– 208. For a thorough overview of the historiography of the labor conscription program, focusing on the debates over the use of the term “forced migration” to characterize it—including recent revisionist attempts to claim that the system was not coercive enough to warrant the label— see Yamada Shōji, Koshō Tadashi, and Higuchi Yūichi, Chōsenjin senji rōdō dōin pp. 13– 66.

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bors, in general the Koreans’ responses stemmed from a natural desire to flee from the carnage and save themselves. Koreans joined the exodus out of Japan’s bombed metropolitan areas, and many who had the freedom and means to do so left Japan all together and returned to Korea. Japan’s eventual defeat turned this flight for survival into an even greater mass migration back to the peninsula, with approximately 1,300,000 Koreans taking any means of transportation available to get there during the first few months of the Allied occupation. Those who stayed on, for whatever reason, became the foundation of the postwar Korean minority community in Japan.

State Policies for Assimilation and Incorporation: “Self-Rejuvenation” for the Burakumin Despite the rise of minority activism detailed earlier, government authorities were surprisingly slow to mount an effective response to the challenges posed by groups like the Suiheisha and Korean student and labor organizations. Gradually, however, authorities in the Home Ministry realized that the state needed to involve itself more directly in minor-

34. While the overall Korean population in Japan continued to grow right up to 1945, the rate of growth slowed dramatically during the last two years of the war. In 1943, the Korean population grew from an estimated 1,625,054 individuals as of January 1, to 1,805,438 at year’s end. In 1943, this latter figure had increased to 1,901,409 by the end of the year, and by August 20, 1945, Tamura estimates that 1,968,807 Koreans were in Japan. (Tamura, “Naimushō keihokyoku chōsa ni yoru Chōsenjin jinkō (I), sōjinkō, danjo-betsu jinkō,” p. 59, table I, “Zenkoku sōjinkō”.) Much of what growth was observed during these final years was probably due to the importation of Korean labor conscripts. Nishinarita (Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 256, table VII-5, “Chōsenjin rōdōsha no tai-Nichi dōinsū”) provides the following figures for the total number of Korean labor conscripts brought to Japan during each of these years: 128,296 for 1943; 286,472 for 1944; and 10,622 for 1945. The numbers from 1945 present us with an anomaly of sorts: 1943 labor conscripts accounted for 71.12 percent of annual population growth, and in the following year the number of laborers brought into Japan actually exceeded the overall growth of the Korean population for that year. This may suggest that many Koreans who had the freedom to do so actually left Japan. 35. Morita, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankokujin-Chōsenjin no rekishi, 35, table 4, “Hikiage to fuhōnyūkoku, sōkan.” The figure refers specifically to those leaving Japan between August 1945 and March 1946.

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ity issues if it wished to contain uncooperative minority organizations and control their communities more effectively. In regard to the burakumin, this approach began as early as September 1925, when the ministry’s Social Affairs Bureau established the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai (Central Conciliation Projects Council) to combat the increasingly communistinspired Suiheisha and wrest control of the yūwa movement from the liberal and often critical Dōaikai. The yūwa organizations fell into line quickly: in July 1927 the Dōaikai, remnants of the Teikoku Kōdōkai, and many smaller, local yūwa organizations that had participated in the Dōaikai-led Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei (National Conciliation Federation) joined the new government-sponsored council, led by deputy chairman Arima and chairman Hiranuma Ki’ichirō. With the speedy consolidation of the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai’s hegemony over the yūwa movement, the term “yūwa movement” became a synonym for the government’s buraku policy. In light of Hiranuma’s right-wing political views, it is tempting to see in this shift of power the death of liberal tendencies among yūwa advocates. Such was not the case, however; along with Arima himself, many liberals who had served him faithfully in the Dōaikai and the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei, such as Yamamoto Masao and Kusumoto Hiroshi, supported the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai. Furthermore, in 1927, while retaining his position as deputy chair of the Kyōkai, Arima assumed the helm of the Tanaka administration’s Shakai Jigyō Chōsakai (Social Works Inquiry Board). This board was designed to formulate policies to check the influence of the Suiheisha and the spread of radicalism that emerged from the severe economic hardships experienced by the buraku communities. Even so, the Chōsakai introduced some very progressive proposals. Among these were some that would have established legal 36. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 103. 37. Yamamoto (1898–1993) was born and raised in a buraku community in Hiroshima Prefecture. As a youth he had been inspired by the social ideas of Tolstoy, Kawakami Hajime, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. He orga nized a buraku youth league in his hometown, and even contemplated forming ties between it and the Suiheisha after that group’s inauguration, but joined the Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei at Arima’s behest in 1926. Kusumoto was apparently a student of Arima’s and served as editor of Dōai, but I have not found any more information regarding him.

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avenues for contesting discrimination in employment, wages, education, the military, and even in marriage. While not intended to lead to an anti-discrimination law, these proposals came closer to it than anything previously suggested by a government panel. Kusumoto was also a major progressive voice in the early Kyōkai, calling for cooperation with moderate elements within the Suiheisha and urging the new government organization to commit itself to eradicating the abject poverty prevalent in buraku communities, which he felt reinforced majority prejudice against their residents. By the late 1920s, however, Kusumoto’s support for the Suiheisha had become a problematic position in the Kyōkai. His many critics argued that the Suiheisha had outlived its purpose as a consciousness-raising force in the buraku community and should be replaced in that capacity by the statesponsored yūwa movement. They also countered his economic views of the origins of anti-buraku discrimination by claiming that he had put the cart before the horse: the burakumin were poor, they argued, because an unenlightened majority continued to discriminate against them, a situation that they claimed could only be remedied through a “national brotherhood movement” (dōhō undō). In the wake of the Manchurian Incident, the Kyōkai unveiled a new platform for the yūwa movement, one that would provide the ideological foundation for government views of the buraku problem until the outbreak of full-scale war with China and the establishment of Prince Konoe’s Imperial Rule Assistance Association. The policy that emerged in 1932 placed renewed emphasis on the idea of naibu jikaku (‫ݙ‬䚼㞾㽮), by

38. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 191. 39. Ibid., pp. 199–201. Kusumoto’s main adversary in this debate, which was carried in the pages of the Kyōkai’s news sheet Yūwa jihō and journal Yūwa jigyō kenkyū during 1927 and 1928, was Shimomura Harunosuke. Although Kusumoto was not the only Dōaikai leader active in the Kyōkai, Fujino suggests that, even at this rather early point, he may have become somewhat isolated. By 1929 even Yamamoto Masao had become convinced that the Suiheisha was on its last legs and showed no signs of future development. Yet in spite of this assessment, Yamamoto took a considerable risk in offering Suiheisha leader and JCP member Kitahara Taisaku refuge in his home during the fall of 1933, when Kitahara was trying to evade a general roundup of Suiheisha leaders involved in the Takamatsu Trial Incident (to be examined in Chapter 6). See Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 160– 61.

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which it implied a sense of enlightened self-awareness and self-esteem among the burakumin, not unlike that which the early Suiheisha leadership had in mind when they urged the burakumin to take pride in themselves and decry the discrimination they faced. In the context of the Kyōkai’s Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō (䚼㨑㌠⏜᳈⫳䘟ࢩ, Buraku Economy Revitalization Movement)—itself part of the wider and similarly named “Nōsangyōson Keizai Kōsei Undō,” aimed at majority farming communities—this idea was wedded to a new concept, “ jiriki kōsei” (㞾࡯᳈⫳) or “rejuvenation through one’s own efforts.” The platform recognized that the burakumin had suffered historical disadvantages, which had produced inferior conditions in buraku communities that would require a certain amount of government help to remedy. And yet, lasting improvement, including an end to discrimination, could not be achieved through “rejuvenation by the efforts of others” (tariki kōsei) alone. The burakumin needed to realize the injustice of their situation and resolve to do something about it. In years past, among the platforms of the Suiheisha movement was a resolution to “achieve absolute liberation by our own actions,” and the movement that developed from this was centered on self-awareness [jikaku]. It goes without saying that self-awareness implies truly knowing oneself and awakening to the nobility of one’s individual character. Someone who has awoken to this spirit would find the experience of being discriminated against a source of pain and disappointment; and they would not be likely to ignore it or let it persist. The strong conviction to take care of one’s own problems oneself would well up inside them, and become the resolve to work towards a solution. . . . For this reason, self-awareness as such must form the basic spirit of self-renewal [jiriki kōsei]. There is something we must consider carefully in this regard, however; when an instance of discrimination occurs, striving to correct it directly, through our own efforts, is certainly a course of action based upon self-awareness. Yet true self-awareness lies not in the sudden venting of one’s frustrations by hurling complaints and accusations at others, but rather in using [the experience

40. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 204– 6. The term “naibu jikaku,” as well as similar slogans such as “jikaku undō,” first appeared in the Kyōkai’s rhetoric during 1928. 41. See Smith, Time of Crisis, for a thorough discussion of the Nōsangyōson Keizai Kōsei Undō program.

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of] such discriminatory treatment as a touchstone for cultivating spiritual discipline and strong convictions.

The Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō thus took the Suiheisha’s emphasis on decrying discriminatory treatment and urged burakumin to turn that indignation into a drive to better their own situation, and to thus break the cycle of discrimination and minority poverty. This was an oblique way of asking the burakumin to “prove themselves” to the majority, but rather than emphasizing the need for self-improvement in morals and hygiene, as the kaizen movement had, the movement sought to apply the spiritual drive of the movement against discrimination to the economic realities of the buraku community. Most of the causes of the economic impasse faced by buraku communities can be found in society. If we just put up with such a situation, believing that there is no way for us to stand on our own two feet, then the command to get up and stand on our own will seem unreasonable. Yet if there is no other way to revitalize the economy of the buraku than by standing on our own two feet, even if it seems impossible to do so, it must be done. “It is regrettable that the world discriminates against us”—we must reawaken this spirit and, taking our stand firmly upon it, break through our economic difficulties and revitalize our communities.

Based on this appeal to spiritual fortitude, self-reliance, and selfsacrifice, the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai called for the establishment in buraku communities of suppliers’, producers’, and consumers’ cooperatives that would receive guidance from local yūwa officials and buraku leaders, but would be run by the buraku residents themselves. The spirit of jiriki kōsei that was to animate all of these programs was more than just the sole means by which the burakumin could hope to salvage the economy of their communities; bravely undertaking the seemingly impossible task of reviving the buraku from within was also presented as a crucial opportunity for them to lay to rest the stereotype of the “lazy, ignorant burakumin,” albeit through an admittedly “unreasonable” expenditure of effort. 42. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Keizai kōsei e no michi” (Sept. 1932), in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, p. 82. 43. Ibid.

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That this movement was an attempt to win the support of buraku communities at a time when the Suiheisha was at particularly low ebb is obvious. Even so, and in spite of the austere rhetoric in the earlier passage, the government seemed prepared to do more than simply let buraku communities struggle unassisted toward their own betterment. To this end, it introduced in 1935 the so-called Ten Year Program. Under the program, an annual budget of five million yen would be earmarked for improvements to buraku communities that would raise their standard of living to levels of the majority, thus undermining much of the socioeconomic basis for discrimination. In short, this was to become a program of tariki kōsei needed to bolster the jiriki kōsei efforts of the burakumin themselves. The authorities appear to have trusted the burakumin enough to extend to them a certain amount of autonomy and authority within the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō program. Although the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai set community improvement goals under the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, in some areas yūwa organizations founded by the burakumin themselves took the lead in working to realize them, drafting their own specific improvement agendas for the purpose. In order to encourage community leaders to cooperate and take an active role in the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, every year the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai recognized publicly one or two communities in each prefecture that had distinguished themselves as “economic revitalization areas” [keizai kōsei chiku]. This achievement was rewarded with public works projects for those communities, such as the opening up of new arable lands for use by residents. The state’s efforts to incorporate the burakumin were not limited to community improvements, however: the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai also realized that the majority would have to be brought around to accepting the burakumin as equal members of the national community. This idea was evident in a shift in the official terms used to refer to the burakumin. Whereas the “burakumin,” or the euphemism saimin buraku (hamlets of the impoverished), had been used to refer to burakumin and their communities during the 1920s, in the decade that followed the terms ichibu

44. Fujino, Dowa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 239–42.

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no dōhō (a portion of our fellow countrymen) and shōsū dōhō (minority fellow countrymen) became the referents of choice for the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai and in government policy statements regarding the buraku problem. The Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai also promoted the formation of “yūwa kyōiku,” or “conciliation education” curricula in schools. One of the goals of this initiative, as defined in a 1934 Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai policy guideline on the subject, was to make clear to students the nature of the origins of the Japanese, thus “cultivating a spirit of unity among the people of the nation [kokumin ittai no seishin o kanyō suru koto].”  In clarifying the nature of Japanese origins, yūwa education proponents hoped to propagate an understanding of Japanese racial origins in line with the ideas of Kita Sadakichi, to discredit the deeply ingrained view that the burakumin were racially different from other Japanese. A Yūwa Reader (Yūwa Dokuhon), published in 1938 for use in higher elementary schools in Nara, connected an explanation of the origins of the Japanese to the problem of anti-buraku discrimination in a concise summary of Kita’s ideas, while at the same time admonishing the reader that loyalty to the emperor and a sense of gratitude for imperial benevolence— which constituted the very glue that held the kokutai together—required all Japanese to rid their hearts and minds of prejudice against the burakumin. If one examines in a historical and scholarly manner that which we call the Japanese people [Nippon minzoku], one finds that the aborigines [senju minzoku] and peoples from abroad [gairai minzoku] were blended with the tenson minzoku, who were the descendants of the deities from the time of the gods. The aborigines are those who had been living here all along, while the peoples from abroad, also known as naturalized peoples [kikajin], crossed over to Japan from Korea or China long ago and became naturalized. All of these peoples merged completely, both in their blood ties [ketsuzokuteki ni mo] and spirit [seishinteki ni mo], to become uniformly Japanese. In the future as well, no matter where a country may be, if its people receive the blessings of imperial rule and embrace the spirit of the imperial way as their own, their blood ties too

45. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 227. 46. Chūō yūwa jigyō kyōkai, “Yūwa jigyō ni kansuru kyōikuteki hōsaku yōkō,” quoted in ibid., p. 232.

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shall be merged and they shall become upstanding Japanese. In this way, the Japanese people will be able to grow and flourish far and wide for eternity. . . . The supreme mission of the Japanese people, being created out of such a blending and assimilation, is to realize the unity of the emperor and his subjects [kunmin ittai], based upon the spirit of familial harmony and in accordance with devotion to the gods, and exalt the essence of our sacred national polity [kokutai], in which the hearts and minds of the whole nation are as one [okuchō isshin]. Thus it is truly regrettable that people make distinctions between righteous and base occupations out of superstition, or even worse, look upon the very bodies of their fellow countrymen as defiled in connection with this misguided class concept [ayamatta kaikyū kannen].

With the outbreak of the Pacific War, the buraku problem was further reinterpreted in educational policy, which connected the necessity of ridding society of anti-buraku discrimination to Japan’s mission to construct a new order in East Asia. A 1942 Ministry of Education policy statement on the buraku problem stated this in no uncertain terms: One can find no rational basis today for the continuing discrimination against a certain portion of our fellow countrymen. Even if [certain aspects of this problem] still have not vanished of their own accord, and lie within our national psychology or way of life [kokumin no shinri ni arui wa kokumin seikatsu no uchi ni son suru], these too are destined to be swept away. This is because, as such, they represent shortcomings and anachronistic contradictions lingering in our national way of life that serve to undermine the state. That these are now in the process of disappearing is beyond doubt. . . . If by some chance, however, large numbers of our nation’s people do not have a correct understanding of this problem, and choose to ignore it by remaining aloof from it or avoiding it all together, then even in this time of crisis the problem will remain unsolved as before. If our establishment of a new order at home leaves this problem unsolved, however, how can we expect success in the great work of constructing a new order in East Asia, within which its various people will each find their own place? The situation demands that all of the nation’s people recognize the importance of this problem, and cooperate toward its speedy resolution.

47. Nara-ken yūwa kyōiku kenkyūkai, “Yūwa dokuhon,” in Zenkoku kaihō kyōiku kenkyūkai, Buraku kaihō kyōiku shiryō shūsei, vol. 6: Yūwa kyōiku no riron to undō (II), pp. 210–11. 48. Monbushō, “Kokumin dōwa e no michi,” in Zenkoku kaihō kyōiku kenkyūkai, Buraku kaihō kyōiku shiryō shūsei, vol. 6: Yūwa kyōiku no riron to undō (II), p. 380.

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Discrimination against the burakumin was thus no longer viewed as a social injustice in its own right, as it had been back in the days of Arima’s Dōaikai, nor even primarily as an affront to the ideal of the equality of all subjects before the emperor, as promised by the ideology of ikkun banmin. As far as government policymakers were concerned, discrimination against the burakumin was unacceptable because it impeded a much larger national agenda. This viewpoint in fact compromised the very integrity of the initiative by making it a means to achieving something else, rather than an end in and of itself. The officials assumed in their rhetoric that their majority audience understood and agreed with the lofty ideals of greater East Asian co-prosperity, and that they readily accepted the notion of other Asians as “fellow” Asians who should not be discriminated against, if only for the sake of Japan’s national aims.

State Policies for Assimilation and Incorporation: “Harmonization” for the Korean Minority A well-defined official policy line toward the Korean minority was slower to develop over these same years, due in part to the high degree of transience that characterized the Korean population in Japan through the early 1930s. A relative lack of settled stability in the minority community was not the only factor to impede the development of a proactive policy toward the Koreans, however; official attitudes toward incorporating the minority more fully into Japanese society during the nissen yūwa years of the late 1920s and early 1930s were mixed at best, and reveal the competing pressures produced by the ideology of isshi dōjin on the one hand and popular prejudice against Koreans on the other. Reflecting the former, more inclusive impulse was the extension of the ballot to all eligible adult Korean males living in Japan, along with their Japanese peers, under the universal suffrage law of 1925. Despite some consternation on the part of local officials regarding Korean admission to the electorate, the authorities ultimately saw no reason to exclude the minority. To be sure, the law contained certain stipulations that denied the ballot to those on public assistance or those who had resided in a municipality for less than a year prior to the date of an elec-

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tion, but while these disproportionately affected Koreans in Japan, they applied equally to the majority as well. Furthermore, the authorities took measures to ensure that the language barrier would not result in the automatic disqualification of Korean votes, by allowing Koreans to cast their ballots in hangul. Indicative of the latter impulse—to discriminate against Koreans based on popular prejudice—was the double standard applied in the disbursement of welfare benefits to the poor under the hōmen iin (district welfare commissioner) system. As Hur Kwangmu has explained, even though Koreans in Japan often lived well below the poverty line established for the provision of welfare benefits to Japanese, district welfare commissions routinely set even lower qualifying income levels for the migrants, based on the belief that Koreans were accustomed to, and indeed only capable of, a much lower standard of living than their Japanese neighbors. The drastically altered situation that Japan faced after 1931 eventually prompted the state to take a much more proactive role in policies toward the Korean minority, just as had been the case in regard to the burakumin. The Sōaikai had become too closely identified with its strongarmed tactics of minority control in the minds of Koreans in Japan to make it an attractive option for authorities seeking a new means of dealing with the Korean minority. Other groups, such as the “semi-official, semi-private” (han-kan han-min) Ōsaka-fu Naisen Kyōwakai (JapanKorea Harmonization Society of Osaka Prefecture), established in May 1924, proved to be too small in scale and too closely linked to the interests of the Japanese landlords and small-business owners who joined 49. Shortly before the general elections in February 1930, the government implemented mea sures to allow ballots cast in hangul to be translated and counted. Although there was objection to this among Diet members who felt that Koreans, as Japa nese subjects, should at least be expected to use katakana when casting their votes, the measure stood because a similar mea sure allowing the blind to cast ballots in Braille served as a precedent. (“Koreans Will Cast Votes for Labor,” Japan Times and Mail, Feb. 2, 1930.) 50. Hur, “Senzen hinkonsha kyūsai ni okeru Chōsenjin sabetsu,” 28–31. For background on the hōmen iin system in English, see Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 49–59.

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them on the “private” side to achieve the required results. A more direct role for the state seemed to be called for. The central government’s first tentative step toward a national Korean minority policy came in 1934, with a cabinet decision to limit the volume of Korean migration into Japan, improve the living conditions in Korean ghettos, and implement programs that would bring about the thorough cultural assimilation of their residents. That same year, police in Osaka revitalized the faltering Ōsaka-fu Naisen Kyōwakai by establishing kyōfūkai (moral reform associations) within it. As the name suggests, these groups were dedicated to correcting the undesirable habits of Koreans in communities scattered throughout the prefecture. “Undesirable habits” included a wide range of behaviors, from poor hygiene, gambling, and brewing illegal liquor to wearing traditional Korean clothes. The “wholesome practices” that the groups then hoped to instill included such habits as wearing Japanese style clothing and raising the Hinomaru flag on national holidays. The list of proper behaviors and attitudes was rapidly broadened to include conducting Japanese-style weddings and funerals instead of traditional Korean ceremonies, and worshipping at Shinto shrines, all as a means of instilling a proper comprehension of the “concept of the national polity” (kokutai kannen). This program of moral reform was nationalized in 1936, when the Home Ministry instructed prefectural governments to establish their own Kyōwakai organizations and provided budgetary allocations to help. In June 1939, all of these groups joined the Chūō Kyōwakai (Central

51. Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, pp. 21–26. Although these organizations did try to assimilate workers to Japa nese culture, they were too small and had too little funding to reach many. Also, Japa nese business owners and landlords sought to use these groups to quell labor unrest over discriminatorily low wages and orga nized housing disputes against high rents and other arbitrary actions by landlords. 52. Ibid., pp. 27–30. 53. Ibid., pp. 48–53. 54. Ibid., p. 63. The initial budget for such work was fifty thousand yen, which ironically was the same amount that the Hara government had provided for the establishment of yūwa groups to address the buraku problem in the wake of the Rice Riots.

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Harmonization Society), thus bringing all official efforts to deal with the Korean minority into the same organizational and policy framework. The Chūō Kyōwakai was designed to serve a variety of state policy functions. First and foremost was surveillance of Koreans, a task achieved through the direct involvement of the police at every organizational level—from the presence of the director of the Special Higher Police as a councilor of the national organization to the even greater degrees of police involvement on the prefectural and local branch levels. Membership in the Kyōwakai was compulsory for all Koreans residing in Japan, and residents of minority communities were organized in tonari-gumistyle units, which reported to local police officers on a regular basis, usually through Korean guidance officers (hodōin) selected from among the local Korean population. Related to this security effort was another task of the Kyōwakai: overseeing the thousands of Korean labor conscripts drafted into Japan’s mines and factories during the war to ameliorate the labor shortage created by Japanese workers departing for the front. The Kyōwakai organized chapters in workplaces where such laborers were assigned, and issued Kyōwakai membership booklets in each conscript’s name, which Korean labor conscripts handed over to the management of their place of work upon arrival. This latter measure was designed to prevent labor conscripts from escaping and looking for better work elsewhere, since the booklets had to be presented to a potential employer in order to gain legal employment. 55. Ibid., p. 86. 56. Ibid., pp. 108–11. 57. In the case of Kyoto Prefecture, the qualifications for appointment as guidance officer included a high level of proficiency in Japa nese, no evidence of harboring subversive ideas, and a recognized status as a community leader, which usually involved management of some sort of business— such as a boarding house—within the community. Ibid., p. 74. 58. Ibid., p. 146. 59. It is worth noting that a similar system of employment surveillance was instituted for Japa nese workers at around this time to prevent disruptive labor turnover in industries of strategic importance. Specifically, the National Workbook Law of 1941 required Japa nese workers in heavy industries to carry “national workbooks” (kokumin rōmu techō). See Gordon, Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan, pp. 264– 74, for details on this and other systems of wartime labor control for the majority. After the National

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Surveillance and control of minority mobility were not the only functions of the Kyōwakai. Of arguably greater significance to the experience of Koreans during these years was its role in forcibly assimilating Koreans to Japanese culture and society. This objective and the reason for it were clearly spelled out in a prospectus that accompanied the establishment of the Chūō Kyōwakai: The number of our brethren from the exterior (gaichi dōhō) living in Japan has grown from a mere three thousand or so at the end of 1915 to as many as 770,000 individuals twenty-three years later, at the end of June 1938, and continues to increase every year. And yet, due to differences in language and customs, complex and difficult problems have arisen in many areas. This is truly a matter of the gravest concern for the harmonization of national life (kokumin seikatsu no kyōwa). In light of this situation, since 1936 the government has embarked on the urgent undertaking of broadly and thoroughly improving the lifestyles [of Koreans in Japan] and educating them, with their assimilation to Japan as its central objective (naichi dōka o kichō to shite). In the major prefectures concrete projects have been implemented in accordance with government directives, and along with these efforts individual prefectures have established harmonization project groups (kyōwa jigyō dantai), which are working to spread and thoroughly promote these projects. In order for these groups to perform their functions adequately and achieve the anticipated results, however, it is now necessary for them to maintain contact with one another and coordinate their activities into an organic program.

The rationale for forming a centralized, national organization is evident in this passage. And yet, in sharp contrast to the explanation of the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō quoted previously, one is struck by the total absence of any appeal to the Korean minority for its cooperation in this undertaking. Unlike the case with the buraku masses, where the authorities in the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai decided that it was necessary or at least beneficial to speak directly to the minority, the organizers of the Chūō Kyōwakai apparently saw no point in appealing to the Korean minority to win its support for the program. Given the prejudices that

Workbook Law went into effect, Koreans employed in mines and factories were required to carry both booklets (p. 146). 60. Quoted in Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, pp. 87–88.

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had been in place prior to the annexation, it was believed that as long as Koreans remained Koreans, the only sort of agency the minority might possess was incorrigible subversion and opposition to the interest of the state. This view defined the Kyōwakai’s approach to the masses of Korean laborers it sought to control, but even in regard to Korean university students, intellectuals, and Koreans affluent enough to be selected as the program’s own “guidance officers,” appeals to loyalty and patriotism were absent. Their support for the state and its policy initiative seems to have been simply taken for granted. The term naichi dōka—literally “assimilation to the interior,” meaning Japan and its culture—was the key term of Kyōwakai policy. Although prefectural affiliates like the Kyoto Kyōwakai claimed that they also sought to “improve the economic life of Koreans” and “promote understanding and brotherly love toward these recently attached brethren [shinpu dōhō]” among the Japanese majority, very little was actually done in this regard. As with the treatment of the burakumin, a cosmetic change was made in the language used in official policy statements and the press: “Chōsenjin” and “senjin” were phased out in favor of “hantō dōhō” (“peninsular brethren” or “fellow countrymen from the peninsula”) and “hantōjin” (“peninsular people”), as if to suggest that the only thing distinguishing these people from the rest of the Japanese was that they came from the Korean Peninsula rather than the Japanese archipelago. During the war, Koreans accused of violent or disruptive behavior, breaking laws, committing subversive acts, or harboring such thoughts, however, continued to be called futei senjin or simply senjin. The Kyōwakai, with cooperation from the popular press, also increasingly plugged the image of Koreans as loyal citizens. From 1938 onward, official publications and even the popular press began to feature “beautiful tales” (bidan) of supposedly true, selfless acts of mutual aid and friendship between Japanese and Koreans, as well as inspirational stories of patriotic sacrifice to the nation on the part of Koreans. In 1944, the

61. “Kyōto-fu Kyōwakai yōran,” in Higuchi, Kyōwakai kankei shiryōshū, vol. 3, p. 422. 62. Weiner, Race and Migration, pp. 160– 61. 63. While stories such as these had appeared in the popu lar press as far back as the early 1920s, following the launching of the Kyōwakai they appeared with greater

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Kyōwakai published a collection of such stories entitled “Naichi zaijū hantō dōhō jūgo bidan” (Beautiful home front tales of our peninsular brethren in the interior). It is doubtful that these new terms and the images of Korean patriotism ever really caught on among members of the Japanese majority: in any case, the government showed little concern for promoting a wider understanding of the problems Koreans faced in adapting to Japanese society and of the aims of the Kyōwakai program. Although there was sporadic discussion of the need to introduce programs into Japanese schools to teach children about the injustice of discrimination against Koreans, nothing appears to have come of this: there was no Kyōwakai counterpart to the yūwa education curriculum of the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai. Even some of the Japanese civilians involved in overseeing the frequency. A search for stories involving bidan, using the database of Korean minority related newspaper articles maintained on Mizuno Naoki’s homepage (http://www.zin bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~mizna/shinbun/), revealed 32 such articles published in Kansai-area dailies between 1923 and 1935. In contrast, 70 stories of “beautiful tales” appeared in these papers between 1936 and 1945. The nature of these tales changed over time as well. Whereas the articles published prior to 1936 generally relate human-interest stories about Koreans who rescued Japanese from accidents and other perilous situations, or Japanese individuals and communities that took it upon themselves to help impoverished Koreans, after 1936 articles increasingly reported on Koreans who willingly contributed money and volunteered labor without compensation to support the war effort. Aside from promoting the image of Korean patriotism for Japan, these articles may also have been part of an effort to encourage even greater levels of contribution from Japanese readers. 64. Reproduced in Higuchi, Kyōwakai kankei shiryōshū, vol. 2, pp. 427– 97. 65. See, for example, the section entitled “Hantō gakudō no zenzen inai kyōwa kyōiku” in Kageyama Isao, “Kōbe-shi ni okeru kyōwa kyōiku,” Kyōwa kyōiku kenkyū (1941), reprinted in ibid., p. 260. As a school inspector in Kobe, Kageyama shares his views and observations regarding various programs for Korean children in city schools. In this section, Kageyama responded to the hypothetical question of whether kyōwa kyōiku programs should be implemented in schools with no Korean students. He claims that this is absolutely necessary if the aims of the kōminka movement and the goal of naisen ittai are to be achieved, since the attitudes of Japa nese children toward their Korean peers are an important element in the process of making Koreans into model Japa nese subjects. He offers no actual examples of such programs being carried out in Kobe, nor does he provide any concrete suggestions regarding what the curriculum for Japa nese students should contain; he merely explains that it should strive for the realization of “mutual morals” (sōgoteki dōtoku) between Japa nese and Korean schoolchil-

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Kyōwakai programs at the prefectural level were wont to complain that the Japanese public had little understanding of the nature of the Kyōwakai or its activities, due to a lack of available information. The main objective of the Chūō Kyōwakai’s initiatives was to change the Korean minority into proper Japanese subjects. This policy paralleled the so-called kōminka movement in colonial Korea, implemented under Governor-General Minami Jirō, through which the conversion of Koreans into true “imperial subjects” (kōmin, ⱛ⇥) was to be achieved. The Kyōwakai policy was also an extension of “moral reform” efforts carried out by police in Osaka prior to 1937. During that period, local police and Kyōwakai workers had taught Koreans how to speak and write in proper Japanese, ordered them to display the flag in front of their homes on national holidays and other occasions of importance to the state, instructed Korean women in the correct ways of wearing and sewing Japanese clothes and cooking Japanese cuisine, and brought groups of Koreans to worship at Shinto shrines and urged them to install kamidana alters in their homes. These policies were not merely for the “old,” settled Korean communities; even the labor conscripts received such instruction through the Kyōwakai branches at their work sites, although there the emphasis was overwhelmingly on learning the rudimentary Japanese necessary to understand work orders. These measures were designed to make Korean communities seem less alien and to facilitate communication between their residents, on the one hand, and the state and majority society, on the other. Yet the Kyōwakai ultimately sought to achieve a more fundamental transformation of the Korean minority, one that would mold each individual’s beliefs about nation, self, and the connection between the two. Th is was dren.” Furthermore, unlike so much of the rhetoric in policy statements on yūwa education, in which terms like keishi (to look down upon) and senshi (to view as defiled) appear in describing majority prejudice against the burakumin, Kageyama makes no overt reference to the problem of discrimination against Koreans in this short section. 66. Such comments were made by guidance officers in Hyogo Prefecture at a series of roundtable discussions of the Kyōwakai program, apparently held sometime soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War. See “Misshū chiku kondankai kiroku bassui,” in Higuchi, Kyōwakai kankei shiryōshū, vol. 3, pp. 324, 329. 67. Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, pp. 132–42.

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a grand-scale undertaking through which, leaders hoped, Koreans would become more than just close approximations of the Japanese; rather, they would be reformed into truly exemplary Japanese subjects. This involved a variety of initiatives. Starting in April 1940, the Kyōwakai demanded that all Koreans in Japan adopt Japanese surnames and given names, in accordance with the same sōshi kaimei (ࡉ⇣ᬍৡ) regulations being carried out on the peninsula by the government-general. The Kyōwakai also placed particular emphasis on education, especially of the young. Police and other local Kyōwakai representatives pressed Korean parents to send their school-aged children to elementary schools in which “harmonization” (kyōwa) programs had been instituted, and urged them to enroll their preschool-aged children in municipal daycare facilities, in an attempt to dilute the influence of their Korean home environments at a much earlier age. This push for Korean school attendance and use of day care facilities was related to a more general concern for increasing school attendance and public utilization of welfare facilities, but in regard to Koreans, the rationale for doing so took on an added significance under the Kyōwakai program. Kageyama Isao, a school inspector in Kobe, suggested that the point of mandatory schooling and enrollment in daycare for Korean children was precisely to separate them from other Koreans, because if allowed to remain among their own kind Koreans would continue to cling to their “mistaken national consciousness” (minzoku ishiki). “The more Koreans there are left together,” he declared, “the less likely they are to become aware of their own faults.” For the Japanese officials involved, this kind of total assimilation of Koreans to the customs, beliefs, and culture of “proper” Japanese subjects was the only way to remedy the insufficiencies that had characterized the earlier 1920s nissen yūwa approach. “Conciliation” between Koreans and Japanese had failed to materialize precisely because the Koreans had insisted on remaining Korean. Only by shedding all vestiges of their Korean-ness, both as a group and as individuals, could Koreans 68. Ibid., pp. 121–22. 69. Kageyama Isao, “Kōbe-shi ni okeru kyōwa kyōiku,” Kyōwa kyōiku kenkyū, quoted in Higuchi, Kyōwakai kankei shiryōshū, vol. 3, p. 258. 70. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 194.

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help the Japanese to forget that there was any basis for a distinction to be made. Only then would the Japanese be prepared to accept them as equals. This complete accommodation to the Japanese culture, the officials reasoned, would ultimately be of benefit to the Koreans themselves. Takeshima Kazuyoshi, Kyōwakai councilor and bureaucrat in the newly formed Welfare Ministry, made this plain in a revealing reinterpretation of what “impartiality and equal favor” meant for Koreans in Japan: The idea is that once they come to the interior [naichi], we should have the peninsulars [hantōjin] follow the customs of the interior, and gradually stop doing things that only sow the seeds of their own discrimination. To put it differently, as newly attached people, they should be showered far and wide with the benevolence of His Imperial Majesty, based upon the imperial will of impartiality and equal favor. This is what is called their conversion into imperial subjects [kōkoku shinminka].

Wartime Minority Policies Compared: The Importance of Culture and the Persistence of Suspicion In both the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō and the Kyōwakai program, the key to freedom from discrimination was thought to be minority effort and sacrifice for the greater good of state and society. For the burakumin, this effort entailed the Herculean task of lifting their communities out of poverty, ignorance, and squalor, thus bringing themselves up to a level at which those in the majority would have no reason to feel prejudice toward them. For the Koreans, it meant the willing forfeiture of their language, lifestyle, names, and cultural heritage, and the equally voluntary embrace of Japanese ways, so that their Japanese neighbors would no longer be reminded of who they had been and where they had come from. This, as Miyata Setsuko points out, was the “biggest trump card” of the assimilation program: in exchange for giving up their language and culture, Koreans were promised complete acceptance and freedom from discrimination. But although the movements to incorporate each group both stemmed from a growing national crisis, the sources of each minority’s “problem” 71. Quoted in Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, p. 83. 72. Miyata, Chōsen minshū to “ kōminka” seisaku, p. 156.

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were considered to be very different. The underlying problem for the burakumin was viewed as largely socioeconomic: although the legacy of poverty in their communities was thought to have arisen from a particular “buraku lifestyle,” which in itself carried cultural overtones, the authorities in the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai believed that this poverty could be overcome with a little outside help and a dose of enlightened self-interest on the part of the burakumin themselves. The burakumin were thus granted a considerable amount of agency, and not merely in the rhetoric of the government improvement initiative, but in certain aspects of how the programs were implemented on the local level as well. For the Koreans, by contrast, at issue was the much more formidable problem of dealing with an alien culture that compromised one’s loyalty to the state. The cure was thus to rid the Koreans of their own culture and replace it completely with a Japanese cultural identity. This was possible, and even necessary, due to the “fact” of racial affinity between Koreans and Japanese. And yet in their present state the Koreans could not be entrusted to do this for themselves, nor were any promises or platitudes to win their support deemed necessary. Moreover, just like on the peninsula, where a similar kōminka movement was carried out on a much larger scale, there was no such thing as a “sufficient degree” of Japanization: the only thing for Koreans to do, as one training manual for Korean military conscripts put it, was to “work hard at cultivating and training [oneself to become Japanese] even if it kills one.” Whereas the burakumin could be trusted to at least understand the path they had to take once it was revealed to them, the Koreans had to be pulled and prodded. Despite the apparent radicalism of the Suiheisha and the stereotypes of vindictiveness and clannishness surrounding the burakumin, the authorities were more inclined to put their faith in a minority that shared the majority’s language, general cultural values, and historical experience of nationhood since the Meiji Restoration than they were to trust the Koreans, who seemed so incontrovertibly different from themselves. Minority policy initiatives continued beyond the outbreak of fullscale war with China in 1937, and then with the United States in 1941, 73. From Chōsen-gun hōdōbu (kanshū), Chōsen gunji fukyū kyōkai, Chōsen chōhei junbi dokuhon, quoted in ibid., p. 154.

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but they never came close to achieving their stated goals. The Kyōwakai mobilized Koreans to take part in public displays of their patriotism and their desire to behave as proper Japanese should, but these were propaganda spectacles aimed at the majority, rather than spontaneous expressions of real sentiment. More often than not, its initiatives in Korean communities met with a lack of enthusiasm bordering on passive resistance, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 6. For the burakumin, the Ten Year Plan and the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, which together promised to revitalize buraku communities and eradicate discrimination against them through a combination of massive environmental improvement programs and encouragement of diligence and frugality among buraku residents, suffered from chronic budgetary shortfalls: in 1936, the first year that the plan was in effect, only 1,234,484 yen was budgeted for buraku improvement programs—the same figure as that in 1935, and only one-fifth of what the Ten Year Plan called for. After the outbreak of war with China, the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai began to tout emigration to Manchuria as not only the solution to the discrimination problem, but as a noble way for the burakumin to serve the nation, and in 1939 the Ten Year Plan was overhauled to make promotion of Manchurian emigration the main focus of the government’s buraku policy. This was in line with the Ministry of Agriculture’s Bunson Imin Hōshin (Partial Village Immigration Directive) of May 1938, which called for exporting farming villages’ “surplus population” (those who had land holdings or income below a certain level of land holdings or income), redistributing their land among those who were left, and granting the migrants farmland in Manchuria, all in order to increase the number of owner-farmers. Although the point of the Ten Year Plan had been to bring the environmental conditions and standards of living in buraku communities up to 74. These displays usually took the form of labor ser vice and group worship at shrines, which were reported approvingly in Japa nese dailies and other publications. For examples from Shakai jihō, a monthly journal of philanthropy and social work in the Kyoto area published by the Kyōto-fu shakai jigyō kyōkai, see Mizuno Naoki, Kyōto ni okeru Chōsenjin no rekishi, shiryōshū, vol. 1: “Shakai jihō” kankei kiji, in particular the articles appearing from page 70 onward. In contrast to the mobilization of Korean labor ser vice under the Kyōwakai, burakumin were never asked to perform such spectacles as part of the Kōsei movement. 75. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, p. 251.

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about the level of neighboring majority communities, which by necessity entailed special treatment, the government now declared that all social welfare policies must benefit the nation as a whole, not just a single group in particular. The Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai assured the burakumin that anti-buraku discrimination did not exist in Manchuria, but the reaction of burakumin to the program was mixed at best, causing frustrated local officials in some areas to resort to forcing entire buraku communities to emigrate. Programs aimed at educating the majority about the evils of discrimination were equally stymied. Neither the various yūwa education initiatives launched by the Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai nor even the 1942 Ministry of Education policy statement on the subject, quoted earlier, contained any binding requirements for local schools; consequently, as with the much less vigorously promoted idea of kyōwa education in regard to the Korean minority, the vast majority of schools did little or nothing to introduce such lessons into the curriculum. In the absence of any significant initiatives against discriminatory attitudes, little if anything changed in the way majority Japanese viewed minority communities. Surveys conducted by the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai at the end of the 1930s found that negative attitudes toward the burakumin—including deeply ingrained beliefs in the burakumin as violent, defiled, and racially different from other Japanese—persisted among an overwhelming number of school-aged children and their parents. Although no surveys of this kind appear to have been conducted in regard to the Korean minority, given the lack of official attention to the way the minority was viewed and treated within majority society it is unlikely that the nature of anti-Korean prejudice had changed much since the early 1920s. Indeed, as the tide of war turned against Japan, 76. Ibid., pp. 271– 75. 77. Ibid., pp. 280–84. In particular, Fujino cites the case of a community in Nagano Prefecture that local officials arbitrarily sent to Manchuria over the course of three years, from 1941 to 1943, despite a lack of interest in emigration on the part of the residents and the fact that 103 individuals out of the community’s total population of 185 were elderly individuals and children. 78. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 271. 79. See Kurokawa’s summaries of two such surveys, conducted in 1937 and 1938, respectively, in ibid., pp. 244, 255.

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police records noted the prevalence of rumors concerning nefarious and treasonous acts by Koreans, rumors that were strikingly reminiscent of those circulated in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake. While a few rumors circulated among the majority expressed pity for destitute Koreans— such as a story overheard by police in Chiba during October 1943 that described a Korean woman who went insane after being detained by police for two days and upon returning home had found that her three children had starved to death in her absence—in general rumors about Koreans were anything but understanding or tolerant of the minority. In some instances, rumors of Korean cannibalism even appeared: anecdotes also circulated in Chiba during October 1943 described Korean laborers who raped, murdered, and then cooked and ate a hapless Japanese woman. Despite the lack of real progress on warming the relationship between the minority groups and the majority culture, the government, as part of its efforts to increase spiritual and ideological unity in the face of war and diplomatic isolation, changed the names of these organizations in ways that made their minority connection less apparent to the casual observer (and so diverted attention away from the “minority problem” itself). In June 1941, for instance, the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai changed its name to the Dōwa Hōkōkai (ৠ੠༝݀Ӯ, Harmonization Public Ser vice Society). From this point on, dōwa (ৠ੠), which unlike yūwa was not until then associated with the burakumin, became the government’s euphemism of choice for the buraku problem, as it remains to this day. 80. One version of this rumor even claimed that they served some of this macabre meal to an unsuspecting police officer. See Naimushō keihokyoku, “Tokkō geppō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 5, pp. 249–51. 81. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 210–11. 82. The government’s explanation for the choice of the term dōwa was that the term derived from the text of an imperial rescript issued on Dec. 28, 1926, on the occasion of Emperor Hirohito’s ascension to the throne. This rescript contained the following phrase: “pledge to make the people’s hearts as one, improve the their morals and customs, and bring about impartiality and equal favor far and wide” (NjҎᖗᚳɴৠ ৠȿȷ⇥ 乼ᚳɴ੠ ੠ȿ∢ȷϔ㽪ৠҕɖ࣪ɺᅷɠ . . . nj). The highlighted characters were combined to yield dōwa. Interestingly, this combination of characters was also considered as a candidate for the era name of Hirohito’s subsequent reign, which instead became the “Shōwa” era. See entry for dōwa in Buraku kaihō kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai jiten, pp. 592– 93. The relationship of the term dōwa to the buraku problem, however, seems to

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Three years later, at the end of 1944, the Chūō Kyōwakai went through a similar transformation, becoming the Chūō Kōseikai (Ё༂㟜⫳Ӯ, Central Life Prosperity Society). This name change even obfuscated the “harmonizing” function of the organization, as well as the connection to the Korean problem, as if to suggest that further “harmonization” of Koreans and Japanese was no longer necessary. That the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai should undergo its name change first may once again be indicative of government bureaucrats’ greater willingness to provisionally accept the burakumin as members of the Japanese nation. The very fact that organizations like the Dōwa Hōkōkai and the Chūō Kōseikai continued to exist proves that authorities still felt there was more work to be done before Koreans and burakumin could be completely accepted into majority society. The continuing suspicion of these minorities by many of these administrators, however, countermanded the spirit of these name changes and proposals. This conflict was particularly evident in regard to the Koreans: shortly before the Kyōwakai changed its name to the Kōseikai, some from within the Welfare Ministry began to lobby for the increased participation of Koreans at higher managerial positions, even going so far as to propose that Koreans fill all of the central positions in the organization. Furthermore, under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Koiso, a committee was established to consider allowing those Koreans and Taiwanese living in Japan to transfer their family registers to their municipalities of residence, thus becoming, insofar as the law was concerned, indistinguishable from other Japanese. As the prime minister himself put it, this measure was necessary to “inspire in the hearts and minds of these people the conviction that they, as people of the Empire, will receive the same treatment as the Japanese in the homeland, without any distinction whatsoever.” In spite of these magnanimous gestures on the

predate this rescript. The reader will recall that the so-called Spy Incident of 1924, in which Hirano Shōken and Minami Umekichi were expelled from the Suiheisha, involved Hirano’s leaking of Suiheisha secrets to the editor of the Dōwa tsūshin (ৠ੠䗮ֵ), a news sheet that published articles on the buraku problem and other minority issues. 83. Tsuboe, Kaitei zōho— Chōsen minzoku dokuritsu undō hisshi, p. 603. 84. Weiner, Race and Migration, p. 203. 85. Quoted in Wagner, Korean Minority in Japan, p. 36.

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part of a few, however, official suspicion and a lack of concern for Koreans’ plight prevented substantive reforms from being implemented. Koiso’s proposal to allow Koreans and Taiwanese to transfer their registers to Japan was never acted on. And Minami Jirō, who had vociferously championed the ideal of naisen ittai as governor-general of Korea and adviser to the Kyōwakai, betrayed his bias against the Koreans by declaring before the emperor that it was a “grim fact of the matter” that Koreans were “a different people [iminzoku], whose thoughts, feelings, manners, customs, and language are different [from ours].” For its part, the Police Affairs Bureau rejected out of hand the idea that Koreans be allowed to take control of the Kyōwakai/Kōseikai, since this would give them access to information of a highly sensitive nature. While less subject to constant official surveillance than the Koreans, the buraku minority was still eyed with occasional suspicion during the war years. Even after the Suiheisha disbanded in 1942, police were ever vigilant lest the burakumin, under the guidance of those formerly active in the movement, disrupt the smooth pursuit of the war effort at home with complaints about discriminatory treatment. In certain situations, the desire on the part of local police officials to defuse conflicts worked in the favor of the minority. As Sheldon Garon and Andrew Gordon have explained, the police played a role in mediating labor disputes. 86. Quoted in Miyata, Chōsen minshū to “ kōminka” seisaku, p. 166. Minami made this comment at a meeting of the Privy Council on Oct. 28, 1942, five months after his retirement from the position of governor-general. He was speaking in opposition to a proposal to unify the administrative structures of the Japa nese homeland and the colonies, which would have greatly reduced the power of the governor-general in Korea. Minami objected that the immense differences of the Korean people posed particular problems of governance that administration in the metropole would not be able to deal with adequately. 87. Weiner, Race and Migration, p. 203. Higuchi (Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, p. 103n17) mentions that a certain number of Koreans became officers of the Kōseikai following the name change in 1944. 88. Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan, pp. 205– 7; Gordon, Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan, pp. 323–24. Interestingly, burakumin appear to have fared somewhat better than workers in police-mediated disputes, at least insofar as their demands were mainly centered on receiving an apology and/or fairer treatment from the offending individual, business, or orga nization. The police seem to have been very helpful in eliciting other people’s apologies and ser vices, if they judged doing so to be an expedient way out of a prolonged dispute involving the minority.

