Imagine the predicament of the contemporary scholar of Japan who seeks to communicate the country's politics and diversity. Most any student of Asia knows that other major Asian nations—India, Indonesia, China, Myanmar, Malaysia—host a panoply of ethnic and religious groups, and have emerged through historical flows of global migration, capitalism, and empire. In contrast, modern Japan is—outside its twentieth-century imperial history—invariably seen as pathologically isolated and insular. The historian or anthropologist of Japan who seeks to place it alongside other Asian nations in terms of social heterogeneity and cross-border flows fights an endless battle against the deluge of cherry blossoms, calligraphy, samurai, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, geishas, uniformed schoolgirls, sex-themed manga, and gory anime that seem to prove that Japan, and the Japanese, are inextricably particular, peculiar, and homogenous. Thus a country whose linguistic DNA incorporates neighboring East Asian grammars, which since the nineteenth century has seen perpetual immigration from and emigration to the Americas, whose imperial project embedded the Japanese in the Philippines, Java, Korea, and Manchuria, is commonly reduced to an inward-obsessed outlier, the exception to inter-Asian connectivity and global diversity. On the one hand, the uniqueness of Japan must be brandished for it to be relevant; on the other, this singularity makes it impossible to see Japan as a comparative site of scholarly investigation, for it to illuminate anything beyond itself.
The compulsion to constitute “Japan as an object of desire,” as Leo Ching has argued in a different context, still informs scholarship.Footnote 3 To study it, one must do so by looking at what is properly and fully classified as Japanese, and to translate their essence to a broader world. Accordingly, most research on Japanese society still proceeds from, and limits itself to, the national frame. Moreover, Japanese people themselves often participate in this. In the words of Jennifer Robertson, their “attempts to locate cultural uniqueness mirror the attempts of non-Japanese anthropologists, among others,” to unveil Japanese society's “presumptive authentic core.”Footnote 4 Naoki Sakai, writing about the notion of “Japanese thought,” describes these dynamics of mirroring, and even complicity, in terms of the mutual desire between the West and Japan to configure the latter as an irreducible, meaningful object, a “black box” of culture.Footnote 5
The four books discussed in this review essay present part of a broader scholarly challenge to these ideas. A discussion of the thematic range of these texts can proceed by discussing certain ideas that suffuse these texts: first, transnational processes and exchanges; second, the community as the locus for articulating and managing diversity; and third, multiculturalism as a state project and lived reality.
Transnational Processes and Exchanges
An attention to transnational processes, that is, the ways in which communities, identities, objects, and discourses are constituted via “sustained cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-states” can illuminate the contingency and malleability of the national frame.Footnote 6 It does so by considering how groups, ideas, and things deemed Japanese are produced through and in transnational encounters and practices. At the same time, the transnational unfolds in specific places, in specific historical and social contexts, even as it pertains to linkages across national borders.Footnote 7 These four books take up the transnational in different, interrelated ways. Deborah Milly's New Policies for New Residents and Kazuyo Tsuchiya's Reinventing Citizenship, from political science, and history and American studies, respectively, are both comparative studies. Taking Japan as the central but not exclusive example, Milly comparatively examines transformations in immigrant policy advocacy in relation to national governance, local governments, and civil society actors in Italy, Spain, and South Korea. Here, the transnational entails a cross-cultural perspective that is warranted by shared recent historical contexts. All four countries have experienced dramatic increases in immigration since the 1990s within a context of state devolution and expanded “multilevel governance,” a process unfolding since the 1980s, wherein national governance is increasingly decentralized as various tasks such as welfare programs, education, employment, and healthcare matters are delegated to actors at multiple governmental levels.
Similarly, Tsuchiya examines the parallel struggles for equal rights and access to welfare programs during the 1960s to 1980s of two marginalized communities: impoverished African Americans in Los Angeles, and Zainichi (resident Koreans) in Kawasaki. The parallels go beyond the grassroots level, and are mirrored in local and national government responses to activists. Tsuchiya demonstrates how techniques of governance and managing popular unrest are also transnationally constituted, such as community and citizenship. In both Los Angeles and Kawasaki, African Americans and Koreans respectively fought for inclusion in this period in the realms of housing, education, and healthcare. Moreover, Tsuchiya shows how Korean activists found inspiration and new ways of fighting for their cause in American liberation Black theology writings and leaders. In the face of general public indifference at home, Zainichi leaders cultivated transnational affiliations based on shared religion and by aligning Korean experiences of race- and class-based discrimination and marginalization with those of African Americans. This enabled new imaginations of Zainichi identity. The exclusion of these former colonial subjects was recast in terms of liberation from oppression, and articulated in novel ways, such as the desire to live openly as Korean in Japan, using Korean names and language.
