5
Burakumin Protest: The Incident at Yoka High School

At 9:30 A.M. on 22 November 1974, some fifty-two teachers at Yoka Senior High School in southern Tajima, an area in Hyogo Prefecture, walked off the job, declaring that under the conditions prevailing in the school they were unable to teach. The immediate targets of their statement were members of a local branch office of the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaiho Domei, referred to hereafter as the league). The league's student members at Yoka High School had been attempting since May to gain approval for a study group on burakumin problems at the school and at the time of the teachers' walkout were engaged in a hunger strike over the issue. Emerging from Yoka High into the bright sun of that Friday morning, the teachers encountered a large gathering of league members. Shouting that the teachers were abandoning their responsibilities as educators, league members blocked their exit and ordered them back into the school. As one league account later succinctly stated, "The teachers resisted, which resulted in chaos. In this struggle, many people were injured."^[1] The "chaos" continued for some thirteen hours, during which time the teachers were forced back inside the school, formally denounced by the league, then compelled in extended sessions to acknowledge in writing that they had behaved discriminatorily toward burakumin. By the end of that long day, as many as sixty people, most of them teachers, had been injured, with forty-eight hospitalized.

[1] Yoka Koko sabetsu kyoiku kyudan toso: Sabetsu kyanpein o haishi jijitsu o tashikameru tameni (Kobe: Buraku Kaiho Domei Hyogo-ken Rengo-kai, 1975), 48. The account of events is reconstructed from numerous sources, including Akahata, Mainichi, the Yoka student newspaper, and league publications. The figure for those hospitalized is from Rohlen, "Violence at Yoka High School," 685–686.

In the conflict referred to as the Yoka High School incident, the objective condition for a protest is located in the terms of status relations that persist between majority Japanese and burakumin, of whom there are an estimated 1.2 to 3 million today in Japan.^[2] As in the case of the Untouchables of India, burakumin (literally, "people of the hamlet") were originally assigned outcaste status because of their occupations as butchers, tanners, and leatherworkers—tasks regarded as impure and despicable under the tenets of Buddhism. In Japan, Buddhist teachings on the evils of killing animals and eating meat fused with Shinto conceptions of kegare (impurity or defilement) and imi (avoidance connected with blood, dirt, and death). Historically, then, the burakumin were "specialists in impurity," in that they assumed occupational roles that protected the rest of society from having to deal with the impure.^[3] In some cases they enjoyed elevated status as a result; temple sweepers and landscape architects, for example, "polluted" through their association with dirt, nevertheless had a privileged position in society.

Until well into the medieval period, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, these "special-status people" were a loosely defined group of persons engaged in a broad range of occupations. During the latter part of the medieval era, however, occupational categories tightened, and those who dealt with pollution now came to be seen as polluted themselves. Laws enacted in the Tokugawa period required burakumin to live in segregated villages, and the deference behavior required of them likewise became increasingly extreme. When burakumin encountered a majority Japanese, for example, they were expected to move away or to prostrate themselves until the other had passed. Extraordinary restrictions on movement were sometimes instituted; in 1820 in the feudal domain of Tosa, for example, they

[2] Determining or even estimating the number of burakumin in Japan is both a difficult and a sensitive task. Since the historical aim of at least one wing of the burakumin liberation movement has been for burakumin to merge with the majority population, it is considered inappropriate to ask people who live outside officially designated buraku (those villages that have qualified for compensatory measures under laws passed in 1969 and 1982) to identify themselves as burakumin in various government tallies. The Buraku Kaiho Domei estimates the number at 3 million, while the official figure from a 1985 General Affairs Agency survey was 1.2 million. The latter figure, however, includes only those burakumin living in officially recognized buraku districts (Daily Yomiuri, 6 December 1987, 6).

