Dōwa Policy and Japanese Politics

Ian Neary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367651367
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000430677
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique asiatique

This book locates the development of D?wa policy projects within their historical and political context, offering examples of human rights protection in a non-Western society.

Charting D?wa policy from its origins in the pre-war period to its revival after 1945 up to the turn of the 21st century, chapters in this study provide a social and historical review supplemented by detailed analyses of policy process and implementation at both national and local levels. No previous publication on the 'Buraku Problem' has focused on the direct impact of D?wa policy in overcoming prejudice and economic inequalities. Topics covered range from left-wing Buraku Liberation League demands in the late 1950s, the Special Measures Law for D?wa Policy Projects (SML) in the 1960s, and the evolution of a human rights based D?wa policy into the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Through its evaluation of the relative successes and failures to improve local infrastructure and opportunities for marginal communities, this book invites comparative analysis with policies in other Asian and Western polities which seek to mitigate descent-based and racial discrimination.

D?wa Policy and Japanese Politics will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of international relations, human rights, politics, and Japanese studies.

1 Dōwa policy projects and the problems for which they were a solution

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127994-1

Owing to discrimination which was formed based on social status in the course of the historical development of Japanese society, some Japanese people have been forced to endure a lower status economically, socially and culturally, and they are still subject to various kinds of discrimination in their daily lives even today. This is the Dōwa issue, which is a unique Japanese human rights problem.

…the State, together with local public entities, has been working since 1969 on measures for regional improvements …in order to improve the impoverished environment of the Dōwa districts … and the regional disparity has become considerably smaller.

However, discrimination in marriage and employment has not ended….

Ministry of Justice website 2015 (since deleted)

After being mostly overlooked by overseas scholarship, more has been written recently in English about the ‘Buraku Problem’. Since 2000, some 15 academic monographs focusing exclusively or partially on Buraku issues have been published in the USA or the UK. However, most of them deal with historical topics; only three consider Buraku issues in the context of post-war Japan. A search of publications in academic journals reveals a slightly wider variety of articles that seek to explain the persistence of the Buraku issue in the context of contemporary Japan but none explore the origins or impact of the Dōwa policy that the state launched in 1969 to address, even solve, the ‘Buraku Problem’.

There are of course many policy areas that have for whatever reason received scant attention in the English language literature. Japan is a large and complex political economy and the number of non-Japanese scholars working on it is relatively small and usually focused on topics relevant to their polities. Even in such circumstances one might expect to find more research published in Japanese about the Dōwa policy which had not, yet, been examined by overseas researchers. Now there was a time when this was true. As I will discuss in a little more detail later in this chapter, during the 1980s, there was a wave of interest in Dōwa policy that led to a series of publications about what had been done, what remained to be done, and how effective it had been. Entering the 1990s, however, as the implementation of Dōwa policy drew to a close, that interest quickly evaporated. Most of what has been published on the topic since then has taken the form of compilations of government documents reproducing the legislation, regulations, and budgets of the Dōwa Projects Policy. But this did not stimulate researchers either in Japan or outside it to enquire what had been done or to assess what had been achieved. Exactly why this is at a time when there has been an increase in academic research about Japan is an interesting topic but not one that will be addressed here.

This book is a first step towards such an analysis. The historical focus for this study is the period between publication of the report of the Dōwa Taisaku Shingikai (Dōwa Policy Commission of Enquiry) in 1965 which set the parameters within which Dōwa policy was developed, and 2002 when it was brought to a close. Through these policies, the Japanese state aimed to improve the living environment and life chances of the residents of Dōwa districts and by the early twenty-first century most people, even Burakumin activists, would have agreed with the MoJ 2015 statement quoted above that ‘the impoverished environment of the Dōwa districts’ had been improved even though ‘discrimination in marriage and employment has not ended…’.

The body of this volume will consider the background to Dōwa policy, how it was implemented over the course of 33 years, and what has replaced it. I will provide a summary of its contents shortly but first let me try to convey in a few paragraphs something of the nature of the discrimination being encountered by residents of Buraku communities/Dōwa districts at the time the Dōwa policies were being implemented.