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And police anxiety over the possible resurgence of buraku militancy actually prompted them to take a proactive role in mediating disputes involving discrimination against burakumin, often with favorable results for the minority. Despite such ostensibly pro-minority efforts, however, the authorities were suspicious of the degree of patriotism among the burakumin. Police reports from Nara Prefecture commented disparagingly on the selfish demands of buraku communities there for larger rice rations, and claimed that the source of the problem was that the burakumin “squandered” the fair share of rice they received. More damning still were the charges that the burakumin were shirking their ultimate duty to the nation, military ser vice. Police in Okayama Prefecture suspected local buraku youths of ingesting large quantities of hot peppers and other substances prior to their medical examinations for military ser vice, in order to make it appear that they were suffering from debilitating or contagious illnesses. The same report also voiced skepticism about what it claimed was a suspiciously high rate of military ser vice exemptions for health reasons granted burakumin in the prefecture, which reflected a glaring “lack of consciousness of the state” (kokka ishiki ni toboshiki). The compilers surmised that such problems were the result of the peculiar buraku “family psychology” (kazoku no shinri) and “entangled blood relations within the buraku” (sakusō seru buraku nai ketsuzoku kankei ni yori). For both Koreans and burakumin, the rhetoric of incorporation that characterized state policies during the war years was undermined by this sense of official mistrust. If it was more prevalent in regard to the Koreans than the burakumin, it was due to Koreans’ relative cultural distance from the unrealistic image of “model” Japanese behavior that the authorities believed was crucial to the success of the war effort. As a group the burakumin may not have stood out as much as the Koreans in comparison to this image, but it is doubtful that representatives of the state’s authority had discarded all prejudice against the minority and

89. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 270– 71. 90. “Shokuryō zōhai chinjō undō,” Tokkō geppō, (June 1943), in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, pp. 1018–20. 91. “Shūdanteki shōshū kihi jiken,” Tokkō geppō (Sept. 1943), in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai-suihei undō shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, pp. 1020–21.

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come to accept them as they were on any level, administrative or personal. Special policies to deal with minority “problems” sustained the impression that these groups were separate and different from the majority, thus making it less likely that they would be readily accepted on equal terms by the majority culture. This was a contradiction that would continue to plague minority policy in the postwar period, especially in regard to the burakumin, who eventually became the major focus of the state’s minority policies. While neither minority group fully cooperated with the dictates of these policies, nor did they display complete support to the war effort, the cultural distance of each group from the model standards of behavior promoted by the state seemed to determine how willing and enthusiastic they were for the home-front war effort. These differences would drastically alter the way each group was perceived by, and saw itself in relation to, the majority culture in Japan.

ch apter 6 Minorities in a Time of National Crisis: Burakumin and Koreans during Mobilization and War

By the beginning of the 1930s, minority anti-discrimination movements were in disarray. The Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei had disbanded to join forces with the Japanese labor movement, a move that had failed to gain the support of many rank-and-file members. Likewise, the Suiheisha stood poised to dissolve itself into the general labor and peasant unions on the Left, after suffering rank-and-file attrition and factional and ideological bickering at the center. On top of this, Koreans and burakumin found themselves the objects of the state minority policies that, as described earlier, were designed to undermine or otherwise inhibit autonomous movements. Neither minority reacted to the pressures of these years in a uniform way: among each, a variety of attitudes, views, and conceptions arose regarding the minority’s place in Japanese society and in relation to the Japanese state, which in turn produced a spectrum of responses ranging from steadfast support for the state in its time of need, to hostile alienation from it. Where a particular individual stood along this spectrum was greatly influenced by factors such as socioeconomic position— or how “successful” one had been in Japanese society— and the degree to which one perceived the state as capable of addressing and easing the minority’s problems. Both minorities yielded ardent supporters of the state and its war effort, as well as those who resisted, actively or passively. On the whole, however, the buraku minority supported the war effort to a much greater degree than did the Koreans. The difference in attitude was in part a result of the state’s somewhat more

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inclusive, respectful approach toward the burakumin during the 1930s, but it also stemmed from that minority’s fundamentally different orientation toward the Japanese nation— an orientation based on notions of belonging and allegiance that had been formed by commonalities in culture, language, and experience.

The Suiheisha Leadership and the State: The Shifting Foci of Criticism and Minority Identity The bitterness between pro- and anti-dissolution factions within the Suiheisha notwithstanding, the debate over dissolution was never argued out to a conclusion. Two factors intervened: one was the appearance of yet another Comintern thesis on Japan, which reversed much of what the previous 1931 theses had stated. The other was the fact that, while these two factions bickered over whether to dissolve, the yūwa movement’s Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō had managed to significantly erode support for the Suiheisha in many buraku communities. Suiheisha activists on both sides realized that unless they settled their differences and took some constructive action quickly, there would be no movement left either to lead or dissolve. The urgently needed plan of action came from what had until recently been the dissolution group. The plan, unveiled at the eleventh national meeting in March 1933, was essentially to beat the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō at its own game. The group would set up in individual buraku communities consumer’s cooperatives and other organizations that would serve the needs of the people better than the state could because these organizations would be run by fellow burakumin, rather than by a yūwa bureaucracy that was just trying to save the government some money by making the burakumin more “self-sufficient.” The Suiheisha called this new plan the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō (Buraku Committee Activity), and included within it a wide range of community services—from procurement of foodstuffs to help with writing letters. The Iinkai Katsudō also

1. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 158. 2. Suiheisha members admitted as much. See the third point of the dissolution faction’s final leaflet in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 2, p. 1273.

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sought to mobilize the burakumin politically, especially for the purpose of demanding exclusive access to government funding for buraku improvement projects. With this new proposal came a reformulated description of the nature of the buraku situation: Interwoven into every area of our social lives is a status distinction that rests on the view that burakumin are somehow unclean. Burakumin have had the civil freedoms of residence, occupation, and marriage snatched away from them. But that is not all! The laboring burakumin find themselves bound in the chains of capitalist exploitation. In comparison with most laborers, those who come from the buraku are exploited under conditions that are much worse. . . . The standard of living among buraku laborers is actually no different from that of colonial laborers. The laborers of the buraku, bound as they are by two sets of chains, demand and fight for the eradication of status discrimination, and the abolition of the highest stratum of society [i.e., the kazoku nobility]. At the same time, they rise to the fight against exploitation at the hands of capitalists and landlords, thus merging with the proletarian liberation movement.

The concept of social status—the outcome of the historically separate position of the burakumin—was of course nothing new in discussions of the buraku problem. It had figured prominently in Kita Sadakichi’s writings on the burakumin, and terms such as mibun (status) and shakaiteki chi’ i (social position) had appeared occasionally in the writings of Suiheisha activists from the earliest years of the organization. Never before, however, had the Suiheisha issued an official statement on the buraku situation that presented social status as a central concept in the discussion of buraku identity, while attempting to tie it to the idea of the minority’s fundamentally proletarian nature. The buraku minority thus became redefined as a group with its own specific interests and concerns, while remaining intrinsically part of the proletariat. Such an interpreta-

3. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 161– 62. 4. Quoted from the last statement published by the dissolution faction, dated Feb. 20, 1933, in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 2, p. 1273. Although released just prior to the eleventh national meeting at which the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō was inaugurated, this statement makes reference to the necessity of launching a “Burakumin iinkai katsudō” to orga nize the political, economic, and social demands of burakumin.

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tion left room for a separate buraku movement alongside the majority proletarian movement, and had the added benefit of including the entire minority— all those who could be considered burakumin by dint of their ancestry or connection to a place recognized as a buraku community—thereby providing a much more compelling explanation of anti-buraku discrimination for those burakumin who had little connection with the working class. The Suiheisha’s revival, however, had more to do with the fortuitous timing of the launch of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō than with any popular appeal that this characterization of buraku identity might have had among the minority. Three months after the launching of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, two burakumin from Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture—Hisamoto Yukitaro and Yamamoto Yoneichi—were found guilty of abducting one Ishihara Masae with the intention of forcing her to marry Yamamoto. From the start of the trial, the prosecution’s case against the defendants was undermined by the testimonies of Ishihara and others. Ishihara had in fact initially agreed to marry Yamamoto, if he met two conditions: that he pay back the thirty-seven yen that her employer at her cafeteria job had given her parents as an advance on her wages, and that he obtain her father’s permission. Furthermore, contrary to what the prosecution charged, Hisamoto and Yamamoto had not kept Ishihara confined against her will while they were trying to fulfill these conditions. The trial proceeded in spite of such problems with the case, however, and on June 3, 1933, the two defendants were charged with abducting Ishihara and keeping her confined against her will, to which both pleaded guilty. More than the actual evidence or testimonies involved, the prosecution’s arguments and the presiding judge’s verdict rested on the fact that the two defendants had concealed the nature of Yamamoto’s background from Ishihara during the course of the liaison. This glaring instance of discriminatory treatment became known as the Takamatsu Trial Incident. As soon as the details of the case reached the Osaka headquarters of the Suiheisha, planning commenced on what would become the largest and most successful kyūdan campaign in Suiheisha history. The Suiheisha saw in the details of this case an attempt to 5. See Neary, The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan, pp. 76–80, for a detailed account of the trial and its aftermath.

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reinstitutionalize status discrimination: by allowing the prosecution to present the fact that the two defendants had concealed their background as one of the major points in its case, the court had in essence acted to countermand the 1871 abolition of pariah status. Aside from decrying such obviously contemptible features of the trial, the Suiheisha also viewed this campaign as a chance to regroup and rally new support, as well as to try out some of the principles of the newly launched Buraku Iinkai Katsudō. One of these new principles concerned the methods of kyūdan campaigns themselves. Whereas in the past little thought had gone into the demands to be made or the objectives to be achieved beyond an apology from the offending party, the new strategy called for campaigns to have constructive aims highlighting social or economic injustices against the burakumin. In this regard, the Takamatsu trial offered many meaningful possibilities. In this campaign, the Suiheisha made three demands of the government: the immediate release and full pardon of Hisamoto and Yamamoto; the resignation of the chief inspector, prosecutors, and judge involved in the trial; and more radical and important from the standpoint of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, full funding for those public works projects in buraku communities that had been proposed by the various local buraku committees established under the group. Since both the burakumin and the nobility were status-group relics from Japan’s feudal past, those drafting the demands felt that the burakumin—like the officially recognized kazoku nobility and the publicly supported throne— should receive a stipend for this special position, and the public works projects would be the government’s way of paying this stipend. These demands, and the kyūdan campaign to win them, were adopted at a Suiheisha-sponsored “Zenkoku Buraku Daihyōsha Kaigi,” a national meeting of representatives from buraku communities (not just those with active Suiheisha chapters) held in Osaka on August 28, 1933, which was significantly the anniversary of the official abolition of outcaste status. As the centerpiece of the campaign, the Suiheisha planned a protest march from Fukuoka to Tokyo. When the police would not al6. See the resolutions of the Suiheisha-sponsored “Zenkoku buraku daihyōsha kaigi,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, pp. 38–39.

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low this, they made the trip by train instead, stopping along the way to make speeches and collect petition signatures. The Ministry of Justice received all fifty thousand of these signatures, along with the Suiheisha’s demands, on October 19, 1933. The Suiheisha leadership sought to develop this campaign into a larger political statement as well, by declaring the trial to be an example of “the undisguised appearance of fascism, aimed at repressing all liberal and progressive ideas, and stripping the people of their freedoms in order to force a reactionary dictatorship upon them.” To a certain extent, this concern for fascism reflected the call for a “struggle against social fascism” contained in the 1932 theses of the Japanese Communist Party. At the same time, however, Suiheisha consciousness of the threat posed by fascism was greatly influenced by an awareness of the racist policies being implemented under Nazi rule in Germany. The declaration issued by the aforementioned Zenkoku Buraku Daihyōsha Kaigi highlighted this awareness: Just as it is today in fascist Germany under the dictatorship of the Nazis, where Jews [yudayajin] are hunted down in broad daylight with the most barbarous of insults, we cannot help but worry that just so will it be in fascist Japan; a day will come when such brazen and cruel oppression befalls us too.

On the face of it, one might be tempted to see in this appeal to a parallel between the Jews of Germany and the burakumin in Japan a return to the notion of an ethnic difference between the burakumin and majority Japanese. The language of the declaration requires closer examination on this point. It opens by mentioning how “the undisguised appearance of fascism” has stripped “the people [jinmin] of their freedoms.” This can refer to none other than the Japanese people as a whole, given the context. The description of the Jews, too, is free of the race-bound terminology used in Suiheisha discourse during the 1920s: in this passage, yudayajin signifies the Jews, instead of yudaya-zoku, with its social Darwinian 7. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 169. 8. From the text of the declaration of the aforementioned Aug. 28, 1933, national buraku meeting, in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 38. 9. The section of the 1932 Theses that deals specifically with fascism can be found in Beckman and Okubo, Japanese Communist Party, pp. 348–49. 10. Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 38.

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shades of ethnic and racial classification. It seems therefore, that the mention of the Jews in this passage is not intended to point out a similarity in terms of ethnic situation vis-à-vis the majority, but rather to draw a political parallel: both the Jews and the burakumin are minority groups that have lost their civil rights at the hands of unjust governments. The passage identifies the burakumin as a political or social minority, not as a racial or ethnic one. Beyond their pivotal importance in reviving the Suiheisha under the new platform of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, reactions to the Takamatsu case reveal the nature of majority attitudes toward the burakumin at the time. On one level the details of the trial call to mind a much more wellknown and drawn-out incident that had begun roughly two years earlier: the long series of trials and appeals surrounding the case of the “Scottsboro Boys”—nine African-American youths accused of raping two white women while riding a freight train in northern Alabama. But although the guilty verdicts in both cases were based on majority prejudice rather than sound evidence of the charges, there were many key differences between the two. Whereas the Scottsboro case revolved around allegations of minority males raping majority females— an allegation that was common in the American South whenever sexual relations between black men and white women came to light—the Takamatsu case involved cohabitation and proposed marriage between a minority male and majority female and, despite the obvious connotations of sexual relations involved, the prosecution did not make sexual violation a charge in its case. Indeed, the specter of consensual sexual relations between a minority male and a majority female—which was a constant source of white anxiety in race relations between whites and non-whites—is practically conspicuous by its sheer absence in the Takamatsu case. Whatever beliefs the prosecutors and judge may have shared 11. Indeed, characterizing any sort of sexual relationship between a black male and a white female as “rape” had long been used as a means of denying the possibility of the woman’s consent to such liaisons in order to persecute African Americans. Ida B. WellsBarnett’s A Red Record was perhaps the first work to draw attention to this rationalization mechanism. See in particular her chap. 6. 12. Although in the American milieu this anxiety was particularly pronounced in regard to African-American males, alarmist sentiments and rumors of lust and rape surfaced in situations where males of other racial groups came into frequent contact

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about the racial difference or eugenic inferiority of the burakumin, the arguments voiced in support of the verdict suggest that for them the transgression of status boundaries was more of a concern than the threat of miscegenation. In this sense, the Suiheisha’s focus on social-status discrimination was a truly incisive and well timed critique of the prejudicial attitudes of the state. Although superficial, the similarities between Scottsboro and Takamatsu, along with the fact that the Takamatsu case occurred in the context of appeals to the initial Scottsboro verdict, may suggest something about the Suiheisha’s changing orientation toward global problems of discrimination. As Susan Pennybacker has demonstrated, the injustice of Scottsboro became a cause célèbre among communists and socialists in America, Europe, and parts of the colonized world in the struggle against racism and colonialism. Yet the Suiheisha, which in its early years had expressed moral support for the struggles of the oppressed across national borders, remained silent on the plight of the Scottsboro nine: no resolution of support appears in the minutes of the Suiheisha’s national assemblies from these years, nor is any mention of the case made in the editions of the Suihei shinbun published during the early 1930s. References to the persecution of the Jews under the Nazis notwithstanding, at the very least this lack of concern seems to reflect a turning of the movement inward, toward a focus exclusively on the particular problems facing the burakumin. This was not a return to minority nationalism, however. The appeal to status as the defining term of buraku identity, while it demarcated the minority more distinctly as a group than had the “proletarian first” conceptions of buraku identity prevalent in the late 1920s, was not meant to serve as a source of group pride in the same way that the Suiheisha’s original appeal to the term eta had been. It was not social status per se, but the shared injustice of suffering discrimination due to it, that served

with white women. See, for example, Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery, on racial fears of male Chinese immigrants and their interactions with the city’s white women. Europeans were hardly more charitable in their views of non-white males. On the interracial anxieties of Europeans for the plight of “their” women in the colonies, see Stoller, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, esp. pp. 58– 61. 13. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich.

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as the new rallying point for the minority. Status was a legacy of the past, lodged deeply in the minds of majority Japanese, that had to be discarded; it was not something to be embraced as a positive, self-affirming element of buraku identity. An example of this effort to avoid any suggestion of an intrinsic distinction between the burakumin and majority Japanese was the coining of a new terminology to refer to the burakumin. In the text of the declaration issued on the occasion of the eleventh national meeting in 1933, the phrase buraku kinrō taishū (䚼㨑ࢸ࢈໻㸚, “the laboring masses of the buraku”) became the preferred signifier of the minority. At the meeting the following year, hiappaku buraku (㹿೻䖿䚼㨑, “the oppressed hamlet”) and hiappaku burakumin (㹿೻䖿䚼㨑⇥, “people of the oppressed hamlet”) came into common usage as labels for minority communities and the people who lived there. And in 1935, the platform of the Suiheisha was revised to make hiappaku buraku taishū (“the masses of the oppressed hamlet”) the official term for members of the buraku minority within the Suiheisha, replacing the term tokushu burakumin. With these terms, the defining characteristic of the minority became the oppression it faced, a very specific condition that was readily rectifiable if only the proper measures were taken. The Buraku Iinkai Katsudō drew on the energy of the protest march against the verdict in the Takamatsu trial to attract an unprecedented amount of support among buraku communities across the country. Perhaps as many as two-thirds of the buraku communities nationwide joined in the protest movement in some capacity, and the group’s subsequent success in clearing the charges against the defendants and obtaining the resignations of the officials responsible was followed by an upswing in the number of newly formed Suiheisha chapters. Many burakumin were probably attracted to the Suiheisha at this time not only for the excitement and sense of empowerment that joining in the protest of-

14. Text of declaration adopted at the Suiheisha Eleventh National Assembly, Mar. 3, 1933; see Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, pp. 19–20. 15. “Zenkoku taikai hōkokusho,” in ibid., pp. 219–24. 16. “Suiheisha sengen, kōryō, ketsugi,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, p. 1220. 17. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, pp. 168– 69.

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fered, but also by the concrete, practical goals of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō platform. In contrast to the often complex and typically doctrinaire Marxist language of earlier platforms, the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō told burakumin in straightforward terms that the state needed to take responsibility for the discrimination against them, and that the minority itself could help ensure that it did so by putting pressure on local and central governments to fund improvement projects in buraku communities. Under this platform, the number of Suiheisha chapters began to grow steadily, from the 314 recorded by the authorities in 1934, to 488 in 1939—this at a time when most of the social movements with similar roots in the 1920s were in rapid decline, if not already defunct. And yet, as Neary reveals, the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, with its policy of demanding government action to solve the problem of anti-buraku discrimination, and the Suiheisha, with its emphasis on connecting the identity of the buraku minority with that of the majority—now referred to as “the masses” rather than just the proletariat—brought the Suiheisha closer to the aims, if not yet the rhetoric, of the government’s yūwa initiative. The pragmatic approach of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō also brought the Suiheisha into a position where, in order to convince the broader society that the burakumin did not deserve the ostracism they had experienced, it had to negotiate with the state and civil society and

18. This approach to the discrimination burakumin faced became the template for the liberation movement that would eventually be launched in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat, with many of the leaders who had stood at the helm of the Suiheisha during the 1930s in charge once more. The debt owed to the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō platform was even reflected in the naming of early postwar movement—the Buraku Kaihō Zenkoku Iinkai. 19. The figures for Suiheisha chapters are from the table “Fuhyō 1— Suihei dantaisū (Shōwa 4-16nen),” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 1027. This table is compiled from figures that appeared annually in Naimushō keihōkyoku, Shakai undō no jōkyō. The numbers given here represent only those for groups affiliated with the National Suiheisha, and do not include groups belonging to the overtly nationalistic Nippon Suiheisha or groups classified under the heading “sono ta dantai sōsū,” a miscellaneous category of groups with tangential, but no formal, ties to the national Suiheisha orga nization. Although the number of groups increased by roughly 55 percent during this six-year period, the total membership in these did not expand at the same rate. From the 35,903 members recorded in 1934, the Suiheisha membership peaked in 1937 at 40,366 (in 391 groups) before declining to 35,527 by 1939.

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portray itself as a responsible organization. It is important to note that the Suiheisha was never subservient in these negotiations; kyūdan campaigns, for example, were revived under the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō program, where they were painstakingly orchestrated to highlight aspects of the social, political, and economic oppression that burakumin faced. Yet Suiheisha leaders did become more “practical” about the kinds of causes they chose to support. At a Suiheisha central committee meeting held on July 4, 1937, as Japan stood on the brink of entering into all-out war with China, Izuno Rikizō declared: From here on, it is necessary to purge all those who harbor leftist ideas from within the national Suiheisha organization, for the sake of the Suiheisha’s continued growth and development. A single deed that is carried out is more desirable to us than a hundred arguments. I believe that it is far more urgent a matter for us at this point to obtain a single loaf of bread than to listen to the endless ideological ramblings of those on the Left.

To hear a former advocate of socialist ideas such as Izuno speak in these terms obviously calls to mind the phenomenon of tenkō, and Izuno was certainly not the only Suiheisha activist to experience such an ideological about-face during the late 1930s. As early as October 1934, such pivotal, founding members as Saikō Mankichi, Sakamoto Sei’ichirō, and Yoneda Tomi had begun to promote their visions of a militarily mobi20. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 241. 21. Kurokawa (ibid.) mentions that Izuno had probably experienced his own conversion to emperor-centered fascism by the time this comment was made. At this meeting Izuno went on to criticize the Social Masses Party as a tool of the Comintern, and recommended that all members of the party be purged from the Suiheisha as well. This did not sit well with Kitahara Taisaku, also present at the meeting, who was secretary of the Fukuoka chapter of the Social Masses Party, nor was it likely to have pleased Suiheisha chairman Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, who joined the Social Masses Party as a Diet representative in 1937. Police records of the meeting claim that it was brought to an abrupt end when Kitahara and Izuno began to argue bitterly over Izuno’s comment. (See “Zen-Sui sōhonbu shunōbu no dōsei,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, pp. 495– 96, for Izuno’s statement and the argument between him and Kitahara.) Because the crux of this argument was not so much about whether the Suiheisha should offer organizational refuge to leftist radicals as it was about whether or not the SMP should be viewed as a radical orga nization, however, it would appear that even Kitahara was in general agreement with the pragmatic stance Izuno had taken toward associating with those who still adhered to leftist ideas.

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lized, emperor-centered, national-socialist Japan in the pages of their publication Gaitō shinbun (News of the street). In addition, the Suiheisha’s assertion of its unity with the “masses” resulted in the adoption of a new rhetoric for the movement— one that seemed to embrace concepts that the organization had once scorned as devices used by those intent on deceiving the burakumin and sapping their zeal for liberation. The term jinminteki yūwa (“popular reconciliation” or “reconciliation of the people”) provides a case in point. Despite the presence of the term yūwa, which Suiheisha activists had found so abhorrent in regard to the buraku problem during the 1920s, the slogan jinminteki yūwa was adopted in 1935 to express the notion of striving to create unity among “the people,” who were assumed to be naturally opposed to the militaristic and fascist designs of the state. Aside from the embrace of the term yūwa, the phrase jinminteki yūwa concealed problems of praxis as well. First of all, how broadly and inclusively was this “people” to be defined? Unlike the former emphasis on the proletariat, “the people,” much like “the masses,” was far too vague and open to interpretation to serve as a reliable guidepost to what kinds of groups the burakumin should seek out as their natural allies in the twin struggles against discrimination and fascism. And second, what should the Suiheisha do if this vaguely defined but presumably progressive and pacifist “people” turned out to support an increasingly militaristic and fanatical appreciation of what it meant to be Japanese? The Suiheisha leadership never came up with clear answers to either of these questions. Without such firm interpretations to guide it, the Suiheisha became caught in the whirlpool of hysteria and fanatical patriotism engendered by war psychology and the rigorous suppression of dissent; indeed, in many respects its leaders willingly took the plunge, seeking to turn the

22. For an in-depth analysis of the national-socialist views of these founding members as expressed in this newspaper, see Fujino, Suihei undō no shakai shisōshiteki kenkyū, pp. 211–41. In English, see Neary, Political Protest and Social Control (p. 195) for a concise summary of the newspaper and the activities of Suiheisha leaders connected with it. 23. “Zenkoku Suiheisha dai-13-kai taikai,” in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 4, pp. 230–31.

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rhetoric of national unity to their advantage. In September 1937, after the war with China had begun in earnest, the Suiheisha issued a set of “policies for the movement in a time of crisis.” While claiming that war between the two nations was “regrettable for peace in the Orient and the coexistence and co-prosperity of the Japanese and Chinese peoples,” the Suiheisha promised to “maintain a proper understanding of the emergency situation at hand, and play an active part in [realizing] the ‘unity of the nation’ [kyokoku itchi].” Furthermore, it warned that such national unity could never be attained so long as status discrimination prevailed, and thus swore to wage kyūdan campaigns that would help to realize the ideal of “true national unity” through the promotion of what was now termed kokumin yūwa: “national conciliation.” At the fifteenth national meeting, held in November 1938, the organization reaffirmed its commitment to bringing about national unity, adding to this the goals of “clarifying the importance of constructing a community of mutual cooperation in East Asia” (Tō-A kyōdōtai kensetsu no igi o akiraka ni shi), and working for the “reorganization of the nation” (kokumin saihensei). Also at this meeting, the term hiappaku was dropped from the phrase used to describe the minority, possibly because the label “oppressed” implied the existence of an authoritarian oppressor. The most hotly discussed issues at this meeting were the persistence of discrimination in the military and the fact that many in positions of authority continued to show contempt for burakumin, who were bravely serving in the army and navy. 24. “Hijōji ni okeru undō hōshin” (ratified by the Suiheisha expanded central committee meeting held on Sept. 11, 1937), in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 4, pp. 240–41. 25. “Zenkoku Suiheisha dai-15 kai taikai,” in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 4, p. 243. 26. Ibid., pp. 246–47. This discussion arose in response to a “motion concerning eradicating discrimination in regard to military matters.” The entire delegation supported the mea sure, but the discussion in support of it revealed the persistence of discrimination against burakumin, even when the minority was doing its best for the nation. Okamoto Isoyoshi of Fukui Prefecture related with anger the story of a memorial ser vice held in his community to honor soldiers from there who had died at the front. The ceremony was attended by local and prefectural officials, as well as one government minister, but none of these dignitaries offered so much as a stick of incense to the souls of the fallen burakumin. Following this, Fukugawa Takeshi, a long-time orga nizer in

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With the Suiheisha now advocating complete cooperation with the state in the war effort, the organization returned to a dilemma it had faced in regard to the question of joining forces with the proletarian movement in 1931: since the Suiheisha now claimed that anti-buraku discrimination would disappear in the realization of “national unity,” which was already a central goal of the state and the yūwa movement, what reason was there for maintaining a separate Suiheisha organization? Did not the continued existence of such a group merely perpetuate the social divisions that barred the burakumin from participating in this unity? Such doubts led Asada Zen’nosuke, Kitahara Taisaku, Ueda Otoichi, and other former members of the JCP-influenced dissolution faction to launch in April 1940 yet another movement calling for the end of the Suiheisha: the Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō (䚼㨑८⫳ⱛ⇥䘟ࢩ, Buraku Welfare Imperial People’s Movement). This movement arose in anticipation of Prince Konoe’s Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA), to be launched later that year. Those involved in it reasoned that both the Suiheisha and the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai stood in the way of achieving the kind of national unity that would bring about a resolution of the buraku problem; the Suiheisha in particular, because of what the Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō leaders saw as its obstinate, leftistliberal concern for buraku rights and interests over those of the nation as a whole, but the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai as well due to its misguided focus on the buraku minority, when it should be fostering unity and a spirit of sacrifice for the nation among all Japanese subjects. The classfirst appreciation of the buraku minority that had shaped the thinking of these activists during their involvement in the dissolution movement of 1931 had been transformed into a problem consciousness that was centered on nation rather than class, but otherwise was strikingly similar in its line of argument. Based on such reasoning, which left no room for action on behalf of the buraku minority that was not of equal benefit to the nation as a whole, Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō leaders called for the the Kantō area, described a recent address made by a high-ranking military officer in which said officer spoke disparagingly of the opportunism of Great Britain as being like “the disposition of a dirty whore, with even more of an eta spirit than that of the Jews.” 27. Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 257–58.

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sublimation of all minority interests to those of the nation and the war effort, even to the point of turning a blind eye to discrimination in the military. Ueda Otoichi, for example, suggested that burakumin in the armed forces should learn to “laugh it off ” when they experienced it firsthand. Through the complete and unquestioning participation of the burakumin in the war effort, the Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō intended to achieve the complete “dissolution of the very form of the buraku.” With a platform such as this, the Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō was destined to be a short-lived movement. On December 9, 1940, less than two months after the launching of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, the movement voluntarily disbanded into the IRAA. The leaders of the movement, who had been expelled from the Suiheisha in August, went on to take part in the Dōwa Hōkōkai (ৠ੠༝݀Ӯ, The Harmonization Public Ser vice Society), the 1941 reorganization of the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai, but their conviction to solve the problem of anti-buraku discrimination through the full realization of national unity in the war effort remained unchanged until Japan’s defeat. If we put aside the personal animosities that arose between activists like Asada, Ueda, and Kitahara, on the one hand, and Matsumoto Ji’ichirō and others in the Suiheisha, on the other, what we find is a subtle difference of interpretation. For the Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō, the burakumin had to behave as if national unity had been achieved, even in the face of the very discrimination that proved it had not; only then would anti-buraku discrimination, and the minority with it, fade away of their own accord. For Suiheisha chairman Matsumoto and the other Suiheisha holdouts, by contrast, national unity would never be realized without first ridding Japan of all vestiges of discrimination against the burakumin. Indeed, Matsumoto’s continuing unease over the persistence of anti-buraku discrimination in Japanese society, in combination with a lingering suspicion of the sincerity of government officials’ stated concern for the minority and his strong attachment to an organization that he had spent an enormous amount of personal wealth bankrolling

28. See Kurokawa’s quote from Ueda to this effect in ibid., p. 259. 29. The phrase is once again Ueda’s, quoted in ibid., p. 258.

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over the years, were perhaps the only concerns that kept the movement intact during these final few years of its existence. In any case, the arguments of either group had little chance of convincing the majority that they should help end anti-buraku discrimination. Since national unity was now the ultimate goal, what was to prevent one from arguing that anti-buraku discrimination was acceptable, if greater national unity could be achieved by rejecting or even persecuting the minority? By appealing to the goals of the wartime Japanese state, buraku rights activists in the late 1930s and early 1940s forfeited an autonomous position from which to voice persuasive moral arguments against discrimination. As Japan plunged into the Pacific War, such activists could only hope that the vast majority of Japanese really and truly believed in the exalted ideas of isshi dōjin and shared their government’s stated commitment to building a new world order, in which the discrimination and exploitation that the countries of the West had inflicted on the rest of the world would have no place.

30. Given its embrace of the rhetoric of national unity and Asian co-prosperity, the exact reason for the persistence of the Suiheisha is not at all clear. Neary (Political Protest and Social Control, p. 210) surmises that the delay was the result of “a personal reluctance on Matsumoto’s part to allow the Suiheisha to disappear after he had spent so much time and money developing it.” Elsewhere, he provides evidence of the extent of Matsumoto’s pivotal financial support of the national organization— amounting to 825 yen in 1934 and 1935 alone— as well as his contributions of significant sums of money to keep the Kyushu Suiheisha solvent (Neary, The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan, pp. 81– 82). The funds for this came from Matsumoto’s family business: the buraku historian Sekiguchi Hiroshi surmises that Matsumoto’s highly lucrative construction company, the Matsumoto-gumi, which is still a major firm in the industry in the Kyushu area today, would probably have grown in the postwar period to rival many of Japan’s national general contracting giants had it not been for Matsumoto’s frequent borrowing from company finances to bankroll the Suiheisha. (Sekiguchi Hiroshi, personal communication with the author.) At the same time, concerns about continuing discrimination against the burakumin and the level of conviction to deal with the problem among the authorities also appear to have weighed on Matsumoto’s mind during these last years of the Suiheisha. Kurokawa (Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 261– 62) cites a public statement made by Matsumoto sometime around August 1939, in which he criticized the Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai’s promotion of group migration to Manchuria as “clearly a policy to exile the burakumin overseas,” and pointed out that many cases of discrimination against burakumin had occurred in Japa nese colonial territory.

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On January 20, 1942, the government forced the Suiheisha to disband, after the organization had refused to comply with an earlier ordinance calling for the voluntary dissolution of all groups outside of the IRAA that were engaged in publishing or public-speaking activities. In many respects, the demise of the Suiheisha during these years had followed a familiar pattern observed in numerous other social movements in Japan: leaders sought to capitalize on the proactive social policies of the state and the patriotic rhetoric of mass mobilization to improve the social and economic situations of the groups they represented, only to be co-opted. In the case of the Suiheisha, however, patriotic sentiment and opportunism had been combined with a definition of “liberation” that came to mean not only freedom from exploitation and discrimination, but also the achievement of these through the complete absorption of the buraku minority into a larger social entity, be it the proletariat, the “masses,” or the harmoniously unified Japanese nation. In a time of crisis when the state itself promised to accept the burakumin as true equals and implement policies to make sure that the majority would do the same, Suiheisha leaders had decided to stake the future of their movement on the sincerity of these claims.

Reactions of the Suiheisha Rank and File and the Buraku Subaltern: Patriotism, Self-Interest, and Resistance Despite their loss of interest in the Suihei movement amid the ideological infighting of the 1920s, and their increasing poverty in the 1930s, burakumin in many communities had not lost the will to demand the treatment they felt they rightfully deserved as full members of Japanese society, nor an interest in taking part in mass political movements to do 31. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 211. This ordinance, issued in December 1941, was the genron shuppan shūkai kessha nado rinji torishimari-hō (㿔䂪ߎ⠜ 䲚Ӯ㌤⼒ㄝ㞼ᰖপ㎴⊩, “Emergency Law for the Control of Meetings and Associations involved in Public Speeches and Publications”). 32. See, for example, Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 115–45; as well as Kano, “Fashizumuka no fujin undō,” pp. 306–27, on the women’s movement; Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy, pp. 283–330, on the labor movement; Mori, Senji Nihon nōson shakai no kenkyū, on tenant farmers unions; and Siddle, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, pp. 133–46, on the Ainu.

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so. The overwhelming outpouring of support for the Suiheisha and the protest movement against the Takamatsu trial suggests just how conscious burakumin across Japan were of the unfair discrimination they faced, and just how committed they were to rectifying this injustice in the arena of national policy and politics. Toward this end, and as part of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō program, the minority made rapid advances into the field of electoral politics. While in 1932, only thirty-eight Suiheisha members had been elected to municipal governing bodies in central and western Japan, by 1934, a year after the start of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, 274 had been elected to prefectural and local governments in these parts of Japan alone. This success was followed with the 1936 general election of Matsumoto Ji’ichirō to represent Fukuoka in the lower house of the Diet. At the same time, Suiheisha groups began to demand funding for community improvements and other purposes from their local authorities. In January 1934, the Suiheisha branch in Onyu, Fukui Prefecture, went so far as to demand that the local government provide funding to cover the group’s operating expenses, and in the same year various Suiheisha branches in Mie Prefecture demanded financial support for specific environmental and community improvement projects in their areas. Far more numerous than campaigns demanding funding, however, were kyūdan campaigns targeting schools, local governments and police, the press and radio, and other organizations that in some way helped preserve the political and social status quo in Japan. These campaigns were generally planned on the local level and designed, in accordance

33. Neary, Political Protest and Social Control, p. 192. 34. Matsumoto’s first bid for election was in the general election of 1928, when he ran as a Labor-Farmer Party (Rōnōtō) candidate to represent Fukuoka in the House of Representatives. Although he failed in this first campaign, he was subsequently elected to the House in the general election of 1936 with wide support from the electorate of Fukuoka, both burakumin and non-burakumin alike. Thereafter, he was reelected to the House of Representatives for three consecutive terms as a candidate of the Social Masses Party (which he joined in 1937), and served in the wartime IRAA Diets as well. For the details of Matsumoto’s election campaigns and activities in the Diet see Neary, The Buraku Problem and Modern Japan, pp. 83–130. 35. “Nenpyō,” in Buraku kaihō jinken kenkyūjo, Buraku mondai, pp. 1280–81.

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with the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō philosophy, to produce concrete benefits for the buraku communities that had been most directly offended by a particular instance of discriminatory treatment. Eleven major campaigns of this kind occurred between 1934 and 1937. The number of minor campaigns was even more impressive: Home Ministry records indicate that 824 minor kyūdan campaigns were carried out nationwide in 1934 alone, and although the annual totals declined steadily thereafter, the annual total for 1938 still reached 499. Furthermore, since in any given year during this period the number of recorded kyūdan campaigns far exceeded the number of Suiheisha affiliates recorded to be in existence at the time, it is possible that some of these campaigns were spontaneous expressions of indignation by burakumin with no formal ties to any organization; others may have even been launched by local yūwa groups. Police anxiety over the socially disruptive and, from their perspective, potentially subversive nature of these campaigns was great enough that, from 1939 on, the vast majority of reported instances of discrimination against the burakumin appear to have been addressed through police intervention. 36. Ibid. 37. Table 3, “Fuken betsu kyūdan jiken sū (Shōwa 2-13-nen),” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 1029. 38. Neary (Political Protest and Social Control, p. 136) notes that, even prior to the launching of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, high-publicity kyūdan campaigns waged by the Suiheisha probably inspired burakumin in unorga nized communities and provided them with a model for taking on whatever discriminatory treatment and unfair allocation of municipal resources they encountered in their daily lives. Kurokawa (Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 217–20) points out that the early 1930s slogan of the yūwa movement, naibu jikaku, was understood by many yūwa activists to mean something on the order of the early Suiheisha’s call to take pride in one’s status as a discriminated minority. For these yūwa activists, awakening the burakumin to the injustice of their situation and prompting them to embrace a certain moral indignation against it was an important part of what naibu jikaku signified. Such a view could also accommodate kyūdan campaigns, as long as these stayed within the bounds of the law. 39. Table 2, “Sabetsu jiken sū (Taishō 12-nen—Shōwa 17-nen),” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 1028. A comparison of this table with the following table in the volume, “Fuken betsu kyūdan jiken sū (Shōwa 2-13-nen),” cited earlier, reveals a correlation in the numbers given for “incidents of discrimination” on table 2 and the total recorded number of kyūdan campaigns, given on table 3, beginning with the figures for 1927. From this year on, the Home Ministry apparently regarded any kyūdan

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Whatever suspicions the police may have had about the burakumin in light of all of this political activity, the minority was, on the whole, as loyal to the state during these years as other Japanese. During the war years burakumin— despite rumors of draft dodging— answered the most important call to duty of an imperial subject and served in the military, despite the discrimination they often faced once enlisted. Some also made sacrifices for the nation in other ways, such as complying with the government’s request that they emigrate to Manchuria— even though at the time traditional buraku industries such as leather-working were being hit hard by the wartime allocations of raw materials that favored those cartels producing matériel for the military. And yet, as with most Japanese during the war years, the burakumin followed the state and its propaganda with some self-interest: while very likely believing much of the ennobling rhetoric about the superiority of the Japanese and Japan’s lofty aims in the war, they also tried to turn the rhetoric of national unity and the demands of mass mobilization to their advantage. Nor were they averse to taking advantage of the exigencies imposed on the authorities by the war effort in order to bargain for improvements in treatment. A striking example occurred in the buraku community of Minami Ariji, Kyoto Prefecture, in 1942, when the male residents of the community threatened to ignore their draft orders unless the family registers of all the families in the community were thoroughly revised to make it more difficult for unscrupulous individuals to identify the bearers of these registers as burakumin. Wishing to save themselves the shame and considerable trouble that would befall them for letting such a situation develop under their charge, the local police chief and

campaign as arising from a bona fide case of discrimination. Table 2 breaks these incidents down by the manner of discriminatory treatment (e.g., by “word,” “gesture,” “written word,” “ treatment,” and “others”) and the method by which the subsequent conflict over it was resolved (e.g., “unconditional apology,” “conditional apology,” “worked out on its own accord,” “solved by other means,” “unsolved,” and “dealt with in a court of law”). For the years 1939 to 1942 (a year when the number of recorded incidents was surprisingly high at 294), the totals in the categories of “unconditional apology” and “conditional apology” are combined. According to the editors’ notes, these combined figures appeared under the heading “solved by other means,” indicating police intervention. From 1939, this category contains by far the largest proportion of the incidents recorded.

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government officials agreed to have the old family registers replaced with revised documents, an unprecedented (and technically illegal) measure. The way burakumin approached the state and their participation in its call to arms may also have been influenced by their continuing consciousness of the potential for discrimination. While Suiheisha leaders embraced slogans such as “national unity,” many burakumin often seemed wary of buying into this rhetoric entirely. From the standpoint of the authorities (and perhaps the majority in general), this must have appeared as ingrained self-centeredness, vexing suspicion of others, and a deplorable lack of patriotic spirit. A case in point was the problem many burakumin had with the wartime Manchurian immigration program, which proposed establishing frontier towns in Manchuria in which 40. Nadamoto, “Kaisei mondai o meguru chōhei kyohi no tatakai,” pp. 1–4. The registers became a problem because, when they were first compiled in 1874, the local officials responsible for creating the new documents had arbitrarily assigned family names to all of the residents of the community (since prior to this time commoners officially did not have such names). The result was that every family in the community was officially named either “Funato” or “Karaki.” Residents eventually realized that this could serve as a marker of their identity as burakumin, and in 1925 petitioned the local government to change their family names on the documents to reflect those that had been adopted by each family in their everyday social interactions. Th is request was granted, but was carried out in line with what was either the law or the standard practice in such cases: the original family name was simply crossed out on the register document, and the new name written alongside it. Since changing the family name on an entire register was an extremely rare occurrence, anyone looking at such a register would be led to suspect that the family to which it belonged was trying to conceal something about its background. This is exactly what happened in 1942, when the parents of a non-buraku woman vehemently opposed the engagement of their daughter to a man from Minami Ariji after a private investigator they had hired requested a copy of the man’s family register and noticed the peculiarity. After learning the details of what had happened, the man in question, a Mr. Nakano, demanded that his family register be destroyed and a new one created, but the local authorities answered that it was against the stipulations of the Family Registration Law to do so. He then convened a community meeting to launch a group campaign for revision, and the community decided that its young men were not obligated to serve in the military so long as the state continued to provide such avenues for discrimination against them. At this point, the Maizuru chief of police stepped in to mediate a compromise, which involved destroying the old registers and creating new ones for every family in Minami Ariji, notifying the Ministry of Justice about the problem (since it was most likely a prevalent situation), and ordering the local officials responsible for providing the information to the private investigator to resign.

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buraku and non-buraku Japanese from the same areas in Japan would reside together. This decision, which was most likely motivated by a desire to simplify the logistics of organizing settler communities in Manchurian, completely ignored the fact that burakumin faced discrimination first and foremost on the local level, where their majority neighbors knew exactly who they were. Despite government assurances that antiburaku discrimination did not exist outside of Japan proper, then, many prospective immigrants among the minority balked at the plan. Finally, we must entertain the possibility that there were some burakumin who secretly defied the state. Evidence corroborating the police suspicions of draft dodging among the minority is difficult to come by, but it does not seem unreasonable to expect that some burakumin, just like some majority Japanese, would find the thought of military ser vice so abhorrent that they would feign illness to escape it. Others may have taken even more radical measures to resist the state. The following declaration, sent to the Osaka Prefecture Social Affairs Bureau on March 20, 1942, provides what might be one example of the motivations for doing so. We, the two-hundred thirty-seven eta (Ketsumeidan), claim responsibility for the forest fire on the sixteenth. This is our warning to His Excellency, Prime Minister Tōjō. . . . We look forward to Japan’s defeat. If that should come to pass, we believe that we will not be discriminated against as eta or yotsu. As long as there is no law provided against discrimination, we will work on behalf of America and Great Britain by setting fire to factories one after another, to say nothing of forests. All two hundred thirty seven of us intend to sacrifice our lives in order to save our three million brethren. We wish for the perfect harmonization of the one hundred million [ichioku dōwa] to be realized without a day’s delay. Every day it is delayed we shall make the country suffer great damage. We shall set fires, derail trains, remove sections of track, and burn down factories and rice storehouses one by one.

41. Fujino, Dōwa seisaku no rekishi, pp. 282–83. The yūwa immigration policy was in reality merely an appendage of a Ministry of Agriculture program known as the “Manshū bunson imin keikaku,” which sought to export the most impoverished sectors of rural Japa nese society to Manchuria, thus opening their farmland in Japan for use by other, wealthier farmers. 42. “Fuon tōsho,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 1018. The name of the guerilla orga nization, the “Ketsumeidan” (㸔ⲳಷ, in parentheses in the

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There is no way of knowing whether this letter was sent by an actual clandestine group of burakumin intent on hastening Japan’s defeat, whether it was a hoax, or whether it was the work of a single burakumin venting his or her frustrations by making ominous but ultimately empty threats. Although there was in all likelihood never a guerilla force of 237 burakumin wreaking havoc on urban and rural Japan, the language used seems to suggest a more genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo than the writer of a hoax would probably be able to achieve. In particular, the threat to carry out acts of sabotage until “the perfect harmonization of the one hundred million” Japanese is realized suggests a level of familiarity with the state’s rhetoric in regard to the buraku problem beyond that which the writer of a hoax or one simply seeking to frame the minority would be likely to express. The possibility that there were individual burakumin upset enough with the discrimination they faced to take such great risks just to express their anger and frustration does little to change our overall picture of the minority during this period, but nevertheless hints at how unbearable some may have found their lives during these years of strict social regimentation and poverty, when no other avenue could be found to express their dissatisfaction.

Korean Community-Based Activism after the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei As noted in Chapter 4, the December 1929 dissolution of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei into Zenkyō brought an abrupt end to the largest, and most successful, autonomous Korean organization to appear in Japan. By ceding the prerogatives of organized Korean labor to Zenkyō, Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei leaders had forfeited exclusive control over which issues Korean laborers would be mobilized to fight for or against, as well as how their strength as an organized force would be deployed. This is not to say that Zenkyō showed no concern whatsoever for the interests of Korean labor. After the Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei dissolved, a “Korean committee” (Chōsenjin iinkai) was established within Zenkyō, and

original text) is extremely ironic, in light of the character of its notorious prewar namesake. The term “ichioku dōwa” (ϔۘৠ੠) was yet another ubiquitous phrase of wartime yūwa rhetoric.