The other two books under review here focus only on Japanese examples. The Buraku activists in Joseph Hankins's ethnography, Working Skin, are, unlike foreigners or Zainichi, ethnically Japanese. The stigmatization of “unclean” trades dates from the Heian period. “Burakumin” were historically stigmatized due to their occupations related to animal death, places of residence, and descent. Hankins considers the contemporary situation of Buraku people, primarily in Tokyo, and especially through the activities of institutionalized Buraku political movements. Like the Zainichi in Kawasaki a few decades previous, the Buraku Liberation League and its affiliate organizations found new, transnational paths to articulate and contest their marginal status in Japan, but in a far more sophisticated and systematic way. They, too, found international allies in groups facing similar types of social stigmatization, namely the Dalits in India, with whom Buraku organizations developed longstanding exchange programs and collaboration. Together with other groups, they successfully lobbied for the United Nations' 2002 recognition of a new category of “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent.”
Insofar as “transnational” implies a kind of reciprocity, a back-and-forth movement and interconnectedness of groups and places,Footnote 8 both the cases of the Buraku and Zainichi movements appear in these works to be more influenced by, rather than influencing, their allies abroad. For example, James H. Cone, a Black theologian and important figure for Zainichi Christian activists, said he was unfamiliar with the Zainichi situation when approached by Korean leaders (Tsuchiya, p. 127). This is one possible shortcoming of the book: Tsuchiya gives equal attention to the struggles in Kawasaki and Los Angeles, and while we learn about American influences in Japan, there is nothing in the other direction. Even if the influence was largely one-way, this fact in itself opens the question of what it means to do “transnational history and comparative American studies,” as the author sets out to do (Tsuchiya, p. 14). Inter-national power inequalities seem not to be transcended through Black American and Korean relations, but reflect American hegemony. A similar transnational dynamic is revealed in Working Skin. Buraku activists on a solidarity trip to meet Dalits in south India, seeking common ground and imaginative solidarity, are confronted with the estranging fact that Dalits are working on a terrain of serious everyday violence and deprivation, while Buraku discrimination in Japan does not approximate this level of impoverishment and conflict. Thus even as the Buraku reach out beyond the nation, their transnational solidarities are limited by local contingencies.
The transnational therefore offers new possibilities for alliances; new political vocabularies to articulate struggles, such as liberation theology or human rights discourse; and novel expressions of identities for marginalized groups in Japan. Yet imaginative identifications are inevitably refracted through actual encounters, revealing fissures and limits, points where experiences do not fully translate.
