Comment on Fielding's ‘Class and space: social segregation in Japanese cities’

Abstract

our understanding further, by linking causal mechanisms explicitly to the scale of aggregation. In his exploration of Kyoto's social geography, Fielding comes across one irrefutable fact of social segregation in the Japanese city, the buraku, for whose present and past inhabitants where you come from really does make a difference to life chances. Here geography is indeed destiny, though it is a geography which foreigners are rarely encouraged to explore, with its own forbidden lexicon. Fielding is rightly concerned about a scalar imbalance between patterns of segregation and the conventional platforms for political expression, but where common class locations are out of synch with the administrative order, the answer may be to transcend that order, and organize by class across geographical divides. The early history of the Burakumin Liberation League (Yoshino and Murakoshi 1977) graphically illustrates the possibilities for collective action for the achievement of human rights for Japan's 'invisible visible minority'. Within the social geography of the city, however, it could be argued that it is the persistent if chaotic uniformity of other residential areas that makes the buraku stand out, a rock around which waves flow without breaking. Fujita and Hill themselves acknowledge exceptions to the 'together and equal' theme, even in Osaka. As a generalization about Japanese cities, however, it has yet to be demolished, and if anything Fielding's comparison of Kyoto with Edinburgh adds to its credibility, in relative if not absolute terms. A comparison of Osaka with Birmingham or Manchester might offer an even better test.