[3] The term is from Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 48; cited in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 91. Ohnuki-Tierney (pp. 75–100, 140–144) provides an excellent discussion of the historical evolution of the social position of "special-status people" and of the cultural and symbolic meanings of purity and impurity in Japan.

were banned from walking in the street and from entering the city after 8:00 P.M.^[4] When burakumin went to a majority person's home, not only were they not invited in, but they were expected to remove their headgear and footwear and to squat in the dirt-floored entryway before stating their business. They were forbidden to wear silk and were excluded from majority temples, shrines, and festivals.^[5]

In 1871, in the wake of the 1868 Meiji Restoration, the caste system was abolished and burakumin subsequently could move about freely. Yet they nonetheless continued to be exposed to numerous forms of status-based discrimination. Mikiso Hane cites numerous examples of burakumin maltreatment, even by government officials. A handbook issued by the Ministry of Justice nine years after their "liberation" described burakumin as "the lowliest of all people, almost like animals."^[6] In 1919 the government instructed an entire burakumin hamlet in Nara Prefecture to relocate because it overlooked an area considered sacred to the Japanese. Not until World War II was an effort made to end discrimination against burakumin use of majority temples; meanwhile, burakumin continued to be barred from hot springs and bathhouses.

No legal barriers restrict burakumin today. Indeed, article 14 of the Japanese constitution of 1947, which guaranteed equality to women, also forbade discrimination based on social status and family origin—wording designed to extend the measure to burakumin. Since burakumin are ethnically, linguistically, and in every other way indistinguishable from majority Japanese, the basis for discrimination against them is difficult for outsiders to understand. Discriminatory attitudes in the end spring from fears of pollution that have remained long after the religious taboos associated with eating meat and slaughtering animals disappeared, and after burakumin themselves, with all other Japanese, gained occupational freedom and mobility at the outset of the Meiji period.^[7] Because of discrimination in employment and other spheres, economic status and educational levels have been lower and the crime rate higher among burakumin than among majority Japanese; these and other handicaps in turn lead to fur-

[4] See Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 142–143.

[5] Ibid., 139–143; and DeVos and Wagatsuma, Japan's Invisible Race, 6–34. See also Harada Tomohiko, Hi-sabetsu buraku no rekishi (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1975); and Hijikata Tetsu, Hi-sabetsu buraku no tatakai (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1973).

[6] Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 146.

[7] According to anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Monkey as Mirror, 100), the "symbolic structure of purity and impurity" that placed burakumin at the bottom of the social stratification system and, figuratively speaking, outside society has not fundamentally changed since the onset of the Tokugawa era.

ther discrimination, in a vicious cycle that affects disadvantaged groups widely, whatever the national setting.

Discrimination against burakumin is multifaceted (see table 3); however, the two most prevalent forms are in marriage and employment. When a marriage is contemplated with someone whose family is not known to the prospective bride or groom's parents, they commonly will hire a "marriage detective" to do a background check. If the prospective spouse's family is traced to a burakumin village, parents often will oppose or abort the marriage plans.^[8] The same discrimination occurs in employment, where a person's burakumin origins may be traced to place of birth. Although the traditional Japanese family registry system included such information, in 1976 groups associated with the burakumin movement finally succeeded in restricting access to these records. Since then, "buraku place-name registers" (buraku chimei soran ), published commercially and sold surreptitiously to companies, marriage detectives, and others, have continued to allow interested parties to identify burakumin. Even though such books are outlawed by the Ministry of Justice as soon as they appear, new versions are quickly produced—evidence of the enduring intent to discriminate.^[9] Moreover, discriminatory treatment is often quite different from

[8] In a 1980s survey of married couples in which one partner was a burakumin and one was not, 37 percent reported that they had faced opposition to the marriage for explicitly discriminatory reasons (Daily Yomiuri, 6 December 1987, 6).

[9] For an excellent discussion of the legal battles over such books, see Buraku Kaiho Domei, Konnichi no buraku (Osaka: Kaiho Shuppansha, 1987); and Frank K. Upham, "Ten Years of Affirmative Action for Japanese Burakumin: A Preliminary Report on the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects," Law in Japan: An Annual 13 (1980): 39–73.

that experienced by a minority person whose race or ethnic identity is readily visible, and can come unexpectedly when the burakumin origins of someone thought to be a majority Japanese are suddenly discovered. In short, the informal exclusion of burakumin from many spheres of majority social life continues, thereby affirming the stigma that their status carries.

In contrast to youth and women in status-based relationships, burakumin do not confront a calculus of rewards under ideal conditions. Historically, it is true, burakumin did benefit from various protective measures that, in effect, compensated for their status inferiority and exclusion from society. In the Tokugawa period, for example, they enjoyed clear instrumental rewards in the form of an occupational monopoly on leatherwork and certain other "polluted" occupations. Indeed, burakumin were able to use their "polluting effect" to expand the monopoly to occupations that had formerly been neutral, such as straw-sandal making and basket weaving; thus burakumin had work even when other groups, such as ronin, or masterless samurai, could find none. Other material benefits included tax-free use of land, and various benefits accrued as well to burakumin leaders, who were permitted to exercise rather complete control over their own communities, even to the point of having power of taxation.

