Images of Black People in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Japan, 1543-1900 by Gary P. Leupp & Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan by Yukiko Koshiro

The Arrival of 'Southern Barbarians,' 17th Century

I interrupted my reading of Miriam Silverberg’s masterpiece in order to peruse two articles which call attention to Japan’s earliest exposures to African and African-American people(s) and culture(s) and the historical significance of these contacts. The corpus of identity issues in Japan, especially with reference to race, minority and discrimination, is not only of personal interest but, in my opinion, has carried political and cultural weight from medieval times up to the present day. My intention here is to expose the ways in which images of black people have been a matter of considerable importance to Japan’s history by making specific reference to Gary P. Leupp’s Images of Black People in Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Japan, 1543-1900 and Yukiko Koshiro’s Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan. I also want to investigate historical similarities between black people and Koreans (the latter whom I covered in a previous post) in regard to racial acceptance and rejection in a country which constantly redefined its position towards other ethnic groups in order to benefit its shifting geopolitical agenda. Lastly, I want to show the impact of African Americans’ striving for social justice and how this inspired and mobilized Japanese leftist movements.

Interesting things I learned from reading Prof. Leupp’s article:

• The first appearance of black people in Japan occurred in the 16th century;
• Black people arrived on European ships, either as slaves, sailors or attendants to Christian missionaries or traders; 
• They were the subject of intense fascination among people of various social status (both upper-class and commoners);
• One famous African was a man from Mozambique to whom Oda Nobunaga gave the name ‘Yasuke.’ Nobunaga was so intrigued by this foreigner that he put him on his payroll. Yasuke fought for his new master until Nobunaga was forced to commit suicide. Akechi Matsuhide (Nobunaga’s vanquisher) spared Yasuke and eventually released him from service;
• Before the deterioration of tolerance towards foreign presence and the closing of the country in the early 17th century, black people were allowed to move freely, take Japanese wives, buy Japanese slaves and were even recruited in the service of various daimyō;
• The black people employed by the Dutch East India Company served as translators at the shogun’s court and sometimes engaged in smuggling European goods;
• African people were often confused with Indian people. This confusion contributed to radical revisions of Buddhist art as when Bodhidharma and Sakyamuni Buddha were depicted as having black skin. 

     With the advent of Dutch Studies (Rangaku), the overall positive, tolerant attitudes towards people with dark skin changed radically. Derogatory descriptions and terms started to appear in poetry and scholastic writings as early as 1764. In all instances, dark skin was associated with low status and a lack of civilization. However, some scholars adopted a more skeptical view. For example, Ōtsuki Gentaku, a Dutch Studies scholar, had this to say:

Among koronbō [a term heterogeneously spelled referring to black people, which only later started to carry derogatory connotations] there is certainly a distinction between the noble and the lowly and the wise and the foolish.

Following the weakening of bakufu closed-country policies and the arrival of the Black Ships in 1853, interactions with white Westerners became more widespread. Feelings of appreciation and awe for Western superior technology and weapons gave way to disparaging attitudes towards all non-white people, especially those colonized or conquered by the West. These included non-Japanese Asians such as Indonesian, Chinese Koreans, etc. White color skin became associated with superior intellect while the opposite judgement was accorded to dark color skin. Questionable Western perspectives of an absolute racial hierarchy (with white-skinned Europeans and Americans at the top and black Africans at the bottom) were readily accepted. Moreover, foreign racialist attitudes had a role to play in the dissemination and assimilation among the Japanese people of the idea that blacks belonged to an inferior civilization. The American envoy, for example, was no stranger to such circumstance:

In Yokohama on 23 March 1954, Perry announced a ‘minstrel show’ after dinner and drinks with his hosts. (One diary referred to the event as an ‘Ethiopian Concert’). Crewmen in Perry’s vessel, The Powhatan, put on black faces and sang ‘Mistah Tambo’ and ‘Mistah Bones’ to the apparent delight of the Japanese in attendance. The show was a huge success.

Assembled Paintings of Commodore Perry's Visit, 19th Century

This and other similar depictions of black people as innately inferior or as objects of ridicule became ingrained on the Japanese psyche. Soon, Japanese scholars and politicians started to promulgate this notion far and wide. For instance, various members of the ambassadorial missions to US were recorded as making the following distasteful remarks:

The blacks are inferior as human beings and extremely stupid.

