Buraku Liberation and the Politics of Redress in Modern Japan, 1868–2002

This chapter offers a general background discussion to the Buraku problem in modern Japan, focusing on the politics of financial redress and the ways in which state funding targeting the Buraku problem affected communities and understandings of the core issues. Despite a growing Anglophone scholarship on Burakumin in recent years, relatively little has been written about the modern politics of financial redress and the ways that worked to help alleviate problems facing Burakumin as well as enable the constitution of Buraku identity and shape understandings of pathways to liberation. Japanese state funding and government services particularly in the postwar period played a critical role in reducing inequality between Buraku and mainstream communities and lessening discrimination toward them. State funding of Buraku causes and strong controls exerted by the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) over distribution not only secured important material advances for targeted communities but also hastened the emergence of a new form of identification among Burakumin that emphasized their position as a minority group with separate interests requiring recognition, protection, and opportunities for civic engagement. In an important sense, the now dominant conceptualization of Burakumin as a fully fledged minority group arose in force only after the commencement of state funding and organizational implementation of reforms which altered the very nature of the postwar debate about Burakumin, although such a view needs to be carefully distinguished from those put forward by recent historical revisionists.