Revw Law Econ 2020; 20190021

J. Mark Ramseyer*

On the Invention of Identity Politics:
The Buraku Outcastes in Japan
https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2019-0021

Abstract: Using 14 national censuses and a wide variety of first-hand accounts, I
trace the creation of a largely fictive identity for Japan’s putative outcastes andthe transformation of their nominal human rights organization into (on several
crucial dimensions) a heavily criminal extortion machine. Scholars have longdescribed the outcastes – the “burakumin” – as descended from a pre-modern
leather-workers’ guild. Their members suffer discrimination because their ancestors handled carcasses, and ran afoul of a traditional Japanese obsession withritual purity.
In fact, most burakumin are descended not from leather-workers, but frompoor farmers with distinctively dysfunctional norms. Others may or may nothave shunned them out of concern for purity, but they certainly would haveshunned many of them for their involvement in crime and their disintegrating
family structures.
The modern transformation of the buraku began in 1922, when selfdescribed Bolsheviks lauched a buraku “liberation” organization. To fit thegroup within Marxist historical schema, they invented for it the fictive identity
as a leather-workers’ guild that continues to this day. Bitter identity politics
followed. Within a few years, criminal entrepreneurs hijacked the new organization, and pioneered a shakedown strategy that coupled violent accusations ofbias with demands for massive amounts of money. Selective out-migration andspiraling levels of public subsidies ensued. The logic follows straightforwardly
from the economic logic outlined by Becker and Hirschman: given ever-larger
amounts of (expropriable) subsidies, burakumin with the lowest opportunity
costs faced ever-larger incentives to stay in the buraku and invest in criminal
careers; given the virulent public hostility that this strategy generated, thoseburakumin with the highest legitimate career options abandoned the community
and merged into the general public instead.
Keywords: ethnicity, extortion, organized crime, discrimination
JEL Numbers: H30, I26, I38, J49, K14, K38, K42*Corresponding author: J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA,
E-mail: ramseyer@law.harvard.edu

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J. M. Ramseyer

I Introduction
According to most accounts, the Japanese “burakumin” trace their ancestry to aguild of seventeenth century tanners and leather-workers.1 By Japanese religious
strictures, these ancestors had worked within a ritually unclean world. Given thepervasive but rarely articulated Japanese obsession with ritual purity (theseconventional accounts explain), modern Japanese continue to discriminate
against their present-day descendants. Centuries later, they still shun marriages
with the burakumin and avoid hiring them when they can.
The “burakumin” (i. e. people of the “buraku”) do not differ visually fromother Japanese. They do not speak a separate language. They do not worship a
private deity. Solely out of this centuries-old concern for ritual purity, we are
told, secular and educated Japanese continue to shun the group. For intellectuals in modern American universities, it seems a story tailor-made to confirm
the eternal plasticity of culture and the boundless human capacity for bias,
exclusion, and ethnic cruelty.
In fact, the ancestors to most burakumin did not tan animal skins or work in
the leather trade. They did not work in a guild. Instead, most burakumin trace
their ancestry a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers. The
nineteenth and twentieth century buraku were dysfunctional in ways that track
under-class communities the world over. Like (to take but one example) the“crackers” among the poor whites in the U.S. south, many (obviously not all) of
the poorer burakumin were quick to take offense, quick to escalate any quarrel
to dangerous levels, and quick to avoid costly investments in work or education.
They formed communities with astonishingly high levels of crime. And only
haphazardly did they invest in their own marriages and families.
The hostility between buraku and non-buraku followed from economic
development. Trade, travel, and migration increased exponentially over thelast decades of the nineteenth century. As they did, contact between mainstream
Japanese and burakumin followed. And with the contact came cultural conflict.
Matters reached a head in the early 1920s. These were years of revolutionary
ardor for intellectuals. In 1922, young men from the buraku upper class launched
for themselves a “liberation” movement. Their commoner friends were creating
Bolshevik and Anarcho-Syndicalist cells. They created one for their own stilllargely inchoate communities. Marxist historians were characterizing the earlier
Tokugawa period as feudal, and in German Ideology Marx had placed feudal

1 The politically correct term in Japanese is “dowa”; the standard English language term seems
to remain “burakumin.”On the Invention of Identity Politics

3

workers in guilds. For their own group, the young burakumin intellectuals
dutifully invented a fictive ethnic identity as a leather workers’ guild.
[Correction added after online publication 6 November 2019: In this article, I
explore the way that self-appointed leaders of the Japanese “outcaste” burakumin in 1922 invented for their group a fictive origin in a premodern leatherworkers’ guild. The most powerful of the early leaders were Bolsheviks (one of
the founders secretly travelled to the Soviet Union where he joined the party andserved on Comintern). They invented this origin, I explain, in part to fit theirgroup within the historical framework that Marx had outlined. Given that Marx
had placed guilds at the center of the premodern economies, they invented fortheir own group a predecessor guild.
In explaining this history, I referred to Marx’s discussion of guilds in German
Ideology. As one reader noted, this reference is incorrect: although Marx and Engels
wrote German Ideology in 1846, the work was not published until 1932, long after
their deaths. Note, however, that guilds figure prominently in a wide variety ofMarx’s documents. Most obviously, they appear in the Communist Manifesto – onwhich in part the early buraku leaders modeled their own 1922 manifesto.]
Over the course of the ensuing decade, these young intellectuals and thecriminal entrepreneurs who followed them began to couple accusations of bias
and discrimination with credible threats of serious violence. In the process, they
began to extort ever-increasing amounts of money from local governments. The
ensuing identity-politics-based shake-down strategy would last eight decades.
Consistently, it generated government subsidies that buraku leaders (under theguise of their human rights group) found easy to divert.
The resulting transformation follows the basic economic logic to non-market
behavior pioneered by scholars like Gary Becker. Necessarily, the subsidies shifted
the relative returns to legal and illegal careers. In the process, they increased the
incentives for buraku men with the lowest opportunity costs to crime to drop outof school and invest in criminal skills. Many of them then stayed within thecommunity, joined the organized crime syndicates, and leveraged their collective
pressure to induce the government to increase transfer payments still further. Yet
more young burakumin left school to join the syndicates; the now higher criminalpressure (and lower buraku educational achievements) induced the government
to raise transfer levels even higher; and so it went. An unholy spiral ensued.
Through this identity politics, the buraku leaders (acting still through theirnominal human rights group) thrust their community violently into the publiceye. Massive public hostility ensued, of course. Before the 1920s, the buraku hadconstituted nothing more than a set of loosely identified, indigent communities

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J. M. Ramseyer

whose poorer residents followed often dysfunctional norms of behavior. Thoseburakumin who chose instead to behave by broader Japanese social norms often
did well, but chose not to leave. Instead, many opted to stay within thecommunity and build its social and economic infrastructure instead.
The virulent public response that the buraku leaders incited during the 1920s,
however, inaugurated a distinctly selective out-migration. Given the lack of any
identifying cultural or physical attributes, burakumin faced (to turn toHirschman's [1970] term) a low-cost “exit” option. Those burakumin who perceived a comparative advantage in criminal careers stayed to divert the government subsidies to their private accounts. Increasingly, those with the best options
for careers in the Japanese mainstream abandoned the community instead.
After the war, the extortion steadily picked up pace. During the early post-war
years, the buraku leaders and organized crime syndicates began to work together
to extract funds from local and prefectural governments. Starting in 1969, they
began to collect from the national government – and the extraction dramaticallypicked up pace. In Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018), Eric Rasmusen and I describe
this later process in detail. Not until 2002 did the government stop the subsidies.
But when it did, it effectively shut down the extortion machine. With lower returns
to criminal careers, burakumin boys stayed in school. They left for universities,
and never returned. The identity politics that the Bolshevik leaders had inaugurated – had invented – in the 1920s finally collapsed.
As a group, the burakumin have received substantial attention in the West –whether from scholars broadly concerned with questions of inclusion and bias,
or from public intellectuals like Kristof (1995). The burakumin are also, however,a group that these scholars and intellectuals profoundly misunderstand.
Fundamentally, they misunderstand it for reasons that trace themselves to abasic unfamiliarity with the economics of social behavior pioneered by scholars
like Hirschman and Becker, and expanded by the hundreds who followed.
This article builds on Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018), but corrects its
account of the historical roots to the buraku. In that earlier study, Rasmusen
and I described the collapse of identity politics during the first decades of thetwenty-first century; in the article that follows, I explain how this phenomenoncame to be. In this article, I explore the dynamic logic to the social transformation of this group during the twentieth century: (i) to the spiralling descentof the burakumin with the lowest paying legitimate options into organized crimeand ever-higher levels of government extortion; and (ii) to the selective migration of those burakumin with the highest paying legitimate job options out of theburaku and into mainstream society.
After surveying the English-language literature on the buraku (Section II), I
summarize its modern connection to organized crime and shake-down politics

On the Invention of Identity Politics

5(Section III). I then describe its roots in the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries,
and note its tenuous connection to the leather industry (Section IV). I discuss theincreasing contact between the buraku and other Japanese communities in thelate nineteenth century, and document the conflict that ensued (Sections V, VI).
In Section VII, I turn to the pivotal moment: to the creation in the 1920s of theburaku as a sharply defined ethnic group, and to the inauguration of violent identity
politics. In 1922, fringe-left burakumin redefined the buraku as a leather workers’
guild. The history they created was largely fictitious, but its creation constitutes theinvention of the identity politics that would last through 2002. (Section VII). Public
hostility followed, and with it a selective out-migration as burakumin hoping formainstream careers left the group en masse (Sections VIII, IX).

II Buraku scholarship
A Premodern
Japanese scholars tell accounts of the pre-modern buraku that differ fundamentally from those they tell of the modern buraku. On the buraku’s pre-modern
history, scholars have compiled an increasingly sophisticated and intellectuallyindependent corpus of work. It was not always thus. Mid-century scholars were
overwhelmingly Marxist, and often mechanically so.
By the last few decades of the twentieth century, buraku historians began to
exhibit a refreshing thoughtfulness. Apparently, mob-affiliated leaders in theburaku left historians largely alone. Perhaps they thought heterodoxy in seventeenth and eighteenth century history posed less of a threat than in scholarshipabout the 20th. Whatever the case, over the past half century historian havecompiled a complex and sophisticated body of work. Economic historians like
Akira Hayami, Osamu Saito, and Masanori Takashima brought modern social
science to a field once locked in nineteenth century ideology. To the history of
the buraku itself, scholars like Toshiyuki Hatanaka, Midori Kurokawa, andTakashi Tsukada brought their own brand of independence.
Working from the resulting body of work, several recent Western historians
have produced careful studies of the pre-modern buraku. Ehlers (2018; forthcoming) examines the “hinin” communities in Fukui prefecture along the Japan
Sea. Abele (2018) studies the nineteenth century transformation of a suburban
Osaka buraku that would become the center of the slaughterhouse industry.
McCormack (2013) draws particularly on work by Hatanaka to detail the buraku
transition from late Tokugawa to early Meiji.