With emancipation in 1871, however, burakumin lost these various forms of compensation for status inferiority, which Meiji policy considered special feudal rights; these included the tax exemption of their land, as well as the trade monopoly on leatherwork—and just when the demand for leather for boots, saddles, and other equipment for Japan's new conscription army was rising. The special power and prerogatives of burakumin leaders were likewise stripped away.^[10]

Certain benefits did accrue to burakumin as a result of their earlier legal monopolies, however. Burakumin continue to figure prominently as butchers and middlemen in the beef industry and as merchants and manufacturers in the shoe industry. Indeed, they have used their political power effectively to lobby for protections of both industries against inexpensive imports.^[11] Burakumin have also been aided by dowa, or "integration," legislation of 1969, 1982, and 1987, with funds provided to improve living conditions in qualifying buraku. Yet despite the bitter criticism of many majority Japanese, to whom such measures represent "special treatment," the charge that burakumin as a group are better off than majority Japanese

[10] See DeVos and Wagatsuma, Japan's Invisible Race, 17–34.

[11] See John Longworth, Beef in Japan (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), 70–75, for the role of burakumin in the beef imports issue. For their role in the leather and shoe industries, see Asahi Shinbun (evening issue), 24 December 1985, 3.

because of successes in a few occupations or the monetary benefits gained from recent legislation has little basis in reality. By virtually every measure, from health to status in the workplace, burakumin are significantly worse off. Few material or affective rewards have come to burakumin in exchange for accepting the status quo; indeed, the benefits they have gained—such as protection for the meat industry or special funds for buraku—have been the reward not of quiescence but of making active claims. Thus, for burakumin, the expectations that operate on women and juniors in a seniority system have not been a constraining factor. With so little to lose, it is no wonder that burakumin have picked up the pace of their protest in this century.

Like many social conflicts involving a large cast of characters and numerous charges and countercharges, the particular conflict that unfolded at Yoka High School is multidimensional. At one level it was the eruption of an ongoing ideological conflict between the Japan Socialist party (JSP), which has links to the Buraku Liberation League, and the Japan Communist party (JCP), to which most of the teachers were connected through their membership in the JCP-allied Hyogo Prefecture High School Teachers' Union (Hyogo-ken Kokyoso). The political ideological dimensions of this conflict were manifest throughout. Indeed, sources identified with the JCP position in the struggle later argued that the real "minority" players in the Yoka incident were not the burakumin people or the league members but the teachers, who found themselves confronted with a JSP-dominated power structure in Yoka Town that backed the league because of its links to the Socialist party; in this view, the league members who participated in the struggle were little more than pawns in a game being played by the JSP.^[12] Similarly, some league sources have charged that the teachers were hapless victims of their own JCP-dominated union, which was acting on its own party-dictated agenda. These sources, pointing to the dramatic success of the JCP in the local election held three months after the Yoka High School incident, argue that the Japan Communist party sent the teachers out on that November morning into waiting throngs of angry league members specifically to provoke an attack, knowing that the actions of the league, with its JSP ties, would discredit the town's Socialist administration and so cause its defeat in the upcoming election.

At another level, the Yoka incident was a manifestation of an inter-

[12] Fujiwara Toshihiro, interview with author, Kyoto Buraku Mondai Kenkyujo, Kyoto, 3 July 1978.

organizational conflict within the burakumin movement over who should lead: the Buraku Liberation League, which, with its prewar antecedents, has been the major burakumin rights organization, or a rival organization, the National Liaison Council for Buraku Liberation League Normalization (Buraku Kaiho Domei Seijoka Zenkoku Renraku Kaigi), formed in 1969 by communists who broke with the league. These two groups, though they share a commitment to improving the lives of burakumin people, have fundamentally different views on how to achieve that goal. The "normalization group," following the JCP line, sees the plight of burakumin in the context of the working-class struggle. In the key issue at Yoka, for example, they saw the purpose of a high school study group dealing with burakumin problems to be that of teaching the participants about the oppression not only of burakumin, but of labor and farmers as well, all in the context of a discussion of class struggle. The league, in contrast, has argued that a high school study group directed at burakumin problems should be aimed at raising burakumin people's consciousness of their own unique problems as an invisible minority.^[13]