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Korean-language supplements to the organization’s Rōdō Shinbun (Labor news) were produced, along with similar supplements to the news sheets of affiliated unions. Under Zenkyō, Korean laborers also took part in a series of joint strikes with Japanese laborers, in which the abolition of discriminatory wage differentials between Japanese and Korean workers was often included among the strikers’ demands. Even so, the dissolution of the Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei meant that Korean interests would enjoy, at best, secondary importance in union platforms and activities. Although both the JCP and Zenkyō admonished Japanese workers to treat Koreans as their equals, neither organization took concrete steps to educate Japanese workers about the divisive evils of anti-Korean prejudice. Zenkyō’s tendency to use Korean workers as frontline shock troops in some of its most reckless demonstrations and strikes in the early 1930s also seemed to replicate within the labor movement the very notion of Korean expendability that the union was supposedly fighting as it championed Korean demands for equal wages and an end to discriminatory layoffs. And yet there were Koreans who, whatever their doubts about the degree to which their Japanese comrades truly cared about their problems, remained steadfastly loyal to Zenkyō and the JCP. This was true of the former organizers of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei who remained with Zenkyō as part of the aforementioned Korean committee, many of whom were also members of the JCP. It was also true of many Korean laborers who joined the union. Although Zenkyō never attracted 43. Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin undōshi: 8.15 kaihō-mae, p. 230. 44. See ibid., pp. 232–57 for details on several of these Zenkyō-organized strikes. 45. Zenkyō leaders, for example, voiced self-criticism about not doing more on this front in 1931, but in 1932 claimed that nothing had been done as of yet in relation to ethnic issues. See Taniai, “1930 nendai zaihan Chōsenjin rōdōsha no tatakai,” pp. 9–10. 46. Taniai Kayoko (ibid., pp. 7–11) provides a variety of examples of Korean laborers— only Koreans— being mobilized to take part in “street demonstrations” in Osaka, which often resulted in violent clashes with police and numerous arrests. Nishinarita Yutaka similarly criticizes Zenkyō’s imperious disregard for the well-being of Korean construction workers whom it used as shock troops in a futile raid on the factory and offices of Kishiwada Spinning Company during a 1930 strike by Korean women working at the mill. See Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 156.

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as much support from the minority as the disbanded Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei had maintained, the fact that the majority of laborers organized in many Zenkyō affiliates were actually Koreans suggests that it was more than just Korean JCP members and other communist-inspired minority labor leaders who embraced the union. Indeed, Korean membership in Zenkyō-affiliated unions continued to increase even in the early 1930s, when the state cracked down hard on it and other organizations with ties to the JCP: from 2,663 Koreans in 1930, to a peak of 5,510 in 1933. In some affiliates, Koreans actually comprised the overwhelming majority of members. The Tokyo branch of the Zenkyō-affiliated Nihon Doboku Kensetsu Rōdō Kumiai (Japan Construction and Civil Engineering Workers’ Union) had a membership of 1,000 at the end of 1932, of whom 930 were Koreans. In Osaka, with its enormous population of Koreans employed in small-scale factories and refineries, the figures were even more striking: all but one member of the local branch of the Nihon Kagaku Rōdō Kumiai (Japan Chemical Workers’ Union) were Koreans. Korean involvement with Zenkyō during the early 1930s went beyond the relatively small number of laborers organized by the union. An intriguing example of minority ingenuity and perseverance, backed by Zenkyō’s connections and fi nancial help, was the Tōa Tsūkō Kumiai (ᵅѰ䗮㟾㌘ড়, East Asia Shipping Union), established in April of 1930. By the end of the 1920s, the Ikaino area of Osaka (present-day Ikuno ward) had become a burgeoning enclave of Koreans from Cheju Island, due to the existence of two shipping lines connecting Osaka and Cheju operated by the Amagasaki Steamship and Chōsen Mail Shipping companies. In 1930, when both companies announced a fare hike that would have proved prohibitively expensive for most Korean workers in Ikaino, the residents petitioned for lower rates. When the negotiations failed, they formed the shipping union as a cooperative company. The union quickly managed to pool enough money from the 4,500 Korean families that had joined it to purchase a used vessel with Zenkyō assistance, and set the fare at 6 yen 50 sen, a full six yen cheaper than the inflated fares

47. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, pp. 145–46.

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of the established lines. Amagasaki Steamship and Chōsen Mail Shipping attempted to crush the union by lowering their own fares to three yen, with a meal provided free of charge, but the Tōa Tsūkō Kumiai kept its vessel full, even to the extent of exceeding its passenger limits, by appealing to the solidarity of the Ikaino Korean community and its mistrust of the established shipping companies, as well as an element of classconsciousness. The union decorated the sides of its ship with Koreanlanguage slogans such as “Don’t Be Fooled by Temporarily Low Fares!” and “Don’t Ride on the Bourgeois Boats!” Although Tōa Tsūkō eventually succumbed to constant police harassment and high operating costs, until its demise it enjoyed the unflagging support of the Cheju islander community in Osaka. The combination of ethnic solidarity and a willingness to seek support from Japanese communists and leftist labor unions was also apparent in the many consumers’ unions established to serve the needs of Korean communities. While such organizations were certainly not a rarity among the majority, Koreans took to organizing them with particular enthusiasm during this period. As early as 1929, roughly four years before the Suiheisha called for the establishment of such groups as part of the Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, Koreans in the Kansai area began to establish these unions, many of which came to be affiliated with the Nihon Musansha Shōhi Kumiai Renmei (Japan Federation of Proletariat Consumer Unions), established in March 1932, which itself maintained connections with Zenkyō. By 1935, at least twenty-five unions had been established by Koreans in the prefectures of Osaka, Tokyo, Kyoto,

48. Kim Ch’angjfng, Ihōjin wa Kimigayo Maru ni notte, pp. 219–23. In 1932, union membership among the residents of Ikaino had in fact increased to 10,050 households. Police regarded the union as a communist front due to its connections to Zenkyō, its support of anti-Japanese movements in Cheju, and the fact that on later voyages the union ship was touted as “the ship of the entire proletariat” and adorned with red flags as it set sail. Kim, however, claims that the decision to do so was less that of the Korean union leaders than of their Japa nese supporters in Zenkyō. Kim does not specify exactly when the Tōa Tsūkō Kumiai ceased to operate, but suggests that the end came when the union’s second ship, the Fushiki Maru, became unseaworthy, and the costs of replacing it were deemed prohibitive.

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Hyogo, Wakayama, and Aichi. The main activity of these unions involved procuring foodstuffs and other daily necessities for their members at prices below the market rate and paying members a share of the annual profits from union activities in proportion to the amount they had initially contributed to establishing the union. In addition, Korean consumers’ unions provided assistance to laborers involved in strikes, offered night classes to help Koreans learn to read and write, and urged the authorities in their municipalities to take action to reduce taxes on the working class and combat housing discrimination against Koreans. Some Korean consumer unions seem to have attracted considerable, lasting support from the communities they served. The Hanshin Shōhi Kumiai, for example, had a membership of 120 households within a year of its 1931 founding in Amagasaki. As late as 1941, it was still in existence, with a membership of 450 households, although most other Korean cooperatives probably succumbed to police pressure much earlier than this. Educational activities, typically in the form of night school classes, were another point of intersection between the Korean minority and the Japanese Left in the 1930s. Such schools in themselves were not new to the minority community; the Sōaikai had established night school classes at many of its local offices as far back as the early 1920s, and the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei also offered classes to Korean laborers. As with the otherwise very different programs provided by the Sōaikai and the Korean union, one of the points of emphasis of these 1930s community schools was teaching students hangul and basic math skills. The reason for this emphasis was much the same as it had been in the programs of the 1920s: illiteracy rates among Korean labor migrants to Japan remained high. Even for Korean children born and raised in Japan, poverty, the need to find work at a young age to contribute to the family 49. Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōssenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 179. 50. Ibid., pp. 180–88; Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin undōshi, p. 271. Members appear to have contributed a set amount of money for a “share” (hitokuchi) in these unions. In the case of the Hanshin Shōhi Kumiai, each share cost a five-yen contribution to the union. (Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōssenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 181.) Reduction of taxes and aid to nearby strikers was part of the general platform of the Nihon Musansha Shōhi Kumiai Renmei. 51. Horiuchi, Hyōgo Chōssenjin rōdō undōshi, p. 181.

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income, and the effects of bullying and other discriminatory treatment at Japanese schools prevented many from completing much schooling. The emphasis on teaching Korean language skills over Japanese to the youngest generation of minority Koreans helped maintain a sense of community across generations. As early as 1928 the teachers at Naniwa Night Academy (Naniwa Yogakuin), an autonomous Korean school established to serve the minority community of Naniwa ward, Osaka, commented on the problem of Korean children who could not communicate with their own parents effectively in Korean, due to the influence of Japanese they had absorbed either at school or through growing up in Japan. Through their Korean language curriculum, many night schools also endeavored to give students a sense of Korea’s history and their place in Japanese society as both colonial migrants and laborers. These goals were not part of the program at every Korean night school in Japan, of course: as Itō Etsuko has pointed out, especially in areas like Aichi Prefecture, where the Sōaikai remained strong into the 1930s, night schools typically had what the Japanese authorities classified as a yūwa character— meaning that they did not have any ties to labor organizations like Zenkyō, nor did they espouse leftist or ethnic nationalist ideas through the classes they offered. But the majority of schools, especially in burgeoning Korean enclaves of Tokyo and Osaka, as well as in other cities with large Korean populations, did have ties to local consumers’ unions or the labor movement, either through Zenkyō or other leftist organizations. Many teachers were Koreans who were active members of such groups, and the texts they used presented Korea and the world from a leftist perspective. A textbook entitled Nodong Tokbon (Labor reader), for example, which was used in many of the night schools in the Ikaino area, was apparently printed by an underground press in Seoul and smuggled into Japan by the teachers themselves. In addition, some schools in Osaka made use of materials from the Japanese proletarian

52. Itō Etsuko, “1930 nendai o chūshin to shita zainichi Chōsenjin kyōiku undō no tenkai,” p. 36. 53. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 54. Kim Ch’anjfng, Ihōjin wa Kimigayo Maru ni notte, pp. 152–53. The book was in fact a series of three texts.

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movement, such as films shown at the Zenkyō-affiliated Kyōmei Academy’s periodic “Proletarian Cinema” nights. Whatever the political views of the parents of children at these schools, the night schools appear to have been very popular in the communities they served. The Naniwa Night Academy, for example, recorded three hundred graduates by the end of its second year in operation. Perhaps an even more reliable measure of minority community support was the success of fund-raising drives to support Naniwa and other schools like it, which attracted contributions not only from the communities these schools served but from individuals in Korea as well. Predictably, the police took a very dim view of these schools, not only because they disseminated “unwholesome” socialist ideas, but also for their emphasis on teaching the Korean language, which flew in the face of the state’s new aims, articulated in the Kyōwakai initiative, for the linguistic assimilation of the minority. The police resorted to a policy of flushing out and forcibly disbanding these schools, often right in the middle of class, and arresting the instructors. One of Kim Ch’anjfng’s interviewees in Ikaino recalled the experience of such raids. Several police officers suddenly burst into the second-floor classroom and proceeded to beat the teacher into submission. While the students looked on in horror, one of the officers growled that the same thing would happen to them if they kept studying at “Red” schools. Even if the textbooks and lessons at these schools did not turn students into Korean nationalists or strident communists, the naked brutality and contempt displayed by the police toward both teachers and students during these raids certainly must have made these young Koreans realize that the government was intent on depriving them of their right to learn and the freedom to study whatever they wished, both as Koreans and as impoverished workers. This real-life lesson in itself may

55. Itō Etsuko, “1930 nendai o chūshin to shita zainichi Chōsenjin kyōiku undō no tenkai,” p. 39. 56. Ibid., p. 37. 57. Ibid., p. 40. Itō points out that in Osaka Prefecture, which supplied the forerunner of the national Kyōwakai program, this crackdown started as early as 1932. Thereafter, Korean schools were forced to operate underground. 58. Kim Ch’anjfng, Ihōjin wa Kimigayo Maru ni notte, pp. 155–56.

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have had more of a lasting impact on students’ views of Japan and their place in it than any textbook could ever have managed. For the Korean organizers of schools, labor unions, and consumers’ groups affiliated with the JCP, Zenkyō, or other organizations of the Japanese Left, as well as for rank-and-file members of these groups, what it meant to be a Korean in Japan was integrally tied to one’s workingclass status. That is, Koreans’ experience of Japan was the experience of working-class Japan, and this in turn defined what it meant to be Korean. For this reason, despite the discrimination they experienced at the hands of working-class Japanese and the lack of concrete action on the part of Zenkyō and the JCP to combat it, Koreans at the helm of these organizations maintained a firm commitment to the ideals of proletarian struggle and liberation. The increasingly Korean composition of local JCP branches as police round-ups gutted them of their original Japanese organizers was a sign of this continuing commitment. More revealing of their maintained faith in the ideals of the international proletariat, however, was the steadfast refusal of Korean communists apprehended in police raids to renounce their beliefs. Unlike their Japanese comrades, who could rejoin the fold of the Japanese nation by renouncing their faith in communism and embracing the emperor, Korean “thought criminals” knew that they stood to gain nothing for converting: the Japanese nation would not reciprocate their embrace. Even though Korean communists had managed to discard a rigid adherence to class identity over ethnic identity in their attempts to organize Korean workers and communities, their commitment to ethnic nationalism did not mean accepting the Korean people, or even the Korean community in Japan, as they found it. Their dissatisfactions with the conditions in the minority communities they fought for reveals this, giving us a glimpse into the nature of life among the minority in the 1930s. Kim Ch’angjfng’s detailed study of the history and contents of a Korean-language publication called the Minjung sibo (People’s times) provides a valuable example in this regard. A group of Koreans in Ikaino, 59. Taniai, “1930 nendai zaihan Chōsenjin rōdōsha no tatakai,” p. 11. 60. Weiner, Race and Migration, p. 178. 61. Kim Ch’anjfng, Kenshō, maboroshi no shinbun “Minshū jihō.” The information in this paragraph comes from pp. 16–41.

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many of them affiliated with Zenkyō or the JCP through their involvement in consumers’ unions and the East Asia Shipping Union, began publishing the Minjung sibo in June 1935. Although the paper lasted for only a little over a year— eventually being banned and disbanded in November 1936 after a run of twenty-seven issues—it appeared two or three times a month, with a circulation of roughly two thousand copies. The paper catered largely to the Cheju islander community of Ikaino, but copies were distributed throughout the Kansai area. It provided Koreanlanguage reporting from Korea, Japan, and elsewhere in the world on labor and social movements, political developments, and items of particular interest to Koreans living in the Kansai area in general and Ikaino in particular. In the first issue, the paper pledged to “promote the improvement of the lives and raise the cultural level of Koreans residing in Japan.” What this meant for the staff became evident in its editorials. There are few people who lead lives as irrational as we do in coming to this land. In regard to [our] lifestyles, there are many things we have brought with us and cling to stubbornly that are outdated and do not suit our surrounding environment. Among the tools and implements of our daily lives are so many things that serve no purpose that space does not permit pointing each and every one of them out here. From now on, however, whenever the occasion permits, we will publish reflections on our way of living, in the hope that it will provide you, our fellow countrymen [dōhō shokun], with material upon which to reflect, so as to establish a new lifestyle for ourselves.

Among the customs and practices of their minority community that the writers criticized as “irrational” and “outdated” were marriages at a very young age, the taking of mistresses so as to produce male heirs, the superstitious reliance on charms and fortune tellers, an adherence to parochialism among the migrant community that led to conflicts between Koreans from different parts of the peninsula, Cheju islanders’ practice of sending bodies of the dead back to the island for earthen burial instead of having them cremated in Japan, and what it called “bad habits rooted in the remnants of the clan system [shizokusei].” 62. Quoted in ibid., p. 48. 63. Editorial from issue no. 20, Apr. 11, 1936, quoted in ibid., p. 111. 64. Criticism of these habits appeared in various editorial columns in the paper, as mentioned in ibid., pp. 61, 72– 73, 106– 9, 111–12.

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It is important to note that in criticizing such customs as not “suit[ing] our surrounding environment,” the editors of the Minjung sibo were not calling for Koreans in Japan to assimilate to Japanese culture. Their emphasis was instead on the “irrationality” of these practices, which they saw as leading to wasteful spending and as undermining the social and political solidarity of the minority. Their point of criticism thus differed from the Sōaikai’s concern over “typically Korean” behaviors that upset the majority, as well as from the Kyōwakai’s campaign of making Koreans into Japanese by making them act just like Japanese. Even so, the cool reception such criticisms received from rank-and-file Koreans revealed the gulf between the ideals for minority behavior envisioned by these editors, who were inspired by a socialist commitment to rationality over ethnic tradition, and the everyday world of most minority Koreans. Zenkyō and JCP activists could organize communities and mobilize them on occasion in defense of common community interests, but their rationalist, socialist values ran up against the moral economy of the vast majority of these migrants from the Korean countryside. The mixture of working-class rhetoric with ethnic nationalism provided many Koreans with a potent means of taking pride in who they were in the face of harsh majority prejudice against them, but it is doubtful that most were “true believers” who understood society and their place in it exclusively in terms of either class or ethnicity. In fact, by the 1930s, as minority communities became more established and their populations grew larger, internal divisions along a variety of lines became increasingly evident. The parochialism that the Minjung sibo criticized, for example, was mainly in reference to the discrimination that Cheju islanders faced from mainland Koreans. The ostracism was so prevalent that even after the two groups migrated to Japan and experienced an equal degree of discriminatory treatment at the hands of the Japanese, Cheju islanders and Koreans from the peninsula typically avoided one another whenever possible, leading to the concentration of Cheju Koreans in Ikaino and the absence of non-Cheju Koreans in the shipping union and other Ikaino consumer organizations. 65. See Kim Ch’anjfng, Ihōjin wa Kimigayo Maru ni notte, pp. 85–104, for a detailed description of the tensions between the Cheju islanders of Ikaino and Koreans in other parts of Osaka.

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Other divisions took shape in response to the situations encountered in Japan. A letter to the editor of the Minjung sibo from a factory worker at an Osaka glassworks, for example, mentioned abuse and discriminatory treatment from Japanese workers and foremen, but also expressed indignation at the arrogance of rank-and-file Sōaikai members, many of whom were younger males, who behaved toward older workers in much the same way as the Japanese did. Similar rifts began to open along socioeconomic lines, as some Koreans managed to attain levels of wealth in Japan that separated them from the community and experience of the vast majority of Korean migrants. Their understanding of what it meant to be Korean and how that related to being part of the Japanese empire differed in meaningful ways from that of the Koreans we have examined thus far.

Minority within a Minority: The Korean Middle Class Most Koreans living in Japan during the 1930s lived in community settings like those described earlier, in which their relationship to the society around them was marked by mutual avoidance and antagonism. There were others, however, who drew closer to the majority. For the most part, these were Korean entrepreneurs whose businesses catered to the majority as well as the minority, if not exclusively to the majority. Some got their start in Japan as laborers, before becoming labor contractors or boarding-house proprietors, jobs that entailed interacting closely with the majority culture. All had in common diligence, thrift, sheer luck, and a particular orientation toward Japanese society that simultaneously made their social and economic success possible, and made them “models” of exemplary Korean behavior for Japanese authorities. Like the labor gang bosses of the 1920s, many of these Koreans had been in Japan for a considerable amount of time by the 1930s, and had established a stable life for their families in their new home country. As early as 1924, for example, a study of Koreans in Osaka recorded the personal history and feelings about life in Japan of a diligent and relatively successful twenty-nine-year-old Korean employed at a glassworks. Leaving his wife and newborn daughter behind in rural Korea, this mi66. Kim Ch’anjfng, Kenshō, pp. 104–5.

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grant had made his way to Osaka in 1919. Despite having only ten sen a day to live on after paying for his room and board, through self-denial and clean living he managed to put aside five yen a month. The danger and discomfort of his original job detail—washing and carrying the finished glass products—was formidable, yet through perseverance he eventually won a position as an assistant to one of the factory’s Japanese workmen. During three years in this capacity he gradually learned all the skills of the trade, and finally became a full-fledged workman with a monthly salary of sixty yen. Much of the money he saved over these first few years at the factory he sent to his wife in Korea, who managed to save 270 yen after four years. With this wealth, he was able to bring his wife and child over to live with him. With a monthly income of sixty yen and additional savings of 270 yen, this Korean would have been doing fairly well for a factory worker in Taishō-era Japan. His success was due in no small part to his diligence and frugality, but the opportunity to ascend the pay scale by learning new skills and taking on new responsibilities at the workplace came from the uncommon generosity of his Japanese employer. Obviously aware of this (and also of the fact that anything he said to the interviewer might get back to his boss), he summed up his feelings for his work, his Japanese coworkers, other Koreans, and life in Japan as follows: At present, I’m working as a glass blower. I plan to make a living at this job from now on. The Japanese workers? They all treated me kindly. I tried to be as even-tempered as possible and never got angry no matter what happened. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t things that got me upset or made me want to cry. But whenever I see my fellow Koreans complaining about this or that, or trying to act tough, it always makes me sick. . . . I want my wife and kid to learn Japanese quickly. Yeah, I love Japan [naichi] so much that I want to die here. I’ve even got some Japanese clothes [wafuku]. Got some for my wife and kid, too.

While we may suspect some embellishment in these assessments, it is highly unlikely that this worker was simply trying to put on a pleasant

67. Ōsaka-shi shakaibu chōsaka, “Chōsenjin rōdōsha mondai,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, pp. 387–88. 68. Ibid., p. 387.

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face for his Social Affairs Department interviewer. His sentiments, as expressed here, were no doubt to a great degree heartfelt. Perhaps more than anything else, it was his “even-tempered” disposition in the face of whatever discriminatory treatment he received that endeared him to his employer and made it possible for him to advance. The ability to maintain the “proper” attitude in one’s dealings with Japanese superiors was, along with good luck and hard work, of great importance for Koreans to get ahead. Although biographical information on successful Korean workers is almost as hard to come by as it is for those in the much larger category of the impoverished, the careers and life stories of other “exemplary Koreans” do occasionally surface in the source material, giving us another opportunity to examine the elements involved in the rise of this middle class. One such source is the record of proceedings from the Second Conference on the Protection of Koreans Residing in the Prefecture, held in Fukuoka City on February 20, 1929. The conference presented in detail the achievements of those individuals commended as “exemplary Koreans” because of their “diligence in their own work since coming to Japan.” While these individuals ended up in a wide variety of different occupations in Japan, they all shared the admirable qualities of perseverance, thrift, and self-motivation necessary for success. Yi Tfkkgn, who worked as a typesetter, managed to set aside some of each month’s pay, even though he had to support a family of five and pay six yen a month for rent while receiving a daily wage of only one yen, eighty-five sen. Pak Rinho taught himself dentistry while working as an apprentice dental technician and within four years had become skilled enough to examine and diagnose patients himself. As a boxed-lunch vendor in Moji Station, Hyfn Kyfngryfn worked hard enough to receive a salary ranging from forty to seventy yen a month in sales commissions, out of which he set aside over three hundred yen in savings and invested twenty-six yen a month in bonds— an investment that, upon maturation, had an estimated yield of over two thousand yen. 69. “Dai-2-kai kennai zaijū senjin hogo kyōgikai,” addendum to Fukuoka Chihō Shokugyō Shōkai Jimukyoku, “Kannai zaijū Chōsenjin rōdō jijō,” reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, pp. 1157– 61. 70. Ibid., p. 1157, 1159– 60.

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Aside from good fortune and the proper mental attitude, the short biographies of these Koreans reveal another aspect of their backgrounds that no doubt facilitated their achievements: a fairly high level of education in comparison with most other labor migrants from the peninsula. The typesetter Yi Tfkkgn graduated from a primary school in Taegu before becoming an apprentice at a printing house there. O Kiyfng also completed an elementary school education before migrating to Japan to become an apprentice to a sugar merchant. Both Pak Rinho, the ambitious dental technician, and Kim Sfngggn, who was employed as a security guard at an iron foundry in Yahata, were educated enough to serve in the colonial police force in Korea before heading to Japan. Most impressive of all, prior to his career as an enterprising boxed-lunch salesman, Hyfn Kyfngryfn graduated from a public elementary school and an agricultural school, then worked for three years in the office of a cotton-spinning company in Andong. We have no way of knowing to what extent their educations prepared these men for life in Japan (although we can safely assume that the two former police officers, and perhaps even the typesetter, arrived already fluent in Japanese), but some degree of school experience must have helped them to navigate an urban society and learn new job skills. An elementary school education may not seem like much, but it served to set these men apart from the bulk of the Korean minority, which, as we have seen, had very little experience of formal schooling throughout the colonial period. It would of course be unreasonable to claim that every successful Korean in imperial Japan had received some level of formal education, but for those who did, it would give them both a sense of superiority beyond wealth to distinguish them from the uneducated and less-well-off Korean migrants, as well as a ready explanation for why they managed to succeed while others remained in poverty. For Koreans who had attained a certain degree of personal advancement in Japanese society, the thought that most Japanese would probably make little if any distinction between them and the less fortunate of the migrant community may well have caused frustration. This is why the Korean glassworker in Osaka became so upset in the presence of Koreans who affirmed negative stereotypes by “complaining about this or that, or trying to act tough.” It is why the security guard Kim Sfngggn claimed that it was his personal mission in life to promote “conciliation

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and harmony between Japanese and Koreans,” ostensibly for the sake of the “wretched laborers” from his home province. And it is probably also why many other successful Koreans in imperial Japan sought political office in the 1930s. The same 1925 law that gave the vote to Korean males residing in Japan also granted them the right to run for political office, although the legislation did not release a torrent of Korean candidates in the local or national elections that immediately followed. It was not until the eighteenth general election in 1932 that the successful campaigns of Pak Chun’ggm for a seat in the Lower House of the Imperial Diet, and Pak Pyfng’in for a seat on the Amagasaki city council, provided those Koreans with political aspirations the confidence to run. In prefectural and local elections held the following year, a total of thirteen Koreans ran, and six were elected to office. Not much is known about these men or the campaigns they conducted. Home Affairs Ministry records list three as labor contractors, one as a white-collar employee in a factory office, two as coal miners, three as merchants of various kinds, one as working in the fertilizer industry, one as unemployed, and two with no occupation specified. Only one of these candidates was attached to an established political party, while eight of the others belonged to groups that appear to have promoted the assimilation of Korean laborers. Thanks to the research of Matsuda Toshihiko, we know the occupations and political affiliations of eighteen Koreans who ran for some sort of public office. Matsuda’s findings, which appear in Table 7, show that almost all of the eighteen were employed in middle- or upper-middleclass occupations: they were professionals, company employees, office workers, labor contractors, and merchants of various kinds before running for public office. The summaries of their political activities make 71. Ibid., p. 1160. 72. Matsuda, Senzenki no Zainichi Chōsenjin to sanseiken, p. 79. The only record of a Korean candidate before 1932 is Han In’gyfng’s unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Hyōgo Prefectural Assembly in September 1931 (Naimushō Keihōkyoku, “Tokkō geppō,” excerpted in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 849). 73. Naimushō, “Tokkō geppō,” p. 849. 74. Ibid. 75. Mastuda, Senzen no zainichi Chōsenjin to sanseiken, pp. 98–101 (Table III-6) and 114–115 (Table III-7). Matsuda compiled the first table from records of 383 Koreans

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clear that most of these individuals belonged to organizations and took part in activities that supported the ideals of imperial Japan and promoted the assimilation of the Koreans within it. Only Kyong Naeu, Sin Taeok, Yi Sangun, and possibly Kim Songryong had a history of involvement in groups or causes that could be characterized as opposed to the state. Moreover, most of the candidates had been involved in organizations promoting Korean assimilation long before their first political campaigns, which would seem to suggest that their involvement was more than just political posturing for the sake of gaining Japa nese votes. Koreans in Japan who ran for public office were likely atypical for men of their class: they surely possessed a desire, whether self-serving or public minded, to have more power and influence than the average citizen. Yet we can assume that these men reflected many of the attitudes and opinions regarding society and politics that were held by their less ambitious social peers. The political careers of two Korean politicians about whom we have fairly detailed information—Pak Chun’ggm and Pak Pyfng’in— offer a close-up look at these similarities. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Pak Chun’ggm’s own financial success in Japan came about through his involvement in the ginseng trade. Selling ginseng was a lucrative trade for Koreans in Japan during the 1920s, as was, to a lesser extent, preparing and selling Chōsen ame (Korean candy), a confection made from pounded sweet rice. In 1929 a Tokyo survey found seven Chōsen ame peddlers earning between seventy and ninety yen per month. (Two years earlier, a survey in Kobe had documented a Korean ginseng merchant with a monthly income of between 500 and

who ran in local and prefectural elections at least three times, and the second from the records of those who ran in national elections. 76. Matsuda seems to miss this point when he writes: “Many Korean candidates, while making Korean votes their base, ‘portrayed [their] election as the manifestation of conciliation and harmony between Japan and Korea, and attempted to gain stray votes among Japa nese’ ” (ibid., p. 89). Matsuda here quotes from a Ministry of Home Affairs report titled Shakai undō no jōkyō without considering that what may have seemed like mere opportunism in the eyes of the writers of that report may not have been exclusively or even necessarily so for the Korean candidates in question. 77. Tōkyō-fu Shakaika, “Zaikyō Chōsenjin rōdōsha no genjō,” reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, p. 989.

ⱑफ⦾ Paek Namgyu

䱇㟈ੑ Chin Ch’imyfng

䞥ᕫ⒊ Kim Tgkyong

䞥೼∌ Kim Chaeyfng

Name (Japa nese name) Nov. 1936: Setagaya ward [Tokyo] Feb. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1936: Arakawa ward [Tokyo] Feb. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1936: Shibuya ward [Tokyo] Feb. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1936: Ebara ward [Tokyo] Feb. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown] Nov. 1940: Ward election [Tokyo, ward unknown]

Election

Physician (1936)

Public works contractor (1936)

Tokyo municipal employee (1936)

No occupation listed (1936)

Occupation

Table 7: Korean Candidates in Local and National Elections, 1931–43 Local Elections (candidate elected to office in elections shown in bold face)

1932: founded Tōa Kyōkai (assimilationist). Ran as Seiyūkai candidate in 1940 elections.

(no record)

Feb. 1940: ran as Minseitō candidate. Nov. 1940: ran as Seiyūkai candidate.

1933: founded Rōgakukai, an assimilationist orga nization.

Political activity

䞥៤啡 Kim Songryong (䞥ѩ៤啡) (Kanai Seiryū)

䶧ҕᭀ Han Ingyong

ᴈ⚇ҕ Pak Pyfng’in (ঢ়⬄⚇ҕ) (Yoshida Heijin)

䞥∌䘨 Kim Yfngdal

Sept. 1931: Hyogo Prefecture Apr. 1933: Kobe City May 1937: Kobe City May 1937: Kyoto City July 1939: Kichijōji School District [Kyoto] Sept. 1939: Kyoto Prefecture Jun. 1942: Kyoto City

Apr. 1933: Sumiyoshi village [Hyogo] Oct. 1933: Hyogo Prefecture Apr. 1937: Sumiyoshi village Sept. 1939: Hyogo Prefecture June 1942: Sumiyoshi village May 1932: Amagasaki City [Hyogo] May 1936: Amagasaki City May 1940: Amagasaki City

Rubber salesman (1931) No occupation listed (1933) Rice merchant (1937) Company employee (1937, 1942)

Scribe (1932, 1936) [daishogyō]

Ginseng merchant (1933–37) Druggist (1942)

1931: possibly the same Kim Songryong arrested in Kyoto for planning an “International Anti-War Day” demonstration. Member of the national socialist Nihon Kokumin Dōmei (which became the Nihon Kakushintō in 1937) from 1932 on. 1942: ran as Dai-Nippontō candidate. (continued )

1926: founded Naisen Dōaikai (assim.), acted as first chairman. 1933: established Amagasaki Naisen Kokubō Seinendan. As a city council member, worked to establish Korean residency rights, decried anti-Korean discrimination. 1943: resigned from city council. Around 1929: founded Seishin Kyōkai (assim.). 1932, 1935: Petitioned the 62nd and 67th Diets for the extension of voting rights to Korea.

1920: founded Chōsen Rōdō Saishinkai (mutual assistance), resigned chairmanship under criticism from members. 1923: established Nissen Yūwakai (assimilationist). 1924: established Hyōgo-ken Senjin Seinendan. 1925: superintendent of the Hyogo-ken Naisen Kyōkai (assimilationist, semi-official org.). 1931: founded Rōdō Kyōshinkai (assimilationist).

May 1934: Moji City [Fukuoka] May 1938: Moji City June 1942: Moji City Nov. 1933: Seto City Nov. 1937: Seto City June 1942: Seto City

ᴈܿ㨀 Pak P’alman (᳼᠌ܿ㨀) (Kido Hachiman)

May 1933: Kyoto City July 1935: Kamikamo School District [Kyoto] July 1939: Kamikamo School District Sept. 1939: Kyoto Prefecture July 1933: Gifu City July 1937: Gifu City June 1942: Gifu City

Election

ᑮᴹ⼤ Kyong Naeu

ᴢⳌ䳆 Yi Sangun (ᑗॳⳌ䳆) (Kōgen Shōun)

䞥ᅫ⋭ Kim Chongsu

Name (Japa nese name)

Table 7: (continued)

Head of Moji Purchasing Cooperative (1934, 1938) No occupation listed (1942) Soy products merchant (1933, 1937) Ceramics salesman (1942)

Labor broker (1933, 1937) Contractor (1942)

Head of Kamikamo Fertilizer Cooperative from 1930 on

Occupation

In the early 1920s, orga nized the Naisen Chūbū Rōdō Kumiai and affiliated it with the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, but later left the union. 1931: orga nized the Shōwakai (assim.). 1933, 1937: petitioned the 64th and 70th Imperial Diets to extend the obligation of military ser vice to Korea. 1941: made statements in support of voluntary military ser vice for Koreans. 1931: established Moji Purchasing Cooperative (Korean nationalist/indepedence group). 1942: participated in the operation of a collection and distribution center orga nized by consumers’ unions in Yamaguchi and Fukuoka Prefectures. (no record)

Belonged to Kokumin Dōjinkai (assim.). 1935: established a nursery school for the children of laborers in Kyoto. 1938: donated 50 yen to Imperial Army for the encouragement and comfort of the troops.

Political activity

Apr. 1942: 21st General, Tokyo 4th District

Feb. 1932: 18th General, Tokyo 4th District Feb. 1936: 19th General, Tokyo 4th District Apr. 1937: 20th General, Tokyo 4th District Apr. 1942: 21st General, Tokyo 4th District Apr. 1942: 21st General, Tokyo 5th District June 1942: Tokyo City Council Sept. 1943: Tokyo City Council

ᴢ㣅ҟ Yi Yfnggae

ᴈ᯹⨈ Pak Chun’ggm

ᴢᝊഁ Yi Kyfnggyu (ᴢᆊᅳ) (Rinoie Makoto)

Born 1906, S. Kyfngsang Province Migrated to Japan in 1919 Worked as assistant train engineer in Toyama, 1927, thereafter, served in local bureaucracy in Korea Returned to Japan as patent attorney, 1934 Became a director of Teikoku Pharmaceuticals, 1935 Born 1891, S. Kyfngsang Province Migrated to Japan in 1907 Involved in mining enterprises in Korea, import and entertainment enterprises in Japan Born 1893, Kyfnggi Province Factory owner at time of 1942 election Factory operative in 1943 (continued )

Member of the Kōjinsha (咘Ҏ⼒, a yūwa orga nization formed in 1926). Later became its chairperson. 1942: dissolved Kōjinsha.

(see text for details)

1935: served as chairperson of Tōyō Kyōwakai (ᵅ⋟न੠Ӯ, pan-Asianist orga nization). 1941: served as member of Kōmin Jissen Kyōgikai, seijikyoku (ⱛ⇥ᅳ䏉न䅄Ӯᬓ⊏ሔ, Implementation Committee for Imperial People’s Policy, Political Affairs Bureau), influenced by Tokutomi Sohō’s ideas on the centrality of the imperial institution. 1942: during election campaign, called for the swift implementation of military conscription in Korea as vital for the construction of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Feb. 1932: 18th General, Osaka 4th District Feb. 1936: 19th General, Osaka 4th District Apr. 1937: 20th General, Osaka 4th District Apr. 1942: 21st General, Osaka 4th District

Apr. 1942: 21st General, Osaka 4th District

䕯⋄⤘ Sin T’aeok

Election

ᴢ୘⋾ Yi Sfnhong

Name (Japa nese name)

Table 7: (continued)

Born 1902, N. Hamgyfng Province Graduated from Waseda Univ., 1931 Lawyer

Born 1894, S. Cholla Province Migrated to Japan in 1917 Pharmacist at time of 1932, 1936, and 1942 elections Unemployed, 1937

Occupation

1922: established Chōsenjin Kyōkai (Association of Koreans, a yūwa orga nization), later in this year disrupted inaugural meeting of the Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai (later to be affi liated with the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei). 1926: attempt to form yūwa Zenyūkai (୘টӮ) in Osaka prevented by Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei interference. 1932: received campaign endorsement from founder of the right-wing Genyōsha, Tōyama Mitsuru. 1924: central executive committee member of the Chōsen Seinen Sōdōmei (left-wing student orga nization). 1926: investigated the group lynching of several Korean laborers in Mie Prefecture, as an executive member of the Ichigatsukai (left-wing student group). 1929: decried the destruction of the Korean economy under Japa nese imperialism in an article published in Chūō Kōron. 1930: criticized by the Korean committee of Zenkyō for abandoning reformism in favor of advocating autonomous rule. 1931: passed higher civil ser vice examination in law.

Political activity

Apr. 1942: 21st General, Aichi 1st District

Born 1904, birthplace unknown President of Tōa shinbun (Japanese-language newspaper)

1935: began publishing Tōa shinbun, with an editorial policy in complete support of the Kyōwakai program. 1936: hosted film showings to raise money for flood relief in southern Korea. 1938: personally presented Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro with a letter of gratitude on the occasion of the inception of voluntary military ser vice for Koreans. 1940: held public lecture meeting on Korean-Japanese issues in commemoration of the 2600th anniversary of Jinmu’s ascension to the throne. 1942: toured Korea and Manchuria.

source: Matsuda Toshihiko, Senzenki no zainichi Chōsenjin to sanseiken, vol. 5 of Matsuda, Sōsho zainichi Kankoku- Chōsenjin no hōritsu mondai (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1995), pp. 98–101, table III-6, “Chihō gikai senkyo e no Chōsenjin rikkōhosha (rikkōho kaisū 3-kai ijō no mono),” and pp. 114–115, table III-7, “Shūgiin giin senkyo e no Chōsenjin rikkōhosha.” Information on the political activities of Yi Sfnhong was not provided in the original source table, but is given on p. 108 of Matsuda’s accompanying text. note: The entire table includes only those candidates known to have run in three or more elections.

ӏ啡ঢ় Im Yonggil

1932: opened legal practice, hereafter became a manager of Chosfn Ilbo newspaper and vice chairperson of the Chōsen Bengōshi Kyōkai (Lawyer’s Association of Korea). 1941: assumed directorship of Chōsen Rinsen Hōkokudan (Patriotic War Preparation Group). 1942: pledge to promote “Construction of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” during election campaign. 1945~: continued to maintain influence in Korean political and legal circles after the liberation.

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600 yen.) Although their clientele included some Koreans, entrepreneurs such as these probably catered mostly to Japanese customers. Indeed, in the case of ginseng and Chōsen ame, the very ethnicity of the business owner may have been a business asset: it attested to the authenticity of the product for their majority customers. In Pak’s case, ginseng set him on the path to wealth, from which he branched out into importing a variety of commodities of Korean origin as well as getting involved in real estate and other business concerns in the colony. At the time of his first election to the Imperial Diet from Tokyo’s fourth electoral ward in February 1932—made possible by the backing and endorsements of influential Sōaikai supporters such as Maruyama Tsurukichi and Saitō Makoto—the popular press heralded Pak as the embodiment of Korean loyalty to Japan. Pak himself embraced the

78. Kōbe Shiyakusho Shakaika, “Zaishin hantō minzoku no genjō,” reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 1, p. 612. 79. The communist Korean labor orga nizer Kim Tuyfng once claimed that Pak and Sōaikai co-founder Yi Kidong “made millions of yen selling ginseng,” and that this wealth allowed them to make connections with influential government figures. (Kim Tuyfng, “Kawasaki rantō jiken no shinsō,” Senki, July 1929, p. 77.) Pak and Yi served as assistant managing directors of Nissen Kigyō Kabushiki Kaisha (Japan-Korea Enterprises, Inc.), founded in May 1922. This company did business in the entertainment industry, sales of foodstuffs and other commodities from Korea, and real estate. As of 1924, the company possessed 500,000 yen in capital. Aside from Pak and Yi, Japa nese occupied all of the other executive positions. (Nihon zenkoku shokaisha yakuinroku, p. 75.) 80. The first mention of Pak’s candidacy appeared in the January 23, 1932, edition of the Yomiuri Shinbun, in an article entitled “Senjin saisho no rikkōho, Akaike, Maruyama no moto ryōsōkan ni susumerare Sōaikai no Boku Shunkin-san,” which mentioned Pak’s Sōaikai connection and the fact that police superintendents Maruyama and Akaike had recommended him to run. Thereafter, Pak’s candidacy was carried in papers across the country. Articles of this sort, which emphasized his exemplary character as a loyal, public-minded Korean, include “Chōsenjin Boku Shunkin-kun Tōkyō dai-yonku (Honjo Fukakawa) kara noridasu/nijū-nenrai nissen yūwa ni tsutome risshi denchū no hito,” Fukuoka Nichinichi Shinbun, Jan. 23, 1932, which lauded Pak as a selfmade man who had worked tirelessly to bring about harmony between Japa nese and Koreans. Pak’s Japa nese wife, Itoko, also featured prominently in such coverage. Interviews with Itoko on her husband appeared in both the Tōkyō asahi shinbun (“Dashin shite miru—kōhosha fujin no yosō: Chōsenjin mina naku, Boku Shunkin-shi fujin Itoko-san no dan,” Feb. 20, 1932) and the March 1932 issue of the women’s magazine Fujin sekai (“Seisen ni tatsu otto e no hanamuke—naisen yūwa o mezashite tatsu senjin

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characterization, and even adopted the phrase “Korean-born Japanese” (Chōsen-umare Nihonjin) to describe himself as one who had been born in the colony, but truly belonged in the metropole. In 1930, two years before announcing his intention to run for office, Pak expressed his political views on Japanese colonial policy in a self-published volume entitled Warera no kokka shin-Nippon (Our nation, new Japan), bearing the cumbersome subtitle Chōsen dōhō no fuan to kinkyū o nobete, chōya shoken ni uttau (Stating the anxiety and hardships of our Korean brethren to prompt reflection by people of wisdom in and out of government). As Oguma Eiji has observed, for a work authored by one as pro-Japanese and indebted to the colonial power structure as Pak, this book was surprisingly critical of colonial policy in Korea. The thrust of Pak’s criticism for Japanese colonial policy was that it had consisted of half-hearted approaches resulting in no concrete policy at all. The “military rule” (budan seiji) during the first eight years of military leadership had ignored the desires of the people for a better life, and so had resulted in the outpouring of discontent witnessed in the March First Movement. The policy of “cultural rule” (bunka seiji), instituted under Pak’s benefactor Governor-General Saito, however, was even more problematic, because it offered no clear objective whatsoever. Should the aim of Japanese colonial rule be to prepare the Koreans for independence? This Pak found to be an absurd suggestion, and in arguing against it he restated the teitairon arguments about the deleterious effects that centuries of political and cultural subservience to China had left in their wake. Should the Korean colony be incorporated completely into the political system of the metropole, thus granting all Koreans the same legal and political rights as Japanese? This would not work, Pak claimed, foremost because most Japanese would never accept such an arrangement—in particular because it would suddenly allow millions of Koreans to vote and thus influence Japan’s national policy—but also

saisho no rikkōho”). Itoko was also highlighted for a tearful campaign speech she gave on behalf of her husband in the Japan Times and Mail on Feb. 20, 1932. 81. Pak uttered this phrase in his very first speech before the general session of the Sixty-Second Diet, on June 5, 1932. The text of the speech appears in Shakai Mondai Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Teikoku gikaishi, vol. 12, p. 509. 82. Oguma, “Nipponjin” no kyōkai, p. 375.

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because most Koreans were not intellectually or culturally prepared for it. Perhaps a policy of limited self-rule, such as Great Britain had instituted in India, was a feasible compromise? This too would fail, in Pak’s view, because Korea was home to far fewer colonizers than was the British Dominion of India, and furthermore because Korean malcontents would only lead the masses to demand independence, and this demand would have to be suppressed by military force. In any case, Pak concluded, whether the Japanese ultimately sought to thoroughly incorporate Korea or allow it to engage in home rule, the assimilation of Koreans would first need to be carried out. Pak explained what measures would be required to bring this about while commenting on the problem of socialist and ethnic-nationalist agitators and the social movements they had launched. In Pak’s eyes, these Koreans had made careers for themselves by capitalizing on popular frustrations in the colony, frustrations that were due to the lack of a clear policy to incorporate Koreans more fully and the refusal by the Japanese to treat Koreans as equals. In the case of Korea, [such movements] are a kind of political movement. Their slogans contain anti-national meanings, and their ideologies are unpatriotic. No matter by what means or in what form such ideas are disguised, the government must be resolute in suppressing them. Although some will criticize this as anachronistic or even tyrannical, only by doing so will the Korean masses awaken to “the proper path.” . . . It is because the path to take is not clear to them that they go astray. If nothing is left for them but a single avenue, regardless of whether they are pleased with this path they must follow it, and they will resign themselves to doing so. Once they resign themselves to it, their spirits will grow calm. This is called the stabilization of public sentiment. However, this stabilization of public sentiment is just the “stability of resignation.” It is not the reassuring sense of stability that keeps dreams alive or provides something to look forward to in one’s future. And yet, with the kind support and protection of the government, it should last for a very long time. When there is stability, one attains a frame of mind in which to live happily. This is human nature. From this hope springs and light shines. For this to happen, however, the combined efforts of the government and the [Japanese] people will be needed to provide such kind protection, and they must do it with a kindness that is not the slightest bit affected. 83. Pak Chun’ggm, Warera no kokka shin-Nihon, pp. 18–34. 84. Ibid., p. 38.

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Pak claimed that the vast majority of Koreans desired freedom from discrimination rather than freedom from Japanese rule. If the Japanese could find a way to stop looking down on them for being Koreans, Koreans throughout the empire would naturally come to see their interests as intertwined with those of Japan, and would assimilate willingly. Pak’s activities in the Diet were in some respects aimed at bringing about this intertwining of interests. He opposed limits on rice imports from Korea, which the Okada cabinet had sought to impose as a way of bolstering falling rice prices in Japan and so helping Japanese tenant farmers. Pak argued that doing so in essence sacrificed the livelihoods of Korean farmers in order to support the interests of their Japanese counterparts. He also pushed for the seating of representatives from the Korean provinces in the Imperial Diet and championed extending the right to vote to Japanese and Korean men living in the colony— although as we shall see shortly, what he proposed was far from the universal male suffrage system in force in Japan proper. Lastly, Pak called for the extension of the military draft to Koreans residing in Japan. While designed to bring Japanese and Korean interests together, all of these proposals also contained elements that hinted at Pak’s problematic relationship with Koreans below his own socioeconomic position. His charge that limiting rice imports from the colony put the interest of Japanese farmers over Korean farmers was true on one level, of course, but given Pak’s business of importing commodities from Korea, his profits also stood to suffer along with those of the farmers he claimed to be so concerned about. Less obvious yet even more revealing were his proposals on extending the vote and the draft. Pak’s proposals on the vote echoed those of the pro-Japanese National Society (Kungmin Hyophoe in Korean, Kokumin Kyōkai in Japanese), which he maintained close ties to throughout his political career. During his first term he called for electing one or two representatives from each province in Korea to the Lower House, with only those living in urban areas in Korea being offered the ballot. Such a system would have severely curtailed the vote among a population that was still largely agricultural and put the vote disproportionately in the hands of wealthy Korean and Japanese industrialists

85. Matsuda, “Boku shunkin-ron,” p. 23.

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and absentee landlords. During his second term in office following the general election of 1937, Pak adjusted the criteria for the right to vote in his proposal even further: only those Koreans on the peninsula who were paying ten yen or more a year in taxes would be given the ballot, whereas Japanese living in Korea, who under the current system could not vote due to residency restrictions in the laws governing suffrage, would be exempt from this tax qualification and receive the right to vote based on “original place of residence” (honsekichi) alone. The proposal submitted in Pak’s second term also called for one Korean and one Japanese representative from each province. It was in regard to his call for extending the draft to Koreans in Japan, however, that Pak’s concern for the reputation and place of Koreans in the empire, including his own, became most apparent. Unlike the right to vote, the obligation to serve in the military did not automatically apply to Koreans upon taking up residence in Japan. Having the right to vote without bearing the duty to serve was a potential source of embarrassment for the patriotic Pak. In arguing for the military conscription of Koreans, Pak claimed that the draft was the counterpart to the ballot; the right to vote alone would never amount to complete assimilation for Koreans. Pak suspected, however, that some of his fellow Diet members might find the thought of training and arming large numbers of Koreans unsettling. As a compromise approach, in 1935 he asked instead for the implementation of a system of voluntary ser vice. This plan, he claimed, would give patriotic Koreans a chance to prove themselves and thus smooth the way for the full military conscription of all minority Koreans. It took three years for the army to implement such a system, but Pak was pleased nonetheless, and urged the army to increase the numbers of volunteers admitted while pushing for the navy to insti86. Ibid., p. 29. 87. Ibid., p. 23. 88. This apparently annoyed him somewhat. Matsuda quotes from a committee meeting in which Pak remarked, “If [a military incident] were to happen, you need not worry about whether [Korean troops] would shoot the enemy or those on their own side” (ibid., p. 24). 89. See his question to the Ministers of the Army and Navy, Feb. 5, 1935 general session, Sixty-Seventh Diet, in Shakai Mondai Shiryō Kenkyūkai, Teikoku gikaishi, vol. 22, pp. 401–2.