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J. M. Ramseyer

B Modern
This is not the way buraku history once was, and it is not the way modernburaku studies are today. Work on the modern buraku by serious Japanesescholars barely exists. The reason is simple, and lies in the leadership of the
Burakumin Liberation League (BLL). The BLL presents itself as the human rights
champion for the buraku, but from time to time has also maintained deep ties tothe organized crime syndicates. Against scholars who would deviate from its
own declared orthodoxy, it takes a ruthless approach.
Serious scholars have better things to do than to quarrel with the BLL andthe criminal syndicates. Writers tied to the Japan Commuist Party (JCP) can anddo turn to the party for support against the BLL. Say what you will about the
Marxist premises, these JCP scholars do at least ignore the orthodoxies
announced by the BLL. Those who insist on intellectual independence fromboth the JCP and the BLL typically find other things to study instead. Put mostcrassly, most non-JCP scholars who do write about the modern buraku produce
entirely predictable work of at-best dubious veracity. Japanese routinely dismissthem as crude goyo-gakusha (“at-your-service scholars”).
Unfortunately, Western scholars rarely do much better. Whatever the reason, Westerners seem routinely to start their research with stints at either the
BLL or one of its affiliated research groups. UC San Diego anthropologist
Hankins (2014) recently published a book based on his University of Chicago
dissertation. In the course of researching the study, he interned for a year and ahalf with a BLL-affiliated organization. The BLL, he enthusiastically tells hisreaders, seeks tirelessly to integrate the burakumin cause into the international
human rights movement and to shift Japan to a more “multicultural” vision.
McLauchlan (2003:113) wrote his book after interviewing 21 burakumin
selected for him by the BLL. The 21 seem to have convinced him that the “BLLis clearly the champion of the Buraku [X].” It has, he declares, “unquestionably
worked tirelessly to improve the circumstances of the buraku residents …”
Sociologist Bondy (2015:3) spent “twelve months of participant observation”
in two communities. For one of the two, he obtained his access through the BLL.
They “welcomed” him, he assures his readers (2015:156.). And about that“silence” on the part of mainstream scholars and journalists, he concludes
that the “media are agents that silence public exposure to buraku issues” andcause “both symbolic and literal marginalization” (2015:4).
Of the Western scholars of the buraku, senior Oxford historian Neary (2010:1)
remains the best known. He began his own studies in Japan as an exchange
student at Kyushu University, where he joined a study group on buraku history(2016:xx). He continues to participate in BLL-affiliated study groups to this day

On the Invention of Identity Politics

7(Teraki and Kurokawa, 2016:1–2). In his biography of BLL godfather Jiichiro
Matsumoto, he effuses that Matsumoto “campaigned against the prejudice anddiscrimination that he and his fellow Burakumin encountered in their daily lives.”

C Other evidence
Of the rampant BLL corruption and buraku crime, the evidence has been there foranyone with an inclination to look. The prefecture-level data on buraku density,
crime, and family deterioration that I use below is public data. It has long been
available through a wide range of libraries. The first-hand accounts of the buraku
that I quote have similarly been accessible to anyone willing to search. To be sure,the BLL and its predecessor Suiheisha worked hard to block books that tell accounts
contrary to their preferred narrative. The way they killed the re-release of buraku
community organizer Toyohiko Kagawa’s 1915 ethnography may be the best known
story.2 Yet even Kagawa’s book has always been available in university libraries.
Of the BLL’s ties to the organized crime syndicates, the evidence has
appeared prominently in the journalistic world since the close of the twentiethcentury. At that point, the police began to arrest BLL senior officers. The
prosecutors started to press charges, and networks and mainstream newspapers
gave the cases high profile.
Simultaneously, thoughtful journalists – some of them born into buraku
communities themselves (e. g. Kadooka) – began to publish books detailing theirown experiences within the mob-dominated buraku. Mainstream journalists
began describing the way mob-connected BLL leaders massively diverted government subsidies to their private accounts – though (reflecting the violence the
BLL could wreak) several of them did choose to publish pseudonymously: e. g.
Asahi shimbun press (1982); Ichinomiya and Group K21 (2007, 2012, 2013);
Terazono, Ichinomiya and Group K21 (2004).
Western scholars almost entirely missed (or chose to ignore) these accountsof BLL corruption. Few mention the crisis at all. Neary (2010:298 & n.5) cites
several books in a closing footnote to his biography but insists that the BLL
manipulated the allocation of the government subsidies in order “to ensure thatthe funds were used to the maximum benefit of Buraku communities … . It
would,” he continues (2010:239) “be a research project in itself to review andassess these allegations” of corruption. Absent “any independent analysis it is
2 Discussed in Section VI.B., below. Similarly, the Suiheisha violently attacked the police forallowing the publication of Sansai Kikuchi’s 1922 study, and caused it to ban the book. A
Suiheisha leader later intervened to cause the police to rescind the ban (Kikuchi 1966:3).

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J. M. Ramseyer

difficult to tell whether the amount of corruption has been greater (or less) thanthat which is normal in Japan …” Others (e. g. Rankin, 2012) simply dismiss theaccounts of the mob-BLL ties as “distasteful insinuation.”

D The conventional accountReflecting the strong ties that the BLL maintains with Western scholars, most ofthese scholars tell a remarkably consistent story about the buraku. During the
Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868), the predecessors to the modern burakumin
worked within a guild that skinned animal carcasses, tanned hides, and crafted
leather. They called themselves “kawata,” and others sometimes called them by thepejorative “eta.” Because they worked with dead animals, others treated them as
ritually unclean and forced them to live apart. Commoner peasants might refuse to
let them engage in other work, to marry outside the group, or even to dress likeother peasants. Writes legal scholar Upham (1988:79), the kawata “were forbidden
to marry commoners, to live outside their designated ghettos, or even to serve as
commoner’s servants. They could not eat, sit, or smoke in the company of commoners, dress their hair in the conventional manner, wear geta (wooden sandals),or cross a commoner’s threshold.”
These biases had religious roots, continue Western writers. The prejudice“derived from concepts found in the Shinto or Buddhist religions,” biographer
Neary (1989:2) writes. Granted, explains historian Howell (1996:178), many
Tokugawa kawata “had little everyday engagement with ‘unclean’ professions,”
but still the community “generally engaged in occupations that were considered
to be unclean, especially those that entailed the pollution of death.”3 After all,observes historian Ooms (1996:244), in Japan, “notions of purity and pollution
have historically functioned as powerful categories of ritual classification.”
Western scholars place this buraku within (and below) a class-based
Tokugawa order. As Amos (2011:3) put it, the government rooted its social
order in a “[Neo-] Confucian ideology stressing rigid hierarchical relations,”
and fashioned “a highly stratified social structure reminiscent of a caste system.” Within this world, it created four occupation-based classes: samurai,
farmers, artisans, and merchants. The burakumin it placed below this order asa group not even quite human. “The more than 250 years of internal stability
during this [Tokugawa] period,” explains Upham, “rigidified a formerly
3 Note that Hatanaka (1990), McCormack (2013), and Ehlers (2018) all carefully describe theway that the notion of the burakumin changed over time, explore the lack of continuity within
the buraku community over time, and note the changing character of bias and discrimination.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

9

somewhat fluid occupational and feudal hierarchy and led to the legal delineation of the outcastes as a separate segment of society …”4
In 1868, samurai from several outlying domains engineered a coup (called
the “Meiji Restoration”), and three years later officially “liberated” the burakumin. Yet the liberation was, many western scholars claim, at best a mixed
blessing. For one, the burakumin lost their occupational monopoly in the leather
trade. Legally emancipated, they would now face competition in work they had
earlier controlled as a monopoly (e. g. Upham, 1988:79–80). For another, theywould pay taxes. As outcastes, they had avoided any tax liability. Now theywould owe taxes like everyone else (e. g. Hankins, 2014:21).
At the close of the nineteenth century, some burakumin worked in thetanning sector or the newly created butchering industry, but even those working
elsewhere faced discrimination all the same. Mainstream Japanese forced theminto crowded and unsanitary urban ghettos. They barred them from their firms.
They refused to let their children marry them. Isolated by this pervasive bias, theburakumin eked out their lives on the social periphery.
In the early 1920s, continues this conventional account, a courageous group of
outcastes – now numbering 3 million – organized themselves into the “Suiheisha,”or “Levellers.” They adopted a policy of collective denunciation (kyudan). Faced withan expression of prejudice, they would together “denounce” the perpetrators.
Through their united pressure, they would force the speakers to come to termswith their own privilege. They would insist that the local governments recognize
the systemic and institutional bias, and their moral responsibility to rectify the
structural inequities that they had created. They would demand the water supplies,
sewage, fire truck access, and schools that the brutally discriminatory state haddenied them.
World War II came and went, and in the new environment the Buraku
Liberation League inherited and continued the Suiheisha’s pioneering mission on
behalf of equality and inclusion. Mainstream Japanese still discriminated. Yet byrelentlessly attacking expressions of bias through group denunciation, the BLLlargely eliminated open prejudice from polite discourse. From the local and eventually national governments, it extracted the infrastructural investments enjoyed byother Japanese. It recovered the collective identity of the buraku community, andfostered its pride. In time it would come to work with its international counterpartsin the United Nations and elsewhere to promote Hankins’ (2014) more broadly
inclusive and “multicultural Japan.”
Still, insist Western writers, systemic and institutional bias persists. As New
York Times columnist Kristof (1995) put it, the burakumin are “discriminated
4 Upham(1988:79); see Howell (2005:34); Ooms (1996:244).

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J. M. Ramseyer

against simply because they were the descendants of people whose jobs wereconsidered ritually unclean, like butchering animals, tanning skins, making leather
goods, digging graves and handling corpses.” And to carry out this discrimination,
modern Japanese identify the burakumin by residence. A burakumin is a person
who lives (or whose family once lived) in an identifiable buraku ghetto.
Given that Japanese discriminate by residence, a burakumin ought logically tobe able to escape the bias by moving. Yet that simply “has not been the case,” insists
Howell (1996:179). As anthropologists George de Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma(1967:241) put it, a burakumin can do so only by abandoning his “identity”:
If he seeks this, a complete loss of former identity, he must stop all overt contact withfamily and community by means of geographic as well as occupational mobility. He has toforge for himself an entirely new identity and in some cases fabricate a past so that he will
not be disadvantaged by his lack of ancestry.

Burakumin who attempt this feat, continue de Vos and Wagatsuma (1967:242) livein “constant fear of exposure.” They (1967:252) recount one informant who had “afriend who had tried to pass as a government officer but had somehow failed, left
his job, and though a university graduate, is now running a store in a Buraku.” He
had tried several times to pass, but each time he had returned. Each time, “[t]hefriend would somehow let those around him know about his background …”
Haunted by his past, “when drunk, he would hint in various ways about his
outcaste origin, or he would confide in someone whom he had no cause to trust.”

III The modern buraku
A Introduction
As a description of the modern buraku, all this badly misleads. The burakumin
number about 1 million, and have since the 1930s. They live primarily in a few
prefectures in western Japan. Although they tend to be poor, their poverty does
not – and never did – distinguish them. They do not reside in the poorest
Japanese prefectures, and are not the only poor residents of those prefectures inwhich they do reside.
Yet many burakumin do live profoundly fractured lives. Non-marital childbirth is far more common than among other Japanese. Drug use is more widespread. Crime is more virulent, organized crime is primarily a buraku
phenomenon, and the ties between the BLL and the mob run deep.
The BLL’s famous denunciation sessions were not just about fighting discrimination, if they ever were much about that at all. They were about shaking

On the Invention of Identity Politics

11

down local governments for cash. Through their aggressive attacks, buraku
leaders kept their threat of violence central and credible, and used it to obtain
massive government transfers. Through their systematic corruption, they thendiverted large amounts of those funds to their personal accounts.

B Numbers and locations
1 National totals
Over the last one-and-a-half centuries, the Japanese government – either alone
or in collaboration with several affiliated organizations – has compiled at least
14 censuses of the burakumin population. I give the national totals in Table 1.
Table 1: Burakumin national population.
National Population








,
,
,
,
,
,
,,









,,
,,
,,
,,
,,
,,
,

Sources:
1868
Yoshikazu Akisada, Meiji shoki no “senmin” tokeihyo ni tsuite [Regarding the Statistical
Table of “Poor People” of the Early Meiji Period], Buraku kaiho kenkyu v. 2: 55–75 (1974).
Buraku mondai kenkyu jo, Buraku mondai shiryo, vol. 1 (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu sho,1980), pp. 296–99.
Shigeru Kobayashi & Yoshikazu Akisada, Buraku shi kenkyu hando bukku [Handbook on
Research on History of the Buraku] (Tokyo: Yuzankaku shuppan, 1989), p. 288.
1907
Buraku mondai kenkyu jo, Buraku mondai shiryo, vol. 1 (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu sho,1980), pp. 296–99.
Shigeru Kobayashi & Yoshikazu Akisada, Buraku shi kenkyu hando bukku [Handbook on
Research on History of the Buraku] (Tokyo: Yuzankaku shuppan, 1989), p. 291.
Zenkoku buraku kaiho undo rengokai. 1998. Zenkoku dowa chiku no nenjibetsu gaikyo chosanarabi ni 1993 nen genzai no fukenbetsu gaikyo chosa kiso shiryo [Survey of Circumstances byYear for All Buraku Districts, Together With the Basic Material of the 1993 Prefectural
Circumstances Survey]. Tokyo: Zenkoku buraku kaiho undo rengokai.
1921
Naimu sho, Buraku ni kansuru shotokei [Statistics Regarding the Buraku] (Tokyo: Naimu sho,1921). Reproduced in San’ichi shobo, ed., Nihon somin seikatsu shiryo shusei [Collection ofMaterials Regarding the Japanese Poor] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 1980).