The laws of the land separate the blacks. They are just like our eta caste… The whites are of course intelligent, and the blacks stupid. Thus the seeds of intelligence and unintelligence are not allowed to mix together.

It seems that the whites are beautiful and shrewd and intelligent; and the blacks are ugly and stupid. So the whites always despise the blacks.

Statements like these were proof of the enthusiasm and willingness by which Japanese people adopted and routinely parroted Western behavioral norms and morals. The deep-rooted racist structures of the colonial West appeared in the mind of the Japanese as perfectly acceptable social prerequisites for a strong national economy and state-of-the-art military. There were only a few resisters to this view but it’s important to mention that they existed. However, when the tenets of Social Darwinism began to make incursion in the Japanese academia, these dissenting voices were largely suppressed in favor of a theory that stimulated and endorsed feverish dreams of empire — a modern nation’s new grail — and Japan’s superiority over non-Japanese Asian nations. It also upheld the social divisions in the society as the discourse of nationalism became more ingrained and accentuated: discrimination against Koreans and burakumin was now not only admissible by centuries of tradition but it was also justified by modern science imported from the West. 

Strange as it may seem, the fate of the earliest contacts between Japan and black people suffered the same fate as the Koreans. While the initial exposure to blacks and Koreans before and during Tokugawa rule was graced with vibes of inquisitiveness and acceptance, after the Meiji Restoration these tendencies took a turn for the worst, mostly under the auspices of Western influence. For decades afterwards up to the end of WWII, Japanese scholars and statesmen became entangled in the push for world racialization both at home (where domestic legislature and tradition discriminated against burakumin and Koreans) and overseas (where the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was ideologically and materially built upon racialist views of Japanese superiority). And even though Japan tried to use the exploitation of blacks in the USA as a warning signal to other Asian nations and urged them to unify and stay strong against Western imperialism (under the aegis of the Japanese Emperor, it was implied), in the end, as Mr. Leupp wrote, “such exploitation itself served racist and fascistic goals.”

But there was another side to relations between Japan and black people. Prof. Yukiko Koshiro describes in her article the substantial role that African Americans played in Japanese culture and politics. She argues that African American history, literature and especially the struggle for recognition, acceptance and equality were extensively celebrated in Japanese arts and politics as early as the 1930s. In her detailed exploration of race relations beginning with the Meiji period, prof. Koshiro manages to put together a pastiche of positive causes and effects resulting from the interactions between Japanese and African Americans. In fact, she argues that,

Throughout the twentieth century, African American struggles for freedom and equality have inspired Japanese people far beyond the doomed rhetoric of alliance under the Japanese banner of Pan-Asianism. Those Japanese who attempted to build different kinds of trans-Pacific relations with African American people…dissented from the troublesome race ideology of the nation, challenged it, and envisioned a better Japan.

Before race relations took a sour turn, it is worthy to remember that the Iwakura Mission of 1871-1873 showed respect and admiration for African American advancements in society and politics. The encounter with African American culture had a constructive effect upon members of the mission who went on record stating the following:

It is obvious that skin color has no bearing on one’s intellect. Therefore, those ambitious blacks who saw the importance of education strove to learn and work harder and became great intellectuals, for who uneducated whites were no match.

The history and social condition that befell African Americans were a source of inspiration for Japanese people, especially for the nation’s newly-ensconced statesmen who tried to replicate the gains of a supposed inferior Asian race back at home. Just in the same way that black people managed to secure rights and freedoms in America (albeit limitedly), so Japan wanted recognition of its worth as an equal, strong Asian nation on the world stage. Even though it sought the validity of white supremacy in this matter (validity which, ironically, was incentivized by colonial prospects and, in time, came to be applied brutally against other non-Japanese Asian races) it can be said that Japan’s earliest understanding of African-American people was handled with natural, positive charm.

Another example of positive Meiji attitudes towards African Americans was the translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which came out in print in 1896. The publication of similarly-themed books continued in the Taishō period with the appearance of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography in 1919. In a show of admiration for black culture that continued to be evidenced in Japan around this time, many prominent African American leaders were invited to special events or held lectures at distinguished academic institutions. For example, James Weldon Johnson became the first  African American to be invited at the emperor’s garden party in 1929 and W.E.B. Du Bois visited Japan in December 1936. When relations between Japan and America became tarnished, even ultranationalists like Mitsukawa Kametarō and Kita Ikki turned in their writings to examples of African American struggles, such as Marcus Garvey’s call ‘return Africa to the Africans’, in order to spark a national reaction against Western influence.  

