Japan and the Emancipator
Harvard history professor Daniel Botsman discusses the progress and
plight of Japan's Burakumin under Meiji rule.
A story involving beautiful flowers, Mito Mitsukuni, and then, to
top it all off, the greatest military hero of the imperial past,
Kusunoki Masashige, seems just a little bit too good to be true.
Ayub Khattak
They took away the corpses of people who fell ill and died in the
streets. They posted the severed heads of criminals in public and
guarded them. They were responsible for the carcasses of cows. Some
made leather and some sold flowers. These were the Burakumin, the
outcasts of Japan.
Descendants of Burakumin, Japanese people distinguished by caste,
not ethnicity, continue to face unofficial discrimination in Japan.
Daniel Botsman, a professor of history at Harvard University, told
the ironic story of the "emancipatory moment" of the outcasts in
Meiji Japan (1868-1912) at a colloquium sponsored by the UCLA Center
for Japanese Studies on Oct. 31. The Burakumin were granted commoner
status in the Emancipation Edict of 1871, the culmination of a
campaign spearheaded by Ôe Taku, a prominent citizen. It was Ôe who
formally proposed that the outcast status of the Burakumin be
abolished.
However, this story of liberation has no fairy-tale ending, and the
emancipator's motives were perhaps not as altruistic as he made out,
according to Botsman.
Ôe, born to a lower-class samurai family, devoted himself to the
cause of the emperor and the restoration movement of the 1860s. He
was active in politics and business, including a stint as a railway
magnate in colonial Korea. He eventually was appointed as a judge in
the Kobe area court, a "treaty port" where foreigners were beginning
to set up consulates and trade.
In a 1919 speech, Ôe said that his interest in the outcasts' cause
had been sparked during a stroll when he stumbled on Furonodani, a
village under the general authority of the Kobe area. Ôe said he had
been touched by the poverty of the people and noticed they were
mostly flower sellers, a "beautiful door-to-door trade" that they
alone were allowed to pursue. He found out, he said, that their
monopoly on the trade stemmed from loyalty to the great fourteenth-
century imperial general Kusunoki Masashige.
According to legend, in the early Tokugawa period (seventeenth
century), a great daimyo lord, Mitsukuni of Mito, happened across
the grave of Kusunoki, who had died trying to reassert the power of
the Imperial throne. The general's grave was nondescript and sat in
a lonely paddy field. Yet each morning without fail, Mitsukuni
noticed, fresh incense burned and fresh flowers had been laid there.
He wondered who could be responsible. Soon he found that the people
of Furonodani were the ones loyally tending to this grave centuries
after the great general's death. In recognition of their loyal
service, Mitsukuni granted them the exclusive privilege of selling
flowers in the region.
'Leather Was King'
Although his later account made it seem that the villagers who
touched Ôe were all flower-sellers, they were in fact mostly makers
of leather. Botsman showed this with evidence from population
registers. The Burakumin had the dirty job of skinning and tanning
the carcasses of cows that they were responsible for collecting.
Was Ôe simply mistaken? Although there were many Burakumin flower-
sellers, about six times as many of them were leather workers. It
seems that Ôe focused on one aspect of their livelihood in order to
win them sympathy, Botsman said. A story involving "beautiful
flowers, Mito Mitsukuni, and then, to top it all off, the greatest
military hero of the imperial past, Kusunoki Masashige, seems just a
little bit too good to be true."
Botsman also pointed out that Ôe grew up near a village of these
eta, or outcasts, and had hired them to clear some of his land.
Clearly, he had been exposed to these people before. Where he worked
in the Kobe region, the Burakumin were practically on his office's
doorstep, according to Botsman.
Furonodani was located very close to the burgeoning port area of
Kobe, where westerners were officially allowed to set up shop. While
demand for beef was growing, leather had always been used to make
sandals that were popular in Japan. Even more important in the Meiji
era were leather boots, straps, and belts for the westernizing
army. "Leather was king," Botsman said.
Slaughtering cows and manufacturing leather was a dirty job that
only the outcasts could do, but there were not enough of them. The
industry needed more hands, as Ôe was well aware. He worked in the
local courthouse and had significant responsibility over the
new "treaty port."
Botsman concluded that Ôe invented much of his flowery appeal for
reform in order to bolster the industry. By raising people who had
their hands in the leather and slaughtering business to the status
of others, he hoped to remove its stigma. As long as people shunned
the industry, labor and investment would be difficult to attract.
In his 1919 speech Ôe vouched for the Burakumin to a council charged
with doing something about the "Burakumin problem." Though formally
emancipated 50 years prior, the Burakumin were still a disadvantaged
social group, potentially ripe for revolution against their imperial
government. Japanese officials may have worried about this after
witnessing a socialist revolution in Russia. Botsman said Ôe
intended to help them again in order to prevent such an uprising.
According to Botsman, then, development of the leather industry and
subversion of revolution were, in turn, motives behind Ôe's
championing of the Burakumin's cause.
Date Posted: 11/9/2005
http://www.international.ucla.edu/print.asp?parentid=33148