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Naimu sho, Suiheisha undo jokyo [Circumstances of the Suiheisha Movement], December 5,
1922 (labeled Top Secret), pp. 61–62. Reproduced in Kenji Hirota, ed., Senzenki keisatsu kankei
shiryo shu [Collection of Pre-War Police Material] (Tokyo: Funi shuppan, 2006), p. 43.
Chuo yuwa jigyo kyokai, Zenkoku buraku chosa [National Survey of Buraku] (1936), pp. 335–36.
Nei Hasegawa, Suihei undo narabi ni kore ni kansuru hanzai no kenkyu [A Study of the Suihei
Movement and of the Crimes Related to It], Shiho kenkyu, vol. 5 issue 4, 1927.
Kobayashi & Akisada (1989).
Kenkyu Jo (1980).
1922
Teikoku chiho gyosei gakkai, Chiho gyosei nenkan [Regional Administrative Annual] (1922).
Reproduced in Yoshikazu Akisada, et al., eds., Kindai burakushi shiryo shusei 10 [Collected
Materials on Early Modern Buraku History, vol. 10].
1935
Chuo yuwa jigyo kyokai, Zenkoku buraku chosa [National Survey of Buraku] (1936) (labeled Top
Secret).
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1942
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1946
Sengo buraku no sabetsu jotai no haaku ni tsuite [Regarding Grasping the Actual Circumstancesof Discrimination Against the Buraku], p. 30. Publication information not given, but posted at:
http://www.blhrri.org/old/info/book_guide/kiyou/ronbun/kiyou_0082-15.pdf
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1958
Zenkoku Buraku (1998)
1963, 1967
Kenkyu Jo (1980).
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1971
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1975
http://douwachiku.com/wiki/zenkokunodouwachiku. The source attributes the survey to the
Naikaku sori daijin.
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).
1987
Senichiro Shiomi, Do nakusu? Buraku sabetsu [How to Eliminate Buraku Discrimination?] (Tokyo:
Ryokufu shuppan, 2012).
Kobayashi and Akisada (1989).
Zenkoku Buraku (1998)
1993
Somu cho, Heisei 5 nendo dowa chiku jittai haaku to chosa [Survey to Grasp the True State, Etc.,of the 1993 Buraku Districts] (Tokyo: Somu cho, 1995) p. 18.
Senichiro Shiomi, Shin: Buraku sabetsu wa nakunattaka? [New: Has Buraku Discrimination
Disappeared?] (Tokyo: Ryokufu shuppan, 2011).
Shiomi (2012).
Zenkoku Buraku (1998).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

13

Except for the 1935–36 census, the government has kept all data below theprefectural level rigidly confidential. The neighborhood-level data from that
1935–36 census has apparently been available for some time to researchersaffiliated with either the BLL or the JCP. The data briefly surfaced in late 2015
(and were used in Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018), but only because a buraku
activist fighting the League posted the census on the internet (see Ramseyer andRasmusen, 2018:221–22).
Readers should take the numbers with caution. No one offers a precise
definition of the “burakumin” – or anything close. Nor could they. As thediscussion below elaborates, the term has always been a loose identifier forwhat simply amounts to a dysfunctional under-class. A Japanese on the downand-out (even in the Tokugawa period) who moved into a buraku neighborhood
could always slide into the group. An ambitious burakumin who adopted mainstream norms and left the neighborhood could always slide out. Given thiscontext, definitional disputes are inherently pointless.
Although some detectives may try to trace a person’s ancestry back to thelate nineteenth century (Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018), most people just ask
whether someone comes from a family with long ties to an identifiable buraku
district. One journalist asked a detective how he decided whether someone wasa burakumin. They are burakumin “if their parents were burakumin,” he replied,“or if they came from a buraku.” After all, he explained, “if they’re currently
living in a buraku, then they’re burakumin” (Kadooka, 2005:50). A 2005 Osaka
survey asked the same question. Of the respondents, 50.3 % replied that theylooked at a person’s address, 38.3 % that they looked at the person’s recorded
home (i. e. registry) address, and others looked at the address of a person’s
parents or grandparents (Tominaga, 2015:35).
Qualifications aside, Table 1 outlines the general pattern. From a total of
about 500,000 at the outset of the Meiji era (1868–1912), the number of burakumin (as counted by the various census-takers appointed by the national or
local governments) climbed to about 1 million by 1935. It rose to 1.2 million in
the late 1950s, but climbed no further. By the 1990s, it had fallen back below 1
million. The 1942 numbers are an obvious outlier: most likely, they reflect either
wartime disruption or badly flawed census-taking procedures.
The BLL itself claims that the burakumin number 3 million. From time totime, scholars have given credence to the number. Yet the number is not amodern calculation. In fact, it is not a calculation at all. It dates instead fromthe founding of the BLL’s predecessor in 1922. The organizers had begun thegroup – called the Suiheisha – in March. Already by that April, they had
included the number in a manifesto, and soon were adding it to their anthems

14

J. M. Ramseyer

besides (Keiho kyoku, 1922:54, 68–69). The best-known of their hymns toliberty proclaims:5
Shouldering the burdens of mission and light,
Three million brothers break the shackles of slavery …
Ethnographer Honda (1991:14) recounts how the number came to be. As the
Suiheisha organizers met in 1922, they wondered how many burakumin there
might be. The government had just counted them for the 1921 census, and found
830,000 burakumin in 4900 districts. Reasoning that it must have missed someburakumin, Shoken Hirano – at the time a self-declared anarchist, but one
whom the organization would soon expel (nominally for spying for the police
for money), and who would transform himself into a right-wing nationalist by
the end of the decade – suggested off-hand that they adopt “6,000 districts, 3
million people.” The number has remained an article of faith ever since.6

2 Migration
Over the course of the last 150 years, burakumin have moved. Japanese have
moved generally, of course, and so have the burakumin. To explore the regional
shifts, in Table 2 I report the prefecture-level totals for each of the 14 censuses.
Note parenthetically that Tokyo has several buraku. It never had many, but
has claimed since the 1950s that it has none. The claim reflects municipal
politics rather than demographic change.7
To facilitate comparisons over time, I index the prefectural totals by the 1921
census. To facilitate comparisons across prefectures, I include the absolute numbers for the 1868, 1921, and 1993 censuses. Obviously, the indexed numbers aremost reliable for those prefectures with large numbers of burakumin. Where aprefecture has fewer than 10,000 burakumin, the census takers can cause large
percentage changes just by missing a few districts. Following standard Japanesepractice, I list the prefectures roughly from the northeast to the southwest.

5 Kaihoka [Song of Liberation], https://ehime-c.esnet.ed.jp/jinken/09kaihouka.pdf.
6 Western scholars give the number much more credence than it deserves. For example,
Hankins (2014:3) writes that “the BLL extrapolates a number from historical records, tracing
lineages of “outcastes” from the Tokugawa period … The BLL’s standard is one of lineage andresidence and sits within the imperatives of liberation …”
7 Put more charitably, the Table 1 numbers are not “censuses,” but rather a tally of the people
to whom the government planned to distribute its subsidies. Because the Tokyo government
decided to allocate the money by industry (e. g. tanning) rather than location (see Hankins,2014), it did not report the number of burakumin in the prefecture.

.
.

,
,

,
,

Chubu region
NiigataToyamaIshikawa
Fukui

.
.

,
,
,
,
,
,
,

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

.
.

Kanto region
Ibaragi
Tochigi
Gunma
Saitama
Chiba
Tokyo
Kanagawa

.


Index

.



,

,
,



Hokkaido


Index

Tohoku region
Aomori
Iwate
Miyagi
Akita
Yamagata
Fukushima
NumberPrefecture

Table 2: Burakumin prefectural population.





















Index

,
,

,
,

,
,
.
,
,
,
,

,
,






NumberA. –

.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.
.


.

.


Index

.
.

.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.


Index

.
.

.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.


Index

.
.

.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.


Index

(continued )

.

.
.
.


Index

On the Invention of Identity Politics

15.
.
.
.
.

,
,

,
,

,
,
,
,
,
,
,

,
,
,
,
,

,
,

Yamanashi
NaganoGifu
Shizuoka
Aichi

Kinki region
Mie
Shiga
Kyoto
Osaka
Hyogo
Nara
Wakayama

Chugoku region
Tottori
Shimane
Okayama
Hiroshima
Yamaguchi

Shikoku region
Tokushima
Kagawa

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.


Index


NumberPrefecture

Table 2: (continued )

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.


Index

























Index

,
,

,
,
,
,
,

,
,
,
,
,
,
,

,
,
,
,
,
NumberA. –

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.


Index

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.


Index

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.


.
.
.
.
.


Index

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.


Index

.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.


Index

16
J. M. Ramseyer

Tohoku region
Aomori
Iwate
Miyagi
Akita
Yamagata
Fukushima
Kanto region
Ibaraki

Hokkaido

.

.

,


Index

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

,
,




Number,

,
,
,
,
,


Kyushu region
Fukuoka
Saga
Nagasaki
Kumamoto
Oita
MiyazakiKagoshima
Okinawa

Prefecture,
,

Ehime
Kochi

.


Index

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.











.


Index

.


Index

B. –,
,
,
,
,
,
,


,
,

.


Index

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

.


Index

.

.
.

.
.

.
.

,


Number

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.

(continued )

.

.
.

.
.

.
.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

17,
,
,
,

Kinki region
Mie
Shiga
Kyoto
Osaka

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.

,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,

Chubu region
NiigataToyamaIshikawa
Fukui
Yamanashi
NaganoGifu
Shizuoka
Aichi

.

.
.
.
.


Index

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.

.

.

.
.
.
.


Index

B. –

.
.

.

.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.

,
,
,
,
,
,

Tochigi
Gunma
Saitama
Chiba
Tokyo
Kanagawa


Index


Index


NumberPrefecture

Table 2: (continued )

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.

.

.

.
.
.
.


Index

.
.
.
.

,

.
.
.
.

.

,

,
.
.
.


Index

,
,
,
,

,
,
,
,



.
.
,
Number18
J. M. Ramseyer,
,
,
,

,
,
,
,
,
,
,


Shikoku region
Tokushima
KagawaEhime
Kochi

Kyushu region
Fukuoka
Saga
Nagasaki
Kumamoto
Oita
MiyazakiKagoshima
Okinawa
.
.
.

.

.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.


.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.

.
.

.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

,

,
,

,
,

,
,
,

,
,
,
,
,

,
,
,

Notes: Actual populations for 1868, 1921, and 1993 (in bold). Intervening populations indexed at 1921 = 100 (in Roman).
Sources: See Table 1.

,
,
,
,
,

,
,
,

Chugoku region
Tottori
Shimane
Okayama
Hiroshima
Yamaguchi

Hyogo
Nara
Wakayama

On the Invention of Identity Politics

19

20

J. M. Ramseyer

The buraku have long been a regional rather than national phenomenon,
but the shifts since 1868 have concentrated the burakumin population still
further. When the Meiji government took power in 1868, burakumin tended tolive in the west. From 1868 to the founding of the Suiheisha in 1922, the numberof burakumin grew massively in Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Hyogo (site of Kobe),
in the inland-sea-adjacent prefectures of Okayama, Hiroshima, Ehime, andKochi, and in the northern Kyushu prefecture of Fukuoka. Since 1922, the buraku
have grown more spectacularly still in Osaka and Fukuoka. In 1868, 29 % of theburakumin lived in the five prefectures of Osaka, Nara, Hyogo, Okayama, andFukuoka. By 1993, 46 % of the burakumin lived in these five.