Unfortunately, this seeming appropriation and defense of African American culture was nothing but a facade. While Japan continued on an imperialist path and began occupying other Asian nations, it borrowed Western methods of discrimination and exploitation in their dealings with their colonies. Western racist hierarchies of social division  started to be enacted both at home and overseas with little concern for the hypocrisy behind political maneuvers like the racial equality motion put forward by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Here, Prof. Koshiro is in agreement with Prof. Leupp when she observes that “Pan-Africanism [was] merely one branch of Japan’s Pan-Asianism.”

Into this complicated fold of identity politics and race enter the Japanese Marxists who regarded African Americans as “a revolutionary resource” and “as the vanguard of the world’s proletarian movement.” Prof. Koshiro’s article deals at length with Japanese Marxists and the cultural and political impulses coming from African Americans which galvanized their movement. I found this part to be the most interesting.

Japanese leftists fighting against imperialism at home were largely and brutally crushed. Some of them, like Katayama Sen (1860-1933) and Ishigaki Eitarō (1893-1958), successfully fled to the United States where they continued their fight against social injustice while drawing inspiration from the emancipation of African Americans. Katayama built relations with African American radicals and even published their writings in his journal, The Liberator. Ishigaki portrayed the struggles of black people throughout his work. For a Japanese immigrant to make art which criticized the discriminatory culture of his adopted country and to imbue this art with proletarian flavor (at a time when socialist trends were frowned upon) is nothing short of remarkable. It’s no wonder that in 1938 his works were removed and destroyed after 

the New York City Concil found it offensive that a Japanese not only took it on himself to interpret American history, but also publicly gave African Americans a heroic appearance. Worse, the concil also condemned Ishigaki of panting Abraham Lincoln “with Negroid features.”

     Meanwhile, back in Japan, black writers continued to be translated and published. The most radical works by Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White appeared between 1923 to 1928. In 1933 Langston Hughes visited the country and built close ties with Japanese leftists (I will talk more on this subject in a future post). Prominent leftist intellectuals like Akamatsu Katsumaro and Hayasaka Jirō built their own critiques of their country’s imperialist, racist exploits around the thesis that African American discrimination was an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic order. Japan’s brutal modes of racialization and exploitation were entangled with the newly technological, militaristic and capitalist codification of society, which mimicked Western advancements. Akamatsu argued that an alliance with African Americans was necessary in the anti-imperial, proletarian struggle, for this fight was also against Japan’s racist views of other Asian people. Hayasaka criticized Japan for its aggressive tactics in expanding its imperial reach and accused it of ignoring the voices of oppressed Asians in the national literature, “proving no match for African American literature.”

The close ties between Japanese leftist intellectuals and African American culture survived WWII. Unfortunately, the sources of WWII tragedy — embodied in the emperor system, militarism and oligarchic control of the economy — survived as well and they now thrived and enjoyed the protection of the American occupation. With the American occupation in force, the sufferings of the Japanese people were being compared to African American persecution. Marxist historians like Kikuchi Ken’ichi saw similarities between the exploitation of black people in the US and Japanese people in Japan. As the social emancipation of both ethnic groups was kept in line and regimented under the new imperialist order of capitalism, Nukina Yoshitaka published in October of 1956 the journal Kokujin Kenkyū (Journal of Black Studies), which further cemented the relations between leftist intelligentsia and African American culture. 

But the most notable social development in Japan during the postwar years was the emancipation of Japanese minorities who found new strength to voice their discontentment with decades of state-enforced discrimination and abuse. These minorities sought inspiration for their challenges in the historical experience of African Americans. As a result, burakumin, Ainu, Korean and Okinawan people 

“stood up to challenge the notion of Japan as the land of a homogenous population. Their postwar movement looked at the African American experience as a lesson and a model, and it hoped to eventually find a solution for a universal pattern of discrimination.”