The fourth study considered here, Embracing Differences by Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt, proffers an argument about how transnational power relations between the United States and Japan inform mutual, popular cultural representations. From a cultural studies perspective, Laemmerhirt examines American representations of Japan and Japanese representations of the United States. Among her examples, she includes Hollywood films such as The Last Samurai and Lost in Translation, pop songs, sushi, and Disney theme parks in Tokyo. Its focus on commodities and media sets it apart from the other three books. Much scholarship on Japan, and also in Asian American studies, have critiqued Euro-American representations of Asians and Japanese specifically as Orientalist; these often feature recurring motifs, such as those described at the beginning of this essay. Laemmerhirt's main argument is that we can no longer accurately understand these images simply in terms of cultural imperialism or Orientalism today, and that more complex readings are required. Indeed, there are more representations of Japan than ever, which cannot be reduced to classic stereotypes. However, the book unfortunately frequently reifies the very objects it seeks to deconstruct and nuance with phrasing like “Japanese culture” and “the East” versus “the West,” “American culture,” and “Oriental food” (Laemmerhirt, p. 115). Furthermore, based solely on her interpretive readings of these cultural objects, Laemmerhirt argues that Japanese and American relations have become closer, a claim that cannot be substantiated without empirical study. Given that the meanings of cultural products like film, art, and even Disneyland are socially produced, within particular contexts of production and via audience reception, an engagement with these dimensions alongside the objects themselves would help us see to how groups and individuals imagine and produce Japan or the United States in situated ways. Finally, a deeper engagement with the literature on cultural production of Japan in transnational contexts would have perhaps revealed how media and commodities, while having a particular national origin, are not necessarily appropriated as such by consumers, complicating the claim that these are somehow representative of “Japan” or “America.”Footnote 9
Communities as Sites of Difference
How, then, do these global processes unfold on domestic terrain? A broader story is related in these studies, about social diversity, and how it has been formalized, codified, suppressed, and coopted to various degrees in the modern Japanese nation. Foreigners are often the most obvious outsiders, but contemporary Japan has a whole range of “semi-citizens,”Footnote 10 subordinated and categorized along intersecting lines of nationality, ethnicity, race, work and descent, and class. Difference is intertwined with social inequality: Zainichi, foreign laborers, and Buraku people's presences constitute sites of problematic variation that must be managed by the state. While many earlier studies of social outsiders in Japan have focused on the internal dynamics of these communities themselves and daily lives, these authors draw attention to the interface between “Japanese” and those who are not, or are not quite so, and their political struggles for equal treatment and recognition with majority Japan.Footnote 11 Indeed, the country has always already been diverse, as any other is, but large-scale public discussion of and reckoning with this fact has become pressing in the current historical moment, as demographic trends such as low fertility, a growing aging population, increased immigration, and long-term economic stagnation redefine what it means to be Japanese.
Alongside transnational flows, there is ample evidence here of an ethnically and culturally diverse society: longstanding, former colonial, minority communities like the Zainichi and Chinese; other ethnic groups like Ainu and Okinawans; Buraku people; Nikkei Latin American groups; and a large foreign population of varied origin, just to name some. Nevertheless, it remains a question to what degree these realities puncture the ideological power of national (ethnic and cultural) homogeneity. Both legislation and social attitudes are based upon such claims about what Japan really is, as reflected in Japanese jus sanguinis, easier visa requirements for ethnic Japanese return migrants (Nikkei), or in how Zainichi were stripped of Japanese nationality in the postwar period. Conversely, minorities in Japan may also perceive Japanese identity as mutually exclusive with other belongings. For instance, Takeyuki Tsuda's research relates how migrant Nikkei Brazilians, encountering systematic discrimination in Japan, respond by espousing national “Brazilian” identities contrasted with negatively valuated “Japanese” identities, rather than cultivating a transnational, “Nikkei” identity, thereby reifying the national frame.Footnote 12 The problem, then, is not just about some people not being able to become Japanese, but that they must choose to become fully Japanese and abandon other identities and national, ethnic, and cultural affiliations in order to have equal rights as citizens.
In Milly's, Hankins's, and Tsuchiya's works, community emerges as a key site for contests over redefining and policing the terms of national belonging and (un)acceptable difference. In the 1960s and 1970s, during a period of unprecedented economic growth, “community” became a new locus of state management and discourse in Japan. Rapid social change and unprecedented economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s were the backdrop for new anxieties about “community” in Japan. Labor migration to cities; shifts in kinship arrangements, like the rise of the nuclear family; and sharply drawn gender roles between salarymen husbands and fathers and devoted housewives and mothers signaled an “emergent social crisis” of disintegrating communities and growing (urban) anomie and isolation (Tsuchiya, pp. 43–44). Around the same moment, a number of residents' movements (jūmin undō) against incidents of environmental pollution and development projects signaled popular unrest and questioning of corporate and state-led industrialization at the cost of local lives (Tsuchiya, pp. 44–45). In response to these perceived crises, the state promulgated a powerful set of discourses and instituted programs around the notion of “community,” namely via the Model Community Program. Community was supposed to, according to the state, be the “last place to recover humanity,” and where numerous social problems, such as environmental degradation, juvenile delinquency, elderly care, and safety, were to be solved (Tsuchiya, p. 47). It was a technique of governance, too: by enjoining residents to participate maximally, a restive population and potential radicalism could be neutralized.