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tute a similar system. Meanwhile, however, his enthusiasm for implementing the full conscription of Koreans appeared to cool. As late as January 1942, Pak believed it was “still far too early” to begin drafting Koreans, and that any program of the sort would have to wait until the beneficial effects of compulsory education had taken deeper root in colonial society. In lieu of a clear statement from Pak on the matter, it is difficult to ascertain his reasons for this shift, but in his adopted nation’s time of crisis he surely would have understood that willing volunteers stood a better chance of creating the impression that Koreans were as patriotic and morally upstanding as Japanese than Koreans drafted into the service against their will. How can we reconcile the side of Pak that, as the subtitle of his book put it, sought to “prompt reflection by people of wisdom in and out of government” about the plight of Koreans in the empire with the side that sought to keep the vast majority of Koreans in the colony out of a marginally expanded electorate, or with the Sōaikai’s draconian policing of the Korean minority in Japan? Pak, much like the Korean glassblower and the security guard Kim Sfngggn—but to a much greater extent due to his success and close connections to affluent and influential circles— could not ignore the negative images of Koreans prevalent in Japanese society. At the same time, in his public, political role as the eminent “exemplar Korean” of his day, Pak could not simply turn his back on his own connection to Korea and “pass” in Japanese society, nor did he ever try to. Pak did not want to be mistaken for a Japanese; instead he hoped to be recognized as a loyal, morally upstanding Korean subject of the emperor who had excelled in all the standards of “success” set forth by bourgeois Japanese society. For Pak, there were thus two very different senses in which one could be a Korean: one was abstract and idealized; the other was concrete, particularistic, and for the most part negative. The abstract, idealized image encompassed what Pak referred to as “Korean-born Japanese” and described Koreans much like himself: good, patriotic subjects of the emperor who just happened to be of Korean ethnic heritage but were otherwise no different from the ideal Japanese imperial subject. These

90. Matsuda, “Boku shunkin-ron,” p. 30.

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were the Koreans to whom the doctrine of “impartiality and equal favor” should apply. It was for the sake of these Koreans that Pak decried the hypocrisy of the Japanese, who mouthed lofty slogans of imperial benevolence without any intention of putting them into practice. Pak’s emphasis on extending true “impartiality” to all Koreans even admitted a sense of multiculturalism, in the form of pride in his Korean cultural heritage. The Sōaikai performances of traditional Korean music and dance at the ceremonies commemorating Empire Foundation Day, mentioned in Chapter 3, were noteworthy in this regard. The performance of something traditionally Korean in the context of a ceremony to celebrate the mythological founding of the Japanese nation as an ethnic rather than merely political community, was in essence a claim for the validity of the Korean cultural tradition within the framework of the empire. For Pak, some aspects of “being Korean” did not require total assimilation to Japanese ways in order for Koreans to be considered equally Japanese. It was on this question of assimilation that Pak revealed the contradictions that made his career so problematic. This was where his views of Koreans, not as an abstract and generalized subgroup of imperial subjects but “in the flesh,” as an impoverished and ethnically distinct community within Japan, led him to adopt the authoritarian approach for which he became notorious. As a true Korean “success story”—who had amassed considerable wealth and boasted numerous Japanese acquaintances at the highest reaches of colonial and home government power—Pak had little doubt that he himself had assimilated, becoming a “Korean-born Japanese” in the fullest sense. At the same time, he also may have suspected his Japanese acquaintances of viewing his achievements as particularly remarkable in light of the “handicap” of his Korean ethnicity. His position as a Korean living in Japan, surrounded by a Japanese majority, became significant in this regard. Pak was painfully aware of the stereotypes of Koreans that most Japanese— even those far less successful than himself— embraced; indeed, his efforts to reform the behavior of Korean laborers through the Sōaikai’s programs suggest that he probably sympathized with such views. Although he himself had risen from humble roots, when he looked upon the masses of Korean migrants in Japan, he saw a community that was overwhelmingly poor and undereducated, holding tenaciously to the lower-class Korean lifestyle brought over from

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the peninsula. Rather than see them with compassion, he viewed them with a sense of scorn and embarrassment: they were ill mannered, lazy, ignorant, prone to violence, immoral, aloof from Japanese society, and had little sense of loyalty and gratitude to the Japanese state. Worst of all, the very fact that they too were Korean seemed to Pak to threaten the reputation of honest, hard-working, patriotic, and successful Koreans like himself. Faced with the ever-present possibility of being associated with the déclassé of his own ethnic cohort in Japan, through his social and political activities Pak attempted a kind of damage control. The Sōaikai’s selfappointed role of monitoring the Korean community in Japan, cracking down on “unwholesome” leftists and labor activists, and generally teaching Koreans to behave properly in Japanese society was clearly an important part of this program. It showed through his proposals and some of his statements in the Diet as well. Despite the fact that the electoral district Pak represented, Tokyo’s fourth, contained large working-class Korean communities (in Fukugawa and Honjo wards), Pak once boasted to his fellow Diet members that “only forty or fifty” Koreans from the area had voted for him, as if this attested to his respectability. Even among his cohort of affluent Koreans in 1930s Japan, Pak Chun’ggm was unusual in terms of the degree of financial and political “success” and influence he had attained during his career and, his occasional complaints about Japanese not treating Koreans as equals aside, perhaps in his willingness to cooperate with the Japanese state. In comparison, the much less affluent and less well-known Pak Pyfng’in, elected to the Amagasaki city council in May 1932, seems to have been more vocal in his opposition to anti-Korean discrimination than Pak Chun’ggm had been. While in office, Pak Pyfng’in protested two incidents of anti-Korean discrimination at the administrative level. The first occurred in a city

91. The statement appears in “Beikoku jichi kanri hōan hoka 2-ken iin kaigiroku,” discussion no. 15 (Mar. 16, 1935), in Teikoku gikai shūgiin giroku, frame 748. The ill will was apparently mutual. During his campaigns, local unions with Korean members passed out hangul leaflets urging Korean residents in the area not to vote for Pak, and Pak complained to the police on more than one occasion that Korean laborers were tearing down his campaign posters. See Matsuda, “Boku shunkin-ron,” p. 18.

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council meeting held on December 7, 1933, when fellow councilor Sagawa Yoshitarō claimed that the presence of large numbers of Koreans in a certain public housing project in the city was hampering further development of the area. Pak took issue with this immediately and launched a movement for Sagawa’s resignation, as well as demanded that the central government take measures to punish any future discriminatory behavior by officials. The second incident involved a decision by the Amagasaki Board of Education to bar Korean children from taking part in a citywide school athletic meet to be held in December 1942. The board had reasoned that “because the children from the peninsula are very strong physically and such good athletes” they would take first place in all the competitions. Pak condemned this decision before the city council on March 15, 1943, demanding that the mayor of Amagasaki apologize directly to each of the Korean children affected by the incident, and then take responsibility for it by resigning. Failing to achieve his aims in both of these protests, Pak resigned from office in December 1943. Although Pak Pyfng’in decried discrimination against Koreans much more vociferously than Pak Chun’ggm ever did, he was certainly no ethnic nationalist. Instead, he censured those who obstructed what he felt was the great work of bringing the Koreans into the Japanese nation as equals. For both Paks, the rhetoric of “impartiality and equal favor” supplied the moral framework for their complaints against the discriminatory treatment of Koreans. These successful Koreans’ responses to their tenuous social and class position during the 1930s in many ways recalled the reactions of the buraku bourgeoisie in the late Meiji and early Taishō periods. Much like the buraku community leaders involved in the Yamato Dōshikai, many of these successful Koreans sought to improve the image of the minority by reforming the “improper” behavior, and improving the living conditions, of their cultural brethren in Japan. Also like the buraku bourgeoisie, they were firmly committed to supporting the state and empire of Japan, and sought to play a greater supporting role in both for the benefit of themselves and Koreans in general. Finally, in much the same way as their class counterparts among the buraku minority three decades

92. Yang, “Amagasaki shikai giin,” pp. 74– 75, 78– 79.

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earlier, they confronted the prevalent discrimination against their minority with conflicting feelings of moral outrage at the hypocrisy of the Japanese majority, on the one hand, and agreement with majority prejudices against much of the minority community, on the other. Where they differed from the buraku bourgeoisie, however, was in their journey to success. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buraku bourgeoisie, which arose from the strata of outcaste village leaders present when the pariah status was abolished, had shared bonds of community with their less fortunate neighbors, even if their class interests were not always identical. The rift that developed between wealthy and less fortunate burakumin was one of class, and it expanded in reaction to different experiences of discrimination at the hands of majority society. While culture played a part in how affluent and poor burakumin experienced life in early twentieth-century Japan, both groups absorbed many of the same values and worldviews through the education system and through an ongoing public discourse on Japan and its place in the world, sources of information and values that they shared with majority society as well. In contrast, the new Korean middle class in Japanese society bore a much stronger imprint of the cultural dislocations produced by colonialism: in particular, they sought to distance themselves from the lessprosperous Koreans in Japan. Such a response by these lucky few calls to mind the reaction of educated “exception Jews” in Prussia to the emancipation of the less fortunate Jews at the dawn of the nineteenth century, or the reaction of the established Jewish community in England to the arrival of Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe toward the end of that century. The degree to which some affluent Koreans in Japan sought to dissociate themselves from working-class Koreans also bears a striking resemblance to the attitudes toward working-class African Americans that E. Franklin Frazier observed among the black bourgeoisie in the 1950s. Within the colonial milieu, parallel cases abound: examples can be found in the attitudes of the European-trained bour93. See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of educated Prussian Jews being positioned “between pariah and parvenu” in Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 56– 68. On the established Jewish community in England, see Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, pp. 291–311. 94. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, esp. chaps. 9 and 10.

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geoisie in colonial Algiers, as explored by Albert Memmi, and in the Caribbean toward the underclass and the “native” culture of the colony, as described by Frantz Fanon. These parallel cases offer similarities, but the differences are important. For instance, while the situation of the Korean middle class in Japan resembled that of the black bourgeoisie in America, insofar as both groups amassed wealth through businesses that, initially at least, catered to the needs of the minority community, the drive toward conspicuous consumption to prove one’s status and the sense of self-loathing (as opposed to disdain for those less fortunate than oneself) that Frazier found to be characteristic of the black bourgeoisie at mid-century were not prevalent features of the Korean middle class. The situation of the Jews in Prussia and England during the nineteenth century was also different in terms of the factors that motivated their avoidance of association with the underclass. In England, well-off and highly assimilated Jews reacted to the threat of association with an immigrant population that was culturally as alien to them as it was to their Christian neighbors, while the “exception Jews” of Prussia suddenly found themselves lumped in the same category with a Jewish underclass with whom they had little in common in terms of educational experience and degree of interaction with the larger Gentile society. In both cases, the upper-class Jews involved were separated from the less fortunate by long-established differences in language, culture, educational experience, and values. Likewise, in the colonial situations examined by Memmi and Fanon, colonial middle-class participation in a state-run education system led to the adoption of values that alienated them from the language and culture of the subaltern, but the very opportunity to have access to a formal education was based on (and in turn reinforced) class privileges that 95. On Algiers, see Memmi’s discussion of the “candidate for assimilation” in Colonizer and the Colonized, pp. 119–27. On the psychology of Antilleans in the Ca ribbean, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 145–50. 96. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, pp. 213–32. Some qualification is called for here, since Frazier’s sociological survey of the black bourgeoisie during the 1950s drew on much more data than can be obtained for the Korean middle class in 1930s Japan. In any case, it seems that individuals such as Pak Chun’ggm exhibited little of the kind of “selfloathing” in regard to their Korean identity that Frazier claims to be a characteristic of the black bourgeoisie in America during the 1950s.

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these individuals had enjoyed in colonial society prior to attending such schools. In other words, in all of these examples, the desire to avoid identification with the underclass was motivated by deeper differences and longer experiences of cultural dislocation from them than was the case with the Korean middle class in Japan, whose members rose rapidly from typically humble origins. For the few Korean migrants who, through perseverance, personality, and sheer luck managed to achieve a comfortable life for themselves in Japan, success was its own form of schooling, and the lessons were subtle but powerfully formative. As they met with success, they began to learn new ways of behaving and of looking at the world. This lesson in acculturation was not simply one of becoming Japanese, but of becoming specifically middle-class Japanese. The higher up the socioeconomic ladder of prewar Japanese society such Koreans rose, the more they found themselves divorced from their Korean cultural and class-based “roots”— particularly the largely working-class world of the vast majority of Korean migrants in Japan. This kind of assimilation was spontaneous and voluntary; it was a process they actively took part in, whether they understood its full implications or not. Furthermore, it was motivated by a desire quite different from what is commonly referred to as “passing.” Here too, their motivations differ somewhat from the colonized bourgeoisie as described by Memmi: at least for the most successful among them, such as Pak Chun’ggm, being mistaken for a Japanese was far less desirable than being respected as a patriotic Korean subject of the emperor who had excelled in all of the standards of “success” set forth by bourgeois Japanese society. Here, though, was where they confronted the paradox of assimilation within the ideological framework of Japanese imperialism. No matter how much the state appreciated their loyalty, or how much it professed its commitment to platitudes like “impartiality and equal favor,” prewar Japanese society was not prepared to forget that such Koreans were, after all, Koreans. In the absence of easily observable, phenotypic markers for distinguishing who belonged to the majority and who was a part of the minority, awareness of an individual’s ethnicity and all that it was thought to signify in terms of potential, privilege, and power was a matter of intense concern to Japanese and Koreans alike. Caught in a worldview where distinctions of ethnicity supplied the basis for a discriminatory

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hierarchy of rulers and ruled, successful Koreans found that they could never equal their Japanese peers in this single but crucial category. That is, successful Koreans in imperial Japan found that they could move “up” but not “in.” This predicament was no doubt also common among affluent Koreans in the Korean colony. For successful Koreans who remained on the peninsula, however, a certain degree of commiseration could be found in the company of those of similar wealth and social standing. Having far fewer peers to commiserate with than their peninsular counterparts, the desire of successful Koreans in Japan to join majority society and be accepted by it regardless of their ethnicity was felt all the more poignantly. For the most successful among them, however, a “Korean” identity in imperial Japan was simultaneously the badge they had to wear and the cross they had to bear. Koreans such as Pak Chun’ggm found their very existence propagandized by the state: they were doomed to serve as “exemplary Koreans,” members of a highly visible minority within a minority, solely to reassure majority society that colonial policy was doing the colonized some good. Pak Chun’ggm had to remain “Pak Chun’ggm”— or at least “Boku Shunkin”—rather than adopting a thoroughly Japanese identity, in order for his role in the politics of imperialism and war mobilization to have any significance. Such concerns also separated affluent Koreans in Japan from the vast majority of colonial migrants to the metropole, for whom the preservation of community autonomy and livelihood, as well as some sense of group identity, were of much greater importance than realizing the unity promised by slogans such as naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one body). For the vast majority of Koreans in Japan, what changes did the years of war mobilization bring to their concerns for community and identity?

Korean Reactions to Mobilization and Assimilation In sharp contrast to the Korean “success stories,” those Koreans residing in “Korea towns” scattered across Japan proved to be quite impervious to the Kyōwakai agenda: the state program of molding Koreans into proper Japanese subjects by changing every aspect of their appearance and behavior met with what was at best tactical compliance on the part of Koreans. Korean women, for example, sometimes wore Japanese kimono

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instead of their traditional chima chogori, as the Kyōwakai urged, but only when they ventured outside of their own ethnic enclaves, so as pass undetected in majority society. Official efforts to alter the details of Korean life in a myriad of other ways—from getting Koreans to install and maintain Shinto kamidana shrines in their homes to stamping out the production of illegal liquor in their communities— also met with little success. Perhaps nowhere was the failure of this effort to erase Korean ethnic identity more marked than in regard to the two central goals of the state assimilation policy: persuading Koreans to use the Japanese language instead of Korean, and to replace their Korean names with Japanese ones. The self-contained world of the Korean residential communities would have nothing to do with the push to use Japanese instead of Korean. As a 1939 Kyōwakai report observed of Koreans in Kanagawa Prefecture: Those who truly feel the need to do so and learn [Japanese] are surprisingly few in number, while there are many who live in such a way that they can get by without learning Japanese [kokugo]. . . . Women, children, and elderly people living in heavily populated Korean areas can go about their daily lives from morning to night without having to speak a single word of Japanese. Furthermore, people employed in such areas as excavation and construction, who have command of a vocabulary of only five or ten words of Japanese, can work for years in this manner without feeling any inconvenience.

Compelling Koreans to change their names was easier to implement than the language initiative, and thus met with a greater degree of success. Even in this regard, however, Koreans dragged their feet and found ways of preserving some sense of their original identity. The name change campaign, announced on February 11, 1940 (the 2600th anniversary of the mythological Emperor Jinmu’s ascension), called on the head of each Korean household to register a Japanese family name with local authorities within six months. If no name was filed, all the members of the household, female as well as male, would be assigned the Japanese reading of the householder’s family name. In addition, Koreans were strongly urged to adopt Japanese-style given names. Since Koreans in Japan had

97. Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, p. 173. 98. Quoted in ibid., p. 161.

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no family register outside of Korea, they were to consult with their parents and/or older male siblings about what family name to adopt, and have their chosen given names recorded, along with these Japanese surnames, in the registers kept in their home provinces. The policy—especially its sōshi, or “creation of family names” portion— had implications beyond the alteration of Koreans’ names. Its successful implementation would have dismantled the regionally based patriarchal clan system, in which endogamous marriages and exogamous adoptions were prohibited. It would have also resulted in the imposition of the Japanese-style ie system centered on the male householder’s family line, in which women assumed the family name of their spouse, thus legally becoming part of his family, rather than maintaining their original clan name after marriage, as was the traditional practice in Korea. The colonial authorities of course urged Koreans to consider it their patriotic duty to adopt Japanese-style names, suggesting that this was a way to show their profound sense of respect to the emperor. They also claimed that such changes represented progress; they would rationalize Korean marriage practices and family relations and bring them into the modern age. Koreans on the peninsula, however, greeted the new policy with apathy. As of May 20, 1940, halfway through the six-month registration period, Japanese names had been submitted for only 7.6 percent of the 4,282,754 Korean family registers in existence. In response to heightened official pressure in light of these poor results, there was a significant uptick in registrations during the last three months of the period, so that by the August 10 deadline Japanese family names had been affixed to a total of 3,200,116 registers, 79.3 percent of the total. In apparent contrast to such reticence on the peninsula, Koreans in Japan had long been in the practice of using Japanese aliases. This prac99. Naimushō keihōkyoku, “Shakai undō no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 448. 100. Kim Yfngdal, Sōshi kaimei no kenkyū, pp. 16–22. . The authorities launched a publicity drive in the colonial press to push these points home, supported by noted pro-Japanese figures such as the author Yi Kwangsu. See ibid., pp. 48– 66, for an analysis of the thrust of the articles. 102. Miyata Setsuko, “Sōshi kaimei no jisshi katei,” in Kim Yfngdal and Yang Taeho, Sōshi kaimei (Tokyo: Akashi shoten, 1992), pp. 79–80.

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tice was observed even among the day laborers in the hanba work gangs who had very little contact with majority society. The rationale for doing so, however, had little to do with any ardent love for Japan or desire to become Japanese; the adoption of aliases was motivated by practical concerns such as attempting to “pass” in majority society in order to avoid discrimination or, especially in the case of illiterate laborers, to eliminate the trouble involved in explaining to their Japanese employers or others how to write their names in Chinese characters. In many cases, the Japanese names adopted by Koreans in Japan, like those in Korea, revealed a concern for preserving traces of one’s original name in the new Japa nese identity. Korean family names such as Kim (䞥) appeared in a wide range of Japanese names. Some, such as Kaneda (䞥⬄), Kanai (䞥ѩ), and Kaneko (䞥ᄤ), simply added a second character to the original character for Kim to produce a fairly typical Japanese surname. Other Koreans by the name of Kim adopted the name “Kimura” (᳼ᴥ) for its similar sound. Koreans whose family names did not lend themselves to such ready incorporation, such as Pak (ᴈ) or Ch’oe (የ), often selected Japanese names that incorporated Chinese characters that were the radicals for those in their original names. Names such as Takagi (催᳼) and once again Kimura (᳼ᴥ) took the place of Pak, due to the presence of the character radical for “tree” (᳼) in both, while the radical for “mountain” (ቅ) in the name Ch’oe appeared in name choices such as Yamada (ቅ⬄) and Yamamoto (ቅᴀ). Some families found ways to convey even more information about their original identity through the adopted Japanese family name. Pak Shil, a second-generation Korean resident of Kyoto’s Higashi Kujō area, recalls that his father’s family and their relatives jointly agreed to adopt the Japanese family name “Arai” (ᮄѩ) as a way of demarcating those belonging to their clan of Paks from other clans with the same name. This

103. Kim Ilmen, Chōsenjin ga naze “Nihonmei” o nanoru no ka, pp. 43–44. Kim notes that illiterate and semiliterate Korean laborers adopted Japa nese names such as Kaneda Ichirō (䞥⬄ϔ䚢) and Iwamoto Saburō (ችᴀϝ䚢), since any Japa nese would immediately know how these names were written, without having to inquire about which Chinese characters to use. This meant that at work sites and in boarding houses across Japan, there were often multiple individuals with the same Japa nese alias.

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enabled them to detect and prevent marriages within the clan or adoptions from outside of it. Even those Koreans who chose to adopt Japanese family names that were very different from their original Korean ones often continued to use the same Chinese characters for their Korean given names, simply by having these read in their corresponding Japanese pronunciation. This approach, which amounted to obeying the sōshi portion of the new policy but ignoring the kaimei part, was facilitated by the fact that some character combinations yielded common names in both Korean and Japanese. Even in lieu of such coincidence, however, many Koreans in Japan held on to their original given names, choosing merely to have the characters in which they were written pronounced according to Japanese convention, even though doing so left them with unusual names in Japanese that marked them as Koreans. A prominent case of this kind was the aforementioned Pak Pyfng’in (ᴈ⚇ҕ), who adopted the patently hybrid name of “Yoshida Heijin” (ঢ়⬄⚇ҕ). Yet even if many Koreans appeared unwilling to relinquish every last vestige of their identities as Koreans, this did not necessarily mean that they were opposed to the Japanese state and its aims in the war. We must remember that “Yoshida Heijin,” for example, had no argument with Japanese rule over Korea per se; he merely demanded that the Japanese live up to the lofty ideals that were supposedly embodied in it. Police

104. Interview with Pak Shil, conducted while touring Higashi Kujō, Kyoto, May 6, 1999. Pak himself is significant for being the first Korean to secure the right to use his Korean name for all official purposes, including on his family register, in 1987, years after naturalizing and adopting a Japa nese name with his Japa nese citizenship, which was required by Japa nese naturalization law at the time. The examples of Japa nese family names commonly chosen by Koreans in Japan are also from this interview with Pak. Hildi Kang provides other examples of Korean families in the colony that attempted to maintain some connection to their original Korean name through a carefully considered choice of the Chinese characters used to write Japa nese names in Under the Black Umbrella, pp. 117–22. 105. Records in Tokkō geppō issued after the sōshi kaimei policy was implemented sometimes gave both the Japa nese and Korean names of Korean suspects, from which the following examples of Korean given names that could also be read as common Japanese names were gathered: T’aeho (⋄⌽) or “Yasuhiro”; T’aeil (⋄ϔ) or “Yasuichi”; Chfngmun (䧬᭛) or “Kanefumi”; and Sangmun (ᇮ᭛) or “Hisafumi.” Countless other examples such as these could be presented.

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records from the late 1930s onward note other instances of Korean minority support for Japan’s position in the contentious realm of late 1930s international politics, coming from a much less affluent stratum of the minority community. During the summer of 1939, as relations between Great Britain and Japan rapidly deteriorated over Japanese incursions into China and Japan’s surrounding of the British concession in Tienchin, Koreans in various parts of Japan held anti-British rallies and engaged in other jingoistic protests in support of Japan—many of which, to be sure, local Kyōwakai branches organized. Some of these sponsored events drew impressive audiences. A “Zen-Ōsaka hantōjin han-Ei taikai” (AllOsaka Korean Rally against Britain), for example, held on August 16, 1939, drew a crowd of 37,000 according to police reports, although it is unclear whether this audience was predominantly Korean, or whether participation was voluntary. Other rallies, however, appear to have been spontaneous expressions of support by Koreans. One Suh Sungok, a used goods dealer (furumonoshō) in Yokohama, had one thousand anti-British posters printed and put up throughout the city. Other Koreans, like Yi Yfngu in the city of Handa, Aichi Prefecture, sent telegrams of encouragement to Foreign Minister Arita and of protest to the British embassy in Tokyo. Some Koreans in Japan also displayed enthusiasm for the opportunity to volunteer for military ser vice that was extended to all Koreans in 1938. Although there are no clear figures on the number of Koreans in Japan who signed up, there was apparently enough popular support for the measure among Koreans in Osaka that they urged the army to establish a recruiting center there especially for Koreans, who otherwise would have had to return to their hometowns in Korea to volunteer. Reports state that a Korean by the Japanese name of Hirayama Masao submitted a petition to this effect to the Army and Home Ministry that bore the signatures of 12,000 Koreans and others living in the city.

106. Naimushō keihōkyoku, “Shakai undō no jōkyō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, pp. 258– 60. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., pp. 668– 69. Figures of total Korean volunteers provided in these police records note 3,000 volunteers in 1938, 12,000 in 1939, and 45,000 in 1940, but do not provide figures for those volunteers from among the Korean community in Japan. Th is

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On the whole, however, the Korean response to war mobilization was characterized by a lack of cooperation and plenty of passive resistance, with occasional instances of outright defiance. Korean laborers brought to Japan under the conscription policy instituted in 1939 engaged in some of the most overt forms of resistance. Of the 248,521 Korean labor conscripts brought into Japan during the first three years of this policy, 49,532 of them, or 19.9 percent, took part in a total of 787 recorded labor disputes. Labor unrest was not the only evidence of labor conscript dissatisfaction; some conscripts, particularly those assigned to work in the mining sector, fled their work sites. Nishinarita Yutaka’s analysis of official statistics reveals a dramatic rise in desertion rates among Korean labor conscripts during these years: from a rate of 6.3 percent in 1939, to 37.2 percent the following year and 51.7 percent in 1941. Dissatisfaction and a lack of interest in sacrificing oneself for Japan’s war effort were not only commonplace among Korean labor conscripts; such attitudes were also frequently found among Japanese laborers. Even before the start of American bombing raids on Japanese cities, an average of around 20 percent of the Japanese workforce employed in factories failed to report for work on a daily or monthly basis. Although rates for Korean desertion from work in the coal mines were higher than those for Japanese absenteeism from factories, especially during the early years of the Pacific War, increasingly harsh reprisals and effective measures to prevent desertion by Koreans, combined with plummeting morale on the part of Japanese workers as the war situation grew worse, led to a convergence of rates for Korean desertion and Japanese absenteeism by

is most likely because, like with the sōshi kaimei directive, Koreans were required to volunteer through the local police authorities that maintained jurisdiction over their official area of residence (honsekichi) in Korea. From the perspective of official records, such volunteers would have thus become indistinguishable from Korean volunteers living on the peninsula. 109. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 297. 110. Ibid., p. 293. After 1941, desertion rates declined to 38 percent in 1942 and 36 percent as of the end of June 1943, but remained high through the end of the war. The decline was most likely the result of more effective mea sures to keep Korean labor conscripts bound to their assigned work sites. The brutal reprisals meted out to those who failed to make good on their escape probably also served to dissuade many would-be escapees.

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1944, with Japanese absenteeism at some factories even surpassing Korean desertion rates. In labor disputes as well, the demands most frequently expressed by Koreans were essentially the same as those of Japanese workers: one police survey found that 18.9 percent of the 492 labor disputes involving Korean labor conscripts recorded in 1941 were launched primarily to demand improvements in wages, followed by demands for the dismissal of supervisors (13.4 percent), an improvement of health and welfare facilities (6.5 percent), changes in the system of wage payment (4.7 percent), and a shortening of work shifts (0.6 percent). The difference in experiences and outlook between Korean and Japanese laborers during the war years, however, most likely explains the circumstances surrounding the 55.1 percent of the disputes in this survey that the compilers opaquely classified as arising from “miscellaneous” (sono ta) causes. Many of these may have been disputes in which no clear demands were raised, but as Nishinarita surmises in light of the history of tensions between Korean and Japanese miners dating back well before the outbreak of the war, run-ins between Japanese miners and Korean labor conscripts over miscommunication and discriminatory treatment— real and perceived—must have been a major precipitating factor. Many of these incidents may also have been spontaneous outbursts of violence against abusive overseers, with no demands for dismissal articulated, an activity that Korean and Chinese labor conscripts were much more likely to engage in than Japanese workers. That Korean conscripts, stuck in surroundings quite alien to the world they had been uprooted from, would resort to such measures as committing acts of violence against Japanese foremen (even in self-defense), in spite of the threat of brutal reprisals for doing so, shows how desperate their situation was in comparison to that of Japanese laborers. This is not to imply that every instance of noncompliance by Korean labor conscripts was purely an act of desperation. To be sure, in the remote coal mines of Hokkaido, where an escapee would face slim chances of survival, Koreans had a choice between suffering their situation in 111. The survey appeared in Tokkō geppō, December 1941, and is cited in Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, p. 298. 112. Ibid. 113. Gordon, Evolution of Labor Relations, p. 319.

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silence or venting their frustrations in protests that often became violent. Yet in the coalfields of Kyushu the mines were located much closer to populated areas—areas that often contained Korean communities. Since these “Korea towns” had strong connections to specific regions and provinces on the Korean Peninsula through the process of chain migration during the 1920s and 1930s, labor conscripts could readily find safe haven in communities whose residents hailed from the same part of the colony as they had— and from there, they would make their way back to Korea, or else look for better (albeit illegal) work in Japan. Locally based Koreans may even have infiltrated some mines to provide conscripts from their home provinces in Korea with information on how to escape and where to seek refuge. Lest one conceive of these escapee support networks as part of a Korean nationalist underground, it is important to bear in mind that they were organized more by region than nationally; Korean communities whose residents had migrated to Kyushu from South Kyfngsang province, for example, offered refuge predominantly to labor conscripts from there, and were less inclined to stick their necks out for escapees from other parts of Korea. Even so, the risks these communities took in harboring escaped conscripts went far beyond the risks most working-class Japanese took by job-hopping, not showing up for work, or purchasing on the black market commodities such as rice and saké in excess of their rationed allotments. In addition, their actions were much less focused on increasing their own personal comfort. Koreans’ lack of concern for the war effort was also evident in the statements of Koreans and anonymous graffiti attributed to them, as collected by the ever-vigilant Special Higher Police in their continuous efforts to keep tabs on what the minority was thinking. To be sure, Koreans were not the only ones subjected to such suspicion, as John Dower’s research into popular dissent and police surveillance during the war has made clear. Yet whereas those Japanese who drew the attention of the police usually had decried the pigheadedness of Japan’s rulers for waging a war that was ruining the country and killing its people, Koreans in police records appeared altogether aloof to the fate of the nation. Such 114. Nishinarita, Zainichi Chōsenjin no “sekai” to “teikoku” kokka, pp. 293– 97. 115. Dower, “Sensational Rumors,” pp. 101–54.

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was the attitude of one Pak Namho, a steelworker in Osaka, who lucidly pointed out in 1938 that Japan would lose to China because Japan was “a small country without enough resources,” and added “whether Japan wins or loses means nothing to us Koreans.” As the conflict with China developed into an increasingly desperate war with the United States and its allies, some Koreans even seemed to relish the thought of Japan going down in flames, and saw in it a chance to gain independence for Korea and settle old scores with their Japanese tormentors. Police reports on the Korean minority from the last three years of the Pacific War are preoccupied with graffiti calling for Korean independence, rumors of Korean exiles in the United States preparing to liberate the peninsula by force with the help of the American government, praise for the anti-Japanese exploits of Kim Il Sung in Manchuria, and even the occasional threats of reprisals for past ill treatment. An anonymous letter to the chief of the police in Honda, Kanagawa Prefecture, and a duplicate letter to the chief of police in nearby Isogo, both dated February 8, 1944, read, “Three of my relations were murdered under your charge during the Great [Kantō] Earthquake. The time for revenge has come. With the next air raid, three hundred comrades shall set fires throughout Tokyo and Yokohama and welcome our comrades from America. Remember this when April comes!” Anecdotal as such 116. Naimushō keihokyoku, “Tokkō geppō,” in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 171. 117. Anonymous graffitied declarations such as “Korean independence, grab this opportunity! Hurray for Korean independence!” (Chōsen dokuritsu banzai), found scrawled in charcoal on an iron grating in Nippori Station in December 1943, were typical of this form of expression; see Naimushō, “Tokkō geppō,” p. 279. For the rumors on help coming from Koreans in America, see, for example, the records of the investigation of a Korean junior high school student in Kyoto by the Japa nese name of “Kuwamura Yoshiaki” (ḥᴥᝊ✹), who allegedly circulated a rumor that “there are many Koreans in America, and they have been told by [the government of] America to make Korea independent” (p. 347). And on praise for the anti-Japanese exploits of Kim Il Sung in Manchuria, see the story of two Korean manual laborers known as “Kanagawa” and “Hiranuma,” who were overheard by police as they discussed “the activities for the sake of independence carried out by Kim Il Sung’s party in Manchuria” (p. 372). Likewise, on the ceiling of a ferryboat on the Shimonoseki-Pusan line, police discovered that someone had scribbled the former taeguk national flag of Korea, with the comment “Kim Il Sung, Generalissimo of Korean Independence” (p. 385). 118. Ibid., p. 370.

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evidence may be, it indicates the degree to which many Koreans still did not feel that their interests overlapped completely with those of Japan, even after thirty-five years of colonial rule. In a recollection from the war years, Kim Chongjae provided what is perhaps the most vivid and fitting description of how those in the subaltern of the Korean minority felt toward Japan during its time of crisis. As a guidance officer of the Tokyo Kyōwakai, Kim had many opportunities during the war to visit Korean communities and witness conditions in them firsthand. After the war he recalled the world he encountered on such visits in the following terms: What lay before me was an unexpected, new world. Perhaps because it was cut off from the world of the Japanese, here a simple and abundant way of life prevailed, which was miles away from the tension that pervaded Japan in the midst of the Pacific War. In particular, it was a completely different world at night. Then, there were illegally brewed makkali liquor and vegetables pickled with garlic and cayenne pepper. As the liquor went to people’s heads, folk songs from their home provinces flowed forth one after another from their lips. . . . The drinking and merriment would start at six o’clock in the evening, but it was not unusual for them to continue until two or even three o’clock in the morning.

We may well suspect Kim of imbuing this description with a romantic flair, and question what, given the poverty of such areas, he meant by “a simple and abundant way of life.” Yet he clearly describes a world in which the cares of the war could be, and were, willingly tossed aside on a regular basis. While many Japanese also engaged in such officially scorned behavior from time to time, the Koreans encountered by Kim in these “unexpected, new worlds” probably did so with greater frequency and less concern for what others thought of them for doing so than most Japanese of any socioeconomic stratum: the danger of being branded a “non-citizen” (hikokumin) by their neighbors held no great power of moral suasion over them. Their sense of detachment from the war effort and lack of concern for whether Japan achieved its aims in the conflict gave them the emotional space to indulge in such reverie, while the grind of their daily existence made it a welcome respite.

119. Quoted in Higuchi, Kyōwakai: Senjika Chōsenjin tōsei soshiki no kenkyū, p. 165.

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Burakumin and Koreans experienced the years of mass mobilization and total war in ways that differed considerably, but neither group could be characterized as having given uniform support for or opposition to the aims of the Japanese authorities. As we have seen, the burakumin were on the whole much more responsive to the war effort and susceptible to the patriotic rhetoric that increasingly dominated Japanese society during the late 1930s and early 1940s. For the Suiheisha, the rising tide of patriotism and rhetoric of peerless national unity provided the organization with a new language for denouncing anti-buraku discrimination. Yet this very willingness to resort to such rhetoric and argue that Japan indeed should be a nation of “one hundred million hearts beating as one” ultimately undermined any autonomous, critical stand it could take against the state, and resulted in its thorough co-optation without any guarantees that government slogans of unity would ever be realized. Like their majority neighbors, many burakumin faced war and mobilization with a sense of duty and patriotism, but this did not keep them from noticing the discrimination against them, nor dampen their desire to be treated fairly. Some sought to turn the “emergency situation” to their advantage by gaining concessions from the state in return for their ser vice; many more no doubt hoped that their selfless ser vice to the nation would expunge the prejudice against them. Koreans experienced these years very differently. While a thin stratum of wealthy and well-connected Koreans supported the state and sought to use the rhetoric of isshi dōjin and similar wartime slogans of national unity to their advantage, much as the Suiheisha did in decrying discrimination against the burakumin, the affluence and success that they enjoyed gradually incorporated them into the fabric of middle-class Japanese society and divorced them from the vast majority of Koreans in Japan. Having imbibed many of the views of their class peers in the majority, when they considered the less fortunate of their minority they felt a certain degree of empathy for majority complaints against it, even as they abhorred discrimination against Koreans in general. Those at less prosperous levels of the minority, especially those living in the impoverished and isolated “Korea towns” throughout Japan, sought to preserve their livelihoods and communities, along with their values and sense of self, as well as they could under decidedly adverse circumstances. While many had come to Japan for a better life, they saw little reason to change

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their way of living in order to enjoy it, so they complied with government exhortations to do so in a manner that was perfunctory at best. This orientation toward the state and society during wartime, so different from that of the burakumin, had important consequences for relations between these two minorities as Japan prepared for, and then fought, a catastrophic war.

ch apter 7 Interminority Relations, 1920–45: Movements and Communities

The history of relations between the buraku and Korean minorities during the prewar and wartime period is, for the most part, not a narrative of mutual solidarity in the face of similar kinds of discrimination and exploitation. Despite their similar socioeconomic situations, and the analogous approaches toward minority identity embraced by their social movements, cooperation between burakumin and Koreans on any level occurred sporadically, and was never sustained. This observation should come as no surprise to most readers. Indeed, in light of the common— although often inaccurate—perception that impoverished immigrants take jobs away from the working class of the society they migrate into, it seems reasonable to expect that burakumin would have viewed the arrival of Korean labor migrants as a threat to their already precarious economic situation. Yet the relationship between Koreans and burakumin cannot be explained by labor market economics alone. Nor is it simply the result of a “bigotry of the downtrodden,” according to which everyone needs someone to spit on. Such an appreciation fails to account fully for why these minority movements and their leaders, while promoting very similar views of minority identity and voicing parallel critiques of the state and majority society, seemingly failed to find common cause in their struggles. In regard to the rank and file of these movements and the subaltern of minority communities as well, such characterizations may describe the animosities between the two groups, but cannot explain the general lack of violent clashes in the areas where they came into contact with one another most frequently,

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nor account for the instances of mutual support and cooperation that occasionally appeared. Instead, for burakumin and Koreans in interwar and wartime Japan, mutual solidarity and mutual animosity arose in response to the very specific historical and cultural contexts in which these minorities encountered one another—contexts in which each group’s interpretations of its minority identities played a key role, both for the organizations and individuals that represented their interests, as well as for the level of the rank-and-file membership of these movements and the subaltern of their minority communities.

Buraku and Korean Movements and Their Leaders interminority relations during the age of imperial democracy As we have seen, buraku and Korean activists sampled from various ideologies in crafting new appreciations of minority identity across the 1920s, but increasingly came to place their membership in the proletarian class above all other considerations in defining themselves. It might seem reasonable to expect, then, that their movements would converge on a “proletariat first” vision of minority identity, which would provide opportunities for joint activity between the Suiheisha and Korean organizations such as the Sōdōmei. To be sure, during the 1920s there was some sporadic joint activity and mutual support between the Suiheisha and various groups representing the Korean minority, but these did not increase in frequency as the decade progressed, nor was the association they produced very long-lived. The obstacles to sustained cooperation included (1) a focus on the interests of the particular minority in question, rather than on the nature of discrimination as a much broader social phenomenon, (2) a tendency to identify the minority with the proletariat of the majority, to the extent that a positive view of minority identity outside of the proletariat virtually ceased to exist, and (3) imperialism, in particular its influence on the way the Suiheisha as well as burakumin in general came to view the Koreans. The first of these obstacles was most evident in the actions of the Suiheisha vis-à-vis Korean groups in Japan prior to the ascendancy of the Seinen Dōmei and its Marxist interpretation of buraku identity. During this period, Suiheisha conceptions of buraku identity exhibited ethnic

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nationalist tendencies and the group took a rather social Darwinian view of the problem of discrimination, seeing it as a symptom of the inevitable competition between different groups for dominance. This way of thinking, on the one hand, encouraged some in the movement to reach out to Korean groups. In December 1922, for example, Izuno Rikizō and Yoneda Tomi, both members of the Suiheisha central committee at the time, attended the inaugural meeting of an organization in Osaka called the Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei (Kansai Korean League). This group borrowed much of its platform from the Suiheisha, including the tenet “Koreans shall strive to win an equal, human position [in society] by their own strength and actions,” which echoed the first article of the Suiheisha’s 1922 platform: “We tokushu burakumin will attain complete liberation by our own actions.” Izuno told those assembled at the meeting that the two organizations should work in coordination as sister movements, since the aims of the “Korean liberation movement” (Senjin kaihō undō) and the Suihei movement were essentially the same. Yoneda went even further by stating, “Koreans and burakumin are of the same family and have the same ancestors (dōso dōzoku). We should continually exert ourselves [in our mutual struggle], even if it means making sacrifices along the way.” Yoneda in particular appealed to idea of national self-determination, based on the old belief in the Korean origins of the burakumin, as the motivation for his support of the new Korean group. On the other hand, for many Suiheisha activists the realization that there was an outcaste group in Korea called the paekchfng (ⱑϕ), whose history bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the burakumin in terms of its residential and occupational segregation from the rest of society, complicated the question of joining hands with the Korean minority in Japan. Most in the buraku organization first became aware of this 1. Naimusho keihokyoku, “Suiheisha undō jōkyō,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 1, pp. 166– 67. 2. Interestingly, there is no evidence to suggest that Yoneda himself actually believed in the notion of Korean ancestry. He does not appear to have made statements to the effect in any other context aside from this occasion, nor was he particularly active in promoting greater ties with Korean groups after this meeting. 3. The paekchfng had traditionally performed such occupations as slaughtering and butchering livestock, producing leather and leather products, and many other tasks that were deemed defiling or degrading. The Kabo Reform of 1894 had done away with their

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group in 1923, when several former paekchfng, inspired by the example of the Suiheisha, launched their own movement against discrimination, the Hyfngp’yfngsa (㸵ᑇ⼒, Equity Society). One of the proposals put before the third national conference, held on March 3, 1924, was for the Suiheisha to establish contact with the new Korean organization. The delegates to the conference unanimously approved this proposal. The very next proposal on the agenda, which pledged Suiheisha support for Korean movements against the discriminatory treatment they faced in Japan, contained an important caveat. Although Kimura Kyōtarō of Nara, who presented the proposal, explained that Koreans in Japan did not receive “treatment befitting human beings,” and thus the Suiheisha was morally obligated to do away with such an unreasonable state of affairs, the proposal was only passed with the provision that “since they [the Koreans] are tormenting the paekchfng, we should first formally caution them not to do so.”  This was certainly a valid point on one level, yet the interjection of the paekchfng into the relationship between the burakumin and the Koreans residing in Japan enabled Suiheisha activists to envision the Koreans as part of a majority very much like that which discriminated against the burakumin. Rather than focusing on the similarities between their own situation and the one forced on Koreans due to Japanese colonial rule, Suiheisha activists like Minami identified with the paekchfng. In fact, the Suiheisha ended up maintaining closer contacts with the Hyfngp’yfngsa than it did with any Korean group in Japan, although even this interaction was largely limited to the exchange of greetings and representatives at each other’s annual conferences. Korean approaches to the Suiheisha at this time were just as sporadic and tenuous. Aside from the Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei, mentioned earlier, the earliest instance of a Korean group contacting the Suiheisha appears to have taken place just before the aforementioned third na-

pariah status in a strictly legal sense, much as the “Kaihō-rei” had done for eta, hinin, and other outcastes in Japan, but discrimination against them remained. For information on the paekchfng and their movement against discrimination in colonial Korea, see Neary, “The Paekjong and the Hyfngp’yfngsa”; and Joong-Seop Kim, “In Search of Human Rights,” pp. 311–35. 4. “Dai-3-kai zenoku Suiheisha taikai,” in Buraku mondai kenkyūjo, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 2, p. 211.

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tional conference, held in March 1924, when the Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai relayed official greetings from the Hyfngp’yfngsa to the Suiheisha headquarters. Thereafter Korean groups would occasionally send greetings to Suiheisha national conferences, such as at the fourth national conference, held in Osaka on May 7 and 8, 1925, when a Korean labor union called the Jōtō Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai (ජᵅᳱ冂࢈‫ڡ‬㌘ড়) sent greetings of friendship and solidarity. Otherwise Korean organizations do not appear to have taken much interest in the Suiheisha. The publications produced by Korean groups and the Suiheisha during the early 1920s underscore this overall lack of interest in the other. Almost no articles on the Suiheisha or the buraku minority appear in the various newspapers and journals published by Korean student groups and labor organizations during the entire decade, nor were those that did appear particularly significant. An article in Pak Yfl’s journal Futei senjin mentioned the buraku minority only because the author claimed to be a burakumin. In terms of content, it simply expressed the writer’s sympathy for Koreans in Japan after witnessing a Korean’s frustration at being called a yobo. Another article that mentioned the Suiheisha appeared in the June 1923 issue of Daitō kōron, a journal produced by Korean students in Tokyo and printed in Japanese. The article compared the situations of the burakumin and the paekchfng and the tactics of the Suiheisha and Hyfngp’yfngsa. Another article in the Korean student journal Jigasei merely reported the proceedings at a regional Suiheisha rally. 5. Ibid. 6. Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 1, p. 105. This was most likely the same orga nization as the Jōtō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, which was a Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei affiliate in Osaka. 7. Tokushu burakumin kijinsei, “Mie-ken kara,” Futei senjin, no. 2 (Dec. 30, 1922). The only extant reproduction of this magazine I have found is at Ōhara Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo (Ohara Institute for Social Research), folder “senzen 857-1.” Only the second edition is available. 8. Kim Hgimyfng, “Kaikyū daha undō kaiketsu no kyūmu— Suiheisha mondai o hyōshite Chōsen ni okeru Kōhei undō ni oyobu,” Daitō kōron 1, no. 1 (June 1923), available at Ōhara Shakai Mondai Kenkyūjo, folder “senzen 857-1.” 9. “Suiheisha taikai 4-gatsu 4-ka Tosabori nite kaisai,” Jigasei, Apr. 20, 1926, reproduced in Pak Kyfngsik, Chōsen mondai shiryō sōsho, vol. 5: Zainichi Chōsenjin undō kankei kikanshi (kaihō-mae), p. 207.