The two articles I dealt with in this post made me acknowledge the depth to which black people and African American culture were able to permeate the historical and social edifices of Japan. Prof. Koshiro especially articulated the interlinkages between African American struggle for social justice and Japan’s battle for recognition on the international stage, but also at a domestic level with regard to minority issues. Resistance against Japan’s imperialist action in Asia (and the repulsive racism which it demonstrated in its expansion) existed with the impetus of African American influence. But this was only expected because, as we saw from prof. Leupp’s essay, the links between black people and Japanese people ran deeper than one might think.

K.K.K., 1936

Whipping, 1925

The Noose, 1931

Works cited:

Koshiro, Yukiko. "Beyond an alliance of color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan." positions: east asia cultures critique 11.1 (2003): 183-215

Leupp, Gary P. "Images of black people in late mediaeval and early modern Japan 1543-1900." Japan Forum. Vol. 7. No. 1. Taylor & Francis Group, 1995

Ishigaki Eitaro's images borrowed from here and here.

        Credit for the The Arrival of 'Southern Barbarians' and Minstrel Show paintings goes to Visualizing Cultures Website, developed by MIT.

On the Margins of Empire - Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan by Jeffrey Paul Bayliss

     

Norma Fields’s book In the Realm of a Dying Emperor made a strong impression when it came out in 1991. In the preface, Norma laid out an acute observation which, characteristic of her fearless disposition, explored the complexities of her book’s content and exposed the bleak, precarious nature of what it meant to live in one of the world’s ‘most orderly and prosperous societies.’ An intimate passage strips bare the historicity behind the prose (misguidedly implied by the author’s credentials as a foremost specialist in East Asian Studies) and recovers its purview, elevating the book into the realm of personal confession and social criticism:

When there are neither visible oppressors nor victims, and where memory of historical suffering has grown remote, freedom becomes subtle, banal, and finally, elusive. To call attention to its flight amidst pervasive prosperity is a thankless undertaking. Most who embark on such a venture have not chosen it. They have been driven to it, by vivid confrontation with the residues of historic oppression, by encounters with victims and oppressors, who are, after all, produced even in times of prosperity and peace as well as war, and finally, by recognition of the repressiveness of everyday life, a recognition they cannot dispel in spite of potency of common sense, most especially the belief in the existence and importance of social harmony.

The unnerving quality of these lines makes itself present in Jeffrey Paul Bayliss’ On the Margins of Empire - Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan, the subject of this review. Unlike Norma’s book, which deals with a Japan in the midst of a psychologically-redefining, collective upheaval following the death of the Showa Emperor in 1989, Bayliss’ book approaches a Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, when the country found itself in the throes of an unrelenting and successful pursuit of Western industrial technologies, vital requisites for its own militaristic and imperialistic aims. The bulk of Bayliss’ monumental archival research deals with the periods of time mentioned in the title, specifically the late Meiji period (1868-1912), the Taishō period (1912-1926) and the prewar and interwar Shōwa period (1926-1945). The political, social and economic traumas of this interval and their importance in the historical formation of a modern Japan cannot be overstated but they have been tackled more extensively by other writers. In this book, Bayliss is concerned with the sophistications of the relationship between Korean and Buraku minorities under the auspices of violent modernization, failed attempts at a democratic process and the militarization of all aspects of life, to mention just a few of the major overhauls of the social order during the scramble to create Dai Nippon Teikoku (‘the Great Empire of Japan’).

The common plane where Bayliss’ and Norma’s intellectual concerns actually intersect is revealed by the first line of his Introduction:

For those with more than just a casual interest in modern Japan, the once widely held notion of it as a remarkably homogenous, socially harmonious nation has been exposed as a historically contracted 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.

 Bayliss’ book, as the title aptly reveals, examines the history of the Burakumin and the Koreans and the formation of their identities from victims of a protracted discriminating social order that has its roots in Japanese antiquity to militant activists in a hostile modern environment afflicted by war and repression. For these social categories their oppressors are visible, intolerance is a constant living reality and freedom is not only a distant panacea but, in Japan of the Taishō and early Shōwa years, it is also a dangerous, even criminal, object of interest. There are many injustices portrayed in this book but Bayliss’ main aim is not to compile a catalogue of historical proofs for an acrimonious audience. His main purpose (at which he excels) is to draw on a voluminous assortment of primary and secondary resources to construct an almost complete overview of the development of Buraku and Korean identities. These two distinctive groups on the margins of Japanese society progressively converge, influence each other and eventually break apart in their mutual pursuit of recognition, tolerance and equality. 