Discrimination against Burakumin in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – some selected examples

The Ministry of Justice website quoted above talks about the continuation of discrimination in marriage and employment, so we will focus on examples on those topics beginning with a vignette which introduces both issues¹:

Y M, was born in 1980, from Daiki town, Watarai-gun, Mie Prefecture. When she was in her second year of junior high school, the Civics teacher came to her house because her class were learning about the buraku issue. After the visit, she learned from her parents for the first time that they live in a discriminated buraku area. After graduation, the high school introduced her to a company hoping she could get work, but they did not hire her because she was from a Dōwa district. After she finished school, she started dating, but when they talked about marriage two years later, her boyfriend’s mother was against it. M thought: ‘We’d better break up then. But next time I go out with somebody, it will probably happen again. What’s the point of my life?’ and she mindlessly cut her wrists. Fortunately, her family was nearby and prevented a tragedy.

(Šturdík, (Kurokawa) 2017, 709)

A slightly more detailed account illustrates some of the psychological and social complexity of discrimination when such a marriage takes place:

Hiroko and Kenichi, married each other in 1984 when they were both 22. They started seeing each other in middle school and continued to see each other in high school. Hiroko called Kenichi’s house frequently and even met his parents several times. Hiroko figures that Kenichi’s parents found out that she was a Burakumin because her father is a well-known Buraku liberation movement leader in the area. From the time they started dating, Hiroko had doubts about the relationship: ‘I kept thinking that if I can’t explain [the essence of what it means to be Burakumin] to my boyfriend and make him understand, then who can I explain it to? So, it was more than just the fact that I liked him, but my own pride and stubbornness kept me from giving up.’ After graduation, they saw little of each other except on weekends. Hiroko was content to continue dating Kenichi and to go out with her friends, but when her mother decided it was time for her to get married, she went along with it. This is when Hiroko and Kenichi found out that Kenichi’s parents were against the marriage. They said, ‘We have a lot of relatives, and we are not going to be able to see them [if Kenichi marries a Burakumin].’ In addition, Kenichi’s parents believed that Kenichi and Hiroko’s marriage would adversely affect Kenichi’s younger sister’s chance of marrying. Kenichi’s sister told her parents that she thought this was absurd. She also went to the same middle and high schools as Hiroko and Kenichi and had many Burakumin friends. She had no prejudiced attitudes and stood up for Hiroko and Kenichi. During this time, Hiroko had difficulty dealing with the discrimination: ‘I felt like it would all be OK if I just gave up. I knew that discrimination was bad, yet somewhere in the back of my mind, I had this feeling that I was somehow to blame because I am a Burakumin.’ Meanwhile, Kenichi and his parents fought almost every night about the upcoming wedding. Kenichi told Hiroko that he would marry her even if he defied his parent’s wishes or they disowned him. Kenichi’s parents eventually gave in, mostly because they realized they could do nothing to stop the marriage. Even so, only Kenichi’s mother and sister came to Kenichi and Hiroko’s wedding. After their marriage, they rented a house in the Buraku area against the wishes of Kenichi’s parents, who objected because Kenichi and their children would be perceived as Burakumin. Only Kenichi’s mother ever visited them in the Buraku area, and this was … only after her grandchildren were born. Kenichi’s father died without ever visiting his son’s house.

(Morgan, 2007, 32–3)

Both of these scenarios played out during the last decades of the twentieth century while Dōwa policy was being implemented by central and local governments. But there is evidence that similar discrimination continues and does not only involve young adults:

In 2015, a divorced middle-aged man was considering proposing to a co-worker. He first revealed his Buraku background to her, as he had experienced marriage discrimination before. The woman was not, herself, deterred from accepting the man. She decided to mention him, little by little, to her mother—omitting his intentions, and of course his Buraku origin. The mother … immediately took the man’s name to a detective agency. The budding romance was nipped in the bud.

(Kobayakawa, 2020, 13)

Few companies would admit to practising employment discrimination and examples are hard to find but Kobayakawa cites the case of a manager who was quite explicit:

One branch manager of a company with its headquarters in Tokyo said to a career counselor that ‘it is better to tell you now rather than later and get into trouble. My company absolutely does not hire Koreans or Burakumin.’ The publication of another company taught branch managers that Burakumin were the class of employee most to be avoided… shafū is the usual reason for rejecting applicants. Shafū means a company’s atmosphere, a corporate culture, a company style, and [the company] rejects applicants from minorities such as Burakumin and Koreans, former convicts, the disabled, and so on. On top of the shame of associating with Burakumin, there is the ‘common knowledge’ that Burakumin are less productive than non-Burakumin.

(Kobayakawa, 2020, 14)

When marriages have taken place, the non-Buraku partner may often find themselves subject to ‘micro-aggressive’ discrimination if they choose to live in the Buraku community:

The first time I felt like I was discriminated against was a small thing, but happened when my first child was entering elementary school and I wanted to get dressed up for the ceremony… I put on my Kimono (formal dress) and went to a hair salon located just outside the Buraku area. Other elementary schools around the area were also having ceremonies, so while the beautician was cutting my hair, she was asking me if my child went to one of the schools outside of the Buraku area and was naming the various schools. I said no and as soon as I told her the name of the school [this school is located in the Buraku area and most people know it is a Buraku school] her face changed: she shut up and gave me a cold look. After I went home, I thought that the beautician probably didn’t think a Buraku woman would go to her shop to get her hair done for a school ceremony…That’s when I really felt that people look down on the Buraku school, as well as the school children’s parents.

(Morgan, 2007, 47)

Moreover, discrimination can follow a person throughout their careers. The following instance relates to an event that took place between 2001 and 2003, just as the Dōwa programmes were coming to an end, and involved a leading politician:

Nonaka Hiromu, born 1925 in a Buraku in Kyoto prefecture, became one of the most prominent members of Liberal Democrat Party in the 1990s rising to the post of secretary-general by 2001 at which point he was a possible contender to become party leader and thus PM. Asō Tarō, another contender for the leadership, strongly opposed Nonaka’s ambitions at a meeting in 2001 and then again at the executive council of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2003. In 2001 he is reported to have said: ‘Nonaka, A and B are all Buraku people. So what’s going to happen if people like that become Prime Minister of Japan. (Laughs).’ Asō denied the reports at the time but Nonaka has since repeated the allegations.

(Šturdík, 2017, 704–5 quoting Kurokawa; Nonaka and Shin 2009, 164)

Each of these vignettes deserves greater exposition that there is no space to provide here. If the reader is interested to learn more, they should refer to the original sources. However, I think that they serve to demonstrate first how prejudices and discrimination persistently constrained the daily lives of those born into Buraku communities and those who associate with them in the late twentieth century, the era of the Dōwa policy projects. And, second, that they affect the lives of a broad swathe of Japanese people, from a non-Buraku heritage mother at the hairdressers to a potential leader of the ruling party. As we will see, the origins of these prejudices can be traced back into Japanese history but they are not a problem of the past alone and have been recreated within Japanese society such that they continue to influence how mainstream Japanese regard Burakumin and how they see themselves.

A note on definition and size of population

Burakumin cannot be distinguished from mainstream Japanese people ethnically, religiously, or linguistically. Some Western analysts refer to them as descendants of outcastes of the early modern, Edo period in order to indicate their location both geographically and normatively outside ‘normal’ society and to suggest the possibility of comparison with the plight of outcaste communities in South, Southeast Asia, and even Africa. Others suggest that it is more productive to think of them ‘as if’ they were a ‘racial’ group (Brown 2013; Kurokawa 2016). There are a number of difficulties that arise from the problem of definition which will be explored in the following text but for the moment I want to focus on the more basic question of how many of them there are? Across the twentieth century, successive government surveys indicated that around 1% of the Japanese population reside in Buraku communities and are descendants of outcastes of the pre-modern period, suggesting a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• General Editors’ preface to Ian Neary, DōwaPolicy and Japanese Politics
• 1 Dōwa policy projects and the problems for which they were a solution
• 2 Approaches to the problem
• 3 A brief review of modern Buraku history and the formation of Yūwa policy
• 4 From the Occupation to the new Ten-Year Plan: Dōwa policy and the reconstruction of Japanese politics, 1945–60
• 5 From the Shingikai to the Special Measures Law – the formation of the Dōwa policy in the 1960s
• 6 Implementation I: the Dōwa policy process at the national level
• 7 Implementation II: spending on Dōwa policy projects by the main ministries
• 8 Implementation III: how Dōwa policy was implemented locally: examples from Osaka, Nara, and Fukuoka prefectures
• 9 Corrupt practices? A comment on yakuza involvement
• 10 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Index