Tsuchiya demonstrates how, although the jūmin undō movement was nominally inclusive, many were excluded from this depoliticizing, state-led discourse of community—which was imagined as a homogenized group of people with shared needs and interests. Japanese welfare programs targeting communities held that they were caring for residents, but by equating “residents” with Japanese people, and defining citizenship strictly in terms of nationality, the state excluded Koreans from these. Ethnic Korean enclaves of workers had grown around the city's military factories. Later, while Kawasaki, as well as the rest of Japan's “industrial belt,” greatly benefited from postwar economic growth, Korean areas remained impoverished and underserviced into the 1960s and 1970s (Tsuchiya, pp. 118–19). Zainichi children were held exempt from national education requirements and frequently disqualified from receiving health insurance, and their neighborhoods lacked basic infrastructure and resources. Community discourse and programs thus concealed racial and economic inequalities.
In Working Skin, community similarly emerges as a site of struggle over identity and belonging. Whereas in Kawasaki Zainichi activists fought for the visibility of their community to access equal rights, with Buraku people, a gradual fading of identifying markers seems to parallel diminished discrimination. Unlike Zainichi, Buraku are ethnically Japanese. They are identified via “an occupational, a spatial, or a genealogical relationship to historically stigmatized labor such as meat and leather production” (Hankins, p. 3), and the category is produced and sustained via talk, official records about labor and residence, and family registries. Historically, there were Buraku communities across Japan, such as in particular urban neighborhoods or provincial villages. Buraku status was thus highly located, in specific places, with particular industries, and where certain kinds of people, some of shared descent, lived together, and was reinforced by laws and development subsidies that encouraged the formal registration of certain areas as Buraku (Hankins, p. 83).
In the postwar period, though, Hankins explains how a combination of factors led to the increasing difficulty of spotting the Buraku person. Changing environmental regulations to limit pollution caused by the run-off into rivers of corrosive chemicals used in leather tanning; the 2002 lifting of legal protection of stigmatized industries, which had thus far been relatively sheltered from economic liberalization begun in the 1960s; and the availability of cheaper offshore labor have all contributed to the dramatic shrinking of the formerly Buraku-dominated leather industry. At the same time, public access to family records (koseki) has been restricted, and internal migration and urbanization made it harder to identify the individual Buraku. Increasingly detached from a particular occupation or place of residence, and sometimes unaware of their own genealogy, people do not always know that they are Buraku, or, if they work in a stigmatized industry or live in a (formerly) Buraku area, are not aware that they might be read as such by others. Most significantly, those who do know they are Buraku might, under such conditions, be able to avoid the social discrimination in marriage, education, and employment their predecessors endured. Buraku identity is “contagious” because of its enactment via work and residence, Hankins writes, but this is exactly why it might be possible to not “catch it” or be “cured” of it as well.
As Buraku areas and persons become increasingly invisible, it seems that Buraku discrimination is also disappearing, or at the very least diminishing. Community, as group belonging, located in space, was historically a liability for the Buraku, but it could be transcended. Hankins illustrates this point with the fictional case of Ushimatsu from Shimazaki Toson's 1906 novel Broken Commandment, who spends his life hiding and running away from his stigmatized origins. Ushimatsu finds his liberation by migrating to Texas, a land of cows and leather, but for those active in the Buraku political movement today, the Ushimatsu character stands in for the “unliberated” Buraku subject who hides their identity to their psychological detriment (Hankins, pp. 73–75). If community was historically the site of Buraku identification and exclusion, where people lived and worked together in the same occupations, what happens to the stigmatized identity when these links are attenuated and broken? This might be a welcome change for some who bear the stigma of Buraku association, if not to be freed from it, then to have ties with it loosened. The Buraku Liberation League (BLL) and the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), Buraku political organizations, on the other hand, see freedom as the right to freely choose and bear a Buraku identity with pride. Their attempts to remake Buraku-ness on an international stage as a new kind of transnationally embedded community are ambitious, but not necessarily successful in garnering recognition back at home.