3 Implications of the location-based definition
That Japanese define burakumin primarily by residence has two straightforward
preliminary implications. First, burakumin can and do exit the group. Theirs isthe classic case of Hirschman’s (1970) easy exit. When scholars insist thatburakumin cannot, they simply capture an artifact of sample bias: a person
who researches the subject by interviewing buraku residents will not meet many
who left and never returned.
For in massive numbers, Burakumin leave. As Figure 1 shows, they have beenleaving the buraku since the 1930s. From 1921 to 1993, the Japanese general
population increased from 56,665,900 to 124,937,786 – a growth of 124 %. During
the same period, the number of burakumin grew from 829,675 to 892,751 – agrowth of 7.6 %. Suppose the buraku grew at the same rate as the rest of theJapanese population. After all, first-hand observers usually note a higher-thanaverage birthrate among the buraku, not lower. If the buraku birthrate tracked thatof the rest of Japan, by 1993 its population would have reached 1,862,141. In effect,
over the intervening 72 years at least 1 million burakumin had vanished into thegeneral population.
Second, the buraku will necessarily include farmers and exclude professionals. Farmers invest in land, and land is obviously location-specific. Should afarmer want to leave the buraku, he can do so only by liquidating his business. By
contrast, an upper-middle-class professional will have little choice but to leave aburaku. The phenomenon does not turn on the strength of any Japanese bias. It
simply turns on the group’s location-based definition. Whether in the U.S. or
Japan, university-educated professionals have mobile careers. To exploit theireducational investments, they follow the jobs. Whether in the U.S. or Japan,
virtually no professional lives within ten blocks of his natal home. If a burakumin
moves more than those ten blocks, however, he ceases to be a burakumin.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

21

Figure 1: Index of total population growth vs. Burakumin population growth 1921 = 100.
Note: 1942 Census omitted because an outlier.
Source: See Table 1.

C Dysfunction
1 Slums
Visitors to the modern buraku have every right to express surprise. Given thestandard western accounts, the most notable aspect of the modern buraku is
how notable they are not. They are not impoverished. They are not dirty. They
do not lack in-door plumbing, adequate space, fire protection. They are notdistinctive at all. Given the accounts, a visitor might expect a slum. Primarily
only in Osaka – and only in one spot in Osaka – will he find one.
The infamous Japanese slum lies in the Kamagasaki district of Osaka’s
Nishinari ward. Euphemistically renamed Airin in 1966 after a series of violent
riots on hot summer nights, the district contains day laborers, flop houses, homeless alcoholics, and drug addicts. With 20,000 to 30,000 heavily burakumin
residents, it serves as the center for mostly male day workers. Several organizedcrime syndicates locate their headquarters there. Contractors recruit clean-up crews
for the Fukushima reactors.
Visitors should pause to note that Japan has very few non-buraku slums
either. When critics detail the way mob-affiliated BLL leaders diverted massive

22

J. M. Ramseyer

amounts of government subsidies (see Subsection 4, below), writers sympathetic
to the BLL reply that at least the subsidies eliminated the worst of the buraku
slums. In fact, however, most of the non-buraku slums have disappeared too.
They received none of those targeted subsidies, yet vanished all the same.
Japanese slums did not disappear because of government subsidies. They disappeared because Japanese incomes grew.

2 Incomes
Prefecture-level data suggest that modern burakumin tend to be only modestly
poorer than other Japanese. For want of any burakumin population figures
below the prefectural level (other than for 1935), I use prefecture-level data.
The risk of ecological fallacy is obviously real. With that caveat, however,consider the correlation between the fraction of burakumin in a prefecture andseveral indices of personal welfare. For burakumin concentration, I use the mostrecent of the 14 censuses – that from 1993 (Somu cho, 1995).
I construct the following prefecture-level variables:
Burakumin PC, 1993: The number of burakumin in 1993 (Somu cho, 1995),
divided by total population.
Density, 1993: Total population in 1993, divided by area (100 sq. km)
Prefectural Income PC, 1993: Total prefectural income (kenmin so shotoku; Naikakufu, 1994), divided by total population.
Sewage rate, 2010: Number of people served by sewage facilities in 2010
(Nihon gesui, 2011), divided by total population.
Poverty rate, 2007: The fraction of households in 2007 living below theminimum cost of living. Tomuro (2016) calculates the number by firstestimating the minimum cost of living per prefecture, and then assessing
the number of households with income below that measure.
HS-College Rate, 2010: Students proceeding to college in 2010, divided bytotal number of high school graduates (Monbu kagaku sho, 2011a).
Life Expectancy, F 2010: Life expectancy of women, 2011 (Kosei, 2011b).
Height, Grade 5 F, 2010: Average height of girls in 2010, grade 5 (Monbu
kagaku sho, 2011b).
Infant Mortality, 2010: New born deaths in 2010, divided by total births(Kosei rodo sho, 2011b).
I include selected summary statistics in Table 3. For the convenience of thereader, I repeat these and all later variable definitions in Table 4.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

23

n

Min

Mean

Median

Max











.

.
.
.
,
.

.
.
.
,
.

.
.
.
,
.





.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.












.
.
.



.e-

.


.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.

Table 3: Selected summary statistics.

Burakumin PC



Density, Pref income PC, Crimes PC
Welfare rate, Illegitimacy rate


Taxpayers PC, Exogamy, Suiheisha BO, B pref’l voters, Murder rate, Buraku agri ratio, Buraku size, Subsidies PBC, –
Sources: See text and Table 1.

Table 4: Variables used.
Anti-liberation riots:  if the prefecture experienced any riots against the  liberation edict, otherwise.
Buraku agricultural ratio: Number of burakumin households engaged in agriculture, divided by
the number of burakumin households.
Buraku crime rate, PBC (per burakumin capita): Number of burakumin committing a crime,
divided by the number of burakumin.
Buraku illegitimacy rate: Non-marital burakumin births, divided by total burakumin births.
Buraku prefectural voters PBC: The number of burakumin eligible to vote in the prefecturalelections (suffrage depended on income), divided by the number of burakumin.
Buraku public assistance, PBC: Number of burakumin on public assistance, divided by the
number of burakumin.
Burakumin PC: The number of burakumin, divided by total population.
Chest circumference: Chest circumference of of boys and girls at age .
Crimes per capita: Number of Criminal Code violations, divided by total population.
Density: Total population, divided by area ( sq. km)(continued )24

J. M. Ramseyer

Table 4: (continued )Divorce rate: Number of divorces, divided by number of marriages.
Dysentery rate: Number of deaths from dysentery, divided by the total population.
Exogamy: Number of marriages between burakumin and commoners, divided by all marriages
involving burakumin.
Height, Grade  F: Average height of girls, grade .
Height: Height of boys and girls at age .
Hinin fraction: Fraction of hinin among the  burakumin.
HS-College Rate: Students proceeding to college, divided by total number of high school
graduates.
Illegitimacy rate: Number of non-marital births, divided by total births.
Infant Mortality: New born deaths, divided by total births.
Kyudan rate: The number of denunciation sessions, divided by the number of burakumin.
Life Expectancy, F: Life expectancy of women.
Meth crimes per capita: Number of crimes involving methamphetamines, divided by total
population.
Murders PC: Total murders for given year, divided by total population.
Population growth: fractional growth in total prefectural population since .
Poverty rate: The fraction of households living below the minimum cost of living. Tomuro ()calculates the number by first estimating the minimum cost of living per prefecture, and thenassessing the number of households with income below that measure.
Prefectural Income PC: Total prefectural income (kenmin so shotoku), divided by total
population.
Sewage rate: Number of people served by sewage facilities, divided by total population.
Shirayama shrines: The number of Shirayama shrines (said to have been a marker of the
traditional location of burakumin communities).
Subsidies PBC: The amount of the prefectural subsidies targeting burakumin (in , yen)over a given time period, divided by the number of burakumin.
Suicide rate: Number of suicides, divided by the total population.
Suiheisha BO: The number of branch offices of the Suiheisha.
Taxpayers PC: Number of taxpayers, divided by the total households.
Total crime PC: Total crimes for given year, divided by total population.
Tuberculosis rate: Number of deaths from tuberculosis, divided by the total population.
Weight: Weight of boys and girls at age .
Welfare dependency: Number of households on public assistance, divided by number ofhouseholds.
Notes: Obviously, these values changed over time. As relevant, I identify the year involved in
the text and in the tables below.

First, at the prefectural level (a coarse measure to be sure) burakumin concentration
does not significantly correlate with reported per capita income (to the extent
burakumin work in illegal industries, my income figure understates their real
income) in simple pairwise correlation, but does correlate with the fraction of theOn the Invention of Identity Politics

25

population living below the poverty line. To explore this and other questions ofcorrelation (obviously not causation), in Table 5 I hold constant population densityand prefectural income. Importantly, the fraction of burakumin in a prefecture does
correlate with the fraction of households below the poverty line (Table 5, Panel A,
Regression (2)). Even with population density and per capita income held constant,prefectures with more burakumin do have a higher fraction of people in poverty.
Table 5: Modern Buraku.
A. Social Welfare
()

()

()

()

()

()

Dependent
variable

SewagePoverty

HS-CollRate

Life Exp F

Hght GrFInf Mort

Buraku PC −.
.**(.)(.e-).e-*−.e-(.e-)(.e-). −.e-***(.)(.e-)
.
.

.**(.).e-(.e-).***(.).

−.
(.)−.e-(.e-).
(.)−.

−.
(.).e-(.e-)−.
(.)−.

−.
(.).e-**(.e-)−.***(.).

Density Pref Inc PCAdj R:B. Indices of Dysfunction
Dependent
variable:
Buraku PC 
Density Pref Inc PCAdj R

Crimes

Meth Welfare dep
Crimes.*** .***(.)(.).e-** .e-***(.e-)(.e-).**.
(.)(.)
.
.

.**(.).e-***(.e-)−.***(.).

IllegitDivorce.**(.).e-***(.e-)−.***(.).

.**(.).e-*(.e-)−.***(.).

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. n = 46, 47.
OLS regressions. Correlation coefficients, or regression coefficients followed by standard
errors. All regressions include a constant term.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

Second, far more non-burakumin live in poverty than burakumin. Where
Tomuro (2016) estimates a 2012 national poverty rate of 18.3 %, by the 1993
census only 0.71 % of all Japanese were burakumin. Consider Kochi, the ruralprefecture with the highest fraction of burakumin – 4.3 % of households, or
13,800. With a poverty rate of 23.7 %, 76,300 of the households live in poverty.

26

J. M. Ramseyer

Even if all Kochi burakumin lived below the poverty level (which they do not),the great majority of the poor would not be burakumin. Or consider Fukuoka, anurban prefecture with a relatively high fraction of burakumin – 2.3 %, or 48,500
households. With a poverty rate of 20.6 %, 435,000 households are in poverty.
Again, even if all burakumin lived in poverty, most of the poor families inFukuoka would not be burakumin.
Third, none of the other regressions in Table 5 suggests that burakumin live
poorly. As an index of public infrastructure, take sewage: centralized sewage
facilities are more widespread in the cities than in rural villages, but population
density held constant, burakumin are not associated with lower access to sewage lines (Part A, Reg. (1)). Neither – in unreported regressions – are they
associated with less access to running water. As an index of educational access,take university education: burakumin are not associated with lower rates ofcollege attendance. They are actually associated with significantly higher rates(Reg. A(3)). As an index of public health, take life expectancy: burakumin are
not associated with lower life expectancy for women (Reg. A(4); the adjusted R2
is not even positive). Neither are they associated with lower life expectancy formen (unreported regression). They are not associated with lower heights for 5th
grade girls (Reg. A(5); again, the adjusted R2 is not even positive). Neither are
they associated with lower heights for boys (unreported regression). They are
not associated with higher infant mortality rates (but rural villages do havehigher mortality rates; Reg. A(6)). Neither are they associated with higher
unemployment rates (unreported regression).

