Nakagami Kenji and the Buraku issue in postwar Japan

Tsutomu TOMOTSUNE

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the psycho-political discourse in the works of Nakagami Kenji (1946-92), born in a 'hisabetsu buraku' and became a successful writer, in order to situate it in the political trajectory of the buraku issue in the post war society in Japan. Through the Meiji restoration and the abolition of regime-determined outcasts, the people who were formerly outcasts were released from such names. Instead, the term 'hisabetsu buraku was adopted as a temporary name, in accordance with an emancipating and modernizing process, in order to supersede the disparaging names derived from the old system and to avoid the discriminatory nuances of such names. Thus, although the term 'hisabetsu buraku' conveys the background history of an emancipatory process by which buraku people can have their identity, it nonetheless is never free from the fact that their position and identity are determined by the binary relationship between majority and minority.

Unlike the conventional narrative of buraku history which always depicts the buraku as having been surrounded by an everyday discrimination that has gone unchanged since the premodern period, experiences such as those of Nakagami's should be conceived as one of the typical trajectories that the buraku have had since the postwar period. Through the position of egalitarianism after 1945, a narrative of the emancipatory process of the buraku made it possible to disavow the racialist discourse in the interaction with Korean-Japanese and the US-Japan relationship, and transform racialist discourse into national discourse. This transformation was especially forced to accelerate at the time of the Korea War. In this situation, the buraku could be free from the ghost of racism and ethnic racial identity and separate themselves from any other ethnic minorities such as Korean-Japanese. Through this, the emancipatory narrative of the buraku in postwar period formed itself upon the racialist discourse.

   Within postwar society, buraku's desire was connected to the position of difference within the nation, in relation to the emperor, or to the national people (kokumin). Even if buraku people were to meet other minorities, and even if solidarity beyond national borders could be expected as a possibility, the movement of desire would not allow buraku people to 'become other,' but would continue to differentially internalize the national people. The differences within the nation-state will indeed be infinitely differentiated under the slogan of multiculturalism, but this will not alter the racist hierarchical order that has the nation-state as its unit.  The consciousness of buraku people as described by Nakagami also traces the structure of such an imaginary map. By reading Nakagami in this way I have created a template, and have used it to reconstruct the discourse of the postwar buraku issue.

Author’s biography