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By the same token, articles on Korea or Koreans in the Suiheisha newspaper Suihei shinbun were few and far between during the 1920s. Indeed, only three such articles appeared in the paper between its first issue, dated June 20, 1924, and the February 27, 1932 issue, which carried news of the dissolution proposal at the tenth national meeting. Furthermore, only one of these articles, “Tōkyō shinsai tōji o omowasuru senjin dōhō bokusatsu jiken no shinsō” (March 15, 1926), which reported on the murders of Korean laborers in Mie Prefecture during January of that year, was specifically about Koreans in Japan. The other two, “Undō kiji—Kōheisha to akushu” (June 20, 1924) and “Chōsen musan kyōdai no kikin o sukue!!” (September 20, 1925), concerned the establishment of relations with the Hyfngp’yfngsa, and a relief drive for famine victims in the wake of flooding in Korea, respectively. The rising influence of the Seinen Dōmei in the Suiheisha, and the organization of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei under JCP influence in 1925, presented the possibility of greater cooperation between minority movements through a new class-based understanding of minority identity. Ostensibly at least, the influence of communist views also provided opportunities for both groups to join hands in opposing Japanese imperialism. The Suiheisha, the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, and other Korean groups did in fact join together with Japanese proletarian organizations to protest a variety of issues during the latter half of the decade. Such cooperation was often seen in protests against government plans for the Peace Preservation Law and the Labor Dispute Settlement Law, and the disbanding of the Farmer-Labor Party (Nomin-Rōdōtō). Furthermore, both the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei and the Suiheisha supported the strikers during a massive labor dispute at the Japan Musical Instruments factory in Hamamatsu during 1926. And yet, despite such joint activity, the Suiheisha and Korean groups like the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei still seemed to take very little

10. Newspaper articles on such protests can be found in Tamiya, Shinbun kiji kara mita Suiheisha undō, pp. 295– 97. 11. Suiheisha support for the strikers is noted in ibid., p. 335. Iwamura (Zainichi Chōsenjin to Nihon rōdōsha kaikyū, p. 138) mentions the involvement of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei in this same strike.

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interest in each other’s specific problems or movements. Nowhere was this absence more graphically illustrated than in the pages of the Seinen Dōmei’s Senmin. Despite the youth group’s mission to guide the Suiheisha away from the “buraku first” policies that had characterized its early years toward the more broadly focused and theoretically informed view of the problem of discrimination that would characterize the movement from 1925 on, not a single article on the Korean minority or any organizations representing it ever appeared in the paper. The reason for this distance probably has to do with their both identifying with an undifferentiated proletarian movement that tended to erase the specific features of each minority group and inhibited the opportunity for organizations representing the two minorities to find common cause outside of the more general problem of class exploitation. Koreans and burakumin participated together in the proletarian movement, but did so without acknowledging each other as specific groups within that struggle—groups that had their own unique experiences of discrimination. Within the context of the proletarian struggle, leaders of minority movements thus ignored instances of discrimination against the other minority, even while they censured acts of discrimination committed against their own group. An interesting example of this occurred at the aforementioned Japan Musical Instruments Strike of 1926. The Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei took an active part in this strike, since the factory employed Korean laborers who belonged to it, and so did Japanese workers affiliated with the Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai (Japan Council of Labor Unions), the Korean union’s main Japanese ally. The Shizuoka Suiheisha was involved as well, providing food and other assistance to the strikers. Since the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei was participating in the strike, its nemesis the Sōaikai joined the ranks of Japanese groups mobilized by the company to act as strikebreakers. The resultant Korean-Japanese alliances on both side of the picket line led to an incident in which Japanese strikers taunted the Sōaikai strikebreakers by telling them that they were acting “pretty damn cocky for Koreans” (Chōsenjin no kuse ni namaiki na). The Sōaikai group countered by 12. Senmin was published from Feb. 15, 1924 to July 15, 1925, after which the Seinen Dōmei itself dissolved, and the paper, re-titled Seinen taishū, became the organ for the JCP-affiliated Zen-Nihon Musan Seinen Dōmei.

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shouting back “What?! How dare you treat us like tokushu burakumin!” Suiheisha leaders in Shizuoka subsequently decried the Sōaikai’s use of the offensive term, but did not take issue with the Japanese strikers’ discriminatory attitude toward Koreans, even though they might have likewise admonished the Japanese strikers for revealing a lack of proper proletarian class consciousness. Underlying both the “group first” and “proletariat first” obstacles to cooperation between these minority movements, however, was the issue of Japanese imperialism. As Kim Jungmi has pointed out, this was particularly a problem for Suiheisha activists in their relationship with the Korean minority and its movements, owing to a considerable amount of ambivalence within the Suiheisha on the question of Japan’s colonial domination of the peninsula. Most of the group’s leaders never voiced overt support for Korean independence, nor were they willing to associate with Korean groups that clearly stated independence as one of their goals. Although founding member Sakamoto Sei’ichirō once publicly stated that the Korean struggle for independence was as morally justified as movements for freedom among colonized peoples in other empires, he was careful to substitute the phrase “unreasonable society” for any overt reference to Japanese colonial rule. Even Izuno Rikizō’s approval of the Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei’s “Korean liberation movement” was not a statement of support for Korean independence per se; the platform of the Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei clearly stated that the group was dedi13. “Hamamatsu Nippon gakki no dai-sutoraiki ni karamaru handō dantai no sabetsu jiken,” Suihei shinbun (June 30, 1926). 14. Kim would no doubt take issue with my use of the term “ambivalence” in regard to the Suiheisha position on Japa nese imperialism, since one point she emphasizes in her Suihei undōshi kenkyū is that the Suiheisha and its postwar incarnations were guilty of gross hypocrisy in presenting themselves as opposed to all forms of discrimination, while at the same time taking an imperious, if not downright discriminatory, attitude toward Koreans and other Asians. For my part, I use the term “ambivalence” in regard to the Suiheisha’s orientation toward imperialism simply because, even if their words and deeds reveal a tendency to look down on Koreans and other Asians or to see their interests as subordinate to those of Japan (or the Suiheisha, for that matter), activists at the center of the movement never came out with a statement of support for Japa nese imperialism during the period examined here. 15. From a speech meeting in Osaka, Aug. 5, 1923, reprinted in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 1, p. 660.

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cated exclusively to doing away with discrimination against Koreans in Japan, and explicitly disavowed any involvement with the independence movement. Likewise, despite a proposal for the “internationalization of the Suihei movement” at the second annual meeting, which included a call for “establishing contact and mutual cooperation” with movements such as Sinn Fein in Ireland, Gandhi’s swaraj movement in India, “the black slaves [咦཈] in America,” and the Koreans, chairman Minami Umekichi objected to the idea of joining hands with the Korean independence movement. In the end, the motion was only approved after reference to the Koreans was removed. For its part, the Marxist Seinen Dōmei, which reported on independence movements in Ireland, India, and struggles against racial discrimination by blacks in the United States and South Africa in a series entitled “Racial Problems,” shied away from publishing any stories on the situation in Korea. Avoidance of the Korean issue was not the only problem: even when the Suiheisha did approach Korean groups, it had a tendency to do so in an imperial way. This was evident in relation to the Hyfngp’yfngsa. In December 1924, following on the decision at the third national conference, Minami Umekichi met with Miyazawa Kiyosuke, representative of the newly formed Chōsen Suiheisha— a chapter formed in Seoul by burakumin who had settled in the Korean Peninsula—to discuss the idea of having the Hyfngp’yfngsa merge with the Miyazawa group, thus absorbing the paekchfng organization within the Suiheisha in a “united Japanese-Korean nationalist movement” (nissenjin gōdō no minzoku

16. Ibid., p. 167. 17. The explanation of the proposal appears in Kim Jungmi, Suihei undōshi kenkyū, pp. 60– 61. Kim quotes from the minutes of the representatives’ meeting, held the day before the conference. The representative from the Kashiwara Suiheisha, Nara Prefecture, presented the proposal. Kim points out that this proposal was followed at this meeting by a similar one for joining forces with the Korean independence movement, presented by Izuno Rikizō, but that Minami used his authority as chair to shelve the proposal. Kim also states that the first proposal was approved at this meeting with reference to the Korean independence movement included. The record of the second national conference held the following day, however, notes that Minami further removed any reference to the Koreans as a condition for approving the motion. See Kim Jungmi, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 2, p. 182.

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undō). Nothing came of this plan—mostly because Minami had already been purged from the Suiheisha earlier that month over his involvement in the aforementioned “Spy Incident.” The subject of the Hyfngp’yfngsa would not be brought up again at the national level until a proposal for renewed cooperation was put before the seventh conference, held in May 1928. Although this proposal reflected the general Marxist influence over the Suiheisha at this point by recognizing that “all the people of Korea are exploited as slaves of the imperialist Japanese state,” it spoke specifically to the problems of the “paekchfng (eta)” who had been “oppressed three or four-fold” by exploitation and discrimination. By putting the label eta in parenthesis after the Chinese characters for paekchfng—as if to suggest that this was the way those characters should be read—the Suiheisha suggested that the two outcaste populations were in fact the same, and so should join together in an empire-sized movement against discrimination. The Suiheisha in essence gave itself the role of opposing discrimination within the framework of empire, thus lending tacit approval to the ideological raison d’être of Japanese rule in Korea, while at the same time opposing the discriminatory policies of the state. This occasionally imperious attitude was due to more than just a lack of empathy for the plight of Koreans. Even Suiheisha activists who witnessed anti-Korean discrimination and decried it were inclined to do so in terms borrowed from the imperialist state’s rhetoric of “impartiality and equal favor” (isshi dōjin). An article in the September 15, 1925, issue of the Ōsaka suihei shinbun by one Matsutani Isamu provides an illuminating example. Matsutani relates the case of a well-educated and upstanding “Korean fellow countryman” (Chōsen dōhō), referred to as “Mr. K,” who chose to live in Matsutani’s neighborhood out of his warm feelings 18. “Nissen shōsū dōhō ga gōdō shite minzoku undō,” Ōsaka asahi shinbun (Dec. 28, 1924), in Tamiya, Shinbun kiji kara mita Suiheisha undō, p. 224. The same article claims that the Chōsen Suiheisha was established by “150,000 of our minority brethren” (a common, sympathetic euphemism for the burakumin at this time) living in Korea. The number is obviously inflated, much as Suiheisha claims of three million burakumin had been. Even so, the existence of this orga nization suggests that burakumin may have migrated to Korea in large enough numbers by this point to feel it necessary to form their own chapter of the Suiheisha, and implies that they continued to face discrimination from majority Japa nese despite leaving their native buraku communities behind. 19. Kim Jungmi, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 3, p. 113.

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for the burakumin and enthusiasm for the ideals of the Suiheisha. But although the buraku community into which Mr. K settled had an active Suiheisha chapter, he was dismayed to find that the burakumin there treated him coldly, and even called him yobo. In his article, Matsutani decries the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of such Suiheisha members, who only see discrimination when it happens to them. He continues by stating that the Japanese masses themselves are not responsible for the subjugation of Korea—Japan’s ruling class is—but they are guilty of internalizing a sense of superiority toward the Korean people that is itself part of the ruling class’s act of conquest. All those who look down on Koreans are thus guilty of taking part in this domination. Yet despite linking anti-Korean prejudice to Japan’s imperialist conquest of Korea, Matsutani does not even allude to the idea of Korean independence. Rather, he seamlessly turns his argument into a call for yūwa: As long as we harbor feelings of superiority in our hearts, or conceal the ambition to rely upon [such sentiments], conciliation between Japan and Korea [nissen yūwa] will be impossible, whether among laborers or intellectuals. True conciliation only becomes possible when feelings of superiority and the desire to defeat others are lost. We of the Suiheisha must look deep within ourselves and do away with our base feelings of superiority.

Matsutani’s appeal to the concept of yūwa in regard to the Koreans—a term that he, as a Suiheisha member, would no doubt have found repugnant if it were suggested in connection with the buraku minority— underscores the limitations of the views of even the most sympathetic buraku activists at this time. Even those who were not opposed to the idea of Korean independence failed to see that Japan’s imperial expansion and colonial domination of Korea had set in motion a process by which increasingly demeaning stereotypes of Koreans were emerging. In the absence of such an appreciation of the Korean situation, Suiheisha activists like Matsutani could conceive of anti-Korean discrimination as something completely separate from empire. Seemingly in their view, the same measures that would rid society of discrimination against the burakumin would do likewise for the Koreans. What was necessary was 20. Matsutani, “Mazu mizukara no yūetsukan o nozoke,” p. 132.

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a joining of hands between the Koreans and the Japanese proletariat, burakumin and non-burakumin alike, in order to overthrow the social system that oppressed all of the downtrodden. For this to come about, true friendship and mutual trust—the manifestation of yūwa—had to prevail. With the exception of the Sōaikai, the Korean groups that shared this interpretation of the discrimination they faced actively reached out to the Suiheisha. This was the case with the Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei, of course, but also for some in the Hyfngp’yfngsa; as central committee member Im Chungjae once explained to Hirano Shōken, “Even if Korea becomes independent, it will only mean liberation for the yangban and commoners. We paekchfng won’t be liberated by it.” For the leaders of groups like the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, for whom participation in the Japanese proletarian movement was a means to the end of Korean independence, however, there was little if anything to be gained by seeking out ties with the Suiheisha.

the suiheisha’s critique of discrimination within japan’s “new order” in east asia Whatever the reason for Korean reluctance to reach out to the Suiheisha during the 1920s, the dissolution of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei in 1929 meant the loss of a national organization representing exclusively Korean interests that could have served as an obvious point of contact for the Suiheisha. Zenkyō-affiliated unions on the local level continued to organize Korean laborers in such areas, of course, but they did so without making demands that were specifically for the benefit of Koreans. At the same time, the Suiheisha’s shift away from supporting any ideas that bore the slightest scent of communist influence as Japan’s military entanglement in China dragged on certainly precluded any cooperation between those at the center of the Suiheisha and Koreans organized under the JCP-influenced labor union. Indeed both the Suiheisha and Korean efforts at organization under Zenkyō offered few opportu21. According to Hirano, Im confided this to him during a 1926 visit with Hyfngp’yfngsa leaders in Seoul. Hirano Shōken, “Chōsen kōheisha o tazunete,” Dōai, no. 37 (Sept. 1926), reprinted in Dōai (reproduction, vol. 3), pp. 2176– 79.

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nities for joint action. Korean groups focused solely on preserving the livelihoods and lifestyles of the communities they served, and the platform of the Suiheisha’s Buraku Iinkai Katsudō made no mention of cooperation with other minority groups, even those living among the burakumin. Given the economic hardships that Korean and buraku communities felt in the 1930s, the movements representing their respective interests turned their attention inward. The Suiheisha warrants particular attention in this regard, because of the strengthened, reunified position it had attained in the aftermath of the Takamatsu Trial Incident. Suiheisha proclamations from the middle of the 1930s onward had little to say about other minorities in Japan, despite the organization’s stated concern for the possibility of fascist persecution of the buraku minority. The closest that the Suiheisha ever came to decrying the prevalence of discrimination against other groups by the Japanese majority came only in 1940, when the organization had long since committed itself to cooperating with the state in supporting the war. As a member of the lower house of the Imperial Diet and chairperson of the Suiheisha, Matsumoto Ji’ichirō commented on the issue of Japanese discrimination against other Asians in a speech delivered before the Diet on March 14: If there is oppression and violence, there is subservience. Where oppression and subservience exist, however, there can be no harmony or good will [kyōwa shinzen]. For this reason, that which should become the foundation for the construction of a new order in East Asia is nothing other than moral harmony among its peoples [dōgiteki minzoku kyōwa]. . . . If we look at this matter from the vantage point of our present domestic situation, however, we see that an unreasonable, pernicious custom of looking down upon and discriminating against a portion of our country’s people [ichibu kokumin] persists to this day among our people [waga kokumin], who should assume a position of leadership to become the pillars of this harmony among peoples. . . . Our country now faces a situation unprecedented in all of its history. There has never before been a time in which national unity and brotherhood were required more. It is difficult to imagine anything that disrupts the proper wartime structure of our nation more than this unpatriotic [hikokuminteki] oppression and rejection of the millions of the people in buraku communities facing discrimination [hisabetsu buraku no taishū]. Furthermore, the same notions and

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ideas that insult the burakumin provide the mentality that insults and oppresses the people of China and Korea. We must bear in mind that this discriminatory mindset, which runs counter to the founding national spirit of the whole world under one roof [hakkō ichiu] and disturbs the national principle of ikkun banmin, is opposed to the very nature of our national polity. Without first solving the domestic yūwa problem, how can we hope to achieve harmony among different peoples?

In a similar vein, Suiheisha activists involved in the Daiwa Hōkoku Undō, such as Fukugawa Takeshi of Tokyo, expressed a concern for the problems of discrimination faced by Koreans and others under Japanese rule. The following proposal was drafted at an informal, organizational meeting of the Daiwa Hōkoku Undō on November 26, only months after Matsumoto’s speech. As long as the Japanese possess feelings of contempt for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese, the solution to the domestic yūwa problem will be difficult to achieve. Therefore, within the Daiwa Hōkoku Undō an East Asian section and a domestic section should be established. The East Asian section will work to remedy the feelings of contempt aimed at Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese, while the domestic section will work toward a solution to the original yūwa problem.

These two statements offer similar views on the integral relationship between discrimination against the burakumin and discrimination against other Asians within Japan’s expanding sphere of “co-prosperity.” According to Matsumoto, discrimination against Koreans and Chinese was deleterious because it undermined the goal of constructing “a new order in East Asia.” Before discrimination against fellow Asians could be eradicated, however, discrimination against the burakumin had to be extirpated, presumably because it provided the template for Japanese prejudice against other groups. The Daiwa Hōkoku Undō proposal turned Matsumoto’s line of reasoning on its head, by arguing that antiburaku discrimination would be difficult to eradicate as long as “the 22. Kim Jungmi, Suihei undōshi no kenkyū, vol. 4, pp. 427–28. As Matsuura Tsutomu notes, the complete text of Matsumoto’s speech and the government response to his questions was reproduced in the Chūō Yūwa Kyōkai’s Yūwa jihō, April 1, 1940 edition, number 162. See Matsuura, “Ajia taiheiyō sensō to hisabetsu buraku,” p. 96. 23. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 263.

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Japanese possess feelings of contempt for Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese.” For activists involved in the Daiwa Hōkoku Undō, the problems of anti-Asian and anti-buraku discrimination needed to be combated at the same time. In either case, however, the ultimate goal was freeing the burakumin of the discrimination they faced. Statements and proposals such as these used the rhetoric of national unity and Asian coprosperity in order to cast the buraku problem as a question of vital national interest. The claim that discrimination was a serious flaw in the fabric of empire, and a threat to Japan’s moral imperative in Asia, resonated with similar arguments voiced by bourgeois Korean politicians such as Pak Chun’ggm (see Chapter 6). Yet there is no record that Pak supported Suiheisha statements to this effect— even though, as a fellow representative in the Lower House at this time, Pak may well have been present at the same March 14, 1940, meeting of the Diet at which Matsumoto spoke. In spite of Pak’s own criticism of anti-Korean discrimination, he does not appear to have commented on Matsumoto’s views afterward, nor is there any evidence that the two minority Diet representatives had any interaction at all. The lack of interaction between the two minority politicians probably had something to do with Matsumoto’s being an outspoken member of the Social Masses Party, and Pak’s political orientation as an independent who had run with the backing of conservative bureaucrats. Furthermore, while Pak’s feelings about Matsumoto’s buraku background are unknown, Matsumoto’s career at the helm of the Suiheisha no doubt would have made the celebrated buraku rights leader seem suspicious, or even like a hikokumin posing as a patriot, in Pak’s eyes. And finally, even if Pak had felt an urge to publicly voice agreement with Matsumoto’s arguments, his concern with his own public image, which had led him to shun any association with the déclassé of the Korean minority community in Japan, would most likely have kept him from associating with the burakumin. By the beginning of the Pacific War, Korean and buraku rights activists in Japan had shared various ways of conceiving minority identity and place in Japanese society. None of these fostered sustained cooperation, however, in no small part due to the intrusion of imperialist worldviews into the Suiheisha mindset and Korean reluctance to form ties that under such circumstances would have done little to improve their

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situation. Minority appeals to the war mobilization rhetoric of peerless national unity before the emperor also failed to bring about cooperation, due not only to the limited appeal of such rhetoric among the Korean minority, but perhaps also to a Korean reluctance to jeopardize their position by associating too closely with “unpatriotic” Suiheisha activists. In both cases, state discourses on empire and nation, and on how Koreans and burakumin fit into these discourses, limited the possibilities for viable mutual ties.

Interminority Relations at the Subaltern Level: Work and Community the 1920s and the influx of koreans Interactions between minorities, especially between new immigrants and settled minority groups, conjure up images of competition for jobs and ethnic strife. Yet although there was an influx of Korean labor into the Japanese labor market, in the major industrial sectors where both Korean and buraku workers found employment starting from the 1910s and 1920s onward (such as textiles and coal mining), the way in which Korean labor in particular was managed and treated served to limit opportunities for contact with other workers. This separation limited both the chances of widespread conflict as well as the opportunities for finding common cause. The textile and cotton spinning industries are an illustrative example. Just as majority Japanese women played a pivotal role as laborers in the rise of the Japanese textile industry, minority women— specifically Korean, Okinawan, and buraku women—were recruited later, with the industrial boom occasioned by World War I, to work in the mills. Martin Kaneko found evidence of eleven mills in the Kansai area in which minority women comprised the bulk of the workforce at one time or another. At the Hidaka Spinning Company in Wakayama Prefecture, for example, the female labor force was 50 percent Okinawan and 30 per-

24. Kaneko, “Senzen-ki sen’i sangyō ni okeru Hyōgo-ken hisabetsu buraku no josei rōdōsha— Okinawa, Chōsen kara no dekasegi rōdōsha to no kanren de (part 1),” 88. Kaneko did find evidence of one mill that recruited women from buraku communities as early as 1911, but this was an isolated case.

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cent Korean, with many of the remaining laborers recruited from a buraku community located near the plant. While it is tempting to assume that factories such as the Hidaka mill became sites of interaction for the Korean and burakumin women working there, Kaneko’s findings do not bear this out. Interviews with former mill workers from the Okinawa and Kansai area buraku communities show that instead, management created a system for deliberate segregation of the workforce. Under this arrangement, while Okinawan and buraku women often shared the same dormitories, Korean women were housed separately, and at least one mill provided separate bathing and dining facilities for them as well. Majority Japanese workers also had facilities of their own, apparently because management acquiesced to the demands of parents that their daughters not be forced to live with burakumin. The reason for segregating Koreans from the other two groups is harder to understand, however; management may have been trying to avoid problems arising from the language barrier, but given the extreme difference between the Kansai and Okinawan dialects, it was probably nearly as difficult for the Okinawans and burakumin to communicate effectively. Regardless of the reason, the result was a pattern of segregation in the dormitories that resembled a demographic taxonomy of empire, in which the burakumin and Okinawans together occupied a middle ground between the most “legitimately” Japanese workers and the newly incorporated Koreans. Along with segregation in the dormitories and other facilities, evidence suggests that there may have been differences in the way Koreans and other minority women working at the mills were treated. Strikes by Korean women were common, for example, and generally concerned wages and other issues of treatment. By contrast, in his interviews with Okinawan and buraku women who once worked in the textile mills of

25. Ibid., p. 90. Kaneko provides no date for these figures, but because the Hidaka Spinning Company was established in 1919, they most likely reflect the situation in the mill at some point in the 1920s. 26. Ibid., pp. 94–104. 27. For examples, including a detailed account of the protracted and violent strike by Korean women at the Kishiwada Spinning Company in 1930, see Kim Ch’anjfng and Pang Sfnhi, Kaze no dōkoku; and Kim Ch’anjfng, Chōsenjin jokō no uta.

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the Kansai area, Kaneko found little evidence of their participation in strikes, and indeed barely any recollection of such events. That Korean women would strike over wages should come as little surprise, given the wage discrimination noted in Chapter 3. We might be tempted to assume that Okinawan and buraku women also would have faced wage discrimination at the mills, since their exploitability would seem to be one of the major advantages to recruiting them, although there is no reliable evidence to suggest that this was indeed the case. In fact, Kaneko’s buraku and Okinawan interviewees do not recall any dissatisfaction over the wages they received. Could this mean that wages at the mills were determined in accordance with an ethnic hierarchy in which Koreans were at the bottom, majority Japanese at the top, and other minority groups in the middle? Other aspects of the treatment that minority women received at the mills suggest that this may have been the case. Many of the former Korean textile workers interviewed by Kim and Pang recounted frequent verbal and physical abuse at the hands of Japanese foremen, as well as painful and humiliating punishment for poor job performance and denial of food and proper medical treatment to those who fell ill on the job. Cases of such abuse were by no means unheard of among nonKorean women employed in the industry. Yet in contrast to the recollections of Kim and Pang’s Korean interviewees, Kaneko’s burakumin and Okinawan interviewees generally recounted their years at the mills with a sense of nostalgia, even declaring that their lives as textile workers were preferable to the living conditions they faced in Okinawa or the buraku communities from which they came. Segregation in the workplace, along with possibly significant differences in treatment, thus resulted in very different experiences of life in 28. Kaneko, “Senzen-ki sen’i sangyō ni okeru Hyōgo-ken hisabetsu buraku no josei rōdōsha— Okinawa, Chōsen kara no dekasegi rōdōsha to no kanren de (part 2),” pp. 84–85. 29. Ibid., p. 93. 30. Kim Ch’anjfng and Pang Sfnhi, Kaze no dōkoku, pp. 135–44. 31. Kaneko, “Senzen-ki sen’i sangyō ni okeru Hyōgo-ken hisabetsu buraku no josei rōdōsha— Okinawa, Chōsen kara no dekasegi rōdōsha to no kanren de (part 2),” pp. 84–87, 93– 94.

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the textile mills for Korean women and their Okinawan and buraku coworkers. We might also add to this the sense of isolation that Korean mill workers would most surely have felt in the harsh, repressive, and alien environment of the mills. To be sure, Okinawan women arriving at the mills must have felt a similar sense of shock, as did many buraku and majority Japanese women, but for young women from the Korean countryside, the unfamiliarity of the language and mill culture would have only been compounded by the awareness of how far they really were from their homes. All of these conditions probably contributed to the greater frequency of disputes involving Korean women at the mills than conflicts involving burakumin and Okinawans. Indeed, Kaneko notes that the willingness of Korean women to strike, in combination with the increasing difficulty and cost involved in finding Korean women willing to work in the mills, were probably important factors leading to the gradual replacement of Koreans with Okinawans as the 1920s wore on. A similar situation prevailed in the coalfields of Kyushu, at mines that employed thousands of Korean and buraku laborers, both women and men. Although mine owners had made use of Korean labor even prior to the annexation of Korea, from the beginning Japanese and Korean miners were usually organized into separate work crews, housed in separate facilities, and often assigned to work separate tunnels. The fact that occasional fights broke out between Korean and Japanese miners in spite of this separation no doubt convinced management of the wisdom of continued de facto segregation under the naya labor gang system. The records of mining companies do not identify Japanese miners or mining crews as burakumin, so it is difficult to determine what relations between Koreans and burakumin may have been like in the mines. Given the large number of buraku communities in Kyushu’s coal-rich Chikuhō region and the prevalence of buraku labor within the industry even prior to the modern period, however, contact and interaction undoubtedly occurred, especially in cases where labor gangs of mixed 32. Ibid., pp. 92– 93. 33. Tōjō, “Meijiki, Nihon ni okeru saisho no Chōsenjin rōdōsha,” pp. 151–53. 34. W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Asō Coal Strike,” p. 99. Smith provides a very clear explanation of the naya system and its impact of Korean miners on pp. 96– 98.

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ethnic composition were formed. In these rare instances, the close-knit nature of the labor gang life caused Koreans and burakumin to close ranks in opposition to majority discrimination, even in the face of violence. Hayashi Eidai relates an incident from 1922 involving a work crew at Kaijima Mining’s Number 7 Mine that was composed of equal numbers of Koreans and burakumin. The buraku miners in this crew apparently supported their Korean coworkers in a violent altercation with Japanese miners from another work crew over a woman miner’s use of derogatory language in an argument with a Korean male. More often, however, mutual support between Koreans and burakumin in the coalfields of Kyushu was orchestrated by activists inspired by a proletarian view of minority identity, particularly leaders and members of local Suiheisha branches that backed Korean miners in their disputes with management over conditions and treatment. A 1931 strike by Korean miners at Nittetsu Mining’s Takao Number 1 Mine in the Chikuhō region of Kyushu, for example, was vigorously supported by a local Suiheisha activist named Nagamatsu Kiyoaki, who allowed the Korean strikers to set up their base of operations in his home. Despite the risks involved, the residents of Nagamatsu’s buraku community successfully protected this office from attacks by bands of thugs hired as strikebreakers. A year later, in August 1932, the Kaho branch of the Suiheisha also came to the aid of four hundred Korean miners who, as part of the Asō Coal strike, demanded payment of back wages, promises of no further pay cuts, and compensation payments to injured Korean miners. The Suiheisha provided to the strikers rice that had been donated by the cup and handful from its rank-and-file members, many of whom most likely worked in the Asō mines as well. Such cases of cooperation and mutual support were few, however. Because of the language barrier, and because Koreans usually lived in segregated labor crews, for Japanese miners—majority and burakumin alike—Korean miners remained a misunderstood, alien presence in their midst. In addition, negative stereotypes of Koreans that had spread throughout Japanese society during Japan’s imperialist usurpation had 35. Hayashi, “Chikuhō ni okeru Chōsenjin kōfu to hisabetsu buraku,” pp. 15–16. 36. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 37. Ibid., p. 22; W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Asō Coal Strike,” p. 113.

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shaped miners’ impressions of Koreans, creating conditions for animosity to arise. According to one Korean striker’s recollection, miners from the surrounding buraku communities scorned the Koreans for making things harder on all the miners by not working and accused them of self-interest and laziness. That not a single Japanese miner chose to take part in the strike also indicates the degree to which majority and buraku miners saw Korean demands as having little to do with their own interests. Much more than in major industrial sectors such as textiles and coal mining, however, Koreans and burakumin came into contact with each other as day laborers on civil engineering projects, as construction workers, as collectors of scrap metal and other recyclable resources, and as laborers in a variety of industries that comprised the second tier of Japan’s prewar economy. Wages in all of these sectors were poor, and steady work could be affected by the weather, in the case of day labor, or the slightest fluctuations in the economy. In all of these sectors, Korean and buraku laborers, as well as the most impoverished stratum of the majority working class, competed for jobs by selling their labor at the lowest wage possible. Much more so than in the mills or the mines, in these areas contact was close and thus could more easily lead to conflict. The economic historian Ha Myfngseng has explored the dynamics of the Korean entry into this underside of the prewar Japanese economy, especially in regard to the way it played out in the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka. His findings reveal that across the 1920s, Korean labor gradually came to displace other groups. As colonial laborers unfamiliar with Japanese society, possessing a limited command of the language, and often with little political or organizational support to rely on, they were easier than Japanese workers to exploit and lay off. The effect on buraku laborers was particularly drastic: a survey of unemployed day

38. Hayashi, “Chikuhō ni okeru Chōsenjin kōfu to hisabetsu buraku,” p. 22. 39. W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Asō Coal Strike,” p. 113. As Smith points out, however, even if some buraku miners had empathized with the Korean strikers, it may have been very difficult for them to join in the strike for fear of losing their jobs or sacrificing wages. 40. Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi, pp. 63–173. 41. Ibid., pp. 82–85, 97– 98.

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laborers in Kobe, conducted in 1925, found that approximately 24 percent were Korean, which stood on par with the 23 percent who were majority Japanese. These figures paled in comparison to the 52 percent who were burakumin. As the decade progressed, Korean labor likewise began to displace buraku labor in small-scale factories manufacturing products ranging from Kyoto’s traditional yūzen dyed goods, to knitted items, glassware, and even the traditional buraku industry of leather goods. Entry into these sectors did more than just bring Koreans into contact (and competition) with burakumin in the workplace; it also brought them into the buraku community. Unlike Matsutani’s story of the sympathetic “Mr. K,” however, most Koreans who found their way into urban buraku communities came—and stayed—primarily for practical, economic reasons. The small factories and worksites where Koreans found employment were often located in and around buraku communities. Living in the buraku community also presented advantages in terms of cost of living: food and other daily necessities tended to be cheaper in buraku areas than they were in non-buraku areas, including even urban slums. But the main reason Koreans chose to settle in buraku areas was for housing. Two features of the housing situation in buraku communities made it possible for Koreans to obtain affordable housing there. One was the practice of subletting portions of rented property. Buraku tenants wishing to derive extra income let out to Koreans structures and other spaces not used as primary living space, such as outdoor storage sheds, and typically charged rent on a daily, not monthly, basis. This arrangement was preferable to those Koreans working as day laborers, since it allowed them to pay as they went and move on when they needed to find work elsewhere. The other feature of buraku communities that facilitated Korean settlement was the willingness of buraku landlords to let 42. Ibid., p. 81. 43. Ibid., pp. 88– 96. 44. Ibid., 90. Food was typically cheaper due to buraku merchants’ practice of hakari-uri (sale by weight or volume), whereby one could purchase exactly the amount of a certain product or ingredient one needed at a given time, rather than buying the product in quantities that might eventually go to waste. This arrangement allowed buraku residents to buy a cup of soy sauce or sugar, for example, rather than spending much more money to buy it by the bottle or bag. 45. Ibid.

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Koreans rent buildings and other structures that were located in parts of the community with disadvantageous environmental conditions, such as areas prone to flooding. These buildings were often in such a state of disrepair that they were barely fit— and sometimes not even intended— for human habitation. Such was the case in the buraku community of Yasunaka, located on the outskirts of the Osaka industrial belt, where one landlord charged Koreans rent for the use of land on which stood a large, decaying chicken coop. In rare cases, buraku landlords even built housing for Korean tenants in their communities. In the community of Moribe, near the city of Amagasaki, for example, one landlord erected a barracks-style tenement for Korean day laborers who were employed on public works and highway construction projects in the vicinity. The burakumin in these cases were motivated by economic self-interest more than any sympathy they might have felt for Koreans as fellow victims of discrimination; they rented to Koreans to cover part of their rent or to generate some income from property that would have been unrentable otherwise. In the case of Moribe, the whole community benefited: not only did the entrepreneurial landlord profit from the rent paid by Koreans, but the tenement provided the community with a free source of latrine waste, an important fertilizer for the community’s tenant farmers. Koreans, for their part, showed great ingenuity in taking advantage of the opportunities provided, no matter how unlivable the conditions might have seemed at first glance; the renters of Yasunaka’s chicken coop, for example, foraged for scraps of lumber, paper, and sheets of zinc to fashion walls, partitions, and a roof for the rotting frame of the original structure. Kwfn Kyfngju, an early Korean resident of the community, recalled that in 1931 he, his parents, and four brothers and sisters were all living in a small partitioned “room” of this improvised tenement house.

46. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, pp. 5– 6. 47. Amagasaki buraku kaihōshi hensan iinkai, Amagasaki buraku kaihōshi, pp. 340–41. 48. Ibid., pp. 341–42. 49. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, pp. 5– 6.

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This pattern of early Korean settlement led to the appearance of Korean ethnic enclaves within buraku communities, or along their fringes, as chain migration brought more and more Koreans into the community. In Yasunaka, the remodeled and expanded chicken coop became the heart of what the buraku locals called “Chōsenjin machi” (Korean town). This area became a conspicuous feature of the community by 1931. In Higashi Shichijō, Koreans appear to have been concentrated in the areas of Yakata-chō and Kawabata-chō, both of which were located along the western bank of the flood-prone Kamo River. By the beginning of the 1930s, these Korean enclaves were well established and showing no signs of shrinking. In March 1929 in Higashi Shichijō, for example, the Korean population stood at 332 individuals, or 4.1 percent of the area’s total population. It would climb to 910 individuals, or 10.2 percent, by October 1938. Higashi Shichijō was by no means remarkable among Kyoto’s buraku communities in this regard: the portion of Koreans in the city’s six buraku areas climbed from 5.2 percent of their total population in 1929 to 14.8 percent in 1938. The situation in Moribe was even more striking: from a total population of 560 in 1913, prior to the arrival of Koreans, the population jumped to 909 in 1924, then soared to 2,649 in 1935, with the bulk of this increase due to Korean settlement. In 1938, a survey by the local police recorded 3,746 residents, consisting of 986 Japanese (“naichijin”—the vast majority of which were probably burakumin), 148 Okinawans, and 2,612 Koreans. How did Koreans and burakumin respond to one another within these communities? Given the Suiheisha’s support for striking Korean 50. Ibid. 51. Although I have come across no material that clearly designates these areas as Korean, this can be inferred from the distribution of “guidance officers” (hodōin) under the Kyōwakai program. Kyōwakai guidance officers were assigned to residential areas with significantly large Korean populations. In the case of Higashi Shichijō, Kyōwakai records from 1938 reveal that guidance officers were assigned to locations in both Yakata-chō and Kawabata-chō. See “Kyōto-fu Kyōwakai yōran,” in Higuchi, Kyōwakai kankei shiryōshū, vol. 3, p. 431. 52. Hur, “Senzen Kyōto no toshi kasō shakai to Chōsenjin no ryūnyu,” p. 75, table 5: “Buraku e no Chōsenjin no ryūnyū.” Total numbers of Koreans for each period were 956 in March 1929 and 3,037 in October 1939. 53. Amagasaki buraku kaihōshi hensan iinkai, Amagasaki buraku kaihōshi, pp. 343–44.

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coal miners, noted earlier, one might expect to find similar support offered by local branches to Koreans who had settled in the community. An exploration of the activities of such local Suiheisha chapters, however, suggests that they were in fact less inclined to reach out to Koreans living in their community than they were to Koreans outside of them. This had been the case with the Kaho Suiheisha; the Korean miners it supported in their strike against Asō Mining did not reside in the buraku community itself. In Higashi Shichijō as well, although the local Suiheisha chapter invited Hyfngp’yfngsa leaders to visit in 1927, it never showed an interest in problems specific to Koreans in the community, despite their growing numbers and similar plight in the face of local majority prejudice. Outside of the Suiheisha activity, the Korean influx across the 1920s also led to interactions between Koreans and burakumin. With the rapid influx of Koreans and the competition for jobs and other community resources, one might expect to see increasing incidents of disputes between the two groups at the community level. A survey of articles published in local newspapers from Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, however, does not suggest this happened. While it is not always possible to ascertain whether a given incident involving Koreans happened within a buraku community, among those that can be placed within a known buraku community, cases involving arguments, tense standoffs, or violence occurred more often between Korean individuals than they did between Koreans and Japanese. Newspaper articles are typically too brief to provide much detail on the causes of such incidents, although frequent mention of “misunderstandings” over “trivial comments” as the cause of runins between Koreans and Japanese would seem to suggest that in these cases discriminatory name-calling was a precipitating factor. Far more common, however, were stories of clashes between Korean individuals, usually over money or during a night of drinking.

54. Ōsaka jinken rekishi shiryōkan, Kōheisha to Suiheisha, p. 17. 55. This survey was conducted using the “Senzen Nihon zaijū Chōsenjin kankei shinbun kiji kensaku” database maintained on the homepage of Prof. Mizuno Naoki of Kyoto University (http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~mizna /shinbun/). At the time I conducted this survey (March 2008), Prof. Mizuno’s database included listings for 31,784 articles on Korean minority-related news that appeared in 39 newspapers from the pre-

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A survey of such articles can only provide a limited amount of information about what interminority relations in buraku communities were like during these years. Only incidents that grew violent enough to attract the attention of the local police were covered in the local dailies, meaning that everyday instances of name calling and other common forms of discrimination usually went unreported. Conversely, it is possible that the press blew such incidents out of proportion, and in the process grossly distorted the facts and nature of the conflict: these articles reveal an almost voyeuristic tendency of the local press to peer into the lives of the urban poor, especially Korean laborers, and sensationalize their “natural” tendency toward violence and debauchery. In light of such a discriminatory preoccupation, however, the relative paucity of stories describing violent conflict between Koreans and their Japanese neighbors and coworkers in buraku areas is all the more noteworthy; it suggests, at the very least, that Koreans generally took their most violent frustrations out on one another, rather than their buraku neighbors. While the burakumin likewise may not have responded to the Koreans in their midst with physical violence on a regular basis— at least to a degree that would make the papers—it seems from the limited evidence that we have that discrimination, avoidance, and even persecution were common. The aforementioned Kwfn Kyfngju of Yasunaka recalled spending most of his childhood days with his older sister inside the family’s converted chicken coop apartment, because if they dared to venture outside during the day passersby would throw rocks at them. At the local elementary school children from the community, together with their nonminority Japanese classmates, taunted Korean children who came to study for being “filthy” and “stinking of garlic” (a reference to the smell of Korean cuisine). The teachers did nothing to stop this bullying and war and wartime era, 25 of which were major dailies published in the Kansai, Chubu, and Chugoku regions of Japan. In this survey, I searched the database for articles with terms such as kenka (quarrel, fight) and rantō (scuffle, brawl), which appeared frequently in the headlines of articles of violent altercations, or articles with content classified as such by Mizuno and his fellow compilers of the database occurring in the areas of Osaka, Kyoto, Amagasaki, and Kobe. I then reviewed these articles to search for clues as to which incidents probably occurred in buraku communities within these urban areas.

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sometimes even took part in it. Adults fared just as poorly; one account tells of a Korean settler in the buraku community of Tanaka, in Kyoto, who was assaulted by a group of burakumin one night after mistakenly urinating near the front door of someone’s home. When the Korean apologized to the offended resident in heavily accented Japanese, a crowd of neighbors gathered to surround him and beat him into submission, amid shouts of “kill the Korean!” An aversion to associating with Koreans motivated other buraku communities to close ranks in order to prevent Korean settlement all together. In the buraku community of Sanjō in Kyoto, for example, an informal agreement prevented Koreans from settling in the area until the mid-1930s. Koreans were not defenseless, however, nor were they innocent of discrimination themselves. Just as Suiheisha activists had equated the Korean paekchfng with the burakumin, but for a very different purpose, Korean settlers in buraku communities began to apply the term to their Japanese neighbors as soon as they became aware of their ostracized position in Japanese society. Ha Myfngseng encountered the term repeatedly in his interviews with first-generation Korean immigrants living in buraku communities in Kyoto. In Yasunaka as well, according to one account, early Korean arrivals in the community would comment derisively on how the “paekchfng [were] acting like big shots” (paekchfng ga erasō na koto iute). The existence of such strikingly similar groups in both countries, which for the Suiheisha had problematized the question of cooperation with Koreans in Japan, also gave Koreans in the buraku community a means of putting themselves above their new neighbors, even though both groups suffered similar discrimination by the majority.

56. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, pp. 5, 10. 57. Taniguchi, “Buraku no naka no buraku—Kyōto-shi Tanaka no Chōsenjintachi,” Buraku, no. 119 (Dec. 1959): 19. 58. Kyōto-shi kyōikubu shakai-ka, Furyō jūtaku misshū chiku ni kansuru chōsa, p. 108. 59. Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi, p. 107. 60. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, p. 10.

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minorities and communities in the midst of mobilization, war, and defeat The immiseration of Koreans caused by employment instability and wage discrimination, along with continued chain migration in spite of the bleak prospects of finding good work at reasonable wages, created conditions in the Korean areas of buraku communities that were dire even by the standards of the surrounding neighborhood. A 1939 survey of overcrowded areas in Osaka found that, in the buraku community of Nishihama, 27.7 percent of Koreans lived in dwellings in which more than two household units resided, while only 1 percent of burakumin did. In the nearby buraku community of Mibiraki, the same figures stood at 22.6 percent for Koreans versus 2.3 percent for burakumin. The same survey produced data that further illustrated the degree of overcrowding among Koreans living in these communities: although an area equivalent to two tatami mats (36 square feet) was considered the absolute minimum space an individual needed to live in relative health and comfort, 62.7 percent of Koreans in Nishihama and 71.5 percent in Mibiraki lived with two mats or less of space. For burakumin in these two communities, the figures were 35 percent and 41.3 percent, respectively. As Koreans took jobs in sectors that had long been monopolized by buraku labor, burakumin became harder pressed to find work, since majority prejudice continued to block their entrance into jobs in higherpaying sectors. A Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai study took note of the 61. Figures calculated from table 4-6, “Nishihama Sakae chiku oyobi Mibiraki chiku no ikko atari kyojū setaisū minzoku-betsu hikaku hyō,” in Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi, p. 196. I have rendered the terms setai (Ϫᐃ) as “household unit” and ko (᠌) as “dwelling.” It should be borne in mind that setai refers not only to family units, but also to individuals who are not considered the dependents of any other individual with whom they reside. Technically, single male laborers each comprised their own setai. Focusing on the proportion of dwellings in which more than two household units resided removes from the figures the prevalent phenomenon of three generations of the same family living together, since these would have been counted as dwellings with two household units. 62. Figures calculated from table 4-7, “Nishihama Sakae chiku oyobi Mibiraki chiku no hitori atari jōsū-betsu setaisū minzoku-betsu hikaku hyō,” in Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi, p. 197. 63. Ibid., p. 204.

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emerging problem as early as 1932. The difficulties that buraku day laborers were having in the midst of the economic downturn, the report pointed out, had been made worse by the fact that “such jobs have been encroached upon by Koreans who have entered [that sector] over the past several years, so that many [burakumin] have fallen into a state of unemployment.” The same report added that the former de facto buraku monopoly over the shoe repair industry was now facing competition from “Koreans and lumpen elements.” A different Kyōkai study from the same year found that an 52.8 percent of day laborers among the buraku minority in Kanagawa and Mie prefectures were unemployed, versus only 24.3 percent of those in the Korean minority. The trends hinted at in such reports continued throughout 1930s. The collection of scrap metal and other discarded material, for example, which had long provided employment to both minorities as well as the poorest stratum of the Japanese majority, became an increasingly profitable line of work as the war in China began, and police reports from 1938 commented on the rising Korean dominance of scrap collection and how it was forcing nonKoreans out of the business. A 1941 report by the wartime Zen-Nippon Kutsu Shūri Kōgyō Kumiai Rengōkai (All Japan Federation of Shoe Repair Industry Unions)— a short-lived organization established by former Suiheisha leader Matsuda Ki’ichi—found that most of the younger workers in the industry were from Korea or elsewhere outside of the buraku community, whereas older repair workers with more experience and better job skills were predominantly burakumin. Such trends brought about even greater levels of Korean settlement in buraku communities during the 1930s. A study of migration into the nine largest buraku communities in Osaka Prefecture between 1925 and 1935 showed that 1,238 individuals had settled in these communities during that period. Of these, 310 (25 percent) were burakumin from other buraku communities, 56 (4.5 percent) came from majority communities,

64. Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai, “Keizai kōsei e no michi,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, vol. 3, p. 78. 65. Naimushō keihokyoku, “Tokkō geppō,”in Pak Kyfngsik, Zainichi Chōsenjin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 4, p. 160. 66. “Zenkoku kutsu shūri gyōsha jitsujō chōsasho,” in Watanabe and Akisada, Buraku mondai, supp. vol. 2, p. 2115.