3 Troubling markers
a Summary statistics
Other data, however, suggest a troubling picture. In Table 6, I examine thesocial structure of the burakumin community more directly. In Table 5, I
explored that social structure indirectly through the correlation between burakumin concentration and social phenomena at the prefectural level. In thisTable 6, I report summary statistics that compare various rates directly
between burakumin and non-burakumin, again at the prefectural level. I takethe statistics from the government survey that yielded the 1993 census (Somucho, 1995), and additional material published by the BLL (Zenkoku Buraku,
1998). The survey was at least nominally national, but compiled from prefecture-level sub-surveys. The burakumin are not a nation-wide phenomenon, ofcourse (see Table 2), and on most of the measures only about half of theprefectures submitted reports.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

27

Table 6: Social welfare, Burakumin and Others, 1993 (summary statistics).
Burakumin

Welfare dependSingle mother HH
Own home
Lot sizeHome size
SewageUnemployment
Wages
Under  millOver  mill

Othersn

MinMedian

Mean

Max

Min

Median

Mean

Max









.
.
.

.



.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.


.
.

.
.


.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

.
.
.

.
.





.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.

.
.

.


.
.

Notes: Figures in bold where means of prefectural averages differ significantly at 1 % level. On
other details, see text.
Sources: See Somu cho, Heisei 5 nendo dowa chiku jittai haaku to chosa [Survey to Grasp theTrue State, Etc., of the 1993 Buraku Districts] (Tokyo: Somu cho, 1995); Zenkoku buraku kaiho
undo rengokai, Zenkoku dowa chiku no nenjibetsu gaikyo chosa narabi ni 1993 nen genzai no
fukenbetsu gaikyo chosa kiso shiryo [Survey of Circumstances by Year for All Buraku Districts,
Together With the Basic Material of the 1993 Prefectural Circumstances Survey] (Tokyo: Zenkoku
buraku kaiho undo rengokai, 1998).

According to Table 6, burakumin are poorer than the general public. Burakumin
are more likely to be on welfare. Despite having much the same percentage ofworkers in agriculture (8.43 % of the burakumin, 8.42 % of the general public),
they have less access to municipal sewage networks (a point that did not appear
in Table 5). They are more likely to be earning very low income, and less likely toearn high incomes. Consistent with the data on illegitimacy in Table 5, burakumin are also more likely to raise children in broken homes.
b Correlations
What is more, the fraction of burakumin in a prefecture is associated withseveral indices of dysfunctional behavior. I use the following variables:
Crimes per capita, 2010: Number of Criminal Code violations (Keisatsucho, 2011), divided by total population.
Meth crimes per capita, 2011: Number of crimes involving methamphetamines in 2011 (Keisatsu cho, 2011), divided by total population.
Welfare dependency, 2010: Number of households on public assistance28

J. M. Ramseyer

in 2010 (seikatsu hogo; Kosei, 2011a), divided by number of households.
Illegitimacy rate, 2009: Number of non-marital births in 2009, divided bytotal births (Kosei 2010).
Divorce rate, 2010: Number of divorces in 2010, divided by number ofmarriages (Kosei, 2011b).
In simple pair-wise correlation, the concentration of burakumin is significantly
associated with the number of methamphetamine crimes per capita, the fractionof the population on public assistance, the fraction of non-marital births, andthe divorce rate.
In Table 5 Panel B, I hold constant population density and per capita income,and use simple OLS regressions to explore these associations (again, not causation)
further. The concentration of burakumin is correlated – statistically significantly –both with the total crime rate (Panel B Reg. (1)), and specifically with the rate ofmethamphetamine crimes (Reg. B(2)). Methamphetamines are the drugs mostwidely abused in Japan, and ones whose distribution is heavily tied to the organizedcrime syndicates. The burakumin concentration rate is also correlated significantlywith the fraction of people on welfare (Reg. B(3)), with the rate of children born tounmarried parents (Reg. B(4)), and with the divorce rate (Reg. B(5)). The actual
magnitudes are modest. Consider an increase in the fraction of burakumin from
0.5 % (roughly the fraction in the suburban Tokyo prefecture of Saitama) to 1 % (thefraction in Osaka). The coefficient on burakumin conentration of 0.0822 suggests anincrease in the crime rate of 0.0004 on a prefecture-level median of 0.0103. It
suggests an increase in the non-marital birth rate of 0.0007 on a prefecture-level
median of 0.0210.

4 Crime and corruption8
a Intimidation
For years, Japanese editors and reporters kept quiet about the corruption within
the burakumin leadership. They avoided the issue out of simple self-interest: therisk of virulent retaliation was just too large. Under the rubric of “denunciation,”buraku leaders responded to criticism with tactics that were both brutal andviolent.
When a question involving burakumin arises, many mainstream Japanese
instead defer comment with the simple “burakumin are frightening” (dowa wa
kowai). In 1989, for example, a Matsuzaka city council representative observed
8 For a much fuller account, see Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

29

that many residents objected to buraku subsidies (detailed below) as “reverse
discrimination” but were “too frightened to say anything because they wereafraid of being harassed by burakumin.” “I’m frightened too,” he added.
To BLL activists, the representative was perpetuating the “stereotype thatthe burakumin are ‘frightening’“ (Miyamoto, 2013:91–96). With no apparent
sense of irony, they marched into city hall and demanded he be punished.
The city council meekly convened a disciplinary committee, and declared thecomment about being frightened “discriminatory.” Thereupon, the representative duly thanked the burakumin for doing what they did. “If this problem had
not occurred, I do not believe I would have had the opportunity to study theburaku problem,” he explained. “From now on, I would like to study the buraku
problem as intently as possible, and to dedicate my life to the realization of thegoal of ‘Matsuzaka: The city that protects human rights.’”
To justify their brutal control over speech, BLL activists rely on two principles. Postwar BLL leader Asada (1979:251) articulated the first as a formal
proposition at the 1956 BLL annual meeting: “Every day-to-day problem thatarises in the buraku – everything disadvantageous to burakumin – results fromdiscrimination.” The second principle is not one the BLL ever formally adopted,
but plays an equally central role and is similarly attributed to Asada: only aburakumin has the authority to decide what constitutes discrimination (Fujita,
1988, 1987:57). The relentless accusations of discrimination and violent denunciations follow.
b Corruption
Crime has been a crucial marker in the modern buraku, and the BLL has playeda central part in that crime. Through its shake-down strategies, the BLL induced
the national government to distribute to burakumin 15 trillion yen ($125 billion
at the 2002 exchange rate) over the course of 1969 to 2002, mostly as construction projects. Through at-best thinly veiled threats of violence, it then arrogatedto itself the power to allocate the money as it wished (described in detail in
Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018).
The BLL awarded the construction contracts to firms that joined its Buraku
Construction Association (BCA). In return, the firms paid the association 0.7 % of
the contract amount. To some BLL leaders, the firms paid tribute beyond the
0.7 % fee. One prominent burakumin, for example, apparently demanded 3 to
5 % of the contract (Kadooka, 2012:96; Mori, 2009:78, 180).
Nominally, only burakumin firms joined the BCA. In practice, mainstream
firms vied to join as well. Profits on the government-funded buraku construction
contracts were so high, in other words, that mainstream firms paid to become

30

J. M. Ramseyerburakumin firms. Sometimes a firm hired a well-known burakumin leader toserve as president; other times, it simply paid a bribe (Mori, 2009:180–83).
Routinely, BLL leaders sold the government the land for these projects at
massively inflated prices. They also routinely diverted construction funds tothemselves through shell companies. To do so, they first formed a corporation.
That corporation joined the BCA and partnered with a mainstream construction
firm. The two firms bid on the government contract together, and upon winningthe bid the shell corporation took its cut and left the mainstream firm to do thework (Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018).
c Organized crime
The flamboyant corruption surrounding the buraku subsidies made clear whatmany Japanese understood but rarely said in public: the mob was a creature of
the buraku. “The great majority of the minority groups earn an honest living,”
writes burakumin journalist Kadooka (2012:28). “But most men in the organizedcrime syndicates are members of minorities like the Koreans or the burakumin.”
Incendiary as Kadooka’s statement may seem, members of the burakumin
community, the syndicates, and the police consistently report that burakumin
men comprise a majority (most estimates put the fraction at 50–70 %) of the
syndicate memberships (discussed in detail at Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018).
The most troubling aspect of this overlap – so inflammatory that academic
accounts never mention it – lies in the fraction of burakumin men who choseto join the mob. The size of that fraction during the years of the targeted
subsidies discloses an enormous diversion of young talent – a diversion fromlife in the legal sector into fundamentally criminal behavior. At the height of themob in the late 1980s, 20 % of the 20–29 year old burakumin men would havebeen part of the mob, and 25 % of men in their 30s. “The buraku,” as Kadooka(2012:20) put it, was “for a long time … the hotbed of the mob.”

IV Pre-modern antecedents
A Introduction
The social disintegration within the modern buraku suggests a series of related
questions: Most basically, how did this come to be? When did crime and familycollapse become so central to the buraku? When – and why – did the group’s
nominal human rights leadership start to overlap with the membership in theorganized crime syndicates?

On the Invention of Identity Politics

31

Modern historians of Tokugawa (1600–1868) agricultural villages make clear
where the roots of the problem do not lie: they do not stem from any concern
with ritual uncleanliness or occupation-linked status in Tokugawa Japan. The
pivotal fact is this: the vast majority of the ancestors of the modern burakumin
never dealt with dead animals at all. Instead, they farmed. As Usui (1991:20) put
it in his study of Hyogo prefecture:
In Hyogo, the business of the buraku was agriculture. Overwhelmingly, the members of theburaku did the same work as the other townspeople and farmers.

The pre-modern antecedents to the buraku were not a guild of leather workers.
Neither were they a guild of tanners. They did not handle dead horses or cattle.
And they were not a guild at all.
Instead, the ancestors to the modern buraumin were farmers. The “earlier
theory,” as historian Seisuke Fujisawa (Higashi, 2018:115) put it, is “clearlywrong.”B Kawata and hinin
Most of these Tokugawa ancestors to the burakumin described themselves as“kawata” in western Japan, “chori” in the east, and faced the pejorative epithetof “eta.” A smaller distinct group went by the term “hinin” (see Ehlers, forthcoming). In some communities at some times, itinerant beggars, peddlers, andentertainers went by still other terms. Aside from kawata, chori, and hinin,
historian Watanabe (1965:101, 338) catalogs nearly forty different names forthe various lower-class communities.9
Conventionally, mid-twentieth century historians of the outcastes focusedon the kawata and the hinin. The kawata skinned dead cattle and horses andworked in the leather trade, they wrote. The hinin policed villages, manned thejails, and carried out punishments. The kawata were born into their group; thehinin could fall into the status out of poverty or be sentenced to it as criminal
punishment. The hinin sometimes exited their status; the kawata never could.10
In practice, the distinctions were far less clear. To be sure, many hinin did
not inherit their status. Although some did, others either found themselves
assigned the status as criminal punishment or descended into the status as

9 See generally Saito and Oishi (1995:52, 62); Ehlers (forthcoming); Ohnuki-Tierney (1989).
10 E. g. Minegishi (1996:44–46, 56); Watanabe (1977:135, 335); Tsukada (2007); Hasegawa(1927:10). On the hinin more generally, see Ehlers (2018); Tsukada (2007).

