‘Human Rights’ in the Discourse of Buraku Liberation: From the 1920s to the 1990s, an Initial Survey

Abstract

The paper argues that ideas about human rights, rather than being a relatively new arrival within political and social discourse, have been present in both the mainstream and the dissenting streams of Japan's political system since the start of the twentieth century. In the years immediately after the war human rights were explicitly promoted by the US occupation and adopted enthusiastically by the Japan Socialist Party and those involved in the Buraku liberation movement such as Matsumoto Jiichiro. During the 1950s, however, this enthusiasm dissipated in the face of the cold war intolerance of government and a focus on policies that could address the relative and absolute poverty experienced by the discriminated Buraku. Only in the post cold war 1990s did the state and the liberation movement once more start to take human rights seriously. Human rights have been present in Japan for well over a century but their impact on political and social practice has varied greatly depending on the complex interplay between domestic social and political factors and the international environment - just as in most other countries around the world. Keywords: Human rights, Buraku liberation, Suiheisha, Matsumoto Jiichiro There is an often-expressed idea that the notion of human rights is alien to non-western societies and hardly present until the post-war period. Then there is an equally unchallenged idea that at some point in the late 1940s or early 1950s the concept arrived or was introduced and became somehow embedded even in East Asia or Japan from which point there was a slow but sure development of its understanding to a point where at the start of the twenty first century it was well established. The story I want to tell differs from this narrative in some significant ways and I will return to this theme in my conclusion. This of course for the moment ignores the problem that the way 'human rights' are conceived by state and citizen in East Asia may be different from that in Europe and that this may result in differences in implementation. Has there, I wonder, been any attempt to trace the history of the term 'human rights' over the last 150 years in Japan or elsewhere in East Asia? There is an important research project there that for the moment needs to be set aside. Here I want to consider some of these assumptions by taking a broad historical view of the human rights related developments in Japan over the twentieth century through the prism of activities related to the Burakumin campaigns against prejudice and discrimination. In brief, what I want to suggest is that we can trace the ideas of rights as a source of inspiration to activists from at least the 1920s and they remain powerful well into the late 1930s. They are then embraced with enthusiasm in the later 1940s and early 1950s but then, rather than becoming ever deeply embedded, as Japan industrialises and emerges as a advanced industrial democracy they disappear from view both within the discourse of the state and of its critics. It is only in the post Cold War world of the 1990s, and arguably only because of the concerns expressed within international organisations supported by the United Nations that human rights once more start to play a prominent part in domestic and international policy making. This is only a very partial account, vulnerable to criticism on a number of counts notably that my material from the period 1920-50 depends heavily on my knowledge of one, albeit indisputably influential, figure and that what I say about the period 1960-2000 relies on my current understanding of a movement and policy process that I have not yet studied too carefully. It is an outline of a research agenda rather than a report on research completed but it will I hope address some of the themes in the relationship between the promotion and implementation of human rights ideas and the political environment. Before I start, some brief words about my context. …