New Writing on the Buraku Issue

Abstract

Kitaguchi Suehiro is a professor at Kinki University and a director of the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute; Kado'oka Nobuhiko is a young Osaka-based freelance writer who used to be a journalist on the Kobe Shinbun. Not surprisingly, the two have very different approaches, but the contrasting pictures they paint of the Buraku issue in contemporary Japan produce interesting resonances. This is a subject that is still poorly understood--partly because it continues to be a topic difficult to broach within Japan and partly because it is difficult to find analogous situations in other parts of the world. English-language speakers familiar with the Buraku issue most likely learned of it from Japan's Invisible Race, an edited volume published by George DeVos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma in the mid-1960s. This continues to be the most comprehensive work concerning the Buraku Problem; various data presented illustrate how a rigid status system instituted during the Tokugawa period gave rise to an outcaste-like group of Japanese who continue to be targets of discrimination in areas such as employment, marriage, housing, living standards, etc. An Introduction to the Buraku Issue is the first book-length English-language work since Japan's Invisible Race attempting to provide a comprehensive investigation of the contemporary Buraku issue.1 It is actually an English translation of Kitaguchi's 1986 publication, Nyftmon Buraku