32

J. M. Ramseyer

vagrants. And under specified conditions, some of the hinin could return to thestatus of ordinary peasants.11
Yet, commoners could acquire kawata status too. Some joined the group by
happenstance. They were poor, moved to the city, rented rooms in a kawata
neighborhood, and found a job with a kawata employer. In time, they and theirdescendants became kawata. Other commoners became kawata by choice.
Sometimes, industries controlled by kawata in an area became very profitable.
When they did, some commoners deliberately adopted kawata status in order toenter the industry.12
And some kawata exited their status and became commoners. Sometimes
and in some communities, kawata could apply for a formal change of status.
More commonly, they simply acquired the skills and economic means to thrive
outside the kawata community. They left their homes, and moved to a new city.
Upon arrival, they rented rooms in a commoner section of town, and took jobs
with a commoner firm. They and their descendants were now commoners.13

C Farming
1 Income
Among farmers, the kawata tended to approach the poorer end of the spectrum.
The data being what they are, historians of the kawata generally focus on one orseveral villages at a time. In the course of their essay, they detail village landholdings. Generally, they find that most kawata were among the poorer villagers.
The kawata sometimes supplemented their farm income with by-employment,
though rarely in the leather industry (Watanabe 1977:106). But they were not
the very poorest farmers in the village. Instead, they earned incomes that substantially overlapped with those of their commoner peers.
For example, historian Ozaki (1982:89–92) assembles records of rice production in a Nagano village in 1736. The village contained 27 kawata and 23
commoner families. They produced (one koku equaled 180 liters):

11 Ishii (1994:91); Tsukada (2001:3); Kikuchi (1961:444); Ozaki (1982:154); Takayanagi (1979:20);
Minegishi (1996:129–30).
12 Hatanaka (1997:110–11). And in other places, hinin became kawata over time, or no one
distinguished the two groups at all (Watanabe, 1977:63, 127; Hatanaka, 1997:110–11).
13 Watanabe (1977:127); Hatanaka (1997:69–80, 110–11); McCormack (2013:53).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

Less than koku

–
koku

Over
 koku

Total













KawataOthers33

Historians have compiled a wide variety of these village land-holding and riceproduction surveys, but they almost always tell the same story: the average
kawata farmer was poorer than the average commoner, but the wealthiest
kawata could be rich even by commoner standards.14

2 Land sales
Note that peasants could, and did, buy and sell their land. Although theTokugawa government eventually purported to limit land transfers, it tried to
do so only during the second half of its rule, and never effectively (Yamamura,
1981:343–44).
When the late Tokugawa government did try to stop transfers, farmers
simply negotiated transactions that circumvented the limits. Saito (2009:171;
ital. orig.) explains how they did this:Tokugawa peasants were not allowed to sell land if the sale were made “in perpetuity.”This ban on the permanent sale was interpreted by contemporaries to mean that peasantswere allowed to sell a parcel of land for a limited period of time, which in practice meant‘pawning’ (shichiire).

3 Landownership
Successful kawata routinely owned much of the land they farmed.15 Claims byhistorians to the contrary, explains Usui (1991:22), stem from “two or three[Tokugawa] bakufu decrees and assorted domainal edicts.” Commoners routinely transferred paddies, and so did the kawata.

14 E. g. Hatanaka (1990:84); Teraki (1996:75, 111); Usui (1991:162, 176–77, 285); Minegishi(1996:30–31).
15 Usui (1991:20); Hatanaka (1997:10); Kyoto buraku (1995:305); Minegishi (1996:32, 330).

34

J. M. Ramseyer

An increase in a kawata’s land holdings could cause conflict over the villagecommons, but not because of the kawata status itself. Rights to the villagecommons mattered because they brought access to fertilizer, firewood, andwater. The conflicts arose when kawata developed new land, and increased
the demands on those village resources. Commoners did not object if a kawata
who had owned land for generations used the village commons. They complained only when those who constructed new paddies wanted access too(Kyoto Buraku, 1995:393).

4 The disposition of dead animals
Within a farming village, typically one or several households held the right toskin the horses and cattle that died within a designated area.16 This skinningright did not inhere in the kawata as a group; instead, it constituted a transferrable property right owned by a few. Farmers bought, sold, and pledged the“shares” (kabu) giving the holder a right to the proceeds of the skinning. In mostvillages, the farmers who held the shares tended to be among the wealthier
kawata. Some acquired shares when a borrower defaulted on a loan. Somebought them outright. And the shares could be – and occasionally were –transferred to commoner villagers.17
The men who skinned the dead animals rarely tanned the hides. Few farmers had the expertise or equipment necessary for the task. Those who held theshares entitling them to participate in the skinning instead sold the hides (andother byproducts) to specialty tanners in neighboring towns. These were themen who had invested in the skills and equipment necessary to turn the skininto leather. Some of them were indeed kawata. Others were not.18

5 Leather industry
Although most kawata farmed, a few did work in leather. Even there, they did
not have a monopoly. Instead, in many leather-related sectors (e. g. leatherbacked sandals), they competed with commoner firms. Buyers regularly
switched their orders between kawata and commoner sellers, and workers

16 Watanabe (1977:104); Mae (1975:217–18, 225); Saito and Oishi (1995:67, 72).
17 Watanabe (1977:114, 304); Matsuoka (1975:19–20, 24–25); Mae (1975:204, 225); Saito andOishi (1995:120); Usui (1991:205).
18 Minegishi (1996:226); Watanabe (1977:191); Saito and Oishi (1995:124).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

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themselves migrated among the two types of firms (Minegishi, 1996:120;
Matsuoka, 1975:16, 41).

D Migration
Those burakumin without land to till could, and did, move. In doing so, theyjoined their commoner peers. During the Tokugawa period, the population grew.
From 17 million in 1600 to 34.5 million in 1874, over the Tokugawa period as awhole the Japanese population doubled (Saito and Takashima, 2015a:8).
And as the population grew, Tokugawa peasants migrated. Daughters andsecond or third sons without a farm to inherit left their villages. Some apprenticed
themselves to a trade. Some left for distant villages with unclaimed land. Bands ofpoorer farmers left en masse to build new paddies and start new villages.
The government did not stop this movement. Mid-twentieth-century scholars
sometimes claimed the contrary. In making the claim, they quoted Tokugawa
decrees banning migration. Yet in fact, the decrees did not bind. Explains
distinguished economist Saito (2009:184–185):[The a]ctual policies taken by domain lords varied from province to province and also fromperiod to period, but the administrations’ attitude became unmistakably permissive towards
individual mobility. … [T]he incidence of out-migration increased over time and, … the ruralurban flow of people became substantial in the latter half of the Tokugawa period.

Like their commoner peers, many kawata left their villages for the urban centers.
Indeed, they migrated to the towns and cities in massive numbers. As Watanabe(1977:154) put it, “the movement of people into and out of the unliberated [i. e. kawata]
villages during the late Tokugawa period was enormous.”19
As peasants (both commoner and kawata) migrated, first metropolitan
centers and then secondary rural towns grew and flourished. During the firsthalf of the Tokugawa period, farmers moved to the large cities like Osaka andthe newly established political capital of Edo (i. e. Tokyo). During the second
half, the farmers moved to smaller regional centers. Estimates demographer
Hayami (2009:102), “perhaps 70–80 thousand people were pulled to the cities
each year” during the seventeenth century. From 60,000 in 1600, by 1721 thepopulation of Edo had reached 1.1 million. By then, “Osaka’s and Kyoto’s
populations had each reached 400,000.”20

19 See, e. g. Kyoto Buraku (1995:364–67); Tsukada (2001:11, 14–15, 30); McCormack (2013:51).
20 See Saito and Takashima (2015a:7, 16); Takashima (2017:192–93, 198); Hayami (2009:102).

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E Regulatory legislation
1 Class hierarchy
Some of the confusion over the status of the kawata follows from confusion over
the role played by the government’s neo-Confucian advisors. Mid-twentiethcentury historians (both Japanese and Western) described Tokugawa society as
a world structured by a rigidly hierarchical neo-Confucian four-plus-outcasteclass structure: samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant, and eta-hinin.
In fact, conclude modern Japanese historians, their mid-century predecessors took far too seriously the philosophical treatises by these advisers. The
Tokugawa officials themselves said virtually nothing about any four-class hierarchy before the mid-eighteenth century. They never pursued it at a more thansuperficial level. And they never even purported to regulate “outcaste” behavior
until 1778.21
What is more, continue social historians Saito and Oishi (1995:32–33), theTokugawa government never used the four-class formula with an “eta-hinin”
suffix anyway. The first reference to this ostensibly Tokugawa phrase instead
appears in 1874. For half a century thereafter, it rarely reappeared. Only in late1920s history texts did the “four-plus-outcaste” formula begin to appear widely(Saito and Oishi, 1995).

2 Sumptuary decrees
On the advice of their neo-Confucian advisers, late 18th and early nineteenth
century Tokugawa elites did periodically order the kawata to live lives befitting a
low status. In fact, they issued a wide variety of sumptuary decrees. Through thedecrees, they purported to regulate what people would wear and what theywould do.
Most commonly, the Tokugawa elites targeted wealthy merchants. These
successful men and women were badly out-of-step with their newly theorizedsocial status below farmers and artisans, and government officials tried torestrain their conspicuous consumption. Wealthy kawata were out-of-step with
their theorized status too, and from time to time government officials tried tocurb their conspicuous behavior as well.

21 See Saito and Oishi (1995:20); Watanabe (1977:6–7).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

37

Over the course of the regime’s last century, Tokugawa elites became
increasingly desperate in their kawata-targeted decrees. When they issued
these orders, they did not issue them out of an excess of repressive power.
They issued them in a last-ditch attempt to slow the pace of social change.
In truth, the decrees reflected the wealth of the more entrepreneurial
kawata. Assigned by the official neo-Confucian philosophers to the bottom of
the social structure, they lived lives entirely out of step with their theorized role
(Watanabe, 1977:126; Kyoto Buraku, 1995:376–79). Had merchants lived impoverished lives, no government official would have bothered to tell them to live
modestly. Had kawata lived immiserated lives, no government official would
have bothered to tell them to live modestly either. According to the Kyoto
Buraku History Research Institute (1995:384):
At first glance, these [decrees] look like the strengthening of discrimination. In truth,
however, they arose from the fact that kawata were breaking through the barriers of status.
The bakufu was trying to drag the world back to the old order.

3 Burakumin land ownership and taxes
The late-Tokugawa bans on kawata land ownership reflect the same phenomenon. As historian Hatanaka (1997:11) explained it, the government tried to ban
kawata from owning land precisely because the kawata owned it on so a wide
scale. Not only did ordinary kawata farmers own their own farms, the more
successful kawata owned extraordinary amounts of land.22 Some had acquired
their land from other kawata, but others had acquired it from commoners. Some
had operated as village financiers, and others had made their fortune in industry
and commerce. Whatever the source, they channeled their wealth into largescale landholdings (Kyoto Buraku, 1995:375). As Watanabe (1977:156) put it:
Large landlords emerged within the buraku. … This emergence of the large landlords isbecause of their involvement in commerce and high-interest lending.

On what they raised, kawata paid taxes. Again, scholars and buraku activists
have routinely claimed the contrary. In truth, the kawata paid taxes on theirharvest.23 They paid these taxes at the same rates as everyone else.

22 Watanabe (1977:189); Saito and Oishi (1995:156–58); Usui (1991:22); Uchida (1975:310).
23 Hatanaka (1997:10); Watanabe (1977:189); Minegishi (1996:330); Kyoto buraku (1995:275);
Usui (1991:22).