The difference in the approach of these two rival groups was even more profound in practice than in theory. A buraku problem study group formed at Yoka High School by the JCP had only one burakumin member at the time of the Yoka incident. According to its league critics, this group approached the problems of burakumin academically and from a historical perspective; its membership, they said, was made up of majority students who were there because of their commitment to the Japan Communist party, not because of an interest in the problems of burakumin specifically. The league-sponsored buraku liberation study group, in contrast, was composed entirely of burakumin, students who, by their own account, wanted a more "human" and personal approach to the problems of burakumin in which they could discuss the discrimination that they and their parents had faced. Yet such an approach, by JCP standards, offered students no real framework for understanding the problems of oppressed groups in general. At this level, then, Yoka High School was one of many arenas in which a long-term struggle between rival organizations with differing goals and approaches was being waged.

Finally, the conflict at Yoka High is a foremost example of a status-based conflict. Leaving aside for a moment the organizational and ideologi-

[13] The league's position is well-described in Yoshino and Murakoshi, The Visible Invisible Minority; and Yoka Koko sabetsu kyoiku kyudan toso . Both positions are delineated in Wagatsuma, "Political Problems of a Minority Group"; and Rohlen, "Violence at Yoka High School."

cal dimensions of the struggle, the fact remains that the two groups which met head on outside the school on that November day were made up of burakumin people on the one hand and majority Japanese on the other. The teachers were representatives of a majority culture in Japan that treats burakumin as social inferiors. Meanwhile, despite the support that the Buraku Liberation League had managed to gain from groups identified with the majority culture, it was burakumin themselves who engaged in the actual physical struggle with the teachers. Indeed, their circle of majority supporters soon fell away when the league suffered severe public criticism following the episode. The struggle, in short, is comprehensible only in the context of the problems that burakumin people face as a former outcaste group in modern Japan.

The problems of burakumin in Hyogo Prefecture have been particularly acute, perhaps largely because Hyogo has had the highest concentration of burakumin of any prefecture in Japan.^[14] The conflict inherent in burakumin-majority Japanese relations became manifest in the Yoka High School case for several reasons. A major factor setting the stage for the struggle was the broad impact that burakumin liberation group activities have had in recent decades on the consciousness of both burakumin and majority Japanese with regard to issues of status. A second factor relevant to the Yoka case specifically was the special influence that the local Buraku Liberation League chapter had in the Tajima area owing to its efforts beginning in 1973 to recruit young people and encourage them to explore their position as burakumin. In a larger sense, the incident at Yoka High School was but one more episode in a long-term movement in which burakumin activists, their consciousness of discrimination raised long ago, continue to press for improved conditions. Unlike the two other conflict episodes described in chapters 3 and 4, the struggle at Yoka High School is part of a larger drama in which conflict has long been manifest and in which a highly visible protest movement presses for change.

Yoka High School, in existence for over eighty-five years, has been considered one of the top high schools in its area of Japan—a senior high school preparing students for Kyoto University, Tokyo University, or another of the prestigious national universities. Before World War II Yoka was a prefectural agricultural high school, oriented toward training stu-

[14] In 1975 there were 4,374 dowa districts in Japan. Nearly half were concentrated in the Chugoku and Kinki regions, which include Hyogo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara prefectures. Hyogo Prefecture had the highest percentage of burakumin in the population. Akio Imaizumi, Dowa Problem: Present Situation and Government Measures (Tokyo: Prime Minister's Office, 1977), 8.

dents for the silk industry. In the postwar period, however, it developed into a general high school, with the general college-preparatory course and vocational courses in such areas as stockbreeding, agriculture, and home economics coexisting under one roof.^[15] Each year its best students excel on university entrance examinations that are Japan's entry to elite status, a fact that redounds to the credit of the school's dedicated teachers. To prepare students for the exams is a challenge to teachers and demands a major commitment of their energies. Several Yoka graduates (who were majority Japanese) described to me with great fondness and appreciation the amount of time and personal attention they had gotten from their teachers as the time of the university entrance exams approached. To do well on the exams was to do well not only for one's parents, but for Yoka's reputation and that of its teachers as well.^[16]