The cultural, social and political realities behind the convergence and the split dominate the pages of the book. Bayliss’ choice to investigate these two minorities together, in a comparative manner, is nothing short of exciting, if not necessary, especially in light of the extensive research on single-minority focus which dominates the scholarly field. As the author points out, the Burakumin and the Koreans shared not only a long history of discrimination and exploitation, but they also lived together in the same communities and often worked in the same industries. As I read through, there was no doubt in my mind that, despite their many differences, contradictory allegiances and distinct identities, the Burakumin and the Koreans had their points of contact.  

The book is organized around seven chapters. To perform an individual analysis of each chapter is counterintuitive as the material covered by Bayliss is too compelling and sweeping; moreover, the author himself summarizes each chapter in his Introduction. I will instead focus on a few interesting historical points described in the book.

Chapter One takes a detailed look at the origins and evolution of discriminatory attitudes towards Koreans and Burakumin beginning with the Edo period (1603-1868) and continuing through the Meiji period (1868-1912). In order to exercise greater control over all the social strata of a newly-unified country, the Tokugawa government instituted policies that made outcaste status hereditary and legally bound. It is noteworthy to mention that a class of outcaste people (senmin or ‘unclean people’) existed even before the Edo period and it included such groups as the eta (‘much filth’) and the hinin (‘un-human’). Members of the senmin underclass undoubtedly lead a desolate existence ripe with exploitation and segregation but the Tokugawa government gave them defined roles and functions in the society (such as skinning animals, making leather, collecting and removing human waste and corpses) and these were protected and preserved by decree. Despite their prominent role, the senmin were almost virtually absent from accounts handed down by Edo period scholars — in sharp contrast to the Meiji intelligentsia who, in its attempts to build a nationalistic, all-inclusive notion of what it meant to be 'Japanese,' never ceased to hypothesize on the hereditary origins of the Burakumin, fostering more discrimination and exclusion throughout their findings and debates. 

        Another contrast to the Meiji period was the Tokugawa high regard of Korean culture, a consideration which began to wane with the appearance of kokugaku (national studies) scholars in late Edo period. From hereon and continuing beyond the Meiji period, the general view of Koreans as inferior was exemplified (and amplified) by Japanese Prime-Minister Itō Hirobumi’s assertion that a ‘subservient way of thinking’ (jidai shisō) was an inherent and causative factor to the general economic and cultural stagnation of the Korean peninsula (an evaluation that gave rise to the much-accepted teitairon or ‘stagnation theory’ among Japanese historians of that era). Bayliss does a comprehensive job of tracing the hardening of this view among Japanese nationals from mythological origins (in the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki) to social Darwinian discussions characteristic of the post-industrialized capitalist ethos which flourished in Japan at the time. All of this was happening in the backdrop of a vitalized consolidation of the nation-state centering on the emperor as a symbol of national and racial unity (a process which coalesced in the notion of kokutai). Most revealing of this first chapter are the condescending and disparaging views towards the Korean and Buraku minorities by important literary figures, scholars and dignitaries such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, Katō Hiroyuki, Nitobe Inazō, Kita Sadakichi and Shibukawa Genji, to mention a few famous ones. Later it became apparent that these views were part of a more elaborate strategy to build a national identity lacking any visible imperfections or impurities, and to stage the foundations of a modern Japanese empire.

The subsequent chapters take a look at Japan’s imperialistic foundations and the seismic changes of public opinion towards war at a large socio-cultural level. The aftermath of the Korean annexation in 1910 led to the further joint marginalization of Korean and Buraku minorities and also, more notably, to their distancing from each other. This distancing was caused in large part by their opposing views concerning Japan’s global exploits. We find out that Burakumin were loyal to the state as it proceeded to exercise political and economical control over Korea, whereas Koreans understandably denounced Japan’s imperialistic incursions into their land. The Burakumin felt that by pledging uncritical support to the emperor and to the imperialistic aims of the state, they would be recognized as patriotic citizens equally worthy to be included in the greater Japanese nation-family and their discriminated status would cease to exist or, at least, be alleviated. For their part, Koreans were supportive of a self-governing Korea and their open endorsement of ‘illegal’ independence movements (most notably the March 1st Movement of 1919) vexed the Japanese. Regardless of their conflicting positions confronting the much trumpeted developments of Japanese militarism (domestically) and imperialism (externally), the principal aim of both Burakumin and Koreans surpassed political loyalties.  According to Bayliss, 

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.