In New Policies for New Residents, Milly engages with community as the starting point of social change, specifically in relation to how local communities deal with the sometimes new, sometimes longstanding presence of foreigners in their midst. While it is a comparative study, I focus here on her findings on Japan, which rest on a founding conclusion: change starts on the ground. Immigration policy has been slow to change in Japan over the last three decades, despite the fact that the country has experienced dramatically increased immigration over this period. This is only likely to increase, because of the high demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor, such as factory workers or nurses and healthcare workers. By contrast, national policy strongly favors the immigration of skilled professionals, who comprise only a tiny fraction of immigrants (Milly, p. 62). Despite the realities, there has not been large-scale public debate about immigration in Japan since the late 1980s, something that would be necessary to bring about broad policy reform. Politicians have avoided such discussions as politically sensitive; and bureaucratic and inter-ministerial conflict has also prevented big changes. Instead, policy changes have been adopted at a small scale, incrementally, in order to avoid controversy (Milly, p. 80). It is “local communities with large foreign-resident populations that have actively adopted measures tailored to their needs to promote social inclusion” (Milly, p. 83). While national policy reform has been piecemeal, slow, and largely invisible, at the local level of prefectures and cities, government has worked with nongovernmental actors to adopt new measures to help foreign residents, deliver services, and include the voice of community residents.
Social change thus begins within communities with the greatest stakes in the wellbeing of foreign residents. Seventy percent of Japan's foreign population lives in just ten prefectures (out of forty-three), and in some of these areas, like Osaka or Kanagawa (which includes the city of Kawasaki), there are long histories of the sort of Zainichi presence and activism described by Tsuchiya, with which the situations of more recent communities overlap (Milly, p. 83). These areas with the biggest foreign populations, unsurprisingly, have the most extensive services and methods of inclusion for them.
As an anthropologist, I was intrigued that while change in national policy is enabled and propelled by local-level decisions and practices, the latter are not so much expressions of ideological adherence to multiculturalism, or a fundamental belief in equality and inclusion for foreigners, but pragmatic responses to specific, everyday problems. For example, housing and education are two arenas of “collective life” that are often flashpoints of social exclusion within a community. Foreigners' “failure to follow mundane rules about garbage, parking, and noise” (Milly, p. 89) are symbolic of how others do not understand “our way” of doing things, and small incidents set off community animosity. Similarly, non-Japanese children are excluded from national compulsory education requirements, and this, alongside uncertainty of long-term settlement in Japan of migrants, and the lack of special support for foreign children in terms of language skills and discrimination, renders education another site where the lines of social exclusion are especially ingrained (Milly, p. 91). It was the dependence of the auto industry on Latin American workers, recruited on a large scale from 1990 onwards in cities like Toyota and Hamamatsu, that compelled local governments and community groups to respond effectively to the needs of their foreign residents, whether by allocating more public housing to them, providing specialized bilingual staff in public schools for foreign children, or licensing “foreigners schools” within the Japanese school system.
Multiculturalism as Discourse; Multiculturalism as Lived Experience
The dynamics of national belonging and exclusion, among both “insider” and “outsider” minorities,Footnote 13 as played out on the stages of communities across Japan in three of these books (Tsuchiya's, Milly's, and Hankins's) speak to ongoing debates about the meanings of multiculturalism and related ideas like internationalization in Japan. Both of these notions, at their basis, have to do with how Japan is imaginatively positioned within the global, whether the latter is Japan as a whole on the global stage, or the presence of sometimes new, sometimes enduring foreignness in Japan, as with immigrants. We all know that Japan has always been multicultural, and that the powerful myths of national cultural and ethnic homogeneity that undergird everything from nihonjinron to globally circulating images and representations of Japan in popular culture (as discussed by Laemmerhirt), while having older roots, have acquired purchase and widespread legitimacy since the postwar period. The tension sustained in these texts is rather between different expressions of multiculturalism: first, as a state-led discourse promulgated from the 1980s onwards, and second, as lived experience, often delinked from the former, official proclamations. Scholars have recently expanded upon what historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki has described as Japan's “cosmetic multiculturalism”—that is, a multiculturalism that uses notions of “culture” and “diversity” as an “esthetic framework” that disguises a nationalism that reaffirms Japanese ethno-national identity, and calls upon foreign residents to celebrate Japanese cultural expressions at a symbolic level, while discouraging them from retaining and practicing their own.Footnote 14