The Tajima district from which Yoka students came in 1974 has a relatively high concentration of burakumin. Whereas in the nation as a whole an estimated 2 percent of the population are burakumin, in Yoka Town approximately 7 percent are burakumin, and in some nearby towns the percentage is as high as 9–10 percent.^[17] Burakumin in the Tajima area have traditionally been concentrated in thirty-one buraku, typically in less desirable areas such as near the river or at the foot of mountains. Unemployment has been high. Those who do work are engaged in agriculture or as laborers or line workers in construction or manufacturing. Because land holdings are small and often far from choice, most agricultural workers engage as well in part-time work such as day labor to supplement their meager income. The buraku, compared to nearby nonburakumin villages, are overcrowded, have narrow roads, and often have drainage and landslide problems owing to their location.

Burakumin in the area have long been regarded—by themselves, by the organizations that represent them, and by the schools—as educationally disadvantaged. According to the league, at the time of the protest few buraku in southern Tajima had nursery schools, despite the high percentage of burakumin women who worked, and there were virtually no cultural or special-education facilities. Only a small percentage of burakumin in the

[15] Following the incident the two tracks were separated and a Tajima Agricultural High School was established some two kilometers from Yoka High School. Both league members and teachers held that this action by the Hyogo prefectural Board of Education was a direct result of the incident.

[16] Interviews with graduates of Yoka High School who were students at the time of the struggle, Yoka Town, August 1978.

[17] Unpublished data provided by the Office of the Mayor, Yoka Town, August 1978.

area went on to the university; quite the contrary, a disproportionately large number, relative to nonburakumin, ended their education before graduating from high school, and most male burakumin students who did finish went through the vocational course. Burakumin school performance in general lagged well behind that of majority Japanese. Data show that among elementary and junior high school students, 10.5 percent of burakumin students were academically in the bottom group in the schools, whereas only 3.3 percent of majority Japanese students fell in that group. Among second- and third-year junior high school students, 44 percent of the burakumin youngsters had what would be the equivalent of a "below C" average in the United States, as opposed to only 24 percent of the majority Japanese.^[18]

In 1974, of the twelve hundred students at Yoka High School, fifty-three were burakumin. Reflecting the educational handicaps faced by burakumin throughout Japan, the students who later became involved in protest activities reported that upon entering Yoka they experienced extreme cultural shock and an educational gap vis-à-vis their majority classmates. The fact that they were burakumin was well known to the other students because of their residence in separate villages. For most, entry into a large high school drawing its students from a broad area was their greatest exposure to date to majority culture. Most of the incoming students, especially the boys, headed immediately into the less prestigious vocational course, whereas exceedingly few became part of that top group of general-course students who are the object of particular teacher interest and attention.

The objective basis for conflict, then, existed in the simple reality of the burakumin students' presence at Yoka High School as a distinct, identifiable minority whose school performance overall was below that of majority students. One of the eight burakumin students central to the Yoka protest, interviewed long after graduation, summarized the situation in explaining why he had wanted to join the league-organized study group when it emerged:

Those of us who came from Sawa buraku, well, our performance was not too good at the beginning. . . . In middle school the buraku students were very active and had a [league] study group. We developed our self-awareness as burakumin, and we could help each other concretely with lessons and the problems we had being burakumin. Our performance really improved. When it came time to go to senior high school, though, we were scattered. I was the only student from Sawa buraku at Yoka. I felt very isolated. When I was

[18] Unpublished data provided by the Hyogo Prefectural Office, August 1978.

approached by [burakumin] seniors to join the new [league] study group I was happy. I had been lonely and timid up until then).^[19]

While the specific grievances of the burakumin students at Yoka High School in 1974 are important for understanding the subsequent protest, the larger environment in which this handful of students became key actors is equally significant. Targeting Yoka for a protest effort was part of an overall strategy of a movement committed to ending discrimination, a movement that has long considered reform of Japan's education curriculum a key goal.