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and an overwhelming 872 (70.4 percent) were Koreans. Likewise, surveys of the six largest buraku communities in Kyoto recorded 17,352 Japanese (94.8 percent) and 956 Korean (5.2 percent) residents as of March 1929. A follow-up survey conducted between May 1937 and October 1938 found 17,416 Japanese (85.2 percent) and 3,037 Koreans (14.8 percent) in these same communities. That is, while the numbers of Japanese had stayed steady, in less than a decade the Korean population had more than tripled. Even in the less centrally located buraku community of Yasunaka, Koreans continued to pour into the community during the 1930s in search of housing and employment: they either took on jobs on construction and public works projects, or in nearby oil refineries and match factories, or took in piecework for the local industry of processing pig hair for use in brushes. Their impact on the community was dramatic. Official statistics for Yasunaka are harder to come by than those for the 67. Figures calculated from table 6, “Ōsaka-fu no 9 chiku e no inyūsha shusshinchi (1925 nen—35 nen),” in Mihara, “Suiheisha sōritsu-gō no shigoto to seikatsu,” p. 177. 68. Figures taken from Hur, “Senzen Nihon no hinkonsha kyūsai to zainichi Chōsenjin,” p. 80, table 3-5: “Buraku e no Chōsenjin no ryūnyū.” 69. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, p. 5. It is far from clear exactly what kinds of work Korean men found in Yasunaka. One elderly Korean resident of the community recalls that there were “four or five oil refineries” nearby that employed him and other Koreans from the area to do dirty and dangerous jobs at low wages (p. 6). It is also possible that Korean men from the area were hired to work on construction projects for sewage treatment and waterworks during the prewar period. These are areas that they came to dominate in the postwar era. Interviews that I conducted in the community with elderly residents and representatives of the local office of the Buraku Kaihō Dōmei brought the existence of the match factories to my attention. Interviewees recalled that residents of the community, burakumin and Koreans alike, worked there until the factory went out of business in the 1950s. Interviewees claimed that the factory employed mostly women and children. Refining pig hair for brushes involved curing pig hair imported from China in a caustic solution in order to straighten the strands, then cutting these to a uniform length. An affluent Yasunaka family that ran the business farmed out the latter part of this process to residents of the community as piecework. Women in the community were predominantly employed for this purpose. (From interviews with Buraku Kaihō Dōmei, Yasunaka chapter director Saeki Chizuko, conducted at the Yasunaka kaihō kaikan, Mar. 1, 1999; elderly Japa nese residents of Yasunaka, conducted at the Yasunaka rōjin sentā, Aug. 27, 1999; and Son Haksu and family, conducted at their home in Yasunaka, Sept. 4, 1999.)

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more closely scrutinized inner-city buraku areas, but for a community that claimed a total population of 462 individuals, living in 89 families in 1918, prior to the arrival of Korean migrants, the estimated 300 Korean households established in Yasunaka at the height of the minority presence in the community during the Pacific War probably meant that the community may have been, for a few years at least, predominantly Korean. This kind of economic competition and population pressure would seem to provide the ideal environment for interminority conflict. As was the case in the 1920s, however, articles in the local press featuring arguments, fights, and other violent confrontations involving Koreans in the buraku districts of urban Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto do not suggest an upswing in violence between Koreans and burakumin during the war years, regardless of what latent animosities might have existed. As before, such news stories usually involved altercations between Koreans over gambling and drinking, rather than fights between Koreans and Japanese in the buraku community. Indeed, not only did the press coverage of such incidents suggest very little in the way of interminority violence, but even the frequency of run-ins between Koreans in these communities seemed to decline as the decade progressed. It would be a mistake to read too much into the apparent lack of conflict and the reduction in frequency over time; other factors must be considered, such as the enhanced police powers of surveillance and control after the 1935 establishment of the Kyōwakai. The mobilization psychology that took hold during the late 1930s, even prior to the outbreak of full-scale hostilities with Chinese Nationalist forces in 1937, also urged papers to divert attention from

70. Population figures for 1918 are taken from Morita and Tsujimura, Kawachi no hisabetsu buraku Yao-za no rekishi, p. 105. Figures for Korean households appear in Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, p. 7. The comparison offered here is somewhat marred by the fact that the figures for 1918, taken from the Osaka Prefecture Buraku taichō, are for kosū (᠌᭄), or number of family units, while the latter figures refer to setai (Ϫᐃ), i.e., household units, which could refer either to families or individuals residing in the community who were not regarded as dependents of others. 71. “Senzen Nihon zaijū Chōsenjin kankei shinbun kiji kensaku” database maintained on the homepage of Prof. Mizuno Naoki of Kyoto University (http://www.zinbun .kyoto-u.ac.jp/~mizna /shinbun/). See the earlier discussion in this chapter’s notes regarding the sources and methodology used in this survey.

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stories that did not contribute to popular support for the war effort. Even so, the sheer lack of reports of violence between Koreans and other residents of the buraku community is striking, particularly for the early 1930s, when state control of the press was not as stringent. By this point, too, some Koreans had been living in the community long enough to form contacts outside of their own ethnic enclave within the buraku area. For example, after flooding of the Kamo River during the summer of 1935 resulted in severe damage to some of the community’s poorest sections, it came to light that local welfare commissioners had distributed municipal disaster relief and welfare funds only to the landlords whose buildings had been damaged, rather than to the residents more adversely affected. In response, the Higashi Shichijō Suiheisha, as part of its program for community improvement, launched a protest campaign calling for the resignation of the commissioners involved and a proper redistribution of funds. The initial protest meeting held on July 25, 1935, brought together three hundred of the community’s residents from areas hardest hit, including fifty Koreans. In contrast to the previous decade, some Suiheisha organizers seemed prepared to approach Koreans living in their midst on an issue of common concern, and Koreans were ready to respond. The example of the Suiheisha and its fight against anti-buraku discrimination inspired some Koreans to seek out a deeper involvement with their “fellow” minority, and ultimately with the Suiheisha itself. A Korean who went by the Japanese name of Asano Yoshitomo provides a fascinating example. Born in Kyfnggi province into a yangban family that had fallen on hard times, Asano migrated to Japan in 1924 in search of work, but with a desire to study literature as well. Once in Japan, his interests gradually shifted to religion, specifically the Jōdō Shin sect. He eventually became a priest of the Higashi Honganji branch, and was assigned to a buraku community temple in Shiga Prefecture. In the course of his studies to become a priest he had encountered the writings of early Suiheisha leaders such as Saikō Mankichi and Kurisu Shichirō, which awakened in him a concern for the social injustice of discrimination. He eventually quit the priesthood and joined the Suiheisha in the fall of 72. “Kyōto Higashi Shichijō suigai tōsō,” Suihei shinbun, Sept. 5, 1935. 73. Yamauchi, Shichijō buraku kaihō-shi, kindai-hen nenpyō, pp. 140–42.

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1933, after learning of the Takumatsu Trial Incident from a Suiheisha organizer who visited the buraku community he was living in. Asano went on to participate in a number of kyūdan campaigns in the area before his arrest and imprisonment in 1935. Some individuals with ties to the Suiheisha even took an avid interest in the problems faced by the Koreans. Kurisu Shichirō was particularly noteworthy in this regard. By the latter half of the 1930s he was no longer active in the movement, but he continued to work for the improvement of the education of young children in the Osaka buraku community of Nishihama by opening an informal academy, the Suihei dōsha (House of the Suihei way), in his home. The postwar zainichi Korean novelist and poet Chfng Sungbak, who became a live-in student at the academy during his early teenage years, recalled that most of the local children who came to study at the Kurisu home were Koreans. But Kurisu’s efforts on behalf of Koreans in Nishihama did not end with the education of their children. As a recipient of the Order of the Golden Kite, seventh class, for saving the lives of several comrades during the Russo-Japanese War, Kurisu had considerable clout with the local police in spite of his Suiheisha connections. According to Chfng, this enabled him to negotiate the release of Koreans apprehended for selling food without a license or for committing other petty transgressions of strict wartime regulations. Asano Yoshitomo and the Korean children of Nishihama who studied with Kurisu were in one sense examples of a process of Korean assimilation: in choosing to become a Jōdō Shin Buddhist priest in Japan, Asano embarked on a career and lifestyle that could not be described as anything but Japanese. Even as a Suiheisha organizer, his interactions

74. Asano, “Zainichi Chōsenjin to buraku kaihō undō no rentai ni tsuite,” pp. 56– 57. Asano was released from prison in 1936, but gives few details on his activities for the remainder of the war years. After the war, he was imprisoned for violating the Alien Registration Law and almost deported to Korea. Later he applied for Japa nese citizenship, which he received in 1962. Although little is known about Asano’s career beyond this essay, his name appears in a 1995 interview with residents of the buraku community of Hirose in Shiga Prefecture, who recalled fondly his efforts on their behalf (Asano had died by the time of the interview). Interestingly, none of the interviewees mentioned anything about Asano’s non-Japanese background. (Hansabetsu kokusai rentai kaihō kenkyūjo Shiga, Katari no chikara, pp. 247–51.) 75. Chfng Sgngbak, Suihei no hito, pp. 11– 72.

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with other Koreans were apparently limited to an address he gave to Korean strikers at the Ishiyama Tōyō Rayon factory in August 1937. Similarly, Kurisu’s efforts at promoting the education of Korean children in Nishihama were oriented toward the majority culture: the point was to achieve enough literacy in Japanese to enroll in the local public elementary school, while Korean was not studied at all. Yet this kind of assimilation came with none of the heavy-handed approaches taken by the Kyōwakai; nor was “becoming Japanese” seen as the primary objective in such cases. Whereas the point of the Kyōwakai program was to convert Koreans into idealized Japanese subjects as conceived of by the wartime state—that is, Japanese subjects who would be unquestioningly loyal to the emperor and unwavering in their compliance with authorities— assimilation in the case of Asano and Kurisu’s Korean students was a “natural,” voluntary process of becoming more like the burakumin around them through shared experiences within Japanese society. Asano revealed this in his explanation for his decision to obtain Japanese citizenship in 1962: he had “decided to become a buraku resident through and through.” In a similar vein, despite the high value placed on military ser vice in the late 1930s, Kurisu cautioned his older Korean students about the brutal abuse they would most likely receive at the hands of their commanding officers and fellow soldiers if they volunteered, and pointed out to Chfng that as a Korean in Japan he would face the same discrimination as the burakumin around him. Japan, Kurisu added, had made the Koreans into “a second discriminated people” (dai-ni no sabetsumin). Kurisu’s appreciation of the problems that Koreans faced in Japanese society in some ways echoes the views espoused by Matsumoto Ji’ichirō and other Suiheisha activists on the relationship between discrimination against the burakumin and discrimination against “fellow Asians.” But years of living in the same environment and facing similar disadvantages in Japanese society had made some individuals among both minorities aware of shared plights and needs. The Suiheisha organizers of the protest in Higashi Shichijō now understood that Korean residents of the 76. Asano, “Zainichi Chōsenjin to Buraku kaihō undō,” p. 59. 77. Ibid., p. 58. 78. Chfng Sgngbak, Suihei no hito, pp. 42–43, 69– 71.

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flooded areas had just as much right to equitable relief as their buraku neighbors. Likewise, from the Korean side, the parents of Korean children who attended Kurisu’s home school supported his efforts even though he did not try to educate the children about how to be Korean, just as other Koreans in Nishihama recognized him as a Japanese man whom they could count on to help them out of a jam. The point here is not to claim that Koreans and burakumin now embraced one another and lived in complete harmony. Korean enclaves such as Higashi Shichijō’s Yakata-chō and Yasunaka’s “Korean town” continued to exist, due to both a Korean desire to live among their own kind, and the continuing practice of renting only the most inferior housing in the community to Koreans— a form of housing discrimination that was only slightly less restrictive than what was prevalent in majority society. Individuals like Asano and Kurisu were most likely rare. When burakumin and Koreans did join forces during the 1930s, the alliance was usually tactical rather than based on strong feelings of mutual solidarity. Along with recognizing that Koreans in Higashi Shichijō had a right to their fair share of compensation, Suiheisha organizers would have understood the advantage of mobilizing them in order to put pressure on the landlords, welfare commissioners, and local police. For their part, Koreans noticed how their buraku neighbors dealt with the problems of marginalization and began to find strategies and allies to help them get by in Japan. Mutual discrimination continued, and in some ways worsened, as settlement in the buraku community provided some Koreans with a more detailed understanding of how anti-buraku prejudice worked in Japanese society. Although Koreans in the buraku area continued to use the term paekchfng in reference to the burakumin around them, they also began to adopt a Japanese vocabulary for name calling. In 1937, for example, Itō Shigemitsu, the principal of the local elementary school in Higashi Shichijō, complained that Koreans in the area were “discriminating against children from the community” (naibu jidō) and “have no compunction about calling me names like ‘Akadama Port Wine’ or even ‘the eta principal.’ ” “Akadama Port Wine” was a reference to the red

79. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, p. 245.

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circle (akadama in Japanese) on the label of a low-grade brand of liquor, which became a euphemism for the burakumin due to its similarity to the red circles used by various organizations to mark the names of individuals suspected of being burakumin. The Korean adoption of such terms reveals that Koreans were indeed assimilating to Japanese ways, even in regard to anti-buraku discrimination. The words they came to use were much more effective put-downs than the Korean phrase paekchfng: whereas the Korean term might not be understood by the burakumin, the Japanese terms were more familiar and thus more potent. Very little material exists to provide us with insights into what Koreans in the buraku community may have felt about their buraku neighbors. It does appear, however, that Koreans viewed the burakumin in ways that, oddly enough, mirrored some prejudices the majority had about the Koreans themselves. In particular, the Korean displacement of burakumin in the labor market seems to have encouraged Koreans to view their neighbors as lazy and incompetent. Ha Myfngseng’s survey of Koreans formerly employed in the Kyoto’s yūzen silk-dyeing industry revealed a glimpse of such prejudice. When asked about the degree to which burakumin had worked the industry during the prewar period, one firstgeneration Korean interviewee in the Kyoto buraku community of Tanaka dismissed the possibility, saying, “There’s no way those guys could handle yūzen dyeing. All they’re good for is digging ditches.” Likewise in Yasunaka, some of the community’s oldest Korean residents, who still remember life in the community before the Pacific War, tend to view the burakumin as lazy, spendthrift, and incapable of all but the most menial forms of labor. The effect of wage competition never enters into these descriptions, or course; to the extent that Korean success is attributed to perseverance and hard work, the burakumin come to embody the opposite of these qualities.

80. Kurokawa (ibid., p. 349n37) mentions that such markings had been used by both branches of the Honganji on their records to distinguish temples located in buraku communities or individual parishioners from the minority. 81. Ha, Kanjin Nihon imin shakai keizaishi, pp. 122–23n81. 82. Interview with elderly Korean residents in Yasunaka (names withheld), Sept. 4, 1999.

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Burakumin were by no means innocent of prejudice against Koreans, though given the mobilization psychology that took hold in the latter half of the 1930s, they expressed such sentiments via means different from the name calling and rock throwing of the 1920s. As burakumin took measures to revitalize their communities in line with the state’s selfimprovement rhetoric under the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, some communities began to scapegoat the Koreans in their midst as a source of the kinds of problems they sought to eradicate. A revealing example occurred in the buraku community of Kashima, in metropolitan Osaka. In 1933 residents contributed to pay for the construction of a new public bathing facility in the community. The community council set the charge to use the bath at five rin for children seven years old and younger, one sen for people up to age twenty-one, and two sen for those over age twenty-one. Problems began in the fall of 1936, when the council instituted a new rate of three sen both for people who were not residents of the community and for Koreans living in Kashima. The Korean residents argued that this was unfair because, even though they had not contributed to the initial campaign, they were still required to pay the monthly community fee of fourteen sen that the council charged all residents. When Koreans refused to pay their community fees in protest, the community council moved to bar Koreans from access to the bath, claiming that Koreans “lack an understanding of hygiene, and ignore the posted rules, thus causing a considerable nuisance for other bathers.” On October 1, the local police intervened to diffuse a standoff that threatened to turn violent, and negotiated what they and the community council no doubt felt was a suitable compromise: the charge remained three sen for Koreans to use the bath, but would be raised to five sen for bathers from outside the community. The police also vowed to instruct Koreans in methods of basic hygiene and Japanese bath etiquette, and deal sternly with those who repeatedly broke the rules. Koreans, of course, found much to be desired in this arrangement. They refused to use the 83. The account that follows summarizes that given in Naimushō keihokyoku, “Chōsenjin undō no jōkyō,” Tokkō geppō (Oct. 1936), in Ōsaka no burakushi iinkai, Ōsaka no burakushi, vol. 6: Shiryō-hen, kindai 3, pp. 128–29.

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bath at the higher fee, and launched a boycott of stores in the area run by burakumin. In retaliation, some members of the community council proposed levying a special surcharge on landlords in the community who rented property to Koreans, equivalent to half the rent charged. This latter move was a thinly veiled attempt to force Koreans out of Kashima altogether. Police reports do not reveal how the conflict played out from this point onward, although they do mention that many Kashima landlords began to side with the Koreans after the council introduced the idea of the rent surcharge. This shift no doubt would have put pressure on the council to reach a mutually acceptable compromise. Of greater interest than the denouement, however, are the circumstances under which this conflict took shape. Kashima, like other buraku communities in Osaka, would have been a site of Korean settlement from the 1920s. The police report does not provide population figures for either burakumin or Koreans in Kashima; it merely notes that 110 buraku households contributed funds for the public bath and that “one hundred twenty or thirty” Koreans were under police surveillance for their involvement in the protest. Given the initial point of Korean dissatisfaction, namely that of being charged the same rate as “outsiders” to use the bath, it seems likely that many of the Koreans involved may have resided in Kashima for quite a while by 1936— at least long enough to consider themselves established members of the community. Likewise, it is noteworthy that the community council—which seemed to have no Korean representatives— would choose to lump dues-paying Koreans together with transients and other “outsiders” at a time when the state’s Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō was calling on burakumin to improve their communities for the sake of the nation. The burakumin of Kashima were not alone in this regard. In the buraku community of Ikue, also in metropolitan Osaka, an organization called the Ikue Keizai Kōseikai (Economic Revitalization Association), established in 1936, provides another case in point. The name itself is significant for what it reveals about its connection to the government’s buraku policy. The inaugural statement of the Ikue Keizai Kōseikai noted that while the naichijin (Japanese) population of the community had increased by only 212 individuals between 1931 and 1936 (from 1,555 to 1,767 persons), the Korean population during these same years had increased

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almost fourfold—from a mere 285 in 1931 to 1,083 in 1936. This influx had observable effects on the quality of life in a community that was already pressed for space, and exacerbated the “backward, feudal circumstances of life” in the buraku community as Korean laborers poured into Ikue and dragged its economic and cultural level down with them. In line with the government’s Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, the platform of the Ikue Keizai Kōseikai called for the “rationalization of town life” (chōmin seikatsu no gōrika) as a means of aiding the nation in its hour of need. Article 4 of the bylaws stated that property owners and heads of households living in the community, regardless of sex, who possessed a sense of “public virtues” would comprise the membership of the organization; the same article, however, added that only naichijin were eligible to join. In the case of the Ikue Keizai Kōseikai, as in the Kashima dispute, Korean residents found themselves denied access to facilities and involvement in organizations intended to promote community welfare, regardless of how long they had lived in the buraku area or how much interaction they may have had with the naichijin community therein. Attempts at marginalizing Koreans like these did not derive from the government’s Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō itself: the rhetoric of the program never claimed that the job of “self-revitalization” was only for naichijin within the buraku community, nor did it specify that only naichijin should reap the benefits of this revitalization. At the same time, however, there was nothing in the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō or any other official program targeting burakumin that urged them to form ties with local Koreans in order to improve the communities they shared. Indeed, the parallel existence of the Kyōwakai program, with its heavy police involvement and rigorous schedule of events designed to teach Koreans how to be upstanding Japanese, may have made it easier for burakumin who observed these events to conclude that their Korean neighbors— even those who had lived in the area for many years up to that point—were still not really Japanese, and so were not yet full-fledged members of the community.

84. “Ōsaka-shi Asahi-ku Ikue-chō keizai kōseikai shui narabi ni kaisoku (sōan),” in Ōsaka no burakushi iinkai, Ōsaka no burakushi, vol. 6: Shiryō-hen, kindai 3, pp. 130–31. 85. Ibid., p. 129. 86. Ibid., p. 132.

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By the beginning of the Pacific War, Koreans in some communities had been living and working among the burakumin for nearly two decades. The war, and particularly the massive destruction that occurred during its final years, drastically altered the conditions of many urban buraku communities with large Korean populations. First and foremost, the devastation had an important impact on patterns of minority residential distribution in these communities. Many inner-city buraku communities like Nishihama and Mibiraki were destroyed by massive air raids in the spring of 1945, and their surviving residents scattered. In Kyoto’s Higashi Shichijō buraku community, by contrast, the population depletion was more selective, affecting the Korean population in particular. The Korean enclaves located in Kawabata-chō and Yakata-chō were forcibly dismantled in the closing months of the war, as the authorities ordered the removal of all structures under the elevated Tōkaidō and Nara lines to protect these vital railways from the anticipated bombing of the city that, in the end, never came. And in Yasunaka, located outside of the scope of destruction, a flood of refugees from the ruins of central Osaka—most of them burakumin and Koreans— settled in and around the area of “Korean town,” leading to the breakdown of former boundaries of the Korean and Japanese sections and a greater degree of residential integration in the community. At the same time, however, this influx strained the already inadequate resources of the community even further. Although less segregated along ethnic and class lines, Yasunaka was now even poorer than before. What the destruction and defeat meant in human terms, and how they influenced the way burakumin and Koreans related to one another in these communities, is difficult to comment on with any degree of certainty because so little reliable information is available. What evidence there is seems to suggest, again, a variety of outcomes that differed by community, though there were certainly instances of mutual avoidance and animosity as well as, less frequently, mutual reliance.

87. Maekawa, “Higashi Shichijō ni okeru sokai-chi seibi jigyō to barakku taisaku,” pp. 3–5. 88. Interviews with elderly residents of Yasunaka conducted at the Yasunaka rōjin sentā, Aug. 27, 1999.

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In Higashi Shichijō, tempers flared in the wake of Japan’s defeat. The empty lots underneath the rail lines into Kyoto Station had become the site of a sprawling shantytown of people disposed by the war. Among these were many Koreans, drawn to the area for its proximity to Kyoto Station, which was the starting point for the return trip to Korea. In the turmoil and privation that followed the surrender, this area soon became a hotbed of black market activity. Although Koreans were not the only ones involved in such profiteering, Japanese authorities on the local and national level were eager to capitalize on the image of brazen criminality on the part of “third country nationals” to turn the opinion of the Allied Occupation forces against the “others”— a tactic vaguely reminiscent of the Terauchi government’s scapegoating of the buraku minority during the Rice Riots. The negative publicity that Koreans received raised the specter of a vicious, criminal minority taking advantage of the downtrodden Japanese. At the same time, the increasingly strident homecountry nationalism displayed by the reorganized Korean movement in the area, which like similar groups in other Japanese cities with large Korean populations tended to portray Koreans as the victors and Japanese as the vanquished, exacerbated anti-Korean animosities among burakumin in Higashi Shichijō. The government’s unintentional removal 89. Interview with Pak Shil conducted in Higashi Kujō, Kyoto, May 6, 1999. 90. One infamous incident involving Koreans in the area was the Jan. 24, 1946, riot at the Shichijō Police Station, involving Koreans belonging to a group called the “Dainippon Chōsenjin Renmei” (Korean League of Great Japan), and Chinese belonging to the “Kyōto Kakyō Rengōkai” (Kyoto Federation of Overseas Chinese). Both groups had posted signs in Kyoto Station declaring that certain sections of the public space were their offices for assisting Koreans and Chinese wishing to return to their home countries. After the police removed these signs, a large mob of members from the two organizations headed to the Shichijō Police Station to protest the removal and get their signs back. Gangs of “tekiya” thugs from Higashi Shichijō confronted them outside the building. The ensuing violence lasted for hours and resulted in several deaths on both sides. Although it was far from clear who had actually started the violence, and even though the police had probably called on orga nized criminal elements in Higashi Shichijō for assistance, newspapers blamed the violence entirely on the Koreans and Chinese. Incidents such as this contributed to a postwar narrative of Japa nese victimization at the hands of arrogant, criminal, (and ungrateful?) “third-country nationals” in the aftermath of the defeat. For a melodramatic account of the incident that is very much part of this genre, told from the perspective of one of the Higashi Shichijō gangsters involved, see Yamadaira, Zankyō, pp. 87–120.

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of Koreans from the community in the closing days of the war, followed by the campaign to blame Koreans for lawlessness and disorder after the defeat, released pent-up Korean frustrations and led to a spike in violent clashes between Koreans and burakumin in the late 1940s. The interminority relationship that would develop in Higashi Shichijō in the years to come played out against this backdrop. In Yasunaka, as in areas with large Korean populations throughout Japan, the defeat caused the Korean population to plummet. One elderly resident who lived near the largest area of Korean settlement during the war recalled that the whole area was suddenly “on the move,” leaving the “Korean town” of Yasunaka all but abandoned within a few weeks after August 15, 1945. In the midst of this Korean exodus, tensions similar to those observed in Higashi Shichijō and elsewhere appeared in Yasunaka, as some Koreans took one last opportunity to settle scores or kick their Japanese neighbors while they were down by vandalizing their property and disrupting buraku businesses. Yasunaka’s location on the edge of the Osaka industrial belt, however, caused postwar relations to play out differently than they did in Higashi Shichijō. Yasunaka was never a focal point of black market activities or militant Korean activism, and the relationships that developed between Yasunaka’s buraku residents and Koreans who stayed or subsequently moved into the community seem to have brought the two minorities closer together during the 1950s. Residentially the community was more integrated than it had been prior to the war, with Koreans and burakumin now living together in some of the community’s most run-down structures. There were even cases of intermarriage between the two minorities in the early years of the postwar period, especially between buraku women who had lost their husbands in the war and Korean men

91. Interviews with elderly residents of Yasunaka, conducted at the Yasunaka rōjin sentā, Aug. 27, 1999. 92. Buraku kaihō dōmei Ōsaka-fu rengōkai, kaihō shinbunsha Ōsaka shikyoku, Hisabetsu buraku ni ikiru Chōsenjin, p. 6. 93. Saeki Chizuko (interviewed on Mar. 1, 1999), Son Haksu (interviewed Sept. 4, 1999), and a group of elderly residents of Yasunaka (interviewed Aug. 27, 1999) all recall that after the war a group of dilapidated buildings known as the Takada Apartments were home to many Koreans and some of the poorest burakumin in Yasunaka.

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who had been long-term residents of the area prior to 1945. On the whole the community was poorer than it had been before the war. But as the immiseration spread more equitably and the influx of new Korean arrivals slowed considerably due to the collapse of the empire, community bonds formed across lines of ethnicity, based on shared needs and experiences. This situation continued until the late 1960s, when the state intervened again, this time in the form of community improvement projects called for by the 1965 “Report of the Dōwa Policy Deliberative Council.” Relations between Koreans and burakumin during the first half of the twentieth century formed and foundered in response to a variety of factors, all related in one way or another to the state, empire, and the positions that each minority aspired to within the majority culture. The influence of imperialism as a worldview had a profoundly limiting influence on the degree to which Suiheisha leaders were able to comprehend and sympathize with the predicament and desires of Korean activists. Even when Koreans such as Pak Chun’ggm voiced critiques of Japanese discrimination against Koreans that resonated with Suiheisha criticism of the problems that anti-buraku discrimination posed for Japan’s mission in Asia, a desire to avoid appearing subversive by joining hands with the other minority in accusing the majority of wrongdoing, as well as a suspicion of the other minority’s motives in supporting the war effort, prevented the appearance of a Korean-buraku “united front” against discrimination. On the subaltern level, in the mills and mines where both minorities worked as well as in the communities where they lived, the constant influx of Korean arrivals in the buraku communities did not alone shape the way those relations developed from the beginnings of contact in the 94. While there are no statistics on rates of intermarriage in the community, elderly residents (interviewed Aug. 27, 1999) recall that such marriages occurred in the late 1940s in particular. Son Chunmi, who was the daughter of one such couple, recalls many marriages of this sort among friends of her parents. She also points out that these were generally marriages arranged between the Korean men and very impoverished buraku widows. (Interview with Son Chunmi, conducted at her home in Yasunaka, Sept. 5, 1999.) 95. For a more thorough analysis of interminority relations in Yasunaka during the postwar period through the early 1980s, see Bayliss, “Grass-Roots ‘Multiculturalism,’ ” pp. 121–41.

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early 1920s through the end of the Pacific War. Instead, approaches to managing the workforce in industries such as textiles and coal mining prevented Korean and buraku laborers from either finding sustainable common cause or coming into more than occasional conflict. At the community level, patterns of Korean settlement in the buraku areas that had created ethnic enclaves probably shielded many migrants from anything beyond incidental contact with the burakumin, in much the same way that the externally imposed segregation and isolation of buraku communities limited interactions between the most impoverished burakumin and majority society. Moreover, as the state instituted new methods to mobilize Koreans and burakumin for the war effort—methods that diverged in regard to the perceived cultural proximity of each minority to the Japanese majority—it inadvertently provided burakumin with a justification for viewing Koreans as an officially “foreign” element within their communities. At the heart of the relationship between Koreans and the burakumin were concerns about pride and place engendered by a hierarchy that was itself a product of empire. This hierarchy, as we saw in Chapter 1, had left the question of the relative statuses of the burakumin and colonized peoples such as the Koreans unanswered by imposing the notion of a cultural difference between burakumin and other Japanese (to explain the apparent “deviance” of the minority). The popular myth of shared ancestry between the two minorities compounded the ambiguity of their situation, despite Kita Sadakichi’s scholarly critique. It is easy to understand, then, why many burakumin would seek to dissociate themselves from the Koreans living in their midst; elevating themselves within the hierarchy of empire required it. Although Koreans living in the buraku communities were much less concerned with their position in this imperial hierarchy than the burakumin were, the overwhelming prejudice against them in Japanese society caused them to look for a means of salvaging some sense of self-esteem. The similar position of the burakumin and the paekchfng presented them with a ready means of doing so: at least they could rest assured that there was nothing worse than being a paekchfng, even a Japanese paekchfng. This connection established, they then used the Japanese vocabulary of anti-buraku discrimination to disparage their neighbors. Whether they used Korean or Japanese terms to deride the burakumin, the con-

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cern was always to reaffirm the “proper” order of the relationship. This was the significance of the charge that Koreans in Yasunaka leveled at their neighbors; namely, that they were just “paekchfng acting like big shots” in pretending to be better than Koreans. This rivalry over relative worth and social status brings to mind a common phenomenon among groups at the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. David Roediger’s exploration of the construction of a “white” racial identity on the part of Caucasian wage laborers, which arose in self-aggrandizing contrast to a stereotypical image of the “black slave” in the northern states during the antebellum years, offered a similar case from a very different cultural milieu. Noel Ignatiev’s study of how Irish immigrants in pre– and post– Civil War Philadelphia embraced a “white” identity as a means of separating themselves from the free blacks with whom they had originally shared a sense of community is yet another. What is most remarkable about the Japanese situation, however, is that the state sent what was at best an ambiguous message about which group was to be valued more until quite late in the period under consideration. When it finally did tip its hand, moreover, it did so only with the subtle favoritism of divergent policies during the war years, while continuing to proclaim that the rhetoric of “impartiality and equal favor” applied to both. For its part, the majority never forgave either minority for being different from the image of the idealized Japanese subject. Burakumin may have enjoyed slightly more social acceptance, but only to the extent that their language fluency and familiarity with the dominant culture allowed them to “pass” in majority society; the discrimination they faced in marriage and employment remained, forcing most into socioeconomic circumstances on par with those of the Koreans. Due to all of these factors, Koreans in the buraku communities and their minority neighbors were forced to live at close quarters by similar forms of discrimination in employment and housing. Typically, the crowding together of economic competitors would cause violent flareups. Yet the apparent lack of violent clashes between the two minorities, the rarity of buraku community pacts against Korean settlement, and the stymied measures taken to force them out during the 1930s under 96. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. 97. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White.

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the Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō seem to suggest that, while the relationship was far from cozy, burakumin and Koreans found ways to tolerate each other during these years. To be sure, in most cases the reasons for putting up with one another—and even cooperating with one another on occasion—had more to do with self-interest than with a belief in the fraternity of the dispossessed; Asano Yoshitomo’s decision to fight for buraku liberation and Kurisu Shichirō’s efforts on behalf of Koreans in Nishihama may well have been a truly rare exception in this regard. Even so, whether it was buraku women and Korean men marrying in the wake of the Pacific War, Suiheisha organizers and Korean residents of Higashi Shichijō reaching out to one another in the wake of the flood, Koreans in Nishihama turning to Kurisu for help and entrusting him with the education of their children, or even buraku landlords who were willing to stick up for their Korean tenants in the face of community opposition, these acts by individuals of both minorities revealed a peculiar kind of mutual understanding and trust, born of the shared experience of living at the ostracized margins of Japanese society.

Conclusion: Prejudice, Policy, and Proximity on the Margins of Empire

After the collapse of Japan’s empire, the situation for the burakumin and the Korean populations diverged in dramatic ways. Although urban buraku communities in particular were more crowded and impoverished than they had been before the war, during the 1950s and 1960s a reorganized and resurgent buraku rights movement effectively pressured local governments to commit to improving the living conditions of their residents. These efforts culminated in the “Report of the Dōwa Policy Deliberative Council” of 1965, mentioned earlier, which made resolution of the “buraku problem” a priority of the state. The postwar experience for Koreans was far more challenging. During the Occupation the Japanese government moved cautiously but steadily to disenfranchise those Koreans who remained in Japan after the initial exodus, finally stripping them of their de facto Japanese citizenship by the time Japan regained its independence in 1952. This move reduced Koreans in Japan to the status of stateless persons until the normalization of diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea in 1965. Without 1. For a concise overview of the rise of the so-called administrative struggle (gyōsei tōsō) campaigns across the decade of the 1950s and the drafting and effects of the 1965 report, see Harada, Hisabetsu buraku no rekishi, pp. 365–86. 2. The normalization made it possible for Koreans to obtain ROK citizenship if they wished to do so. The large proportion of the minority that claimed allegiance to the DPRK, however, remained in essence “stateless” until 1981, when they were granted “special permanent residency” status in Japan by the Japa nese government under a revision of the Immigration Control Act.

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Japanese citizenship, they were denied access to national health insurance, unemployment benefits, and any of the other social security programs of the postwar welfare state. Koreans who resided in buraku communities watched as their buraku neighbors benefited from dōwa initiatives such as public housing, benefits that they could not access due to “nationality clauses.” The differences in treatment could hardly have been more striking for two minorities that had once been promised “impartiality and equal favor” as equal subjects of the emperor. The government’s approach to the burakumin in many respects fulfilled the “Ten Year Plan” of 1935; its orientation toward the Koreans, by contrast, who now had no imperial connection to the Japanese nation, was to stop trying to incorporate them. But although this divergence became most obvious in the postwar period, it had roots extending back as far as the 1920s, in the form of legacies of prewar policies and minority reactions to state initiatives, majority prejudice, and the experience of being marginalized in Japan.

Minorities Imagined The basic stereotypes of burakumin and Koreans arose during a period of four decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century. Ideas about the burakumin drew from premodern materials— old tales of the foreign origin of their supposed outcaste forebears and pervasive folk beliefs about their defiling influence—that were reinterpreted in line with new ways of conceptualizing human beings and their societies. Most significant among these new views of society were social Darwinism and its attendant regimes of hygiene and eugenics, as well as evolving conceptions of proper behavior and deviance. Stereotypes pertaining to Koreans emerged over a shorter period than did those of the burakumin, and so relied less on premodern antecedents. Even so, the social Darwinian arguments that many Japanese commentators employed to justify Japan’s imperialist encroachment upon Korea—namely, that the Korean people were “weak” and thus needed 3. In actuality, the Public Housing Law of 1951 contained no such stipulations. For the details of how the struggle for public housing played out in Yasunaka and the effect it had on relations between Koreans and burakumin in the 1970s, see Bayliss, “GrassRoots ‘Multiculturalism,’ ” pp. 124–27.

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Japan’s help and protection to survive—resulted in many of the same stereotypes being applied to Koreans by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. Both minorities were described as filthy, debaucherous, violent, and lacking the will for self-improvement—in other words, the antithesis of the ideal Japanese citizen/subject as conceived by the state and majority society during the Meiji period. Indeed, the negative images applied to these minorities evolved in tandem with the rise of this idealized image of “proper” Japanese behavior. In the process, contradictions arose among the various stereotypes applied to them: burakumin and Koreans were conceived of as being gullible yet circumspect, lazy yet tenacious, and cowardly and subservient but also given to acts of extreme violence and subversion, among other contradictory images. These contradictory stereotypes had the effect of making discrimination all but inescapable for individuals who belonged to either of these minorities: if they were a known burakumin or Korean, then whatever they did would probably reaffirm some sort of prevalent stereotype against their group, thereby reaffirming for the majority the “fact” of minority difference and deviance. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the stereotypes applied to Koreans and burakumin marked them as deviant in cultural terms; that is, the lifestyles, values, and everyday practices of these groups were what set them apart from the majority and what seemed to affirm their supposed deviance and lack of patriotism. The perceived cultural deviance of the Koreans was a product of unfortunate history. Whether seen from the perspective of teitairon, dōsoron, or the many views from the “grassroots” that appeared from the 1890s onward, the “Korean problem” was always viewed in developmental and historical terms, as the product of the “backwardness” of Korean civilization and the malignant historical influence of Chinese civilization on it. The assumed deviant cultural practices of the burakumin, by contrast, were, starting in the 1880s, linked in vague, unexamined ways to images of disease, inbreeding, and other biological features. By the turn of the century, a popularly held, vaguely biological notion of “bad blood,” linked with images of inherent poverty and criminality, served as the underlying explanation of what was wrong with them. At the same time, a redefined notion of social status, in which burakumin— and especially poor burakumin—were deemed as worthy of less respect than other

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Japanese, continued to shape reactions to their attempts at asserting their equal rights as citizens and subjects of the emperor. Such views of the burakumin proved to be very resistant to change in the decades to come.

Yūwa, Dōka, and State Approaches to Burakumin and Koreans The state response to its “minority problems” drew on the ideas of “conciliation” ( yūwa) and “assimilation” (dōka). Yūwa referred to a vague, utopian notion of the majority accepting the minority as equals, and of all animosities being laid to rest as majority and minority individuals alike came to see the good in one another. This idea found its expression in two forms: the universalistic humanism of associations like the Dōaikai, which proclaimed that all human beings should treat one another with love and respect; and the nationalistic ideologies of ikkun banmin and isshi dōjin, represented primarily by groups such as the Yamato Dōshikai, Teikoku Kōdōkai, and Sōaikai, which claimed that minorities were equally the subjects of the Japanese emperor. The former expression of this idea appeared only briefly, during the vibrant years of imperial democracy in the 1920s; the latter expression, drawing as it did on ideologies that buttressed the imperial institution itself, was a point of reference for a wide variety of groups throughout the period examined here. Yet yūwa alone was far too vague to serve as a basis for a proactive government minority policy. Furthermore, the very ideologies of ikkun banmin and isshi dōjin that many reformers and activists referred to in decrying the persistence of discrimination were not compatible with the idea of diversity among the ruled. For true “conciliation” to come about, as Kita Sadakichi’s writings on burakumin and Koreans argued, minorities would first have to assimilate to the majority. Only then could the majority be expected to welcome these minorities into the nation as equals; only then could burakumin and Koreans be considered truly “Japanese.” The rising sense of national crisis in the 1930s compelled the state to look for new ways of pulling society together and mobilizing all of its resources. Minorities were not overlooked in this drive. Moreover, when the state turned to the buraku and Korean minority problems with renewed interest, it stressed dōka over yūwa, though what “assimilation” entailed for these minorities turned out to be quite different for each.

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The state’s buraku policies sought to eradicate the poverty that had made buraku communities conspicuous and contributed to their stigmatization. If the poverty of their communities could be expunged—and particularly if the burakumin could achieve this feat for themselves—then the vicious cycle of poverty and discrimination would cease, along with the deviant modes of behavior presumed to exist within these communities. Once this was achieved, policymakers argued, the burakumin would become ordinary Japanese in the eyes of all concerned. Policymakers assumed that the burakumin understood the importance of these objectives, agreed that they were desirable, and were capable of actively participating in their realization. Incentive, rather than coercion, was thus a major feature of such policies. In regard to the Korean minority, however, the state took a much more authoritarian and coercive approach. Here the problem was considered to be first and foremost one of culture rather than poverty. State policies thus set out to eradicate a wide range of Korean cultural practices and replace them with majority modes of behavior. A main goal of these policies was discouraging the use of the Korean language and promoting proficiency in Japanese, but other objectives included changing the clothes Koreans wore, the foods they ate, and even the names they used. The authorities in charge of these policies furthermore did not expect the Koreans to understand the desirability of such aims, or be willing to actively pursue them on their own; so unlike programs for the burakumin, Koreans were granted no agency in this process— coercive control was used instead. This mindset was as true of the “philanthropic” measures implemented under the Sōaikai as it was of the state-center “harmonization” initiatives of the Kyōwakai: although they differed in their opinion of whether there was anything worthy of preserving in the Korean cultural tradition, neither organization expected the laborers and community members they dealt with to play a role in the administrative decision-making process. In the end, the difference in these dōka policies was determined by the degree of cultural proximity each minority had to the majority, as perceived by the authorities. Despite the negative stereotypes that had marginalized the burakumin from Japanese society, the authorities in charge of devising and implementing policies to address the “buraku problem” were well aware that the vast majority of burakumin held

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views and values similar to majority Japanese due to their shared cultural and educational experiences. The Korean minority, however, struck authorities as a much more alien group, in large part because they spoke a different language and wore unusual clothing. These distinctions became a cause of intense concern in the late 1930s, in light of the “unprecedented crisis” facing Japan. In their bureaucratic quest for uniformity, government authorities never thought to ascertain whether adherence to majority cultural norms was a necessary prerequisite for loyalty to Japan. Likewise, they never seriously considered the possibility that deep-seated popular prejudice against these minorities might persist even if they began to talk, behave, and live their daily lives in ways that more closely resembled the idealized image of the majority culture.

Socioeconomic Stratification, Assimilation, and Conflicted Identities Throughout the period we have examined, burakumin and Koreans in Japan were overwhelmingly poor. And yet successful entrepreneurs and business leaders emerged within both minority communities. While there were only a few of these individuals, they comprised a minority bourgeoisie that often commanded considerable wealth and power. Some indeed may have used their financial acumen to raise themselves up and out of their communities, attempting to disappear into the company of their class peers in majority society by covering all traces of their minority backgrounds. Others, however, never disowned their minority roots, even though being the economic and political elite of their communities put them in a delicate position in relation to their minority identities. On the one hand, many owed the very success they had achieved to the minority community, its industries, and its laborers. Such was the case of the leather magnates of Nishihama and Higashi Shichijō during the latter half of the Meiji period, and the Korean labor contractors and boarding house operators during the 1920s and 1930s. On the other hand, their success brought them into closer contact with majority society and led to greater involvement with the state. As they rose to social and economic prominence, they came to adopt majority views of the world, views that had a crucial influence on the way they came to understand their own minority.

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The buraku bourgeoisie of the late Meiji period and the Korean bourgeoisie of the 1930s, although they appeared in different decades, provided strikingly similar examples of minority identities stretched between a sense of belonging to majority society and the Japanese nation, on the one hand, and their own minority, on the other. Both viewed their respective minorities through majority eyes, and decried what they saw in terms that reflected common prejudices against Koreans and burakumin. At the same time, however, they felt deeply annoyed with the majority, and sometimes even the government authorities charged with dealing with the minority, for their prejudices. Both likewise accused the majority of the heresy of ignoring the patriotic ideals of ikkun banmin and isshi dōjin that had defined the emperor’s benevolent relationship to all of his subjects, regardless of their background. Yet there were differences in the way these affluent strata of their respective minorities reacted to discrimination and marginalization. Nationalistic arguments against discrimination continued to be voiced by buraku activists after the Meiji period, and were even appropriated by the Suiheisha, as we have seen. But by the middle of the 1920s the leading voices of buraku minority activism—men like Matsumoto Ji’ichirō and other Suiheisha leaders, who were clearly part of an affluent and privileged stratum of the buraku community—had come to embrace ideologies that their late Meiji forebears would have viewed as dangerous and subversive. Nothing like this was observed among the Korean minority; although Korean students in Japanese universities continued to be motivated by “subversive ideologies” until Korea’s liberation, we must recall that, as a group, students spent a comparatively short time in Japan, and usually returned to Korea afterward. Their orientation toward Japanese society was shaped more by their experience of having a small but powerful population of Japanese on the peninsula rule over a vast majority of Koreans than it was by living as members of a despised minority within a Japanese majority. To be sure, differences in the political climate of the 1920s and 1930s were one factor that may have prevented affluent Koreans from criticizing the state beyond an appeal to the rhetoric of “impartiality and equal favor”; this period, after all, ushered in an age in which criticism of the authorities received increasingly harsh suppression. Yet pressures on affluent Koreans in Japan had less to do with the political climate of the

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times and more to do with the difficulty of having a connection to the less fortunate masses of “ordinary” Koreans in Japan, whose lifestyle often seemed alien to the majority Japanese. In order to prevent being identified with such an alien lot, whose loyalties to the nation were suspect, the Korean bourgeoisie felt more compelled than their contemporaneous class peers in the buraku minority to display their unswerving loyalty to the Japanese nation.