This discourse of multiculturalism thinly disguises deeper social and economic inequalities, and indeed seems to reinforce the state's classic approach to immigration, which was assimilation. Some of these stories are about Zainichi who disguise their Korean identities behind Japanese names in order to avoid systematic discrimination. Others are about foreign residents for whom long-term settlement in Japan is unimaginable because of the lack of regular employment; cultural and linguistic demands; and restricted access to welfare programs, healthcare, and education. They all highlight how being Japanese is still understood in narrow and exclusivist terms. Foreigners are usually integrated into Japanese society as foreigners.Footnote 15 Similarly, the state cast its version of social diversity in terms of “living together” (kyōsei), a depoliticizing phrasing that simply reinforced prejudice and inequality (Tsuchiya, p. 168). The difference between these different kinds of multiculturalism might also be paralleled with state policies that encourage the immigration of skilled professionals to Japan, while discouraging unskilled workers. Upwardly mobile migrants from places like Southeast Asia or China were allowed into Japan as university students or “trainees” on a temporary basis that, while appearing to be to their benefit, rendered such individuals part of Japan's role as a paternalistic regional leader helping developing countries (Milly, pp. 126–28). Unpaid trainees and interns in Japan's training-internship programs were sources of cheap labor and especially vulnerable to employer exploitation, such as underpayment, contract violations, and withholding of passports or access to healthcare (Milly, pp. 126–28).Footnote 16
The meanings of multiculturalism—and the friction between the superficial, largely discursive, and nationalistic celebration of diversity and the realities of marginalized groups seeking equal rights and visibility on the ground—take a different, more complex turn in Hankins's work on Buraku people. Here, the Buraku people do not emerge as a cohesive, clearly delineated group. Not only is it becoming harder to identify who is and is not Buraku, there are at least two kinds of Buraku actors in the book: the Buraku person recognizable by traditional distinguishing markers—someone working in a leather tannery and gendered male, presumably living in or close to a Buraku neighborhood—and the Buraku (or ally of the Buraku movement) political activist, working for an NGO or other formal organization, often gendered female. The former is defined by his physicality, the traces of hard work visible in the wear and tear on his body (fingers lopped off by machines, skin corroded by chemicals). When he leaves work, his body stinks of this stigmatized labor with dead animal skins. The latter is defined by her “feminized care” work in the “liberal, multicultural office,” where she engages in translating, inscribing, and representing the Buraku person and movement for a larger audience and in the fight against inequality. The production of leather, juxtaposed against the production of websites (Hankins, p. 33). The former has the weight of Buraku authenticity and lends symbolic authority to the claims of the latter and the NGOs that Buraku constitute a distinct social category of discriminated person, in whose name they act at the national and international levels. The represented Buraku person and those who do the representing are not the same. Both engage in what Hankins calls the “labor of multiculturalism,” a “mode of managing difference” that disciplines people in particular ways (Hankins, p. 232).
In order to achieve their stated aims of “liberating the Buraku subject,” the BLL and other NGOs have the difficult task of making the authentic Buraku subject appear. How is one to do this in a world in which that subject is increasingly elusive? The political activists have done so by remaking, or restaging, the Buraku story from one of exclusion and harmony to one of discrimination, rights, and pride, a narrative made possible within the language of international human rights discourse. In doing so, however, they find themselves in the paradoxical situation of simultaneously producing Japan as a “multicultural society,” thereby converging with the interests of the liberal state. This is surely problematic: given the compromised nature of the state's multiculturalist discourse, what does it mean for a longstanding marginalized group to reproduce that discourse, when Buraku marginalization has been condoned and even enacted by the state for centuries? This is a point that Hankins touches upon only lightly, pointing out the “irony” of this complicity, which is evident in the subtitle of the book: “Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan,” but which demands much more interrogation and discussion.
At the same time, the story told here is actually about how leather is increasingly not being made in Japan; indeed, by the late 2000s, there were almost no tanneries left in Tokyo, the industry demolished (Hankins, p. 86). In the same way, the Buraku subject for whom the BLL, the IMADR, and other groups speak appears to disappear, and is not very visible in the book. Chapter 3 (“Locating the Buraku”) presents a beautiful ethnographic description of work in the leather tannery, where Hankins also works, and we encounter, very briefly, some of the men who work there. Beyond this, however, the reader learns little about what it is like being an ordinary, non-activist Buraku person in contemporary Japan. One wonders how discrimination in realms of daily life like work and education play out today; what the ramifications are of being a Buraku person, who may or may not identify as such; and how questions of choice and strategy play out in how people manage their identities.
