Yamanote's promise: buraku stigma, Tokyo's trains, and the infrastructure of social belonging

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe introduction of mechanized mass transit following the Meiji Restoration contributed to the transformation of public space in Japan. With the legal abolition of codified social hierarchy, a new category of person rose into being: the stranger. Interacting with strangers required different forms of comportment than had been required when there was a robust, legally-enforced social hierarchy. People had to attune themselves to the new protocols of anonymity required for civic belonging in this shifting social formation. This article examines the types of social demands that riding the Yamanote – icon of this new transportation infrastructure – foists upon its passengers. The train carriage became a space in which people would practice the new protocols of stranger sociability and anonymity. But these new protocols were not equally available to everyone in the new system, despite the egalitarian optimism that drove these infrastructural projects. The reach of the Yamanote was uneven; from the beginning it, and the lines it connected, better served the western side of the Tokyo metropolis. Furthermore, even when one could gain access, they had to leave behind previous forms of social belonging in order to become strangers in the train carriage. This essay examines how those constituted as the Buraku minority dealt with such demands, and how that has shaped the contemporary face of Buraku politics and industry in Tokyo. This article, then, makes the argument that the burgeoning transportation system, with the Yamanote at its head, was not only a technological project but a social and political one that was key in the creation of a new discipline of civic belonging that regimented those it included as much as it established standards of exclusion.