The Politics of Minority Identity: Perspectives of the Leadership versus the Rank and File Much of this study has focused on what I have termed the politics of minority identities in prewar and wartime Japan. Koreans and burakumin negotiated the terms of their respective group identities on two interrelated levels. The first was between movement and community leaders, on the one hand, and the state and majority society on the other. In this case, minority leaders chose to highlight certain features of their group as a way of promoting minority interests through affinities to other social movements, or to decry popular prejudice and institutional discrimination on moral grounds. The appeals to the minority’s patriotism and the imperial command of isshi dōjin were one example of this identity creation; claims of the proletarian nature of the Korean and buraku minorities and the need for working-class solidarity were another. The second level on which minority groups negotiated identity issues was between these movement and community leaders, on the one hand, and the rank-and-file members of their movements and subaltern of their communities, on the other. Here the views of the rank and file were seldom clearly articulated, but their concern for preserving a sense of community autonomy could be seen in the way they “voted with their feet” in response to platform shifts within the organization that claimed to represent their interests. In regard to the first level, both the Korean and buraku movements used conceptions of minority identity to try to connect themselves to the wider proletarian movement in Japan and gain allies for their own causes from within it. Yet Korean activists were much less inclined to use characterizations of their own minority identity to try to exert moral suasion over the Japanese majority. The early appeals of student activists

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to the idea of Korean national self-determination were intended to exercise moral suasion over the international community, rather than the Japanese majority. Korean appeals to slogans such as isshi dōjin, too, came from individuals such as Pak Chun’ggm and Pak Pyfng’in, who, as we have seen, made up only a tiny minority within a minority, and had very little support from the Korean community in general. For its part, when the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei tried to convince Japanese of the injustice of discriminating against Koreans, it argued only that Japanese laborers should not behave in such a reactionary manner to their class allies, the Korean laborers. Moreover, Korean activists were much less interested than their buraku counterparts in making use, even tactical use, of appeals to Korean membership in the Japanese nation in order to decry the injustice of discrimination. The situation was similar on the level of negotiations between the leadership and the rank and file in each movement. Fluctuations in membership were a rough barometer of the degree to which “ordinary” Koreans and burakumin understood and agreed with the platforms and minority identities advocated by organization leaders, and we have seen how rankand-file membership levels rose and fell in relation to changes in the platforms of these movements that redefined their “official line” on minority identity. In particular, Koreans seem to have lost interest in these minority-based organizations when the interpretation of Korean minority identity offered by them subsumed Korean identity and community autonomy to an entity outside of the Korean ethnic community. The lack of enthusiasm that Korean workers in general displayed for Zenkyō in the wake of the sudden dissolution of the Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei provides a poignant illustration. The community-based Korean consumers unions that arose thereafter continued to maintain close ties with Zenkyō, but only because Koreans understood that the closest allies they could hope for among the majority were involved in such leftist organizations; associating with the majority Left was not objectionable to most Koreans in Japan, but ceding all of their organizational autonomy to the majority was. The rank and file in the Suiheisha, by contrast, was much more amenable to asserting a Japanese identity even while they showed a concern for preserving the autonomy of the community. Evidence from the earliest years of the Suiheisha—when the organization advocated a separatist,

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minority nationalism—is inconclusive in this regard: some among the rank and file embraced the eta-zoku rhetoric; others, both within the Suiheisha and among the subaltern of the wider buraku minority, found the Suiheisha’s use of such terms offensive. Yet most burakumin who joined the fledgling Suiheisha probably were attracted by the sense of empowerment provided by the Suiheisha’s call for “hurling back labels of derision.” The Suiheisha provided them with strength and solidarity in the face of omnipresent majority prejudice. Furthermore, the fervent patriotism of local Suiheisha groups, such as the Higashi Shichijō branch and its frequent processions to the mausoleum of the Meiji emperor, suggest that the rank and file embraced their identity as Japanese. This appreciation of the movement and the relation of the minority to the majority continued throughout the period examined in this book. Rank-and-file abandonment of the Suiheisha during the struggle over dissolution was not motivated by an aversion to associations with the majority working class; it was the idea of ceding all prerogatives to the working-class movement, including the control over when and how to protest against acts of discrimination, that caused many rank-and-file members to balk at the proposal. Furthermore, even amid the rising tide of ultra-nationalism in the late 1930s, with its climate of public disapproval for placing group interests above those of the nation, Suiheisha branches continued to launch kyūdan campaigns and other demonstrations against official discrimination, while at the same time professing their support for the war effort. Just as it had been an important factor in shaping state minority policies and bourgeois minority reactions, the cultural proximity of each minority group to the Japanese majority played a significant role in shaping the identities embraced by the rank and file of minority movements, as well as the subaltern of both minority communities. More than their class location within Japanese society or the nature of the political ideology espoused by the movements that represented them, their position in ethnic terms in relation to the “Japanese nation” had a significant influence on the degree to which burakumin and Koreans were willing to involve themselves in majority society. This is not to suggest that ethnic identities are “natural” or intrinsic to the individuals who embrace them. At the subaltern level of these two minorities in pre1945 Japan, however, we should recognize that, although burakumin and

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Koreans alike faced very similar stereotypes and forms of discrimination, an amorphous sense of “being Japanese” or “being Korean,” informed by cultural practice and social experience, decisively influenced the extent to which individuals were prepared to interact with majority society. In stating this I am not arguing that culture trumps everything. Koreans’ reaction to their position in Japan was as much a response to the policies of the state as it was to the day-to-day experience of discrimination at the hands of the majority. The fact that by the 1930s the subaltern of Korean communities in urban areas like Osaka saw the wisdom of cooperating with certain elements in majority society—Zenkyō-affiliated labor organizers and sympathetic individuals such as Kurisu Shichirō in particular— suggests that the government might have managed to achieve greater cooperation and control from the minority if it had only employed an approach to dealing with it that was less like the intrusive initiatives of the Kyōwakai program and more like the cooperative approach taken toward the Suiheisha. In other words, if the police and other authorities charged with looking after Koreans had chosen to cultivate a dialogue with local Korean groups, suppressing radicals while at the same time rewarding moderates for their cooperation—much as was the case with the Suiheisha during the late 1930s—they may have succeeded in gaining the support of these groups for the war effort. As we have seen, however, those in a position to enact such a policy were the least likely to do so; their preoccupation with “culture” as a litmus test for loyalty militated against it.

The Shaping of Interminority Relations The degree to which each minority chose to involve itself with majority society also had consequences for its relations with the other minority. Earlier I noted the factors that inhibited the emergence of sustained cooperation between organizations representing burakumin and Koreans. The most detrimental to the formation of a viable joint movement against discrimination was the subtle yet powerful influence of Japanese imperialism: just as the Japanese imperialist worldview subordinated the interests of the colonized to those of Japan through appeals to “common ancestry” and, later, to the “co-prosperity” of all Asians, Suiheisha leaders

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and many sympathetic rank-and-file members typically saw Korean interests as subordinate to those of the burakumin. What was good for the buraku minority, according to this view, was good for the Korean minority as well. This is not meant to imply that Suiheisha activists who held such a view of the Korean problem were necessarily arrogant or disingenuous in doing so; both the former Suiheisha leader Kurisu Shichirō as well as the Osaka Suiheisha member and editorial writer Matsutani Isamu seem to have believed strongly that the principles of the Suihei movement—however vaguely defined they might have been—would free all those in Japanese society from the yoke of prejudice once realized. From the perspective of most Korean activists, however, there was quite simply no viable way of remaining in Japanese society without facing discrimination due to their status as colonized people. Doubts about the sincerity of the Suiheisha aside, most Korean activists probably saw the Suiheisha as an organization committed to solving a related but different set of problems than their own. The possibilities of sustained, substantive cooperation between minority movements during these years foundered on this point: the need for movement leaders on both sides to define minority identities so as to attain advantages for the movement and the minority it represented ultimately meant that they were preoccupied with problems specific to that minority group. As a result of this inward focus, a deeper examination of the causes of discrimination and social injustice, and of how these affected both minority communities as well as other groups in Japanese society, was never undertaken. Nor did sustained cooperation emerge between burakumin and Koreans where they came into contact most frequently: in the buraku communities into which Koreans settled during the prewar period. The most common reactions to the influx of Koreans around this time ranged from mutual animosity and avoidance to a grudging acceptance of one’s new neighbors as an unavoidable sign of the times and one’s impoverished situation. Competition for jobs and other resources was obviously a major reason for this attitude, but other factors played a part in the groups’ mutual discrimination, including the prejudices of the Japanese majority and imperialistic attitudes about the relative worth of the Japanese and their colonial charges. Korean migrants arrived in the buraku communities with no prior knowledge of the burakumin, but once these Korean migrants became

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aware of the “special status” of this particular group of Japanese, and learned what the majority thought of them, they quickly came to refer to the burakumin derisively as the “paekchfng of Japan.” For Koreans frustrated by the discriminatory treatment they faced from all classes of Japanese—including their impoverished buraku neighbors who were no better off than they—the connection between the burakumin and something so familiar to their own cultural experience gave them a readily available pariah to place themselves above. The burakumin, who acted so much like majority Japanese, and yet at the same time were despised by them in much the same way that the Koreans were, became a convenient “stand in” for all Japanese: through ridiculing the burakumin, Koreans found a ready means to vent their frustrations on the Japanese majority as a whole. For their part, when burakumin encountered the Koreans in their communities they already had a well-stocked arsenal of negative stereotypes to apply to them— and much as the Koreans found the existence of the burakumin useful, the Koreans served a similar role for the burakumin. The imperialistic worldview had consigned Koreans to a lower order than the Japanese within the empire. Since the burakumin considered themselves to be Japanese, they felt justified in placing themselves above their new Korean neighbors in the social hierarchy of the Japanese nation. We might see in this relationship a psychology of codependency among the discriminated—that everyone needs someone to feel better than. But promoting the idea that one is culturally closer to the majority than another similarly situated minority was a precarious means of salvaging self-esteem because its success ultimately hinged on what the state and majority society had to say on the matter. In cases where the state seemed to imply that the burakumin were more “legitimately” Japanese than the Koreans— such as in the disputes with Korean residents that occurred in the context of the Buraku Keizai Kōsei movement during the late 1930s—burakumin in communities with Korean residents sought at least to marginalize those Koreans’ position within the community, if not force them out entirely. Such occasions were rare, however. Since the rhetoric of the Japanese nation and empire never could be interpreted as favoring either group—this, indeed, was the very essence of “impartiality and equal favor”— and because the prejudices of society

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never granted one minority a clear privilege of status over the other, the threat of getting put back in one’s place on the margins, alongside other groups one might be tempted to compare oneself favorably with, never disappeared completely. In his memoirs, Suiheisha leader Kitahara Taisaku related exactly this kind of anxiety when describing a formative experience of discrimination from his childhood in the early Taishō period: “You’re not even a Japanese! Your ancestors were Korean prisoners brought back by Empress Jingū when she conquered the Three Kingdoms of Korea!” As Kureo Kōji heaped such abuse upon me, I felt as if I had been hit over the head with a large hammer. I had been humiliated before my homeroom teacher and so many of my classmates. I felt as if their stares were painfully piercing my body. . . . The education system of the time taught children that the Great Empire of Japan was a divine nation ruled by a living god, our emperor, and that the Yamato people were the most sublime in all the world. . . . The people embraced a superiority complex . . . and had prejudices against Chinese and Koreans planted within their minds. A narrow-minded, exclusionist patriotism was the current of thought among the people. Reflections of the imperialistic worldview of the times could be seen in Kureo’s words of abuse for me, as well as in my own way of thinking during my youth, which caused me to feel such shame at his tirade. In any case, being told that I was “not a Japanese” was a definite shock for me.

Kitahara’s observations about the effects of the prewar education system on popular views of Koreans and other Asians are certainly accurate, but his recollection of the incident reveals more than just the fact that his youthful view of the world—like that of countless other Japanese of his generation, burakumin and majority alike—bore the mark of anti-Korean prejudice. Despite the acceptance of anthropological theories that claimed the Japanese were the result of an amalgamation of Asian peoples that contained no small amount of Korean blood, a majority Japanese student in Kitahara’s class, confident and secure in the knowledge that he was a “pure Japanese,” probably would not have reacted with a sense of shame similar to being “hit over the head with a large hammer” had he been confronted with a similar allegation about his own remote ancestry. 4. Quoted in Kurokawa, Ika to dōka no aida, pp. 113–14.

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Situated on the margins of empire, burakumin like Kitahara never enjoyed this luxury of self-assurance. Even if state authorities trusted the burakumin more than the Korean minority in light of their relative cultural proximity to the majority, and even if burakumin consoled themselves with the thought that they were more like the majority than the Koreans, this in itself was not enough to guarantee full acceptance in Japanese society. To be closer, after all, implied that some sort of distance— and thus difference—from the majority remained. This was the dilemma that had plagued these minorities since the late Meiji period: assimilation was no guarantee of acceptance. Only when the majority no longer had any recognition of difference, past or present, could these minorities be accepted as equals. This unforgiving logic was as true for minority individuals as it was for the groups with which they bore an association. For burakumin and Koreans in Japan during the age of empire, it meant a place on the margins, regardless of whether they conceived of liberation from discrimination in terms of complete acceptance by the majority or complete freedom from association with it.

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Index

Absenteeism, 121, 328–29 Abuse: military, 368; worker, 298, 352 Academic Society of Great Korea, 109–10 Adachi Keijirō, 56–58 Adultery, 57 African Americans, 172n13, 173n16, 218, 272; bourgeoisie, 319–20; slaves, 31, 343, 379 Africans, 55n63, 66; South Africa, 343 Agriculture, 5; agricultural settlements, 228; and burakumin, 115–17; and colonial policy, 11, 112, 123, 313; and Koreans, 71, 123; Ministry of, 259, 287n41 Aichi Prefecture, 120–21, 216, 292, 293, 309, 327 Aid: emergency, 88, 340, 366, 369; mutual aid societies, 105, 108, 194– 98; and strikes, 215n111, 292, 354. See also Welfare, social Ainu, 1, 46, 50n53, 78; and origin of outcastes, 29n14, 33, 64, 101 Akashi Tamizō, 89, 94, 98–100 Alcohol, 54, 63, 176, 359, 365; illegal liquor, 250, 323, 332

Aliases, 324–25 All-Korea Youth Independence Corps, 186–87 Amagasaki, 217, 292, 357; city council, 302, 305, 317–18; shipping, 290– 91 Amino Yoshihiko, 4–5 Anarchists, 67, 161, 171n10, 206; “ana-bol” fissures, 188, 204, 207; and Koreans, 158n101, 188, 190, 200 Ancestry, common. See Kinship, racial/Nissen dōsoron An Chungggn, 68– 69 Annexation (of Korea), 49n51, 52, 62, 70, 72–73, 76, 253, 353; and Kita Sadakichi, 50, 145; and Korean migrants, 122; and students, 103–5, 107, 185 Anti-Semitism, 14n31. See also Israel; Jews Aoyagi Tanenobu, 28 Apologies, 91n33, 107, 263n88, 318, 361; and Dōaikai, 156; and kyūdan campaigns, 177, 202, 270, 285n39. See also Kyūdan campaigns

416

Index

Arima Yoriyasu, 153–57, 241, 248 Arita Hachirō, 327 Asada Zen’nosuke, 209–10, 279–80 Asakusa ward, 53, 153. See also Tokyo Asano Yoshitomo, 366– 69, 380 Asō Coal Strike, 354–55, 359 Assassination, 67–70, 142, 207n93; of Itō Hirobumi, 68–70, 142. See also Great Treason Incident; Murder Assimilation: in comparative context, 320; and Dōaikai, 163– 64, 222, 384; dōka, 18–19, 145–50, 152, 163, 222, 384–85; and dōsoron, 51; and education, 122, 237; forcible, 7, 252; and harmonization, 248–57; and imperialism, 14, 73, 313, 320–21; and interminority relations, 368, 370; and Korean politicians, 302–5, 313–16; Korean reactions, 322–23; and Kyōwakai, 252–57, 297, 368; and labor, 133, 162, 213, 239, 302; linguistic, 294; naichi dōka, 253; and nation, 101–2, 247; and self-rejuvenation, 240–48; Sōaikai, 162– 65, 222; and stereotypes, 77–78; and tenson minzoku, 147–48, 150. See also Yūwa Autonomy: of Ainu/Okinawans, 78; burakumin, 98, 245; community, 322, 388–89; of Korea, 15, 73, 103; Korean activists, 219; organizational, 157, 205. See also Self-rule Banks: Dai-Ichi Bank, 72, 73; Yanagihara Bank, 89– 90 Beautiful tales (bidan), 253–54 Bidan. See Beautiful tales Birth rates, 65 Black market, 330, 375, 376

Bloodlines, 38, 43–44, 149n79; kettō, 38 Bolshevism. See Communism; Revolution Bombing/air raids, 208n95, 230, 239–40, 328, 331, 374 Botsman, Daniel, 25, 26n4 Bourgeoisie, 152, 170, 189– 90, 193, 203, 206, 291, 315; black bourgeoisie, 320; bourgeois democracy, 166, 210; bourgeois revolution, 203, 208; buraku/Korean bourgeoisie compared, 318–19; burakumin bourgeoisie, 16–17, 84– 91, 95, 99, 103, 111, 210, 318–19, 386–87; colonized bourgeoisie, 321; feminist bourgeoisie, 182n39; Korean bourgeoisie, 16–17, 197, 236, 318–21, 349, 386, 388. See also Wealth/affluence Boycotts, 106–7, 372 Brethren (as term), 173, 190, 253–54 Brooks, Barbara, 57–58 Buddhism, 94n40, 138, 142; Jōdo Shin, 96, 367 Buraku Iinkai Katsudō, 267–76, 283–84, 291, 347 Buraku Improvement Policy, 62– 65, 95. See also Improvement, community; Kaizen Buraku Keizai Kōsei Undō, 243–45, 252, 257, 259, 267; and interminority relations, 371–73, 380 Buraku Kōsei Kōmin Undō, 257, 279–80 Buraku Liberation League, 2–3n2, 37n30 Burakumin: buraku kinrō taishū, 274; “buraku first,” 206; hiappaku buraku, 274, 278; as Lost Tribe of Israel, 101–2, 149n79; as “paek-

Index chfng of Japan,” 393; saimin buraku, 99, 245; tokushu buraku, 64, 96, 99, 173 202; wealthy, 67, 85– 94, 98–103, 153, 170, 319 “Buraku problem,” 92, 95, 101, 113, 138, 242, 279, 385; Dōaikai and Sōaikai, 151–52, 156–57; and educational policy, 247; as ethnic problem, 218; and government rhetoric, 150, 261– 62, 288, 349, 381; and Marxism, 3, 202; and social status, 268 Burial, 296 Cannibalism, 261 Capitalism, 87n18; and imperialism, 217–18; monopoly capitalism, 3–4; overthrow of, 203, 209, 218 Carcasses, animal, 25, 52, 80–81, 85, 170 Caricatures, 108. See also Stereotypes Censure, 21, 155, 173, 176, 318, 341; kyūdan campaigns, 155, 176–77, 202, 208n95, 269–70, 276, 278, 283–85, 367, 390 Central Conciliation Projects Council. See Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai Chain migration, 124, 132, 330, 358, 362 Characters, Chinese: and names, 325–26; and literacy, 55, 162, 215; and terminology, 64, 196, 261n82, 344. See also Language; Literacy Cheju Island, 290– 91, 296– 97 Child labor, 121 China, 48n48, 246, 375n90; and Confucianism, 41; decline of, 23; and global politics, 186; immigrants from, 29n14, 64, 101, 273n12; Japanese contempt for, 348–49, 394; and Korea, 50, 59– 61,

417

148, 187, 311, 383; labor conscripts, 329; Pacific War, 221, 228–29, 242, 258–59, 276, 278, 327, 331, 346, 363; Sino-Japanese War, 42, 62, 70, 91 Ch’oe Un’gwfn, 212–13, 216 Ch’fndogyo, 141–42 Cholla province, 123 Chfng Sungbak, 367 Chōsenjin (as term), 253 Chōsenjin Rōdō Saishinkai, 196– 97, 198n77, 305 Chōsen Suiheisha, 343–44 Christianity, 67, 141–42, 187, 196, 198, 320 Chūō Kyōwakai, 250–52, 255; as Chūō Kōseikai, 262 Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai, 157, 241–46, 252, 254, 258– 62; and interminority relations, 362– 63; and Manchuria, 259– 60, 281n30; reorganization of, 261– 62, 279–80 Citizenship, 326n104, 381–84; “becoming Japanese,” 258, 321, 325, 368; and “family state,” 42; ideal citizen, 12, 24, 73–74, 76, 122, 368, 383; non-citizens, 332, 381–82; unified citizenry, 29, 40, 61. See also Patriotism Civilization (ideas about), 48, 51, 80, 383: “civilization gap,” 45; “civilization and enlightenment,” 12, 29, 32–33, 41–42, 53–56, 74–75, 83 Civil rights, 2, 9, 272; and United States, 10 Civil society, 74, 76, 275 Class, social: class consciousness, 7, 191, 193, 202, 206–7, 210, 291, 342; class struggle, 3–4, 7, 172, 191, 209, 211, 218; Korean middle class, 298–322. See also Bourgeoisie

418

Index

Clothing: Korean/Japanese, 250, 255, 299, 322–23, 385–86 Co-optation, 3n2, 18, 98, 139n56, 155, 157, 282, 333 Co-prosperity, 248, 278, 281n30, 307, 309, 348, 391; as “new order,” 247, 346–48 Coalmining, 69, 71; and interminority relations, 350, 353–55, 359, 377–78; and labor conscription, 238, 251, 328–30; as occupation, 116, 118, 123, 328 Colonialism: colonial policy, 48, 52, 141, 188n52, 311, 322; and communism/socialism, 273; and “cultural” rule, 144, 150, 311; and Suiheisha, 184. See also Imperialism Comintern, 267, 276n21 Commoners, 24–38, 43, 47, 81–82, 84n13, 286n40, 346; and marriage, 183; “new commoner”/“shinheimin,” 37, 64, 66, 89, 68n98, 113 Communism: American, 218, 273; ana-bol fissures, 188, 204, 207; and colonialism, 273; and interminority relations, 340; and Koreans, 188, 191, 194, 215, 216n113, 289– 91, 294– 97, 310n79, 346; and selfdetermination, 217n115; and Sōaikai, 161; and Suiheisha, 171–72, 202– 9, 241, 242n39, 271, 279, 340, 346. See also Comintern; Japan Communist Party; Revolution Conciliation. See Yūwa Conde, David, 9 Confucianism, 12, 33, 51, 61; and Tokugawa period, 28–29, 41 Conscription: draft-dodging, 66, 285, 287; labor, 7, 231n21, 238–40, 251,

255, 328–30; military, 35, 229, 258, 307, 313–15 Construction industry: and burakumin, 116–17; and interminority relations, 355, 357, 364; and Koreans, 112n1, 123–25, 128–29, 133, 185, 189, 194, 289n46, 290; and Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, 170, 281n30 Consumers: cooperatives, 244, 267; unions, 198n77, 215, 291– 97, 306, 389 Cornell, John, 86n17 Corpses: and outcastes, 25; Korean, 159–160n105, 189, 296 Corruption, 59, 71–72, 169; and Confucianism, 41 Cotton spinning, 130, 131n39, 161, 215n111, 301, 350 Crime, 26, 66 Criminals, 25; and burakumin, 63, 66– 68, 90, 98, 135, 383; and Koreans, 200, 295, 375, 383 Cultural rule, 144, 150, 311 Dai-Nippon Dōhō Yūwakai, 94– 95 Daiwa Hōkoku Undō, 348–49 basket worm dance, 82 Darwinism, Social, 12–13, 24, 42–52, 56, 75, 147, 185, 271, 337, 382 Debt, 131, 225 Defeat, war, 11, 230, 275n18, 280, 287–88; and interminority relations, 362, 374–76; and Korean independence, 186; and migration, 240 Defilement, 12, 25, 46, 56, 80–81, 247, 255n65, 260 Democracy, 113, 139, 145, 188; imperial, 164, 166– 67, 187, 222, 336; and

Index Suiheisha, 204, 210; Taishō, 134, 153 Depression, economic, 1, 222, 230. See also Recession/Downturn, economic Desertion, 328–29 DeVos, George, 10 Diet, 156n95, 157n96, 206, 249n49, 305–6; and Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, 276n21, 283, 347, 349; “mock Diet,” 108; and Pak Chung’ggm, 160n105, 302, 303n75, 310–14, 317, 349 Diplomacy, 29, 40–41, 184n47; diplomatic isolation, 221, 261; and Korea, 28, 40, 47n48, 107–8, 187, 381 Discipline (as value), 75, 107 Discrimination: and education, 83–84, 121n18, 183, 226–27, 242, 293; and employment, 1, 86, 115, 129, 131, 181, 226, 242, 298, 379; and household registration, 37; and housing, 1–2, 233, 292, 369, 379, 382; international covenant on racial, 113, 143–44, 146, 154; in military, 65, 242, 278–80, 285–87, 368; mutual, 369, 392; compared to racism, 13–14; in United States, 343; and wages, 9, 11, 118–19, 126–31, 213, 242, 250n51, 289, 352, 362 Disease, 52–56, 75, 120, 138n55, 383; cholera, 53, 55, 88; leprosy, 43–44; “toady’s disease,” 73, 110 Dissolution faction, 201–11, 267, 279. See also Factionalism; Suiheisha Dōaikai, 151–59, 163– 64, 170, 222, 241–42, 248, 305, 384 Dōhō Yūwakai. See Dai-Nippon Dōhō Yūwakai

419

Dōka, 18–19, 145–50, 152, 163, 222, 384–85; naichi dōka, 253. See also Assimilation Dōjō, 86, 96, 174. See also Sympathy Dōshikai. See Yamato Dōshikai Dōsoron. See Nissen dōsoron Dōwa, 288n42, 382; Deliberative Council Report, 2, 377, 381 Dōwa Hōkōkai, 261– 62, 280; See also Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai Dōwa Policy Deliberative Council Report, 2, 381 Dower, John, 330 Dōzoku, 94n40, 337; as term, 97, 99 Draft. See Conscription Duus, Peter, 49, 56 Economic revitalization, 245, 372–73 Education, 320, 394; absenteeism, 121; and assimilation, 122, 237; buraku, 88, 92, 95, 120–22, 164, 183, 204, 226–27, 246–47, 319, 386; discrimination, 83–84, 121n18, 183, 226–27, 242, 293; Dōaikai and Sōaikai, 162, 164, 170; and interminority relations, 367– 68, 380; and Koreans, 132–33, 159, 162, 215, 237–38, 292, 301, 315; and Kyōwakai, 237, 254, 256, 260, 294; moral, 55n63, 63, 159, 162; political, 204; and women, 121–22, 132, 183; yūwa/conciliation education, 246, 254, 260. See also Language; Literacy; Schools Education, Ministry of, 106, 247, 260 Ehime Prefecture, 83 Electoral politics, 283; and Koreans, 8, 160n105, 249, 302–14, 317; right to run, 302; voting rights, 302, 311, 313–14

420

Index

Elites, 15, 80, 85– 94, 103, 105, 107, 111, 119n14, 386 Elitism, 110, 187 Emancipation Decree. See Liberation Edict Emperor: and fascism, 276–77; as father, 14, 42, 177, 221; gratitude to, 96, 102, 178–79, 246; and Japanese names, 324; system, 3, 29–31, 47, 87n18, 167. See also Ikkun banmin; Isshi dōjin; Loyalty Empire. See Imperialism Employment: interminority competition, 226, 235, 350, 355–56, 359, 362– 64, 392 Empress Jingū, 28, 64, 179, 394 Enlightenment, 155–56; “civilization and enlightenment,” 12, 29, 32–33, 41–42, 53, 56, 75, 83 Entrepreneurs, 56, 58; buraku, 86, 89, 386; Korean, 158, 236, 298, 386; political, 8 Equality. See Inequality; Isshi dōjin Eta, 24–47 passim, 65– 68, 88– 92, 138, 148–49, 169, 172–75, 218, 287, 338n3, 369; “class consciousness called eta,” 206–7; “paekchfng (eta),” 344; “pride in being eta,” 89, 173, 181, 184, 208, 273 Ethnicity: ethnic community, 211–20, 389; ethnic nationalism, 5, 168– 69, 171n10, 173, 195, 293, 295, 297, 312, 318 Ethnocentrism, 48 Ethnologists, 147 Eugenics, 5, 12, 24, 43–45, 55n66, 56, 77, 273, 382 Europe, 153–54, 273; and imperialism, 23, 29, 58n71, 78, 218; Jews, 135n48, 319; and race, 50, 55, 65– 66; views

of Japan, 143, 144n69; and war, 174, 186. See also specific countries Excrement, 57 Executions, 25 “Exemplar Korean,” 256, 298, 300, 310n80, 322 Factionalism, 2–3, 208; ana-bol, 188, 204, 207; and Korean students, 105, 109; and Suiheisha, 201–11, 266– 67, 279 Factories: absenteeism, 328–29; and burakumin, 88, 115, 117, 287; and interminority relations, 351, 356, 364; and Koreans, 124, 194– 95, 238, 251, 290, 298– 99; and labor conscription, 238, 251, 328; sabotage, 287; strikes, 340–41, 368; and unions, 290; and women, 117, 351, 364n69 Family: family name, 286n40, 323–26; family state, 42, 78, 80; family psychology, 264; ie, 37–38, 58, 149n79, 324; interminority relations, 337; “weak branch family,” 50–51, 145 Family Registration Act, 35–39; family registers, 99n50, 114–15, 135n46, 262, 285–86, 326n104 Farmer-Labor Party, 205, 340, 283n34 Farmers, 87n18, 209–10, 223; tenant, 115, 123, 153, 182, 228; and interminority relations, 313; Korean, 124; and Manchuria, 228–29, 287n41 Fascism, 271, 276n21, 277, 347; Nazism, 271, 273 “Fellow Asians,” 248, 348, 368 Fellowship societies (shinbokukai), 104–5, 108, 110, 189, 194– 98.

Index See also Mutual aid societies; Mutual benefit societies Festivals, 82, 108n71 Feudalism, 43, 87n18, 210, 373; “feudal remnants,” 3–5, 203, 208, 214, 270 Filth, 56, 75, 77, 176, 360, 383; and eta, 25, 46 Flags, Korean, 331n117; Japanese, 250, 255 Floods, 88, 309, 340, 357–58, 369, 380; Kamo River, 358, 366 Food: assistance, 341; cost of, 356; denial of, 352; Korean, 255, 360, 385; procurement of 52, 267, 292; selling of, 367 Footwear: manufacture/repair, 25, 83, 85, 88, 92, 116–18, 224, 229 France, 144n69. See also Europe Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, 42 Fujii Kansuke, 46 Fujino Yutaka, 5, 11, 44n40, 64, 99, 134n44, 137n53, 228n16, 242n39, 260n77 Fujitani Toshio, 30n17 Fujiwara Seika, 28 Fukugawa Takeshi, 278n26, 348 Fukui Prefecture, 278n26, 283 Fukushima Prefecture, 170 Fukuyama Prefecture, 32, 34 Fukuzawa Yūkichi, 41–43, 47–48n48, 105n62 Fuse Tatsuji, 191 Futei senjin: publication, 190, 193, 203, 339; as term, 253 Gambling, 66, 250, 365 Gangs, work, 125, 193– 94, 325; bosses, 298; and interminority relations, 353–54

421

Garon, Sheldon, 263 Germany, 49, 186; Nazism, 271, 273. See also Europe Ghettoes/ethnic enclaves, 124, 233, 239, 250, 293, 322–23; and interminority relations, 358, 366, 369, 374–76; “Korea towns,” 124n27, 249, 322, 330, 333, 358, 369, 374–76 Ginseng, 158, 197, 303, 305, 310 Glue (nikawa), 85, 170 Gordon, Andrew, 166, 178, 263 Gotō Shinpei, 135 Governor-General (Korea), 144n71; Minami Jirō, 255, 263; Saitō Makoto, 151n82, 159n104, 311 Gratitude: to emperor/state, 34, 96, 102, 178, 246, 317; and Koreans, 70, 317, 375n90 Great Britain, 279n26; 287; and imperialism, 144, 186–87, 312, 327; and Jews, 319–20. See also Europe Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity. See Co-Prosperity Great Kantō Earthquake, 6, 159, 179, 198, 211, 261, 311 Great Treason Incident, 67– 68, 95, 98–102 Hamlets: impoverished (saimin buraku), 99, 245; Korean, 233; oppressed (hiappaku buraku), 274, 278; special (tokushu buraku), 64, 96, 99, 173, 202 Ha Myfngseng, 20, 355, 361, 370 Hanba-gashira, 195 Hangul, 162, 194, 215, 249, 292, 317n91. See also Language; Literacy. Hantō dōhō, 253 Hara Takashi, 138–39, 143, 250n54

422

Index

Harmonization, 2n2, 248–52, 256, 260– 62, 288. See also Dōwa; Kyōwa Harmony, 18, 139–40, 150, 163, 302, 310n80; and Co-Prosperity Sphere, 347; familial, 247; and Rice Riots, 153; and Sōaikai, 164, 222. See also Yūwa Hayashi Eidai, 354 Hayashi Razan, 28 Health: eugenic, 43, 45; insurance, 382; public, 56, 61, 140, 235 Heaven: heavenly ancestry, 49, 77, 147; Way of Heaven, 31–34 Hiappaku buraku, 274, 278 Hidaka Spinning Company, 350–51 Hierarchy: and empire, 321–22, 378, 393; and ie, 37; and interminority relations, 393; and nation-state, 47; racial, 13; and Tokugawa, 29 Higashi Kujō, 325. See also Kyoto Prefecture Higashi Shichijō. See Yanagihara Higashi Shichijō Suiheisha, 366, 368– 69 Higuchi Yūichi, 8, 11 Hijikata Tetsu, 19 Hinin, 24n1, 25–26, 27n9, 30–32, 38, 43, 338n3. See also Eta; Pariah status Hiragana, 162. See also Language; Literacy Hirano Shōken, 170–71, 174, 179, 185n47, 346; and Spy Incident, 207, 262n82 Hiranuma Ki’ichirō, 157, 241 Hirasawa Keishichi, 200 Hiroshima Prefecture, 83, 208n95 Hirota Masaki, 5, 42n38 Hisamoto Yukitaro, 269–70

Hokkaido, 96, 99, 101, 228, 329 Home Ministry, 98–100, 136, 137n52, 139n56, 150, 250, 327 Honesty, 58, 66; and Koreans, 71, 77, 317 Honjo ward, 160, 200n81, 233, 317. See also Tokyo Honsekichi, 36–39, 314, 328n108 Horiuchi Minoru, 8 Household registration. See Registration, household Housing, 11, 120, 215, 233, 357, 362; boarding houses, 194– 95, 197, 251n57, 298, 386; discrimination in, 1–2, 233, 292, 369, 379, 382; disputes, 215, 250n51; and interminority relations, 356–57, 369, 379; public housing, 318, 382; renters, 123, 250n51, 300, 356–57, 372; segregation, 194, 351, 353; subletting, 356. See also Landlords Howell, David, 26, 31, 35, 74 Humanism, 154, 384 Hur Kwangmu, 9, 20, 249 Hygiene, 5, 12, 24, 53, 55, 58, 62, 75, 138n55, 140, 244, 382; and buraku elites, 92, 94; and Koreans, 196, 250, 371; and public baths, 371–72 Hyōgikai. See Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai Hyōgo-ken Chōsen Rōdō Kumiai, 216, 219 Hyōgo Prefecture, 8, 20, 47, 196, 216–17, 255n66, 292, 302n72. See also Chōsenjin Rōdō Saishinkai Hyfngp’yfngsa, 338–40, 343–44, 346, 359 Hypocrisy: Japanese majority, 9, 17, 111, 145n71, 154, 172n13, 316, 319; Suiheisha, 342n14, 345

Index Ichibu no dōhō, 245–46 Ie, 37, 38n31, 149n79; and family names, 324; and women, 58 Iegara, 37 Ignatiev, Noel, 379 Ikaino, 233, 290– 97. See also Osaka Prefecture Ikue Keizai Kōseikai, 372–73. See also Osaka Prefecture Ikkun banmin, 178, 208, 221–22, 248, 348, 384, 387 Imanishi Hajime, 5, 33n23, 61 Imanishi Tatsu, 71 Im Chungjae, 346 “Impartiality and equal favor.” See Isshi dōjin Imperialism: and agriculture, 11, 112, 123, 313; and assimilation, 14, 73, 313, 320–21; British/European, 23, 29, 58n71, 78, 144, 186–87, 218 312; and capitalism, 217–18; and communism, 273; cultural rule, 144, 150, 311; hierarchy, 321–22, 378, 393; isshi dōjin, 144, 221, 344; and Suiheisha, 84. See also National self-determination Imperial Rule Assistance Association, 242, 279–80, 282, 283n34 Imports, 229, 313 Improvement, community, 87, 90, 93, 245, 283, 366, 377. See also Buraku Improvement policy; Kaizen; Self-improvement Inbreeding/consanguineous marriage, 44–45, 121n18, 383 India, 172n13, 218, 312, 343 Individualism, 72, 102 Industrialization, 11, 74, 112. See also Modernization

423

Industry: heavy, 112, “one industry, one union,” 216 Inequality: social, 134, 168; unequal treaties, 40n35, 69n102. See also Equality Inoue Kiyoshi, 86–87n18, 169n1 Insurance, 382 Intermarriage, 44n40, 77, 147, 376, 377n94 Ireland: and immigration, 379; Sinn Fein, 172n13, 218, 343 Isshi dōjin (“impartiality and equal favor”), 14, 31, 102, 248, 257, 261n82, 316, 318, 321, 384, 387–89, 393; and imperialism, 144, 221, 344; and interminority relations, 379, 382; and Pacific War, 281, 333, 379 Isolation: of burakumin, 93, 378; diplomatic, 221, 261; of Koreans, 7, 58, 104–5, 133, 140, 164, 237, 333, 353 Israel, 135n48; Lost Tribe of, 101–2, 149n79. See also Jews Itagaki Taisuke, 100 Itō Etsuko, 293 Itō Hirobumi, 60– 61, 107; assassination of, 68–70, 142 Itō Shigemitsu, 369 Itowaka Ryūko, 183 Iwamura Toshio, 7 Izuno Rikizō, 276, 337, 342, 343n17 Japan Communist Party, 3n2; establishment of, 202; and Koreans, 215, 289– 90, 295– 97, 346; and Suiheisha, 171, 202, 205, 208– 9, 242n39, 271, 279, 340 Japanese people (Nihon minzoku), 13, 148–49

424

Index

Japan Federation of Labor, 191 Japanization, 258 Japan Socialist Party, 3n2. See also Socialism Jews, 14, 172n13, 218, 279n26; “exception Jews,” 319–20; Jewish state, 175; and Nazis, 271–73; Lost Tribe of Israel, 101, 149n79; and Russian revolution, 135, 154, 175 Jigasei, 339 Jingoism, 327 Jinshu (as term), 13, 64 Jiriki kōsei. See Self-rejuvenation Jiyūmin, 5 Justice, social, 4, 153 Kagawa Prefecture, 82, 269 Kagawa Toyohiko, 153 Kaishō Tōsō Iinkai. See Zenkoku Suiheisha Kaishō Tōsō Iinkai Kaizen, 139; Buraku Improvement Policy, 62– 64; kaizen groups/ movement, 138–39, 152–54, 171, 176–77, 219, 244. See also Improvement Kameido, 200 Kameoka-machi, 54, 56. See also Tokyo Kanagawa Prefecture, 226, 323, 331, 363 Kaneko, Martin, 350 Kang, Hildi, 326n104 Kanghwa Treaty, 40, 60, 69n102 Kang Tfksang, 198n78, 199n79 Kansai, 20, 228, 296; and industry, 116n8, 131n39, 161, 350–52; labor unions, 211, 216, 291; and language, 68n98, 138n55 Kansai Chōsenjin Renmei, 337–38, 342, 346

Kantō, 180, 199n79; and buraku communities, 153, 225–27; Great Kantō Earthquake, 6, 159, 179, 198, 211, 261, 311 Kantō Suiheisha, 177, 207 Karataki Shōsaburō, 91, 98 Kashima, 371–73. See also Osaka Prefecture Katakana, 162, 196, 249n49. See also Language; Literacy Katō Hiroyuki, 31, 42 Kawabata-chō, 358, 374 Kawakami Hajime, 153–54, 241n37 Kawashima, Ken, 11, 125, 161, 165, 216n113, 233, 236n27 Keizai kōsei chiku. See Economic revitalization Kim Ch’anjfng, 8, 130, 131n39, 291, 294– 95, 352 Kim Chongbfm, 191– 93 Kim Chongjae, 332 Kim Hoyfng, 216 Kim Il Sung, 331 Kim Jungmi, 20, 342–43 Kim Okkyun, 47n48, 104 Kim Tuyfng, 188n52, 310n79 Kimura Kyōtarō, 338 Kim Yaksu, 191– 92 Kim Yfngdal, 197 King Kojong, 60, 107, 142 Kinship, racial/Nissen dōsoron, 45, 49–52, 72, 75, 147–48, 258, 337–78, 383 Kishiwada Cotton Spinning, 124n27, 130–31, 161, 289n46, 351n27 Kitahara Taisaku, 65, 209–10, 242n39, 276n21, 279–80, 394– 95 Kita Sadakichi, 50, 101n53, 145–51, 163, 172n13, 202–3, 222, 246, 268, 378, 384

Index Kiyohara Kazutaka. See Saikō Mankichi Kobayashi Sueo, 19 Kobe, 69, 132–35, 141n60, 197– 98, 231, 237, 239; and interminority relations, 355–56, 359– 60, 365 Kobe Chōsen Rōyūkai, 198 Kōdōkai. See Teikoku Kōdōkai Koiso Kuniaki, 262 “Kokumin ittai,” 222, 246. See also Unity Kokutai, 47, 154, 246–47; kokutai kannen, 250 Kokutokai (Black Wave Society), 188 Komai Kisaku, 170 Kōminka movement, 254n65, 255, 258 Konoe Fumimaro, 156, 242, 279, 309 Korea: annexation of, 50, 52, 62, 70, 72–73, 76, 103–7, 122, 145, 185, 253, 353; autonomy of, 15, 73, 103; and China, 50, 59– 61, 148, 187, 311, 383; cultural rule, 144, 150, 311; “Great Korea,” 111; “Korean problem,” 11, 262, 383, 392; migration from, 122–24, 132, 160, 250, 330, 350, 358–59, 362, 392; migration to, 240; and Nissen dōsoron, 49–52, 72, 147, 383; Protectorate, 60, 104–8; and “stagnation theory,” 48–49, 51, 311, 383; Three Korean Kingdoms, 28, 46; Treaty of Kanghwa, 60, 69n102; Treaty of Tientsin, 48n48, 60; and United States, 60, 141, 197n75, 186–87, 331 Koreans, “exemplary,” 256, 298, 300, 310n80, 322; “Korean-born Japanese,” 311, 315, 316; “senjin” (as term for), 253 Korea towns. See under Ghettoes/ ethnic enclaves

425

Kōtoku Shūsui, 67, 68n97 Koyama Montarō, 205–7, 219 Kurisu Shichirō, 177–79, 366– 69, 380, 391– 92 Kuroda Hisao, 191 Kurokawa Midori, 5– 6, 20, 44n40, 63n83, 64, 83, 87, 95n42, 99n50, 149n79, 154n88, 163, 182n41, 184, 276n21, 281n30, 284n38, 370n80 Kusumoto Hiroshi, 241–42 Kusunoki Masashige, 73 Kwfn Kyfngju, 357, 360 Kyōfūkai, 62, 91, 98, 250 Kyōjokai. See Mutual aid societies Kyōkai. See Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai Kyong Naeu, 303, 306 Kyfngsang province, 123, 158, 307, 330 Kyōsaikai. See Mutual benefit societies Kyōto Chōsenjin Rōdō Kyōsaikai, 196 Kyoto Prefecture: and creation of Suiheisha, 169, 171; riots in, 134–35. See also Minami Ariji; Sanjō Buraku; Higashi Kujō; Yanagihara Kyōwa, 256, 260, 347. See also Harmony; Kyōwakai Kyōwakai, 249–57, 259, 297, 327, 332, 358n51, 385, 391; and education, 237, 254, 256, 294; and interminority relations, 358n51, 365, 368, 373; Korean reactions, 322–23; name change, 262– 63; and war, 327, 329 Kyūdan campaigns, 155, 176–77, 202, 208n95, 276, 278, 283–85, 367, 390; and Takamatsu Trial Incident, 269–70 Kyushu, 116n8, 281n30, 330, 353–54

426

Index

Labor: cheap labor, 85, 123, 126; child labor, 121; labor conscripts, 7, 231n21, 238–40, 251, 255, 328–30; control of, 9, 161– 62, 253, 288; day laborers, 8, 115–17, 119, 125, 128, 158, 224–26, 236, 325, 355–57, 363; forced labor, 239; gangs, 125, 193– 94, 298, 325, 353–54 Labor Dispute Settlement Law, 340 Labor market, 20, 126, 129, 194, 211, 235, 350, 370; labor market economics, 335; recruitment/labor shortage, 9, 123, 127, 130, 145n71, 228, 251, 350–51; seasonal, 80, 124, 228, 235 Land, 31n17, 85, 233; and farmers, 115, 223, 259; land rent, 123, 372; and taxation, 30n17, 123 Landlords, 87n18, 117, 249, 250n51, 380; buraku, 205, 356–57, 380; and imperialism, 123, 314; and interminority relations, 356–57, 369, 372 Language, 131, 194, 149, 301, 351, 354, 386; hangul, 162, 194, 215, 249, 292, 317n91; hiragana, 162; katakana, 162, 196, 249n49; linguistic assimilation, 294; night school, 89, 159, 163, 237, 292– 94; writing, 162– 65, 238n32, 255, 292, 325, 326n104. See also Characters, Chinese; Literacy Larceny, 66 League of Nations, 143. See also Versailles Peace Conference; Wilson, Woodrow Leather: and affluent burakumin, 85, 87–89; and Koreans, 127–29, 337n3, 356; Nishihama, 85, 87, 386; as traditional occupation, 25, 27, 65, 81, 116–19, 229, 285

Lee, Changsoo, 10 Leninism, 214 Leprosy, 43–44 Liberalism, 145, 153, 279; and Dōaikai, 156, 241; and Koreans, 188; and self-determination, 218; and Suiheisha, 179, 181, 271, 279; of Taishō democracy, 15, 18, 112–13, 153 Liberation (meaning of), 193, 282 Liberation Edict, 5, 12, 29–37, 80–81, 100, 114, 178, 203, 207, 270 Literacy: of burakumin, 227; of Koreans, 132, 162, 194, 238n32, 292, 325, 368 Local improvement movement. See Improvement Loyalty (to state), 67, 74, 75, 96, 102, 221, 285, 368, 386, 391; and anti-buraku discrimination, 177, 246; portrayal of Koreans, 72, 159, 162, 190, 253, 310, 315, 317, 321, 388; and separatism, 179, 184, 258 Malay-Polynesians, 47 Manchuria, 57–58, 158n101, 309, 331; emigration to, 123n22, 228–29, 259– 60, 281n30, 285– 87; Manchukuo, 228; Manchurian Incident, 242 March First Movement, 104, 133, 140–45, 150, 187–88, 214, 311 Markets, 31n17, 85, 229, 292; black, 330, 375–76; labor market, 11, 20, 126, 129, 194, 211, 235–36, 335, 350, 370 Marriage, 36, 43–44, 117, 268; as between families, 38, 54n62; consanguineous, 44–45, 121n18; and discrimination, 1–2, 21, 44,

Index 183, 242, 379; forced, 162; intermarriage, 180n34, 181, 183, 207n92, 272, 376, 377n94, 380; and names, 324, 326; at young age, 296 Maruyama Tsurukichi, 150, 151n82, 159n104, 163n115, 310 Marx, Karl, 175 Marxism, 3, 18, 155, 166, 168, 202, 204, 208, 218–19, 275, 336, 343–44; Marxist scholarship, 30n17, 86n18, 140n60, 153, 172n13, 217n115 Massacres: and Great Kantō Earthquake, 6, 69n15, 159– 60, 198–201, 211; and Liberation Edict, 35, 84; Shinano River Incident, 189; and war, 60 Matsuda Ki’ichi, 363 Matsuda Toshihiko, 8, 158n101, 302, 314n88 Matsui Shōgorō, 92– 93, 96, 102 Matsukata Deflation, 52, 84 Matsumoto Ji’ichirō, 170, 276n21, 280–81, 283, 387; on “fellow Asians,” 347–49, 368; and “Spy Incident,” 207n93, 208n95 Matsutani Isamu, 344–45, 356, 392 Matsuura Tsutomu, 348n22 Meiji Civil Code, 37, 54n62 Meiji no hikari, 87, 93, 96, 98 Meiji revolution, 23–24, 203, 208 Memmi, Albert, 14n30, 77–78, 320–21 Merchants, burakumin, 88, 116, 229, 356n44; ginseng, 158, 197n75, 303, 305; Korean, 125, 158, 234, 236, 302, 303; rice merchants, 134–35 Mibiraki, 362, 374. See also Osaka Prefecture Middle class: Korean, 298–322. See also Bourgeoisie

427

Mie Prefecture, 64, 121, 175, 180, 182n40, 283; and day laborers, 226, 308, 340, 363 Migration: chain, 124, 132, 330, 358, 362; and China, 29n14, 64, 101, 273n12; forced, 238; and Hokkaido, 96, 99, 101, 228, 329; from Korea, 122–24, 132, 160, 250, 330, 350, 358–59, 362, 392; to Korea, 240; and Manchuria, 123n22, 228–29, 259– 60, 281n30, 285–87; re-entry permits, 160; and U.S. policy, 143–44, 184 Mihara Yōko, 115 Military; conscription, 35, 229, 258, 307, 313–15; draft-dodging, 66, 285, 287; militarism, 277; military rule, 132, 144, 311; volunteers, 314–15, 327, 368 Mimasaka Blood-Tax Rebellion, 35 Minami Ariji, 285–86 Minami Jirō, 255, 263 Minami Umekichi, 171, 179, 184n47, 204; and interminority relations, 338, 343–44; and Spy Incident, 207, 262n82 Mining, 116, 118, 121, 238; and interminority relations, 353–55, 359, 377–78; and Korean labor, 71, 123, 238, 251, 328–30, 350 Minjung sibo, 295– 98 Minzoku (as term), 13; karen minzoku, 100; tenson minzoku, 147 Minzoku to rekishi, 101n53, 149n79 Missionaries, 142 Mitchell, Richard, 9 Miyata Setsuko, 257 Miyoshi Iheiji, 92, 94 Mizuno Naoki, 254n63, 359–360n55