Finally, what kind of multiculturalism is it? What are the contradictions, potentially, between seeking equality through the same discourses that elide other forms of social difference and reinforce inequalities? Erasure of conflict is one the ways in which the Japanese state has managed Buraku difference, making such identities “unspeakable,” so it makes sense that activists fight domestically for visibility and recognition.Footnote 17 Yet how these identities are made visible and how the movement's chosen discourse of multiculturalism might silence others who are more marginal bear discussion as well. Interestingly, we barely hear the voices of the two most marginalized figures at the tannery: a Bangladeshi and a Ghanaian, foreigners at the bottom of the social hierarchy whom the other workers do not talk to. Although in the same city, the politics of exclusion and belonging at the tannery are a far cry from the politics of transnational solidarity against discrimination at the BLL offices. In the mundane, non-activist, local workplace of the factory, Hankins's transnational perspective seems to recede here. Given that the coherence of the contemporary Buraku social category is fairly recent, and has emerged out of a long, multi-stranded history of shifting, malleable categories and disciplining of various groups of polluted and outcaste people,Footnote 18 an attention to the statuses of the Bangladeshi and Ghanaian workers might shed light on some of the present contours of this shifting category.
Conclusion
This essay has considered how these four books all move beyond or displace the national frame in their study of aspects of Japanese society. A transnational perspective, either as a methodological approach that considers Japanese processes alongside similar ones unfolding in other countries or as an examination of transnational relationships and exchanges between actors in Japan and those elsewhere, avoids the pitfalls of methodological nationalism and shows how domestic political and social identities, discourses, struggles, and techniques of governance emerge via cross-border encounters of people, ideas, and things.
However, in these studies, encounters with otherness happen not primarily across borders, but on domestic ground: within one's own local community. Community emerges as an ambiguous concept in the struggles between foreign residents and the Japanese they live among across the nation; between Zainichi Koreans and Japanese in Kawasaki; and between Buraku people and non-Buraku Japanese, as well as in between activists and non-activist Buraku. Its connotations of togetherness, shared interests, and common identity make the term amenable to state-led discourses about “community” and its use in techniques of governance to manage social difference and potential unrest. Communities are where the boundaries between who belongs to Japan and who does not are drawn, played out on the everyday terrain of access to public resources, in the shared spaces of neighborhoods, housing blocks, schools, and community centers. At the same time, community, as a site of local, small-scale, intimate struggles, can be a locus of social change that reverberates more widely.
Finally, does multiculturalism enable a more thorough understanding of Japanese society as both transnationally constituted via the exchanges of people, ideas, and things, and as fundamentally—not newly or partially—diverse? As an official discourse, set out in plans and locally delegated programs, it remains unconvincing and without force, and this poses a question of how useful multiculturalism is for scholars, whether used descriptively or analytically to explain the dynamics of social diversity in Japan. What this new scholarship does show is that, labels aside, struggles over national belonging continuously happen in Japanese society, and these are most often set in motion by the search for answers to immediate, intimate concerns: how to house a group of local workers, how to get a job and keep it when one is a member of a stigmatized group, how to put one's child in school, how to access healthcare, or how to move freely throughout one's town or city without social injury or insult.
Speaking about a different part of the world, sociologist Richard Sennett has written that in order to foster a more just and democratic society, we must embrace the frictions and conflicts of an everyday life lived in the company of those unlike us, and not “purify them away in a solidarity myth,” even if those encounters may cause us discomfort and pain.Footnote 19 In presenting the stories of various people who are deemed imperfectly and only partially Japanese, we see they are both nevertheless equally part of the national society. Their struggles for belonging and rights reveal “Japan” in the making, as a process, not a given. The intellectual task of doing away, for good, with myths of homogeneity and the black box of Japanese culture thus converges with issues of social inequality. For scholars, this opens up new possibilities of investigating and representing Japanese society, where inherent diversity is an assumed precondition, not an endpoint.