Burakumin liberation groups have been extremely active in postwar Japan. The two groups referred to earlier, the Buraku Liberation League and the JCP-organized "normalization" group, both claim large memberships, have research centers in the major areas of burakumin concentration, and carry on an extensive range of activities. The pace of such efforts increased after 1969, when a Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects was enacted by the Diet, making funds available for improving the conditions affecting burakumin. Indeed, much of the conflict between the league and the normalization group has been over which group should apply for and distribute these funds at the local level—in essence, which group is the legitimate representative of burakumin nationwide.^[20]

A major area of dispute and competition between the two groups was education. In major cities such as Osaka, one consequence of the Special Measures Law of 1969 was affirmative action measures, backed strongly by the league, designed to improve the educational achievement of burakumin students. These measures, however, met with some resistance; in fact, they led to a confrontation in April 1969 between the league and several middle-school teachers—the "Yata incident"—that in many ways foreshadowed the Yoka conflict of five years later.^[21] It was, however, in the

[19] Comment by one person in interviews with Yoka graduates who were members of the league-organized study group at Yoka and participated in the hunger strike, Tajima regional headquarters, Buraku Liberation League, August 1978.

[20] See Rohlen, "Violence at Yoka High School"; and Upham, "Ten Years of Affirmative Action."

[21] The measures included extra counseling, remedial classes, upgrading of facilities, and a prohibition on cross-district registration to prevent majority students from switching out of school districts with large burakumin populations. In the Yata incident, the league forcibly detained and denounced several middle-school teachers for supporting the JCP candidate in the Osaka Teachers' Union election of March 1969 and for repeatedly refusing to meet with league representatives to discuss a pamphlet, which the league said was discriminatory, circulated by the candidate. League leaders forced the teachers to attend a public denunciation session in the citizens' hall of a Yata buraku in Osaka. After the session, which lasted all day and until almost 3:00 A.M. , two league officials were arrested for unlawful imprisonment, finally to be acquitted by the Osaka District Court in June 1975. Although the Osaka High Court reversed the decision six years later, the case has been regarded as a major league victory, for both courts upheld the league's right to use denunciation as a protest tactic, disagreeing only on the level of violence that was acceptable in its application. See Upham, Law and Social Change, 78–103.

early educational initiatives that the league's dominant role in assimilation education became well established.

Developments in the Tajima area of Hyogo Prefecture mirrored the changes and tensions taking place in the major cities where burakumin are concentrated. By 1973 Maruo Yoshiaki, a garage mechanic, had emerged as a key local figure in the Buraku Liberation League, and in February 1974 he set up a league district headquarters for southern Tajima. According to Maruo, some 80 percent of the 1,200 burakumin households in the area were at least nominally league members at that time.^[22] The large turnouts during the Yoka protest of burakumin carrying signs and banners associating them with district headquarters attest to the organization's great local influence then.

In the period preceding the Yoka High School incident, the local league, led by Maruo, had turned its full efforts toward the question of burakumin education in the public schools. Maruo's recruitment tactics, according to his critics, involved a combination of persuasion, coercion, and personal magnetism; his focus on the young was fully in keeping with the league's view that liberation for burakumin begins with a change in consciousness through education. As the league states it, the aim has been to force a transition from "education for democracy with little attention to bu [buraku ] and sa [sabetsu ; discrimination], to the democratization of education through the perspectives of the most oppressed."^[23] Over the year or so prior to the Yoka incident, then, burakumin students in both Yoka High and surrounding schools had been recruited through an extensive campaign to win them to the league cause. By the time a core group of eight burakumin students within Yoka began to demand recognition for their study group in May 1974, the burakumin youth had developed a strong consciousness of themselves as a minority with a right to demand that the educational system meet their needs. Fully linked with the local

[22] Maruo Yoshiaki, interview with author, Tajima regional headquarters, Buraku Liberation League, August 1978.

[23] Yasumasa Hirasawa, "Buraku Liberation Movement and Its Implications for Dowa Education: A Critical Analysis of the Literature," Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, March 1984 (photocopy).

chapter of the league and led by Maruo, these students saw their own struggle within Yoka as part of the larger burakumin struggle in Tajima and nationwide.

The struggle at Yoka can be fully understood only in the light of the league-JCP conflict over which approach to burakumin problems was to prevail. For a number of years Yoka High School had had a social science study group devoted to burakumin-related issues; in 1970–1971 it was renamed the Buraku Problem Study Group and was effectively reorganized to continue under JCP guidance; by 1973 all but one of the burakumin student members had dropped out. The burakumin secession and their subsequent moves in early 1974 to form a new group of their own unquestionably were part of the overall league strategy in the southern Tajima region. Yoka High School was singled out by the league as a special target because it was considered a stronghold of JCP control, particularly so since the leader of the local branch of the high school teachers' union, itself a JCP center of power, taught there. The goal of the league was thus to break the JCP's control over burakumin education at the senior high school level, and it targeted Yoka High School as a test case. The league's right to organize study groups in the schools, it may be noted, had already been established at the elementary and junior high school levels, where teachers belonged to union branches not linked with the JCP. To focus on the senior high schools, then, was the logical next step in the league's campaign.

