The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan

The Career of Matsumoto Jiichiro

Ian Neary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781138858053
• eBook ISBN: 9781134167197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by an internationally recognized specialist on Buraku studies, this book casts new light on majority-minority relations and the struggle for Buraku liberation. Ian Neary focuses on the Burakumin activist, left-wing politician, family company manager and arguably the most important Buraku leader of the twentieth century: Matsumoto Jiichiro.

Based on primary material reflecting recent research, each chapter locates Matsumoto Jiichiro's experience within the broader developments in Japan's social, political and economic history and illuminates dimensions of its social history during the twentieth century that are frequently left unconsidered.

As an examination of Buraku history this book will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese political and economic history, ethnic and racial studies, socialism, social thought and social movements.

1
The early years

I Outcastes in Hakata

Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu forms a natural harbour that has been used since before recorded history. It has been a channel through which goods and ideas have flowed into and out of the islands of Japan. From the eighth century onwards this area located in the north of Kyushu was known as Chikuzen. There was a trade mission established here in the seventh century, the K

rokan, and this was the main conduit through which Japan communicated with the outside world, at that time mainly China and Korea. A few miles away Dazaifu was established as an important administrative centre through which the court on Honshu, the main island, attempted to control Kyushu and to regulate relations with overseas courts. A major shrine, Hakozaki Tenmangu, was established in 923 to protect the area from foreign invasion. By 1000 a thriving merchant town called Hakata had grown around the port and developed as a trading centre with a key role being played by an expatriate community of Chinese merchants based on the narrow sandy bar to the west of the town. No trace of these Chinese settlers persists in the modern era, but their ancient presence is remembered in a part of the city of Fukuoka that bears the name T

jin machi (

, ‘China town’).

Several rivers flow into Hakata Bay and around it there are sandy beaches behind which stand woods of pine trees. The Ishid

River flows into the bay to the east of Hakata on whose northern bank there was an area known as Chiyo no Matsubara (‘grove of a thousand pine trees’). Outcaste communities have been located here since at least the sixteenth century. At the social centre of this area there was, and is still, a Honganji Buddhist temple whose parishioners came from the three separate communities located there. Probably the oldest of these communities, and slightly inland on the riverbank, was Tsuji. Also on the riverbank but closer to the sea was Horiguchi, from 1874 known as Toyotomi. Slightly to the east, and on the shoreline until the early twentieth century, was Kanehira.

In the battle of Sekigahara (1600), Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the forces of Hideyori, the son and heir of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who between 1583 and his death in 1598 had established himself as the supreme military leader in Japan. At the start of that battle, Kobayakawa Hideaki, lord of Chikuzen, supported Hideyori, but he defected mid-battle to support Ieyasu in a move that secured his victory. Kobayakawa’s reward was to be given a slightly bigger fiefdom in central Japan and Chikuzen was given to Kuroda Nagamasa, a long-time loyal supporter of Ieyasu and previously ruler of a neighbouring but much smaller fiefdom. Over the next twenty years, until his death in 1623, Kuroda Nagamasa created the base for his family’s rule over the region. Most importantly he moved his military base from Najima Castle, just to the east of Hakata, to the west, establishing his new castle town near a community called Kego and changing its name to Fukuoka, the name of the family’s home town in Okayama. Fukuoka became the castle town and administrative centre, while Hakata, a few kilometres away, continued as a semi-independent merchant town.

At the start of the ‘Fukuoka era’, as the town was being established by the new lord and his retainers, groups were invited to the new settlement to establish their trade, mostly carpenters and other craftsmen who could be useful in the construction of the new settlement. A land survey of 1602 identified some of these craftsmen as kawata (leather workers), but it also suggested that the provision of hides and working with leather was not, yet, an outcaste monopoly. In 1610 the citizens of Hakata were ordered to restore the pinewoods that had stood on the sandy beaches but had been destroyed during the previous decades of warfare. Two years later the outcaste communities of Matsubara who lived close to the beach were given the task of protecting these pinewoods from attack by peasants who might have wanted to use the bark or pine needles, or even to cut down whole trees for firewood. This created a potential conflict of interest between them and the mainstream community (Takayama 2005: 10). Like many outcaste communities in the Tokugawa period, those in Chiyo no Matsubara produced craft goods including leather items such as drums, which were sold in and through the neighbouring market town, Hakata, but the residents also worked small patches of land and sold their surplus produce there too. Apart from the usual crop of rice, the area was known for the quality of its satsumaimo (sweet potatoes) and soybeans.