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F Making sense of kawata
As this account makes clear, most burakumin do not trace their ancestry topeople who specialized in ritually unclean jobs. Most do not trace their lineage
to tanners, executioners, or leather workers. A few do, but not most.
Most burakumin instead trace their ancestry to poor farmers. Since the1920s, Japanese historians of the kawata have usually interpreted the “kawa”
to refer to leather. The Japanese term for leather is indeed “kawa,” so whenwriting “kawata” these scholars have used the Chinese character (kanji) for
leather. Yet “kawa” also refers to river. The characters assigned to leather andriver differ, of course, but homonyms are common in Japanese and seventeenth
century peasants rarely wrote. For them, “kawata” was not a written term; it was
spoken.
Historian Watanabe (1977:257–58) explains the more-likely etymology.24
Suppose, he writes, that several Tokugawa-era impoverished families decided
to leave their homes. They would have relocated near a village with unclaimed
land. During the first half of the Tokugawa period, large swaths of potential
paddy land remained undeveloped (Watanabe, 1977:120).
At their eventual destination, the migrants would have settled on theunused parcels. Because of the risk of floods – particularly during the typhoonseason – farmers often left land along the river undeveloped. Migrants looking
for unclaimed land near a town or village would have found it on the riverbanks. There, they would have settled and built their paddies. And indeed,
modern burakumin often still live along a river. They live there because when
their impoverished ancestors migrated to the area, the available (cheapest, if notfree) land lay by the river.
As the migrants settled in the dry river bed (called kawara) or along the riverbanks, they became “kawara mono” – people of the river bed.25 Because “ta” refers

24 The genesis of the derogatory “eta” is unclear. Some writers (e. g. Takahashi 1927:85) havesuggested that it might be a corruption of “etori,” meaning those who scavenge throughcadavers for pet food (contra Yanagida, 1913:99). The conventional wisdom – declared by the
BLL, and followed almost uniformly by western scholars – is that it instead means “great
uncleanness.” The character used for “uncleanness” and read (using the Chinese reading for thecharacter) “e”, however, is a rare and complex 18-stroke character that does not even fall within
the standard 2200 characters taught through 12th grade. Japanese encounter it – if theyencounter it at all – only in university readings. The notion that semi-literate seventeenth
century peasants would have used the Chinese reading of an obscure 18-stroke character toinvent a derogatory term for other peasants is implausible on its face. See generally Kida,
1919:80).
25 Watanabe (1977:122); Usui (1991:63); Saito and Oishi (1995:64–66).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

39

to rice paddies, once they built paddies by the river they became “kawata” –farmers with paddies along the river (Hasegawa, 1927:28).26 Some poor farmers
migrated not to another farming village but to a more urban area. Again, however,they would have settled along the river at the outskirts of town. There, they would
have taken the least attractive jobs. If only because of the foul smells, tanning jobs
would have been among those undesirable jobs. For that elementary reason, someof these recent arrivals became tanners.

V The transitional decades, 1868–1922
A Introduction
In the wake of their 1868 coup, military leaders from the winning coalition
installed the Kyoto-based emperor as titular head of state, and governed directlyfrom Tokyo. Upon taking control, they ran a census and counted 439,000 “eta”
and 53,000 “hinin” (Table 1). They voided these categories as legal distinctions
three years later, and in 1872 counted 34,806,000 total citizens (Ohsato,
1966:12).
Coups being what they are, residents in several areas remained uneasy.
During the first few years, some rioted over the changes. They rioted over taxes,
the draft, prices, school tuition. In some places, they rioted over the 1871 etahinin edict as well (Takayama, 2005:27; Kobayashi, 1985:297).
Within a few years, the term kawata disappeared from popular usage. Eta
remained its pejorative alternative. In polite speech, people used either “tokushu
buraku” (special village) or simply “buraku” (village).

B Demographics
From 1868 to 1921 the number of burakumin grew in tandem with the rest of the
population. In Figure 1, I index the number of burakumin and of the general
population by 1921 values. Over the course of these five decades, the two

26 Some kawata lived in kawata-only villages (Usui, 1991:39). For the most part, these werevillages that had been newly created in the Tokugawa period. There, they exploited new
paddies (Usui, 1991:144–45, 354–56). Enough land had remained unfarmed at the start of theTokugawa period, notes Watanabe (1977:120) that the kawata who created these paddies sometimes acquired very fertile land.

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populations increased at roughly the same rate. From 1868 to 1921, the numberof total burakumin grew by about 70 % to 830,000. From 1872 to 1921, thegeneral population grew by 60 %.
Apparently, few burakumin abandoned their status during those five decades. To be sure, some commoners joined the buraku and replaced those wholeft. But that caveat aside, the fact that the aggregate number of burakumin grewat the same rate as the general population suggests – as a first approximation –that people born burakumin tended to stay in the community.
Japanese moved during these five decades. They moved from the countryside
to the towns and cities during the Tokugawa period too, but the pace accelerated
massively during the half century from 1868 to 1921. In the urban centers, theyfound (what were for them) well-paying jobs in a thriving economy. In 1878, they
had faced per capita income of 11.5 yen. By 1921, that figure (in constant yen) hadsoared to 199 yen (Ohsato, 1966). Some of the people who arrived in the cities
found jobs in the enormous and diverse universe of small firms. Others worked in
the massive new textile factories. In 1898, 30.5 million people (71 % of the
population) lived in towns of fewer than 5,000 people. By 1920, only 27.1 million
still lived in towns that small, and the number constituted but 48.9 % of the
population. Of the 85,000 factory workers in Osaka city in 1925, fewer than 20,000
had come from within Osaka prefecture (Suzuki, 2016:37).
Burakumin moved in parallel with the rest of the population – from the countryside to the cities, and from the farms to the factories.27 Some burakumin found jobs at
smaller firms owned by other burakumin. Belying claims of pervasive employment
discrimination, others worked in the enormous new factories (Watanabe, 1977:168;
Bahara, 1984:138). The most prosperous built homes in comfortable neighborhoods
and ran thriving businesses. The poorest settled in city slums.
Many burakumin did extremely well during these Meiji (1868–1912) decades.
Crucially, they did well without jettisoning their buraku identity. If (as noted
above) the buraku population increased in tandem with the overall population,
those burakumin who did well must have mostly stayed within the buraku evenas they amassed their wealth. By choosing to identify with the community, thesemost successful of the burakumin helped to create and maintain the social andeconomic infrastructure that the group would have needed to thrive.
In Kyoto, prosperous buraku merchants created the Yanagihara Bank in
1899, and continued to run it until 1927 (Shigemitsu, 1991). In the Nishihama
buraku of Osaka’s Minami ward, burakumin in the leather industry grew enormously wealthy. Of the 120,000 households in Minami ward as a whole, only
130 (0.1 %) had incomes high enough to hold first-class voting rights (Uesugi,
27 Watanabe (1977:168); Suzuki (2016:27); Nara ken (1970:102).

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2010:101–02; Anon, 1918). Of the 1500 buraku households there, nine had thoserights (0.6 %). A burakumin served on the Tsu city council in 1918 (Anon, 1918).
Shotaro Yoneda, a burakumin from Nara, sailed to the U.S. to study first at the
Anglican General Theological Seminary in New York (1895), and then the
Columbia University graduate school (1898). Returning to Japan, he joined thefaculty of the Kyoto Imperial University (Torigai, 1988:70).

C Contact and conflict
1 Introduction
As the economy grew, so too did inter-regional travel, trade, and migration. With
this increased movement came contact between buraku communities and therest of Japan. And with the increased contact came tension, rooted in the
different codes of conduct between the two worlds.
To mainstream Japanese, the very poorest burakumin seemed to live by acode unto themselves. They seemed quick to take offense, wrote contemporary
observers. They seemed eager to escalate disputes to dangerous levels, reluctant
to invest time and effort in difficult tasks, prone to crime, dishonest. They
treated family commitments cavalierly in the extreme.
The buraku norms that mainstream Japanese described were norms that remaincommon among a wide variety of under-class groups across the world, of course. The
groups subsist in part through predation on more mainstream communities, and – tothe extent that they do so – the norms serve them passably. Obviously, however, thenorms did not mix well with the more broadly shared Japanese standards of behavior. As contact between the two communities increased, so did hostility.

2 Mergers
The Meiji government precipitated the first major collision between buraku andcommoners in 1888. Tokugawa era towns and villages had been small collections of households, and as of 1888 there remained 71,000 of them. Of thesemunicipalities, 800 had no residents at all, 2,800 had 1 to 10 households, andanother 12,000 had 11 to 30. Nearly 70 % of the 71,000 towns and villages had
fewer than 100 households.28

28 See Yokomichi (2007:2), Kitagawa (1940:267, 275).

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For these municipalities, the Meiji government intended a wide range ofadministrative tasks. Many of the 71,000 simply could not bear the cost of their
new responsibilities (Nakajima, 2013:4, 21). Some villages were too small.
Others, even if large enough, were too poor.
To resolve the problem, the Meiji government decided to merge villages up
to efficient size and serviceable wealth. By 1889, it had merged the 71,000 into
15,800. In doing so, however, it precipitated vehement resistance across thecountry. No one objected to merging with a small but prosperous village.
Everyone objected to merging with a destitute one. The mandated new administrative services entailed high costs. If a rich village merged with a poor one, itwould – inevitably – bear a substantial cost of the services for the poorer village.
At root, these mergers were about economic redistribution, and wealthy villages
fought mergers with poorer villages the country over.29
Given that the buraku villages tended to be poor, prosperous villages foughtmergers with these villages as well. Some of them also may have objected tomerging with the village because of its buraku status, but the question was
massively over-determined. Wealthier villages fought mergers with poorer villages everywhere, buraku and commoner alike.
To buraku villagers, though, these rejections represented pure bias. In May
of 1922, the Suiheisha would hold the first of its Nara denunciations (kyudan) in
the village of Taisho (Naimu sho 1922:62). In 1889, neighboring villages had
rejected mergers with Taisho, and to the BLL “the reason was extremely simple.”
They had refused because Taisho was a buraku.30 Never mind that in one of theother buraku villages that would merge, a substantial number of households
were delinquent in their taxes (Naramoto, 1955:66–67). Forty years later, theperceived insult remained raw. As the official BLL publishing house would writein 2009 (Asaji et al., 2009:43; see also Amagasaki, 1988:229), “it was because theburakumin were nakedly excluded” through these mergers in 1889 that they“rose up to in a movement to improve the buraku.”

3 Schools
The differing codes of behavior in the buraku and mainstream communities
precipitated battles over schools as well. From the nineteenth century into mostof the 20th, children from the buraku tended to lag far behind their non-buraku
peers in academic achievement. At the outset, Meiji-era villages (both mainstream
29 See Kitagawa (1940:275, 280); Takayose (2006:150–51, 154–55).
30 See Naramoto (N.D.:71); Naramoto (1955:2); Higashi (2018:293).

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villages and buraku villages) had maintained small schools for their own children.
As the government merged the villages and raised the educational standards it
expected of the schools, local governments began combining the schools. The
burakumin schools they merged into the larger schools serving the new,expanded municipalities.31
Once burakumin and commoner students began attending the same school,
tensions rose. In first-hand accounts from the period, observers detail some of themany problems. Buraku children only haphazardly attended school, these observers often complained. According to a 1910 writer in the University of Tokyo law
journal, most students from the Nara buraku communities came only 10 to 15 daysa month. An observer in Amagasaki city (Hyogo prefecture) noted a similar
problem in the 1880s; so did another writer in 1912. In Osaka’s Kamagasaki
slum in 1919, over 70 % of the buraku children did not attend any school at all.
Even if buraku children went to school, they did not do their homework. They did
not review their lessons at home. If a teacher visited a student’s parents to urge
them to encourage their child to study, the parents refused to cooperate.32
When they did come to school, buraku children routinely disrupted class.
They were more likely to get into fights. If a teacher kept children (who had
fallen behind after skipping classes) after school to review the material, theirfathers or older brothers came and berated the teacher. In Nara, one teacher
faced several students with trachoma. Given the risk of contagion, he separated
them from the others. In fact, however, they were all from the buraku. They
called the new seating arrangements discrimination, and launched a boycott.33
One can try to attribute these contemporaneous observations to poverty or
anti-buraku bias. After all, many burakumin were poor, and the Suiheisha did
accuse other Japanese of venemous prejudice. Yet one cannot attribute burakumin truancy to any bias the students might have encountered at school; after all,burakumin children had skipped school at their smaller primarily buraku
schools as well. Neither can one attribute the truancy to any buraku poverty;
after all, many burakumin were poor, but so were many of their non-buraku
neighbors.

31 E. g. Aoki (1982:34–35, 47); Naramoto (1955:98–99); Higashi (2018:294).
32 See Kohara (1910:1452–54) (Nara); Amagasaki (1988:250, 357, 380) (Amagasaki); Kiso (1986:77)(Osaka); Endo (1912:277) (1912 observation).
33 See Kohara (1910:1440:1452–53).