428

Index

Mizuno Rentarō, 136, 150–51 Mobility, 37–38, 115, 252 Mobilization, total, 221 Modernity, 22–24, 53, 74, 76, 79–80, 110 Modernization, 11, 15, 24, 39–40, 58, 74, 78. See also Industrialization Mongolians, 47 Monopoly: buraku monopolies, 52, 81n4, 85, 363; monopoly capitalism, 3–4 Moral economy, 35, 84, 297 Moral education, 55n63, 63, 159, 162. See also Education Moral reform, 250, 255; kyōfūkai, 62, 91, 98, 250 Moribe, 357. See also Osaka Prefecture Multiculturalism, 316 Murder, 60, 66, 136, 261; and Great Kantō Earthquake, 6, 69n15, 159– 60, 198–201, 211; of Itō Hirobumi, 68–70, 142; of Korean laborers, 189, 340; and Liberation Edict, 35, 84. See also Massacres Musansha Dōmei. See Zenkoku Suiheisha Musansha Dōmei Music: Korean, 163, 316; Japan Musical Instruments Factory, 161n109, 340–41 Mutual aid societies (kyōjokai), 105, 108, 194– 98 Mutual benefit societies (kyōsaikai), 104, 195– 96 Mutual Love Society, 153, 157. See also Dōaikai; Sōaikai Nagano Prefecture, 84n13, 152, 199n79, 260n77 Nagoya, 132, 134n44, 158n101

Naibu jikaku, 242–43, 284n38 Naisen ittai, 222, 254n65, 263, 322 Nakanishi Chiyoko, 179–80, 183 Names: ability to write, 162; changing of, 256, 323–26, 385; and Chinese characters, 325–26; and commoners, 36n29; and emperor, 324; and marriage, 324, 326; name-calling, 359, 369 Nara Prefecture, 33, 45n43, 64, 83, 246, 264, 374; Ishigami, 179; Kasuyabaru, 170 Nation: as concept, 13, 101–3, 250; ikkun banmin, 178, 208, 221–22, 248, 348, 384, 387; kokutai, 47, 154, 246–47, 250 Nationalism: Chinese, 186, 365; ethnic, 5, 168– 69, 171n10, 173, 195, 293, 295, 297, 312, 318; Japanese, 28, 71, 157, 173, 184, 384; Korean, 7, 68, 110–11, 143–44, 150n81, 294, 330, 375; minority, 218, 274, 390; united Japanese-Korean, 343 Nationality clauses, 382 National Learning (Kokugaku) School, 28, 41, 45 National self-determination, 16, 113, 141, 144n69, 174, 184–86, 192, 217–18, 337, 389; and Kita Sadakichi, 146–47; and Vladimir Lenin, 217 National Society, 313 Neary, Ian, 10, 30n16, 39n34, 169n2, 172, 208n95, 219n117, 275, 281n30, 284n38 “New commoners.” See Shinheimin Night school, 89, 159, 163, 237, 292– 94 Nihon Musansha Shōhi Kumiai Renmei, 291

Index Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai, 212, 216, 341 Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Zenkoku Kyōgikai (Zenkyō), 216–17, 288– 97, 308, 346, 389, 391 Nihon Rōdō Sōdōmei (Japan Federation of Labor), 191 Nippon Suiheisha, 207, 275n19 Nishihama, 122, 174, 180n34; and inter minority relations, 362, 367– 69, 374, 380; leather industry, 85, 87, 386. See also Osaka Prefecture Nishimura Kanebumi, 33 Nishinarita Yutaka, 8, 20, 127, 191, 195, 214, 328–29 Nishio Suehiro, 180n34, 191, 212n103 Nissen dōsoron, 49–52, 72, 147, 383 Nissen yūwa, 150, 222, 224, 256, 305 Nitobe Inazō, 48–49, 51 Nōmin Rōdōtō. See Farmer-Labor Party Normal people (futsūmin), 114, 149 Occupation, Allied, 9, 240, 375, 381 Ōe Taku, 30, 100–102, 135–38, 145, 149n79, 152, 154 Ōgi Enkichi, 136 Oguma Eiji, 9, 11, 13, 46, 72n111, 150n81, 311 Ōishi Seinosuke, 67, 68n97, 95 Okada Keisuke 313 Okamoto Wataru, 93– 94, 99 Okayama Prefecture, 92, 226–27, 264 Okinawans, 78, 101, 350–53, 358 Okuma Shigenobu, 100 Opportunism: and burakumin, 184, 282; and Great Britain, 279n26; and Koreans, 71, 187, 303

429

Oppression: hiappaku (as term), 274, 278 Ōsaka-fu Naisen Kyōwakai, 249–50. See also Kyōwakai Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, 190– 93, 211–12, 308 Osaka Prefecture: Ikaino, 233, 290– 97; Ikue, 372–73; Kashima, 371–73; Mibiraki, 362, 374; Moribe, 357; Nishihama, 85, 87, 122, 174, 180n34, 362, 367– 69, 374, 380, 386; Shimoda-mura, 81; Tsuruhashi, 8; Yasunaka, 22, 45n43, 85, 357–79 passim Ōsugi Sakae, 188, 200 Outcaste status. See Pariah status Overcrowding, 65, 120, 233, 362 Overseas Students’ Club, 106, 108 Pacific War: Allied Occupation, 9, 240, 375, 381; bombing/air raids, 208n95, 230, 239–40, 328, 331, 374; and China, 221, 228–29, 242, 258–59, 276, 278, 327, 331, 346, 363; and isshi dōjin, 281, 333, 379; Japanese defeat, 11, 186, 240, 230, 275n18, 280, 287–88, 362, 374–76; and surveillance, 239n33, 251–52, 263, 330. See also Conscription Paekchfng, 337–39, 343–44, 346, 361, 369–70, 378–79; “of Japan,” 393 Paek Mu, 191 Pak Chun’ggm, 158– 63, 236, 302–3, 307, 310–18, 320n96, 321–22, 349, 377, 389 Pak Kyfngsik, 7–8 Pak Pyfng’in, 302–3, 305, 317–18, 326, 389 Pak Shil, 325–26 Pak Yfl, 188– 90, 193, 203n85, 339

430

Index

Pang Sfnhi, 130, 352 Pariah status: abolition of, 5, 12, 29–37, 80–81, 100, 114, 178, 203, 207, 270; “senmin,” 24–26, 203 Parties, political; bourgeois, 166; and Korean candidates, 302; of proletariat, 204– 6. See also Electoral politics; Farmer-Labor Party; Japan Communist Party, Japan Socialist Party; Social Masses Party Patriarchy, 324 Patriotism, 15, 60– 61, 73, 98, 111, 152, 264, 383, 388, 394; and class, 168; and Kyōwakai, 253, 254n63, 259; and Suiheisha, 177, 184, 207, 219, 277, 282, 333. See also Loyalty Peace Preservation Law, 340 Peasants, 27, 81, 135; peasant unions, 153, 266; Tonghak Rebellion, 59 Peddling, 45n43, 69, 81, 116–17, 158, 224, 236, 303 “People”: dōzoku, 94n40, 97, 99, 337; free people ( jiyūmin); Japanese people (Nihon minzoku), 13, 148–49; normal people (futsūmin), 114, 149; proper people (ryōmin), 25–26 Physiology, 47, 65– 66, 76 Police Affairs Bureau, 263 Policing, self-, 198, 200–201 Poverty: and discrimination, 176, 235, 242, 244, 257, 385; “saimin buraku,” 99, 245 Progressivism, 100, 145, 152, 241–42, 271; of Dōaikai, 153, 156, 222; of government, 2n2, 34, 152 Proletariat, 3, 140n60, 172n13, 189– 93, 202–19 passim, 268, 291; compared to eta, 175; international, 16,

191, 217, 219, 295; versus “the masses,” 275, 277, 282; “proletariatfirst,” 205, 208, 336, 342, 346 Propaganda, 285 “Proper”: attitudes, 250, 300, 301; behavior, 18, 44, 58, 63, 78, 152, 250, 318, 382, 385; people (ryōmin), 25–26 Property, 90, 115, 356–57, 372–73; property rights, 167; vandalism, 376 Prostitution, 54, 94n40, 180n34; and Koreans, 57–58, 125, 131, 162 Protectorate (Korea), 60, 104–8 Psychology: of burakumin, 55, 87, 264; and discrimination, 10, 393; national, 247; mobilization/war, 277, 365, 371 Public works: and economic revitalization, 245, 270; occupations, 185, 304, 357, 364 Purity: “pure Suihei movement,” 207–8, 209; racial, 47; as virtue, 84n13 Race: as equal to culture, 51; and Europe, 50, 55, 65– 66; “heavendescended,” 49, 77, 147; jinshu, 64; racial blending/amalgamation, 14, 46, 51, 77, 147–48, 394; racial classification, 272; racial hierarchy, 13; racial kinship, 45, 49–52, 72, 75, 147–48, 258, 337–78, 383; racial purity, 47; and sexual relations, 272; and United States, 50n53, 55n63, 173n16, 218, 272, 319, 343; “white,” 379 Racism, 10; compared to discrimination, 13–14; and League of Nations, 113, 143–44, 154; and

Index Nazis, 261; and Scottsboro case, 272–73; white, 143, 173n16, 184–85n47. See also Race Rape, 66, 137, 272nn11,12 Rationality, 202, 247, 297 Rationalization: and discrimination, 26, 272n11; and empire, 145; and marriage, 324; and social life, 62, 373 Recession/Downturn, economic, 52, 123, 126, 363. See also Depression, economic Reconciliation, 86, 94, 97, 100, 102, 277. See also Yūwa Registration: alien, 367n74; family, 35–39, 99n50, 115, 135n46, 262– 63, 285–86, 323–26 Reimeikai, 188n52 Rejuvenation. See Self-rejuvenation Relief. See Welfare/relief programs Religion: religious idealism, 5; religious imagery, 172; religious leaders, 141; shrines, 82, 250, 255, 259n74, 323; worship, 250, 255, 259n74. See also specific religions Relocation, 99. See also Hokkaido; Manchuria; Migration Renmei. See Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei Rent, 123, 250n51, 300, 356–57, 372. See also Housing Repentance, 152, 164; movement of, 156 Residence, official (honsekichi), 36–39, 314, 328n108 Revenge/vindictiveness, 66, 135–37, 177, 202, 258 Revolution, 209, 219; burakumin, 179; Meiji, 23–24, 203, 208; Bolshevik, 16, 112–13, 135, 140–41n60, 154, 175

431

Rice, 115, 123, 287; black market, 330; imports, 313; price of, 88, 135–36, 313; rations, 264; and strikes, 354 Rice Riots, 113, 134–40, 145, 151–54, 177, 201n83, 250n54, 375 Rights, 20, 311; buraku, 279, 281, 349, 381, 384; civil, 2, 9–10, 272; equal, 102; human, 2n2, 31–32, 42, 45; Korean, 311; monopoly, 52, 81n4, 85; status, 93 Ringhoffer, Manfred, 162 Riots, 142–43; anti-buraku, 84; Rice Riots, 113, 134–40, 145, 151–54, 177, 201n83, 250n54, 375 Roediger, David, 379 Rumors: about draft dodging 285; about plots, 72, 141n60, 142, 159, 199–201, 261; about United States, 272n12, 331 Rural life, 82–83, 85, 115, 123, 287n41; and local improvement, 62; and marriage, 45; and outcaste status, 27, 35 Russia; revolution in, 16, 112–13, 135, 140–41n60, 154, 175; RussoJapanese War, 42, 62, 70, 91 Ryōmin, 25–26 Sabotage, 288 Sacrifice, 74, 244, 253, 257, 279, 285, 328. See also Selflessness Sadaejgi, 61, 110 Saikō Mankichi, 170, 172n13, 179, 219n117, 276, 366 Saimin buraku, 99, 245 Saitō Makoto, 151n82, 159n104, 311 Sakai Toshihiko, 188 Sakamoto Kazue, 180

432

Index

Sakamoto Sei’ichirō, 102n56, 170, 172n13, 219n117, 276; and interminority relations, 342; and women, 180, 183 Sakurada Gihei, 88, 90– 91n30, 31 Samurai, 24–31 passim, 40, 43, 93, 146, 207n92 Sanitation, 54–56, 58, 62, 233 Sano Manabu, 172n13, 218–19 Satsuma-Chōshū, 29 Savings, 63, 90n28, 94, 105, 197, 239n33 Scapegoating: of burakumin, 137n52, 151n82, 375; of Koreans, 201n83, 371 Schmid, Andre, 110 Scholars: National Learning (Kokugaku), 28, 41, 45 Scholarships, 105 Schools: Christian, 142; discrimination in, 21, 83–84, 92, 121–22, 146, 180n34, 183, 237, 254, 293, 318, 360, 369; early buraku, 33, 63, 83– 92, 95; early Korean, 55, 103– 7; during 1920s, 120–22, 132–33, 139, 142, 159, 163; and interminority relations, 360, 368– 69; and Kyōwakai/harmonization, 237, 254, 256, 260, 294, 368; and national crisis, 292– 95, 301, 321; and “New Order,” 226–27, 236–37, 246, 254, 256, 260; night school, 89, 159, 163, 237, 292– 94; and yūwa/conciliation education, 246, 254, 260. See also Education; Language; Literacy Science: and minority relations, 42, 64– 66, 218 Scottsboro case, 272–73 Scrap metal, 116, 119, 236, 355, 363

Segregation, 26, 113, 194, 229; and interminority relations, 337, 351–54, 374, 378 Seinen Dōmei. See Zenkoku Suiheisha Seinen Dōmei Sekiguchi Hiroshi, 6, 11, 87, 96, 175, 281n30 Self-awareness ( jikaku), 242–43 Self-determination. See National self-determination Self-improvement, 33, 45, 48, 59, 84, 93, 111, 137n52, 244, 383. See also Improvement, community; Kaizen Self-rejuvenation ( jiriki kōsei), 240–45 Self-reliance, 244 Self-sacrifice. See Sacrifice Self-rule, 45, 71, 104, 188n52, 312. See also Autonomy Selflessness, 74, 253, 333. See also Sacrifice Senmin. See Pariah status Settlement patterns, 9, 124, 126, 231–32, 358, 378. See also Ghettos/ ethnic enclaves; Hokkaido; Manchuria Sex, 57, 58n71, 272; sexuality, 65– 66 Shakai Jigyō Chōsakai, 241 Shibukawa Genji, 70 Shibusawa Ei’ichi, 100 Shinano Dōjinkai, 152 Shinano River Incident, 189 Shinheimin (“new commoners”), 37, 64, 66, 89, 68n98, 113. See also Commoners Shinjinkai, 188 Shinkawa, 134–35. See also Kobe Shinshukai, 89, 91n30

Index Shinto: shrines, 250, 255, 259n74, 323 Shipping, 290– 91; East Asia Shipping Union, 290, 296– 97 Shizuoka Suiheisha, 341–42 Shoguns, 24, 25n3, 28, 40, 108. See also Tokugawa period Shrines, 250, 255, 259n74, 323; festivals, 82 Silk-dyeing ( yūzen), 356, 370 Sino-Japanese War, 42, 48, 59– 60, 91 Sin Taeok, 303, 308 Slavery, 46, 101, 187, 189, 213, 239n33, 344; and United States, 31, 343, 379 Slums, 55, 134–35, 356. See also Ghettoes/ethnic enclaves Sōaikai, 132n40, 151, 157– 65, 196, 215n111, 216n113, 222, 249, 297– 98, 346, 384–85; and night classes, 292– 93; and Pak Chun’ggm, 158– 60, 162– 63, 236, 310, 315–17; and strikebreakers, 161, 341–42 So Chaepil, 104 Social Darwinism. See Darwinism, Social Socialism, 67, 96, 102, 113, 139; as foreign influence, 102; Japan Socialist Party, 3n2; and Koreans, 104, 161, 188, 200, 217–18, 294, 297, 312; and national selfdetermination, 217–18, 273; and Sōaikai, 161, 297; and Suiheisha, 204, 217–18, 273, 276 Social Masses Party, 276n21, 283n34, 349 Social security, 382 Sōdōmei. See Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei Solidarity, 16–17, 173n16, 291, 297, 390; interminority, 19, 236, 335–36,

433

339; working-class, 192, 194, 212, 236n27, 388 Sone Arasuke, 69–70 South Africa, 343 Sovereignty, Korean, 15, 75, 103–4, 107, 110, 187 Soviet Union. See Russia Spencer, Herbert, 42 Spirituality: and nation, 62, 79, 102, 156, 261; and Suiheisha, 204, 208, 244 “Spy Incident,” 207, 262n82, 344 Stagnation theory (teitairon), 48–49, 51, 311, 383 Stateless persons, 381 Status system, 24–29, 74, 81, 87n18; mibun, 268; status commutation, 26, 27n9. See also Emancipation Decree Strikes, 20, 130, 215–16, 289, 292, 368; Asō Coal Mining, 354–55, 359; by Korean women, 351–53; Japan Musical Instruments factory, 340–42; strikebreakers, 161, 341, 354 Student/youth activism, 10, 15, 109, 139, 246, 387–89; during 1920s, 185– 94, 214, 218; and interminority relations, 339, 368; and March First movement, 141–43, 214; and Marxism, 202–5; and Meiji imperialism, 103–11 Students’ Association of Great Korea, 109 Subaltern politics, 17, 20–21, 282, 388– 91; and colonialism, 320; and interminority relations, 167, 335–36, 350, 377; and Korean students, 189

434

Index

Subversion: kyūdan campaigns, 284; Pak Chung’ggm, 158n101, 377; “subversive ideologies,” 387; and views about minorities, 72, 77, 108, 113, 135, 137n52, 141–43, 200, 253 Suffrage. See Voting rights “Suihei movement,” 19, 179, 181, 282, 337, 392; internationalization of, 343; “pure,” 207– 9 Suiheisha: and colonialism, 184; and communism, 171–72, 202– 9, 241, 242n39, 271, 279, 340, 346; Declaration (1922), 169, 172–73, 176, 181; and democracy, 204, 210; and factionalism, 201–11, 266– 67, 279; and hypocrisy, 342n14, 345; and liberalism, 179, 181, 271, 279; and patriotism, 177, 184, 207, 219, 277, 282, 333; and socialism, 204, 217–18, 273, 276; and spirituality, 204, 208, 244; Ten Year Plan, 245, 259, 382; and women, 179–84 Suihei shinbun, 180, 182, 273, 340 Suiyōkai, 171 Superstitions, 57, 247, 296 Surveillance, 108, 132n40, 158n101, 221, 372; and Kyōwakai, 251–52, 263, 365; and war, 239n33, 251–52, 263, 330 Suzuki Masayuki, 178 Suzuki Shōten, 135 Suzuki Yūko, 183 Sympathy (dōjō), 86, 96, 174, 176, 181 Taishō democracy, 134, 153 Taiwanese, 78, 101, 262– 63, 348 Taiyō, 53 Takagi Kenmei, 67– 68, 95

Takagi Masayoshi, 72–73 Takahashi Kurako, 183 Takahashi Sadaki, 170–71, 202–8 Takahashi Yoshio, 43–44 Takamatsu Trial Incident, 242n39, 269–74, 283, 347 Takegoshi Reiko, 104, 105n62, 107n69 Takeshima Kazuyoshi, 257 Tamaoki Kinosuke, 88, 91n30 Tamura Toshiyuki, 125, 199n79 Tanaka Gi’ichi, 241 Taniai Kayoko, 289n46 Tariki kōsei, 243, 245 Taxation, 30–31n17, 35, 123, 292; and virtue, 63; and voting, 314 Teikoku Kōdōkai, 99n50, 100–102, 135–39, 152, 155, 157, 241, 384; and Sōaikai, 164; and “sympathy,” 174, 176 Teitairon, 48–49, 51, 311, 383 Temples, 67, 366, 370n80; temple registers, 36 Tenant farmers, 115, 123, 153, 182, 228, 313 Tenkō, 276 Ten Year Plan, 245, 259, 382 Terauchi Masatake, 72, 150–51; and Rice Riots, 135–38, 177, 375 Textbooks, 293– 95 Textiles: and buraku labor, 116n8, 118; and interminority relations, 350–55, 378; and Koreans, 123, 128, 130–31, 161, 215n111 Tienchin, 327 Toby, Ronald, 28 Tokugawa period, 4, 23–41 passim, 75, 49, 150n81, 177; Tokugawa Iesato, 108, 207n93; Tokugawa Kuniyuki, 156. See also Shoguns

Index Tokushima Prefecture, 47, 146 “Tokushu buraku,” 64, 96, 99, 173, 202. See also Hamlet “Tokushumin,” 64 Tokyo: Asakusa ward, 53, 153; bombing of, 239; Honjo ward, 160, 200n81, 233, 317; Kameokamachi, 54, 56; university students, 72, 104–8, 141, 159, 170–71, 186, 188–89 Tōkyō asahi shinbun, 59, 68– 69, 72, 143 Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai, 190, 193, 201n83, 211, 339 Tokyo First Middle School, 105– 6 Tokyo Imperial University, 92, 188 Tolerance, 77, 261; and yūwa, 164 Tolstoy, Leo, 153, 241n37 Tomeoka Kōsuke, 65– 66 Tonghak faith, 141 Tonghak Rebellion, 59 Tongnip sinmun, 199 Tonomura Masaru, 198n77 Torii Ryūzō, 46–47 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 24 Trade, international, 40, 62, 134–35 Traditions, Korean: 41, 57, 61, 110, 163, 187, 194, 250, 255, 316, 323–24, 385 Treaty of Kanghwa, 60, 69n102 Treaty of Tientsin, 48n48, 60 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 135n48 Uchida Ryōhei, 71 Ueda Otoichi, 279–80 Uesugi Satoshi, 5, 30nn16,17 Unemployment, 125, 185, 225–26, 234–36, 355–56, 363; benefits, 235, 382

435

Unions: consumer, 198n77, 215, 291– 97, 306, 389; “one industry, one union,” 216; peasant, 153, 266; shipping, 290, 296– 97. See also Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Hyōgikai; Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Zenkoku Kyōgikai (Zenkyō); Ōsaka Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai; Tōkyō Chōsen Rōdō Dōmeikai; Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei United States, 143–44, 258; African Americans, 172n13, 173n16, 218, 272, 319–20; civil rights, 10; Civil War, 31; immigration policy, 143–44, 184; and Korea, 60, 141, 197n75, 186–87, 331; Occupation forces, 9, 240, 375, 381; and race, 50n53, 55n63, 173n16, 218, 272, 319, 343; rumors about, 272n12, 331; and slavery, 31, 343, 379. See also Wilson, Woodrow Unity: “kokumin ittai,” 222, 246; “naisen ittai,” 222, 254n65, 263, 322 Universities, 15, 72n110, 104, 387 Urban life: and buraku communities, 38, 52–54, 112, 118, 120, 122, 134, 136, 223, 381; and interminority relations, 356, 360, 365, 374–75; and Koreans, 71, 141n60, 142, 194, 200, 233, 391; and poverty, 9, 55–56, 153, 360; urban politics, 178; and voting, 313 Versailles Peace Conference, 113, 141, 187, 218; and racial discrimination, 113, 143–44, 146, 154 Vigilantism, 159; “self-policing squads” ( jikeidan), 198, 200–201 Villages, branch 27, 82 Voting rights, 248–49, 311, 313–15

436

Index

Wagatsuma, Hiroshi, 10 Wages, 54, 112, 123, 223–26, 233, 235, 329, 354–55, 364n69; competition, 370; discrimination, 9, 11, 118–19, 126–31, 213, 242, 250n51, 289, 352, 362; and forced labor, 239n33; and women, 351–52 Wagner, Edward, 9, 129n33, 235n27 Wakayama Prefecture, 67, 93, 292, 350 War psychology, 277, 365, 371 Waseda University, 108 Watanabe-mura, 80 Way of Heaven, 31–34 Wealth/affluence: burakumin, 67, 85–94, 98–103, 153, 170, 319; Koreans, 253, 313, 333; landlords, 123 Weiner, Michael, 10–11, 104, 106nn65,67, 107n69, 108n71, 116n8, 129n33, 130, 144n71, 194n66, 198n78, 235–36n27 Welfare, social, 135, 158, 260; facilities, 140, 256, 329; unemployment relief, 235, 382; welfare benefits, 9, 249, 366; Ministry of, 257, 262; welfare state, 382 Wells, Kenneth, 187 Wilson, Woodrow, 13, 16, 141–44, 147, 174, 186–87 Women: customs, 255, 322–24; and demographics, 124–26, 231–33; and education, 121–22, 132, 183; employment patterns, 116–18, 123, 130–31, 161– 62, 215n111, 224, 235, 350–53, 364n69; and ie, 324; and rape, 66, 137, 272nn11,12; and sexuality, 65– 66, 272; and strikes, 289n46, 351–53; and Suiheisha, 179–84; and virtue, 57–58; women’s associations, 139, 179. See also Marriage

World War I, 11–12, 112, 141, 184, 186; and industry, 11, 89n27, 112, 123, 130, 350. See also Versailles Peace Conference World War II. See Pacific War Yakata-chō, 358, 369, 374 Yamada Konojirō, 175 Yamaguchi Kōjū, 28 Yamakawa Hitoshi, 171 Yamamoto Masao, 241, 242n39 Yamamoto Yoneichi, 269–70 Yamato Dōshikai, 87, 93–102, 152, 155, 157, 170–71, 175, 178, 318, 384 Yanagihara, 22, 52–53, 63, 87– 92, 119–20, 122, 134, 178; kyōfūkai, 91, 98; as Higashi Shichijō, 22, 178, 358–59, 366, 368– 69, 374–76, 380, 386, 390; as Sūjin, 117; Yanagihara Bank, 89– 90. See also Higashi Shichijō; Kyoto Prefecture Yanagihara Kyōfūkai, 98 Yangban, 190, 197, 346, 366 Yasunaka, 22, 45n43, 85; and interminority relations, 357–79 passim. See also Osaka Prefecture Yi dynasty, 61 Yi Kidong, 158, 159n104, 160n105, 310n79 Yi Kwangsu, 141, 186–87, 324n101 Yi Sangun, 303, 306 Yi Tfk-kgn, 300–301 Yi Uisgng, 197 Yi Yfngu, 327 Yobo, 339, 345 Yokokawa Shūtō, 33 Yokoyama Gennosuke, 53–56 Yoneda Tomi, 276, 337 Yoshimura Mitsuru, 63, 68n98

Index Yoshino Sakuzō, 145, 156, 187–88, 199n79 Yotsu, 68n98, 138, 287 Youth/student activism. See Student/ youth activism Youth leagues: Communist Youth League, 205; National Suishesha Youth League, 202–5, 336, 340–41, 343; Suiheisha Free Youth League, 204 Yūaikai, 172, 197 Yun Ch’iho, 104 Yūwa: as concept, 18, 86–87; versus dōka, 18, 145, 150, 152, 163– 64, 222, 384; versus dōwa, 261; and as government policy, 139, 222, 241–42, 279, 384; jinminteki yūwa, 277; Kita Sadakichi, 145–51, 163, 222, 246; nissen yūwa, 150, 222, 224, 256, 305; yūwa/conciliation education, 246, 254, 260; yūwa movement/organizations, 156–57, 197n75, 241–42, 245, 279, 284n38. See also Reconciliation Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai. See Chūō Yūwa Jigyō Kyōkai Yūzen (silk-dyeing), 356, 370

437

Zaibatsu, 89 Zainichi Chōsenjin Undōshi Kenkyūkai, 8 Zainihon Chōsen Rōdō Sōdōmei, 15, 161n109, 211–17, 292; dissolution of, 215–16, 266, 288– 90, 346, 389; and interminority relations, 336, 339n6, 340–41, 346, 389; and Korean candidates, 306, 308 Zen-Chōsen Seinen Dokuritsudan, 186–87. See also Student/youth activism Zenkoku Suiheisha Jiyū Seinen Dōmei, 204 Zenkoku Suiheisha Kaishō Tōsō Iinkai, 210–11 Zenkoku Suiheisha Musansha Dōmei, 205 Zenkoku Suiheisha Seinen Dōmei, 202–5, 336, 340–41, 343. See also Student/youth activism Zenkoku Yūwa Renmei, 156–57, 241 Zenkyō. See Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Zenkoku Kyōgikai

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Liang Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China Harold C. Hinton, The Grain Tribute System of China, 1845–1911 Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Kaiping Mines, 1877–1912 Chao Kuo-chün, Agrarian Policies of Mainland China: A Documentary Study, 1949–1956 Edgar Snow, Random Notes on Red China, 1936–1945 Edwin George Beal, Jr., The Origin of Likin, 1835–1864 Chao Kuo-chün, Economic Planning and Organization in Mainland China: A Documentary Study, 1949–1957 John K. Fairbank, Ching Documents: An Introductory Syllabus Helen Yin and Yi-chang Yin, Economic Statistics of Mainland China, 1949–1957 Wolfgang Franke, The Reform and Abolition of the Traditional Chinese Examination System Albert Feuerwerker and S. Cheng, Chinese Communist Studies of Modern Chinese History C. John Stanley, Late Ching Finance: Hu Kuang-yung as an Innovator S. M. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen: Its Organization and Functions Ssu-yü Teng, Historiography of the Taiping Rebellion Chun-Jo Liu, Controversies in Modern Chinese Intellectual History: An Analytic Bibliography of Periodical Articles, Mainly of the May Fourth and Post-May Fourth Era Edward J. M. Rhoads, The Chinese Red Army, 1927–1963: An Annotated Bibliography Andrew J. Nathan, A History of the China International Famine Relief Commission Frank H. H. King (ed.) and Prescott Clarke, A Research Guide to China-Coast Newspapers, 1822–1911 Ellis Joffe, Party and Army: Professionalism and Political Control in the Chinese Officer Corps, 1949–1964 Toshio G. Tsukahira, Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan: The Sankin KŇtai System Kwang-Ching Liu, ed., American Missionaries in China: Papers from Harvard Seminars George Moseley, A Sino-Soviet Cultural Frontier: The Ili Kazakh Autonomous Chou

Harvard East Asian Monographs 23. Carl F. Nathan, Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria, 1910–1931 *24. Adrian Arthur Bennett, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth-Century China *25. Donald J. Friedman, The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938–1941 *26. Edward LeFevour, Western Enterprise in Late Ching China: A Selective Survey of Jardine, Matheson and Company’s Operations, 1842–1895 27. Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 1957–1967 *28. Kungtu C. Sun, assisted by Ralph W. Huenemann, The Economic Development of Manchuria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century *29. Shahid Javed Burki, A Study of Chinese Communes, 1965 30. John Carter Vincent, The Extraterritorial System in China: Final Phase 31. Madeleine Chi, China Diplomacy, 1914–1918 *32. Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 *33. James Pusey, Wu Han: Attacking the Present Through the Past *34. Ying-wan Cheng, Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860–1896 35. Tuvia Blumenthal, Saving in Postwar Japan 36. Peter Frost, The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis 37. Stephen C. Lockwood, Augustine Heard and Company, 1858–1862 38. Robert R. Campbell, James Duncan Campbell: A Memoir by His Son 39. Jerome Alan Cohen, ed., The Dynamics of China’s Foreign Relations 40. V. V. Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, trans. Steven L. Levine 41. Meron Medzini, French Policy in Japan During the Closing Years of the Tokugawa Regime 42. Ezra Vogel, Margie Sargent, Vivienne B. Shue, Thomas Jay Mathews, and Deborah S. Davis, The Cultural Revolution in the Provinces 43. Sidney A. Forsythe, An American Missionary Community in China, 1895–1905 *44. Benjamin I. Schwartz, ed., Reflections on the May Fourth Movement.: A Symposium *45. Ching Young Choe, The Rule of the Taewʼnngun, 1864–1873: Restoration in Yi Korea 46. W. P. J. Hall, A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy, 1958–1970 47. Jack J. Gerson, Horatio Nelson Lay and Sino-British Relations, 1854–1864 48. Paul Richard Bohr, Famine and the Missionary: Timothy Richard as Relief Administrator and Advocate of National Reform 49. Endymion Wilkinson, The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide 50. Britten Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations, 1860–1864 51. Ellsworth C. Carlson, The Foochow Missionaries, 1847–1880 52. Yeh-chien Wang, An Estimate of the Land-Tax Collection in China, 1753 and 1908 53. Richard M. Pfeffer, Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949–1963

Harvard East Asian Monographs *54. Han-sheng Chuan and Richard Kraus, Mid-Ching Rice Markets and Trade: An Essay in Price History 55. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution 56. Liang-lin Hsiao, China’s Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864–1949 *57. Lee-hsia Hsu Ting, Government Control of the Press in Modern China, 1900–1949 *58. Edward W. Wagner, The Literati Purges: Political Conflict in Early Yi Korea *59. Joungwon A. Kim, Divided Korea: The Politics of Development, 1945–1972 60. Noriko Kamachi, John K. Fairbank, and ChşzŇ Ichiko, Japanese Studies of Modern China Since 1953: A Bibliographical Guide to Historical and Social-Science Research on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Supplementary Volume for 1953–1969 61. Donald A. Gibbs and Yun-chen Li, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942 62. Robert H. Silin, Leadership and Values: The Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese Enterprises 63. David Pong, A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the Public Record Office of London *64. Fred W. Drake, China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yü and His Geography of 1848 *65. William A. Brown and Urgrunge Onon, translators and annotators, History of the Mongolian People’s Republic 66. Edward L. Farmer, Early Ming Government: The Evolution of Dual Capitals *67. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero *68. William J. Tyler, tr., The Psychological World of Natsume SŇseki, by Doi Takeo 69. Eric Widmer, The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth Century *70. Charlton M. Lewis, Prologue to the Chinese Revolution: The Transformation of Ideas and Institutions in Hunan Province, 1891–1907 71. Preston Torbert, The Ching Imperial Household Department: A Study of Its Organization and Principal Functions, 1662–1796 72. Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China 73. Jon Sigurdson, Rural Industrialism in China 74. Kang Chao, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China 75. Valentin Rabe, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880–1920 *76. Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-Siamese Trade, 1652–1853 77. Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty 78. Meishi Tsai, Contemporary Chinese Novels and Short Stories, 1949–1974: An Annotated Bibliography *79. Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins and Modern Enterprise in Late Ching China 80. Endymion Wilkinson, Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China: Case Studies from Shandong by Jing Su and Luo Lun *81. Barry Keenan, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic *82. George A. Hayden, Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama: Three Judge Pao Plays

Harvard East Asian Monographs *83. Sang-Chul Suh, Growth and Structural Changes in the Korean Economy, 1910–1940 84. J. W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 85. Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Institution in Medieval Japan 86. Kwang Suk Kim and Michael Roemer, Growth and Structural Transformation 87. Anne O. Krueger, The Developmental Role of the Foreign Sector and Aid *88. Edwin S. Mills and Byung-Nak Song, Urbanization and Urban Problems 89. Sung Hwan Ban, Pal Yong Moon, and Dwight H. Perkins, Rural Development *90. Noel F. McGinn, Donald R. Snodgrass, Yung Bong Kim, Shin-Bok Kim, and Quee-Young Kim, Education and Development in Korea *91. Leroy P. Jones and II SaKong, Government, Business, and Entrepreneurship in Economic Development: The Korean Case 92. Edward S. Mason, Dwight H. Perkins, Kwang Suk Kim, David C. Cole, Mahn Je Kim et al., The Economic and Social Modernization of the Republic of Korea 93. Robert Repetto, Tai Hwan Kwon, Son-Ung Kim, Dae Young Kim, John E. Sloboda, and Peter J. Donaldson, Economic Development, Population Policy, and Demographic Transition in the Republic of Korea 94. Parks M. Coble, Jr., The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927–1937 95. Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model 96. Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and Communication 97. Lillian M. Li, China’s Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842– 1937 98. R. David Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China *99. Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Japan’s Renaissance: The Politics of the Muromachi Bakufu 100. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin 101. Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Utilitarian Confucianism: Chen Liang’s Challenge to Chu Hsi 102. Thomas A. Stanley, ņsugi Sakae, Anarchist in TaishŇ Japan: The Creativity of the Ego 103. Jonathan K. Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Jih-ch’ang in Restoration Kiangsu, 1867–1870 104. James Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911–1915 105. Neil L. Waters, Japan’s Local Pragmatists: The Transition from Bakumatsu to Meiji in the Kawasaki Region 106. David C. Cole and Yung Chul Park, Financial Development in Korea, 1945–1978 107. Roy Bahl, Chuk Kyo Kim, and Chong Kee Park, Public Finances During the Korean Modernization Process 108. William D. Wray, Mitsubishi and the N.Y.K, 1870–1914: Business Strategy in the Japanese Shipping Industry 109. Ralph William Huenemann, The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937 *110. Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China

Harvard East Asian Monographs 111. Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yüan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World 112. Luke S. K. Kwong, A Mosaic of the Hundred Days:. Personalities, Politics, and Ideas of 1898 *113. John E. Wills, Jr., Embassies and Illusions: Dutch and Portuguese Envoys to K’ang-hsi, 1666–1687 114. Joshua A. Fogel, Politics and Sinology: The Case of NaitŇ Konan (1866–1934) *115. Jeffrey C. Kinkley, ed., After Mao: Chinese Literature and Society, 1978–1981 116. C. Andrew Gerstle, Circles of Fantasy: Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu 117. Andrew Gordon, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853–1955 *118. Daniel K. Gardner, Chu Hsi and the “Ta Hsueh”: Neo-Confucian Reflection on the Confucian Canon 119. Christine Guth Kanda, ShinzŇ: Hachiman Imagery and Its Development *120. Robert Borgen, Sugawara no Michizane and the Early Heian Court 121. Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectual and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 *122. Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile Industry: Technology and Management at Nissan and Toyota 123. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times 124. Steven D. Carter, The Road to Komatsubara: A Classical Reading of the Renga Hyakuin 125. Katherine F. Bruner, John K. Fairbank, and Richard T. Smith, Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863 126. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The “New Theses” of 1825 127. Atsuko Hirai, Individualism and Socialism: The Life and Thought of Kawai EijirŇ (1891–1944) 128. Ellen Widmer, The Margins of Utopia: “Shui-hu hou-chuan” and the Literature of Ming Loyalism 129. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Chien-lung Era 130. Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 131. Susan Chan Egan, A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893– 1980) 132. James T. C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century *133. Paul A. Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ching China 134. Kate Wildman Nakai, Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule *135. Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 *136. Jon L. Saari, Legacies of Childhood: Growing Up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890– 1920 137. Susan Downing Videen, Tales of Heichş

Harvard East Asian Monographs 138. Heinz Morioka and Miyoko Sasaki, Rakugo: The Popular Narrative Art of Japan 139. Joshua A. Fogel, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit 140. Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century *141. George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan 142. William D. Wray, ed., Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan’s Prewar Experience *143. T’ung-tsu Ch’ü, Local Government in China Under the Ching 144. Marie Anchordoguy, Computers, Inc.: Japan’s Challenge to IBM 145. Barbara Molony, Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry 146. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Hideyoshi 147. Laura E. Hein, Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan 148. Wen-hsin Yeh, The Alienated Academy: Culture and Politics in Republican China, 1919–1937 149. Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic 150. Merle Goldman and Paul A. Cohen, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin L Schwartz 151. James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War 152. Gail Lee Bernstein, Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879–1946 *153. Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China Under Nationalist Rule, 1927– 1937 154. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital Controls, 1899–1980 155. Richard J. Smith, John K. Fairbank, and Katherine F. Bruner, Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866 156. George J. Tanabe, Jr., MyŇe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in Kamakura Buddhism 157. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan’s Military, 500–1300 158. Yu-ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and ChineseAmerican Relations 159. James B. Palais, Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea *160. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan 161. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 162. William Johnston, The Modern Epidemic: History of Tuberculosis in Japan 163. Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, Breaking Barriers: Travel and the State in Early Modern Japan 164. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Rituals of Self-Revelation: ShishŇsetsu as Literary Genre and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon 165. James C. Baxter, The Meiji Unification Through the Lens of Ishikawa Prefecture 166. Thomas R. H. Havens, Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the SeibuSaison Enterprises in Twentieth-Century Japan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. *190. 191. 192. 193. 194.

Anthony Hood Chambers, The Secret Window: Ideal Worlds in Tanizaki’s Fiction Steven J. Ericson, The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan, Hiraizumi: Buddhist Art and Regional Politics in TwelfthCentury Japan Charles ShirŇ Inouye, The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi KyŇka (1873–1939), Japanese Novelist and Playwright Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland Deborah J. Milly, Poverty, Equality, and Growth: The Politics of Economic Need in Postwar Japan See Heng Teow, Japan’s Cultural Policy Toward China, 1918–1931: A Comparative Perspective Michael A. Fuller, An Introduction to Literary Chinese Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 John Solt, Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) Edward Pratt, Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the GŇnŇ Atsuko Sakaki, Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction Soon-Won Park, Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late Chosʼnn Korea John W. Chaffee, Branches of Heaven: A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea Nam-lin Hur, Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa SensŇji and Edo Society Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier: Southwest China, 1250–1850 Kerry Smith, A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization Michael Lewis, Becoming Apart: National Power and Local Politics in Toyama, 1868–1945 William C. Kirby, Man-houng Lin, James Chin Shih, and David A. Pietz, eds., State and Economy in Republican China: A Handbook for Scholars Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan

Harvard East Asian Monographs 195. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 196. Yoshihisa Tak Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria, 1904–1932 197. Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction 198. Curtis J. Milhaupt, J. Mark Ramseyer, and Michael K. Young, eds. and comps., Japanese Law in Context: Readings in Society, the Economy, and Politics 199. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937–1952 200. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600 201. Terry Kawashima, Writing Margins: The Textual Construction of Gender in Heian and Kamakura Japan 202. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China 203. Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China Diplomacy, 1954–1973 204. Guanhua Wang, In Search of Justice: The 1905–1906 Chinese Anti-American Boycott 205. David Schaberg, A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography 206. Christine Yano, Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song 207. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldőich Král, with Graham Sanders, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project 208. Robert N. Huey, The Making of ‘Shinkokinshş’ 209. Lee Butler, Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal 210. Suzanne Ogden, Inklings of Democracy in China 211. Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–1995 212. Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China 213. Aviad E. Raz, Emotions at Work: Normative Control, Organizations, and Culture in Japan and America 214. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China 215. Kevin O’Rourke, The Book of Korean Shijo 216. Ezra F. Vogel, ed., The Golden Age of the U.S.-China-Japan Triangle, 1972–1989 217. Thomas A. Wilson, ed., On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius 218. Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan 219. Daqing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansionism in Asia, 1883–1945 220. Qianshen Bai, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century 221. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History

Harvard East Asian Monographs 222. Rania Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative 223. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 224. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation 225. Xiaoshan Yang, Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry 226. Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 227. Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s 228. John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects 229. Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China 230. Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 231. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China 232. Eric C. Rath, The Ethos of Noh: Actors and Their Art 233. Elizabeth Remick, Building Local States: China During the Republican and PostMao Eras 234. Lynn Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time 235. D. Max Moerman, Localizing Paradise: Kumano Pilgrimage and the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan 236. Antonia Finnane, Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 237. Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 238. Gail Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds., Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950: Essays in Honor of Albert Craig 239. Wu Hung and Katherine R. Tsiang, Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture 240. Stephen Dodd, Writing Home: Representations of the Native Place in Modern Japanese Literature 241. David Anthony Bello, Opium and the Limits of Empire: Drug Prohibition in the Chinese Interior, 1729–1850 242. Hosea Hirata, Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature 243. Kyung Moon Hwang, Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea 244. Brian R. Dott, Identity Reflections: Pilgrimages to Mount Tai in Late Imperial China 245. Mark McNally, Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism 246. Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985 247. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan 248. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China

Harvard East Asian Monographs 249. David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond 250. Wilt L. Idema, Wai-yee Li, and Ellen Widmer, eds., Trauma and Transcendence in Early Qing Literature 251. Barbara Molony and Kathleen Uno, eds., Gendering Modern Japanese History 252. Hiroshi Aoyagi, Islands of Eight Million Smiles: Idol Performance and Symbolic Production in Contemporary Japan 253. Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography 254. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China Relations: An International History 255. Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano ChŇei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan 256. Jonathan W. Best, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche, together with an annotated translation of The Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi 257. Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945– 1992: National Security, Party Politics, and International Status 258. Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing 259. Zwia Lipkin, “Useless to the State”: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937 260. William O. Gardner, Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s 261. Stephen Owen, The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry 262. Martin J. Powers, Pattern and Person: Ornament, Society, and Self in Classical China 263. Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the Huajian ji 啀栢楕 (Collection from Among the Flowers) 264. Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) 265. Sara L. Friedman, Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market, and State Power in Southeastern China 266. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford, Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics 267. Sophie Volpp, Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China 268. Ellen Widmer, The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in NineteenthCentury China 269. Steven B. Miles, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in NineteenthCentury Guangzhou 270. Lin Man-houng, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 271. Ronald Egan, The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China 272. Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 273. Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China 274. Sabina Knight, The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction

Harvard East Asian Monographs 275. Timothy J. Van Compernolle, The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi IchiyŇ 276. Paul Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese 277. Jonathan Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan 278. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 279. Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the KibyŇshi of Edo Japan 280. Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods 281. Eugene Y. Park, Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination in Late Chosʼnn Korea, 1600–1894 282. Nam-lin Hur, Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System 283. Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China 284. Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics 285. Peter Nickerson, Taoism, Bureaucracy, and Popular Religion in Early Medieval China 286. Charo B. D’Etcheverry, Love After The Tale of Genji: Rewriting the World of the Shining Prince 287. Michael G. Chang, A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring & the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680–1785 288. Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: IkkŇ Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan 289. Hilde De Weerdt, Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127 –1279) 290. Eve Zimmerman, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction 291. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 292. Richard J. Smethurst, From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes 293. John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200– 1700 294. Tomoko Shiroyama, China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929–1937 295. Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosʼnn Korea, 1850–1910 296. Gregory Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism 297. Barbara Ambros, Emplacing a Pilgrimage: The ņyama Cult and Regional Religion in Early Modern Japan 298. Rebecca Suter, The Japanization of Modernity: Murakami Haruki between Japan and the United States

Harvard East Asian Monographs 299. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II 300. Linda Isako Angst, In a Dark Time: Memory, Community, and Gendered Nationalism in Postwar Okinawa 301. David M. Robinson, ed., Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368– 1644) 302. Calvin Chen, Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China’s Rural Enterprises 303. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryʼn Dynasty (918–1392) 304. Tina Lu, Accidental Incest, Filial Cannibalism, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Chinese Literature 305. Chang Woei Ong, Men of Letters Within the Passes: Guanzhong Literati in Chinese History, 907–1911 306. Wendy Swartz, Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427–1900) 307. Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History 308. Carlos Rojas, The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity 309. Kelly H. Chong, Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea 310. Rachel DiNitto, Uchida Hyakken: A Critique of Modernity and Militarism in Prewar Japan 311. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China 312. Jay Dautcher, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China 313. Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai 314. Jacob Eyferth, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920–2000 315. David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China 316. James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue ◦が) in Medieval China 317. Lori Watt, When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan 318. James Dorsey, Critical Aesthetics: Kobayashi Hideo, Modernity, and Wartime Japan 319. Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe KŇbŇ 320. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing 321. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-Earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan 322. Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity 323. Lucien Bianco, Wretched Rebels: Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution 324. Cathryn H. Clayton, Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness

Harvard East Asian Monographs 325. Micah S. Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China 326. Robert I. Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1750–1868 327. Robert Ashmore, The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of Tao Qian (365–427) 328. Mark A. Jones, Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth Century Japan 329. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return 330. H. Mack Horton, Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yŇshş Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737 331. Dennis J. Frost, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan 332. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women’s Rights in Meiji Japan 333. Peter Mauch, Sailor Diplomat: Nomura KichisaburŇ and the Japanese-American War 334. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan 335. David B. Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing 336. Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Picturing Heaven in Early China 337. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 338. Patricia L. Maclachlan, The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 339. Michael Schiltz, The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937 340. Daqing Yang, Jie Liu, Hiroshi Mitani, and Andrew Gordon, eds., Toward a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations 341. Sonia Ryang, Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry 342. Susan Huang, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China 343. Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture 344. Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 345. Satoru Saito, Detective Fiction and the Rise of the Japanese Novel, 1880–1930 346. Jung-Sun N. Han, An Imperial Path to Modernity: Yoshino SakuzŇ and a New Liberal Order in East Asia, 1905–1937 347. Atsuko Hirai, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 348. Darryl E. Flaherty, Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan 349. Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan