Japan is widely regarded, by scholarly and popular opinion both inside and outside the country, as a homogeneous, mono-racial or mono-ethnic society: in 1986, then-
Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro asserted that, in contrast to such societies as the U.S.A., “Japan has one ethnicity (minzoku), one state (kokka), and one language (gengo)” (quoted in Lie 2001: 1). Of course, other peoples and cultures reside within the territory of the Japanese state, including Koreans, Chinese, Ainu, Okinawans, Iranians (usually as guest workers), even some Americans, and a group known as the Burakumin. However, the Japanese anthropologist Hasebe Kotondo nonetheless argued that the Japanese “race” was unique and that “the Ainu, Koreans, and others were completely different races from the Japanese” (Yonezawa 2005: 124).
The Burakumin are the most interesting case in Japan, because like many groups encountered already, as well as the Deaf, they challenge the conventional concepts of race and ethnicity. With a label derived from the word burakumeaning village (Burakumin thus meaning “people of the village”), they are also known as eta (extreme filth) or hinin(non-human), strongly indicating their separate and inferior status; they are also sometimes less prejudicially called Hisabetsu. The special problem of conceiving the Burakumin is that they are essentially physically indis- tinguishable from other Japanese; that is, they do not have the ordinary biological markers of a distinct “race.” In fact, George DeVos and Hiroshi Wagatsumo (1966) have called them Japan’s “invisible race,” which seems like an oxymoron: how can a group be a race without racially specific physical features?
The origins of the Burakumin are unclear and controversial. While some Japanese think they are of Korean or indigenous ancestry, the dominant view is that they are descendants of workers in lower class and “polluting” professions such as leather-making and butchering. Their status was certainly recognized by the seventeenth century, when the three classes of warrior, peasant, and townsperson were established, leaving them as outcastes at the bottom of society (like the outcastes or pariahof India, who incidentally did much the same work). Officially, the status of and discrimination against Burakumin was banished in 1871 through the Eta Emancipation Act, but little changed in the short run and negative attitudes toward them linger today.
Many of the Burakumin lived and live in several thousand formal burakuvillages in Japan, but many others do not; many are listed on the official registry of Burakumin, but many others are not. Most importantly, as Lie suggests, with their
“emancipation” the Burakumin began a process of transition from a caste to an ethnicity: no longer (at least legally) required to perform certain economic tasks or to marry within the group, in a classic case of ethnogenesis they began to think of themselves – and to be thought of by others – as a “people” rather than as a class.
An important development in their ethnic consciousness was the promulgation of government policies (like the yuwaor assimilation plan) that recognized and handled them as a distinct group. In addition, the twentieth century saw the formation of pro- Burakumin organizations, such as Suiheisha(Leveling Society) in 1922 and Buraku Kaiho Domei(Buraku Liberation League) in 1955, which attempted to unify and advance them as a group.
All the same, interpersonal and structural discrimination against the Burakumin continues. Negative stereotypes persist, such as that they are “rough in speech, crude
or brutal in relations with each other, having a low boiling point, quarrelsome, highly sensitive to insult, born traders, and relatively much more cohesive than any other community” (quoted in Lie 2001: 88); they have even been accused of possessing unseen physical differences like one less rib or the bone of a dog, deformed sexual organs, or the inability to cast a shadow in moonlight (86). Many still live in seg- regated and substandard housing and work in limited low-paying jobs; they are sometimes explicitly excluded from higher status work through name lists and ancestry registries. Some even adopt noticeable behavioral markers, like a particular kind of sandal. The irony is that a Burakumin can be sitting next to a “regular”
Japanese person on a bus without the latter even realizing the difference between them – which is why Burakumin sometimes exit the bus a stop or two before it reaches their segregated and lower class neighborhood.
We will encounter other examples of racial and ethnic groups, relations, and problems in future chapters, particularly the Hutu and Tutsi, the Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, and various indigenous peoples.
See Chapters 12, 13, and 15
In a society as diverse as the United States (with six race categories, approximately sixty racial com- binations, and almost forty languages reported in the 2000 census), it is inevitable that culture and cultural diversity would be a social and political issue, perhaps especially in the institution most tasked to prepare and unify the citizens of the country – the education system. In the 1990s this issue came to a head in the controversy over “multiculturalism” in schools and other facets of American society. Non-white and non-European people insisted that American institutions were “Euro-centric,” focusing on European or Caucasian history and accomplishments and promoting the views of “dead white males,” with the outcome that “the rest of us are pushed to the periphery, occupying the restricted category of ‘other’” (Reagan 1993: 71). One of the key demands of the multiculturalists was the inclusion of more non-European materials in the curriculum and “canon” (the list of officially approved readings) to represent blacks, Latinos, Asians, women, gays, and other neglected voices. Anti-multiculturalists responded with two main arguments: first, that the curriculum and the canon included what they included for good reason, because those items (e.g., Plato, Shakespeare) were the best that humanity had produced and that other items were “trendy” and substandard; and second, that a society required a common unifying body of knowledge and tradition, and that multiculturalism would fragment society or – worse – literally bring about the “end of American civilization” (Auster 1994: 61). Certainly there is a danger of replacing Euro-centrism with some other centrism, like Afro-centrism, or of fostering a kind of “identity politics” that could lead to the
“disuniting of America” (Schlesinger 1992). On the other hand, no culture or canon is ever closed, and all groups have a right to struggle over what is included in the education and experience of its citizens. What do you think?
BOX 6.3 CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CONTROVERSIES: “MULTICULTURALISM” IN THE U.S.A.
SUMMARY
Like gender, race and ethnicity are cultural interpretations and utilizations of
“facts,” namely the facts of physical and behavioral difference, respectively.
Racial and ethnic classifications are ways in which popular opinion – and scholarly analysis – in some cultures have made sense, and made use, of human difference.
Race has been an especially salient concept in Western societies, imposing a purportedly scientific order on the human physical variation. However, efforts to make race more scientific only made it more problematic. Ultimately, the imprecision and disagreement in the practice of race categorization, together with the discovery of the role of learning independent of biological inheritance, leads anthropology to criticize the notion of race and to focus on the social creation and function of racial thinking and racial systems.
For some observers, ethnic categories take a place alongside, or take the place of, racial categories. Ostensibly based on cultural, historical, and actual kinship characteristics, ethnic groups have proved to be every bit as vague and socially constructed – and socially exploited – as race groups. Cultural differences are actually not always great among ethnic groups, and the rela- tionships among groups emerge as more crucial than the cultural qualities within groups. Accordingly, a number of different kinds of ethnic groups, and of relations among such groups, have been identified, from segregation and violent conflict to peaceful co-existence and amalgamation. Still, race and ethnicity continue to be salient organizational concepts in the modern world.
Key Terms
Anthropometry Apartheid Assimilation Cephalic index Cultural assimilation Endogamy
Ethnogenesis
Eugenics Facial angle Genocide Miscegenation Phenotype Pluralism
Racial assimilation