From the late Meiji period all the way until the conclusion of WWII, the Koreans and the Burakumin were caught in the relentless effort by the Japanese state to convert them into true ‘imperial subjects’ (kōmin). This involved the total disregard of any sort of claim to personal privacy as the state inserted itself in the community and the private lives of the Burakumin by means of kyōfūkai (moral reform societies) which sought to ‘reform’ and ‘re-educate’ the outcastes in order to make them true Japanese. These ‘cosmetic’ strategies proved to be major failures chiefly because they did not improve in any way the material livelihoods of the outcastes or the economy of their community. As for Koreans, the push to turn them into loyal citizens proved to be more brutal especially in the case of those advocating Korean independence or tried to organize into leftist societies that were sympathetic to their cause. In the midst of a rigorous and committed implementation of anti-leftist suppression, propagators and supporters of leftist ideology were hunted down, arrested, tortured and sometimes killed, while leftist organizations were banned and disbanded. By the late 1930s, Japan had endured several economic downturns and was aggressively extending its colonizing reach beyond Korea and China. This development called for ‘total mobilization’ at home:

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 mobilizaiton’ was in essence a renewed emphasis on the old slogan of ikkun banmin [‘one ruler, many people’], the idea of one familial nation, with the emperor as father and the subjects as his children.

In exchange for being part of this ‘family’ Burakumin and Koreans had to endure cruel statist exploitation in the form of slave-labor. Thousands of members of these minorities were forced to work together long, destructive hours in mills and mines (in conditions that were largely unsafe and unhygienic) with no prospect for advancement and no end in sight. Bayliss’ book offers a range of forthright descriptions of these working environments. What stands out from his outline however is not the degree of brutality that befell the Koreans and the Burakumin but the evidence of an upsurge in interminority relations which lasted until Japan’s defeat in 1945. And although these contacts were largely motivated by self-interest or, every so often, resulted in violent clashes or, in many cases, ended up popularizing the racial and social differences stirring up acerbic dissociation among the minorities, there were certain areas of association that enjoyed the participation of both Burakumin and Koreans. As Bayliss mentions in his last chapter,

…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… 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.

There is more to say about Bayliss’ detailed exploration of Suiheisha (a political organization founded in 1920 to fight against discrimination and defend the interests of the Burakumin until it was forced to disband in 1940); the financial and political successes of a small number of memorable and exceptional individuals among the outcastes and Koreans; the displacement of minorities or ‘unwanted elements’ to the remote regions of Manchuria in order to facilitate the state’s imperialistic expansion; the influence of leftist thought and the dynamics of proletarian organization which gave minorities the necessary ideological apparatus and the courage to demand equality in the face of classist adversity. All of these items get their own interesting chapter: nothing that can be written here can match the grand scope and sharp narrative of the book.

The insertion of Norma Field’s quote in the opening part of this review may have seemed marginal at first glance and, indeed, forced. For the unaware, it is truly insensitive to imply that the social traumas experienced by the Burakumin and the Koreans living in prewar and wartime Japan are comparable to the ‘social traumas’ in the aftermath of Hirohito’s death. But while the death of the emperor ushered a new era (Heisei) the discrimination against visible and invisible minorities remained in place and, with minor variations, it stood the test of time. Even today, Buraku ghettos still exist.* In these ‘times of prosperity and peace,’ black vans belonging to the Zaitokukai (a nationalistic, far-right group) drive through Zainichi Korean neighbourhoods chanting violent, derogatory slogans, calling out for the deportation of non-Japanese foreigners. Following a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, permanent non-Japanese residents are refused the right to access the nation’s welfare system.* These ‘visible’ displays of intolerance (camouflaged in the deceiving mantle of economical restructuring and freedom of expression) carry a historical burden. So what can be done to prevent the harmful growth of intolerance and discrimination in these times of globalization, when the rights of minorities are unjustly propped against overriding measures in the servitude of financial capitalism (a different sort of empire), when national history is cultivated in a petri dish of collective amnesia? Bayliss concludes his book on a somber tone, one which could be the starting point for an answer:

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. 

Works cited in this article:

Bayliss, Jeffrey Paul. On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan. Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.

Field, Norma. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor. Random House LLC, 2011.