Even if we grant that the Yoka students' campaign to gain approval for their study group was part of an overall league plan, it is a mistake to underestimate their own personal commitment to the struggle. The "group of eight" (as indicated above in the comment of one of its members) stated that they had become deeply committed to the league and fully convinced that JCP-directed education for burakumin was fundamentally wrong in its approach. As in the case involving women workers, the process of distancing, or what Murray Edelman calls "myth-making," can be seen to have already occurred before the actual protest began^[24] —in the Yoka instance, almost certainly long before the group of eight, with the league in the wings, tried to place its demands before the school authorities.

If all Japanese, by virtue of being women or junior to others, may occasionally find themselves treated unsatisfactorily or oppressively because of attributes that are beyond their power to change, burakumin experience a far more extreme form of status-based discrimination. Historically, prejudice toward burakumin often denied their humanity entirely; nevertheless,

[24] Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (New York: Academic Press, 1971), 53–54.

it is important to note that such discriminatory treatment, while extreme, was on a scale that encompassed all deference behavior—for example, whereas in Tokugawa times all status inferiors were expected to bow deeply to their superiors, for a burakumin this meant prostrating oneself before any majority Japanese. The difference, in other words, was in degree, not kind. In a hierarchically oriented society with the emperor at the apex, some group had to occupy the lowest tier and, in the logic of hierarchy, display the extremes of deference behavior. Likewise, whereas historically women were excluded from many spheres, such as politics or—in the case of the upper classes in prewar Japan—the leisure world of their husbands, burakumin were excluded from most spheres of majority Japanese social life. Exclusion, like various kinds of deference behavior, was designed to preserve hierarchy based on relations between unequals.

Of the three groups whose protest activity this book studies, burakumin are by far the most militant in their rejection of deference and other status-based behavior. But then, the material and especially the affective rewards of deference and quiescence that juniors and women in well-functioning superior-inferior relations reap do not accrue to burakumin today. It is also true that burakumin have had particular advantages in reaching a collective consciousness of the dissatisfactions of status inequality and in organizing to protest. One factor, as noted, is that the discrimination against them has been so extreme. But, as resource mobilization theory establishes so well, the extent of deprivation is far less significant to a group's capacity to successfully mount a protest than are other factors having to do with resource availability. Ironically, the greatest advantage for burakumin, as compared to other status groups, has probably been their isolation and exclusion from the rest of society, for, as noted earlier (and in a way that is consonant with the writings of Coleman, Simmel, Coser, and other theorists), the web of close affiliation in junior-senior and men-women relations in daily life not only constrains overt expressions of conflict but also presses status inferiors to find other solutions to unsatisfactory situations, including self-sacrifice and endurance in the name of preserving harmony, maintaining the long-term relationship, and winning the approval of others.^[25] For burakumin, who in many cases have but limited interaction with majority Japanese, no such constraints or pressures operate. Little distancing need occur because distance has been in place all along.

[25] Coleman, Community Conflict; Lewis A. Coser, Continuities in the Study of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1967) and The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1956).

For all status groups in postwar Japan who engage in protest, however, the greatest resource has been ideological change. Democratization, which carries forward a process that was under way on a lesser scale earlier in the century, supports their efforts at many levels. Their exposure to the "official" democratic ideology of postwar Japan, even with simultaneous socialization in behavior based on hierarchy and deference to superiors taking place, contributes to necessary consciousness-raising as they consider how to respond to unsatisfactory treatment due both to their status and to their consequent exclusion. Furthermore, the broader force of democratic ideology in the culture at large—as reflected in media treatment of intergenerational issues in politics, for instance, and in public awareness of ideological contradictions in the treatment of women—becomes an external resource to the status-deprived, supporting changes in their own consciousness and in the worldview of other potential allies. The next chapter will explore how status inferiors, having reached a point at which they are prepared to wage a protest, begin to take action.