There is some evidence that leather workers may have lived in Tsuji (later called Matsuzono) on the east bank of the Ishid

River even before the Kuroda family brought their own. Indeed, the location on the riverbank would have made it well suited for tanning, which requires copious amounts of water for rinsing the leather (Imoto et al. 1978: 19). How leather production was organised at this early stage is not clear, but it does seem to have been becoming an outcaste – kawata – monopoly, and each community was expected to produce an annual quota of goods. A guild of leather workers was formed in Hakata in 1702 that attempted to monopolise the production and sale of leather goods in the region (Matsushita 1985: 56). This had some advantages for the kawata communities in that it gave stability to their income. They acquired the right to access and deal with all the dead farm animals in the region, which ensured a steady supply of hides. This also worked to the advantage of the local government whose tax on the leather trade added to its financial stability. By the mid-eighteenth century, untreated ox and horse hides were being brought in by boat from northern Kyushu with some of the treated hides then being sent on by sea to Watanabe-mura, Osaka, to be made into leather goods or to be distributed elsewhere across the country (Imoto et al. 1978: 24).

Discrimination against leather workers is not particularly unusual in the world and in some ways quite understandable. It is dirty work, very smelly and if the hides are dyed the leather workers may become literally marked for life. In addition to the visible pollution of these workers, in Japan it was believed that there was a spiritual pollution that derived from the community’s association with dead animals. Both the Shinto and Buddhist traditions, which at this stage in Japanese history were not easy to distinguish, have prejudices associated with the actual and spiritual defilement that was caused by contact with blood and dead bodies. The history of this kind of occupation-based prejudice in Japan is long and complex, but we can summarise it by saying that before the social stability of the Tokugawa period it was at least possible for individuals and their families to move away from discrimination if and when they ceased their contact with leather craft. However, following the foundation of the Tokugawa period and the social and political stability it enforced, it became almost impossible for those living in these communities to avoid discrimination, even if they no longer took part in leather production.

There is considerable debate about how and when these communities developed but little disagreement now about the fact that their numbers increased both absolutely and relative to the rest of society between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century, and that in the same period formal discrimination against them became firmly established. Some of these communities were relatively recent formations but others pre-date both the Tokugawa and, in our example, the Kuroda regimes. In the Fukuoka area, the outcaste groups located on the banks of the Ishid

River called themselves kawata, although they were also referred to as eta –

– two characters meaning ‘defilement abundant’. Meanwhile, there was also a small hinin (

, literally ‘non-person’) community close to the town of Hakata.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the military use of leather had dwindled while its household use, for example as footwear, had increased and the identification of tanning as an outcaste occupation seems to have become fixed. Overall the population of the Chikuzen fiefdom changed hardly at all between 1750 and 1835, hovering around 310,000, while that of the Hakata township between 1670 and 1813 ranged from 14,000 to 16,000 (Morishita 1989: 143). In some rural areas there was actually a decline in the population of some villages between 1700 and 1850. In contrast, the kawata villages grew both in number and overall population. The number of kawata communities increased from twenty-six to thirty-eight during the seventeenth century and the number would further increase to ninety-seven by the end of the Tokugawa era, 1600–1867 (Matsushita 1985: 33–44). This is partly explained by the fact that during the Ky

h

famine of the 1730s as many as one third of the peasantry perished and sometimes kawata would be invited into rural areas to farm the untilled land. However, although they were able to contribute to the tax burden they were not permitted full access to the social and political life of the village. Some in these outcaste communities might continue to undertake crafts in their spare time, including the production of leather goods, but even if this was not their main source of income, they became subject to systematic discrimination (Matsushita 1985: 49–56). During the Tokugawa period, outcaste communities in many areas were excluded from the formal census records and exempt from taxation, but this was not true in Chikuzen where they all had to pay tax. This meant that the records are probably more accurate. The census taken in Fukuoka prefecture in 1871 included the outcaste communities and found 20,175 eta and 1,545 hinin out of a total population of 378,300, which suggests they made up about six per cent of the total (Ishitaki 1985: 67).

Families in the Matsubara area did not depend entirely on the leather industry. At the end of the sixteenth century its total annual agrarian product was estimated at over 360 koku (where one koku equals sufficient rice to support one man for one year). By the mid-eighteenth century the total agrarian product had grown to 680 koku, and by this time the communities were clearly divided into three: Tsuji, Horiguchi and Kanehira (see map p. 4). Of these Horiguchi had become the larges...

Table of contents

• The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The early years
• 2 Matsumoto and the Suiheisha
• 3 From prison to the Diet
• 4 Matsumoto Jiichirō – Dietman, 1936–41
• 5 Matsumoto and the war in the Pacific
• 6 Matsumoto and occupied Japan
• 7 Matsumoto in the 1950s
• 8 His last years – the 1960s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index