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4 Crime and the discovery of the buraku
And as inter-regional contact grew, government officials – in historian
Kurokawa’s (2016:68) words – “discovered” the burakumin. Most prominently,
they noticed what they considered appalling levels of crime. In 1907, the powerful Home Ministry launched a program to reclaim the buraku from their dysfunctional state (Kurokawa, 2016:69). The ministry focused first on the crime andsecondarily on the widespread trachoma (Kurokawa, 2016:71). “Because of theprevalence of criminals within the buraku,” noted the governor of Mie Prefecture
in 1907, “the communities cannot avoid the wariness with which the rest ofsociety views them.”

VI The turn-of-the-century buraku
A Introduction
For a closer sense of the turn-of-the-century buraku, consider a mix of firstperson accounts (Section B) and prefecture-level data (Section C). The observers
tell a remarkably similar story. Some are police or journalists, to be sure –people from whom one might expect bias. Yet one observer was a decidedly
sympathetic community organizer. Others were burakumin themselves.
What is more, the story these observers tell fits the evidence from a wide
variety of prefecture-level regressions. When the n is small and partitions coarse,
the empirical results are necessarily suggestive. One can – and should – worry
about a wide range of obvious qualifications. Crucially, however, the empiricalresults match exactly the substance of the first-person accounts.

B First-person accounts
1 Kagawa
Several writers left careful first-hand accounts of the late 19th and early twentieth century buraku, but the most perceptive was probably Toyohiko Kagawa.
Born in 1888, Kagawa found himself orphaned at a young age, and raised by
foster parents who would go bankrupt before he turned adult. As a child, hecontracted tuberculosis. In 1909, he moved to a large buraku slum in Kobe toOn the Invention of Identity Politics

45

work as a Christian minister and community organizer. There, he would in timemarry and settle into an eight square meter apartment.34
Steadily, Kagawa acquired a national reputation as a champion of the poor.
When militant burakumin set out to organize the liberation movement thatwould become the Suiheisha, they met in Kagawa’s home. They admired him,and so did other burakumin. Among the possible founding leaders for the neworganization, Kagawa enjoyed strong popular support (Torigai, 2002).
Yet Kagawa did not join that Suiheisha founding leadership, and broke withit almost immediately. From the start, the new group adopted a “denunciation”based extortion strategy. Kagawa was appalled. “I’m preaching a gospel oflove,” he complained. “You’re teaching a gospel of hate” (Torigai, 1988:126).
The Suiheisha responded in kind. Sadakichi Takahashi had been one of thegroup’s earliest organizers, and served as a secret representative to theComintern. Kagawa, he declared in 1927, might as well be “telling laborers towork hard and become capitalists” (Takahashi 1924:236). He was nothing but “arunning dog for the ruling class.”
Half a century later, the publishing house Kagawa had founded decided toreprint his life works. The BLL hit hard. Under no circumstances, it declared, should
the publishing house reprint his 1915 account of the Kobe buraku uncensored. It
was flagrantly “discriminatory.” The publishing house duly capitulated, censored
Kawada’s writings, and expressed remorse for having published the “discriminatory text” at all. Henceforth, it penitently announced, all of its employees would joinin “addressing the problem of buraku discrimination.”35
In the uncensored version of his 1915 study, Kagawa had made three sets ofobservations relevant here. First, his burakumin neighbors were “quick toanger.” They routinely claimed to have been “wronged.” They “often lied.”And because they so often lied themselves, “they never trusted anyone”(Kagawa, 1915:100, 300–02, 361).
Second, crime infested the buraku. Theft was everywhere. Gambling was
ubiquitous, and run by gangs controlling discrete territories. Rape was common,and incest was rampant. In Wakayama prefecture, he noted, the crime rate
among the burakumin was three times the rate among other Japanese. And in
Hyogo, the burakumin rate was a third higher than among the prefecture as awhole. Although urban crime attracted the most attention, crime rates in therural buraku were higher than among comparable farm villages as well.36

34 See generally Torigai (1988:21–22, 48–51).
35 Kirisuto (1991:1; see also pp. 2, 25–26); Torigai (1988:6, 2002:160–61).
36 See Kagawa (1915:101, 223, 323, 359, 364–65, 563–68); Kagawa (1919, 467–68) (Hyogo rate isfor 1917).

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Third, family structures in the buraku had largely collapsed. Husbands andwives routinely deceived each other. “Wives would work as prostitutes,”
observed Kagawa, “and lie about it to their husbands.” Prostitution was common. At one point, he recalled, the woman living in the apartment across thealley ran outside yelling, “Hey! Won’t anyone buy me?” Even a woman who did
not work as a prostitute might have 10 to 13 sex partners over the course of herlife.37
Reflecting the combination of widespread crime and family disintegration,
parents sometimes (Kagawa suggested often) killed their babies. They did so bytransferring their infants (called moraigo) to specialists. Those specialists mightthen sell the children among themselves several times, but usually the babies
eventually died (Kagawa, 1915:637–43). Wrote Kagawa (1915:639):[The specialists] just dissolve rice flour into water and wait for them to die. Needless to say,they never give them milk. But sometimes the babies don’t die. They just get sick. They cry.
The adults can’t call a doctor, but it’s embarrassing just to wait. After 100 days, the babies
shrivel up like prunes. Its so tragic one can’t even watch.

Kagawa did not always watch. When he heard that the police had arrested oneof the old women who killed babies for a fee, he rushed to the police station. He
found an infant who was still alive, and raised the girl himself (Torigai,
1988:54–56).

2 Other observers
a Introduction
Kagawa was not the only observer to document wide-spread hyper-sensitivity,
violence, crime, and promiscuity within the buraku. Already by the late nineteenth century, a large range of scholars and journalists had described the samecharacteristics. For all the visciousness with which he attacked Kagawa, even
Suiheisha leader Takahashi – himself a burakumin – seemed not to disagree on
the empirics. Burakumin “are suspicious, and display eta konjo” (see Section b.,
below), wrote Takahashi (1924:223–24). “They have no inclination to save, andare always broke. Many are criminals. By instinct, they act as a group and resist
social pressure. Unless these characteristics change, others in society will obviously dislike burakumin.”

37 Kagawa (1915:301, 312; see pp. 101, 294).

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b Culture
Contemporaries (like Takahashi himself) identified among the burakumin of thelate 19th and early twentieth centuries a style of behavior they freely called “etakonjo” – an “eta essence” remarkably like the “cracker” culture of nineteenth
century southern poor whites: an unwillingness to invest long hours in strenuous effort (whether employment or schooling); an apparent eagerness to takeoffense; and a tendency to escalate any quarrel to dangerous levels andbeyond.38
Of the students of buraku culture, the most prominent was easily Universityof Tokyo professor Kunio Yanagida. Widely celebrated as the most perceptive
student of rural Japanese villages on the cusp of the transition from Tokugawa tomodern, Yanagida noted in 1913 that the burakumin brought a fundamentally“antisocial approach” to community life (Yanagida, 1913:93). When his novelist
friend Shimazaki Toson described life in the buraku as a world of pervasive
oppression from which burakumin could escape only by emigrating to the U.S.,
Yanagida (2017:242 [1906]) dismissed it as wildly exaggerrated:[Shimazaki Toson’s] distinction between the general commoners and the new commoners[i. e. the burakumin] is overstated. I’ve not specifically studied the eta of Shinshu [Nagano].
But in the other areas where I have made some observations, disputes this extreme do notexist … Following the customs of the past, the commoners probably did have a bit of a
distaste for the new commoners. But that general aversion would not have caused a
dispute as extreme [as Toson described].

Late nineteenth-century writers routinely complained about how eagerly burakumin fought. “There are many reasons” burakumin find themselves excluded
from society, wrote another observer in 1889 (Toson, 1889:78–80; not Shimazaki
Toson). “Of those, if we list simply the most basic, … they are violent.” Indeed,
he continued, they rape. Journalist Gennosuke Yokoyama similarly reported in
1898 that burakumin were hot-tempered and quick to take offense (Yokoyama,1898). In 1910, Shinzo Kohara explained in the University of Tokyo law journalthat when burakumin find themselves injured, they exaggerate their injuries,
demand compensation, and turn violent. They are, he concluded, suspicious,
unreflective, and unrestrained (Kohara, 1910:1440). House of Peers member
Ryukichi Endo reported in 1912 that burakumin could be extremely jealous(Endo, 1912:272). “Even the most minor matters” they treat as slights. “Quickly,
they use their imagination to take offense.” And the Kyoto police reported in
1924 that burakumin had traditionally been “quick tempered,” “uncooperative,”and “violent” (Kyoto, 1924:258).
38 See generally McWhiney (1988); McDonald and McWhiney (1980).

48

J. M. Ramseyer

Observers similarly complained that burakumin would not exert effort. If
hired, claimed Endo, they promptly quit (Endo, 1912:277). If per chance they did
not quit, they did not work. One factory owner who had hired several burakumin
discovered they seldom worked for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time.
Concluding that a two-hour stint of work was never going to happen, hedismissed them all within a month (Kohara, 1910:1441).
c CrimeBy virtually all contemporaneous accounts, turn-of-the-century burakumin wereheavily involved in crime. The crime could be serious. Take the massive nationwide arson and extortion in 1918 (Section D, below) or the murder and attempted
murder tied to Suiheisha chairman Jiichiro Matsumoto (Section E, below). Or it
could be petty. When a 16 year old insulted a burakumin child, reported the
Kyoto police chief (Nakano 1923:178–79), a burakumin crowd beat him up. Whena policeman intervened, they beat him up too.
Theft, declared journalist-social-reformer-banker-politician Umeshiro Suzuki,
1888, Sec. 10) in 1888, was “one of the traditional occupations” among Osakaburakumin. They operated in rings, he explained, under the direction of a boss
(Suzuki, 1888:29). More generally, during one seven-month period in 1886,(Suzuki, 1888, Sec. 10) police arrested 603 residents of Osaka’s Nago slum fortheft – this at a time when only 5,100 people 15 or older lived in the entire district.
In Aichi prefecture (home of Nagoya) in 1928, 14 % of the burakumin in theprefecture (25 % of the men) had a criminal record (Aichi, 1928:79).
d Family
Family structure, in turn, had collapsed. Wrote journalist Bungo Sakurada (pseudonym Koji Taiga) in 1893 (Sakurada 1893:14), men of the Osaka buraku “regularly
abandoned their children, left their wives, and moved on – several times over thecourse of their lives.” Conversely (Sakurada, 1893:36), if a husband went to prison,
his wife promptly took up with another man and moved in with him. “Promiscuity is
rampant,” reported Suzuki (1888:35) “Of ten couples, seven or eight will freely havesex with other people.” It all began early, noted Kohara (1910:1438). “Already byage 12, many girls understand sexual passion. Promiscuity and adultery are common everywhere, and no one seems to consider either to be morally wrong.”

C Regressions
Turn-of-the-century observers tell a consistent story. Whether Suiheisha founder
Takahashi, community organizer Kagawa, journalist Sakurada, or the local

49

On the Invention of Identity Politics

police chiefs, they describe the buraku as a place of impulsive violence, crime,and disintegrating family ties. That said, self-appointed burakumin leaders
spent the last 80 years of the twentieth century accusing other Japanese ofvirulent prejudice. Bias is thus an obvious possibility.
To check the credibility of these first-person accounts, consider some prefecture-level data. According to simple regressions on this data, early twentiethcentury burakumin did indeed live within a brutally violent world. By 1907, theassociation between these poorer burakumin and crime reached statistically
noticeable levels. In Table 7, I regress 1907 total crime rates (Panel A) andmurder rates (Panel B) on burakumin density (in percentages; Burakumin PC)

Table 7: Buraku and crime, Pre-World War II.
A. Total Crimes, PC
Dependent variable: Total crime PC








OLS

OLS

SLS

OLS

SLS

OLS

SLS

()

()

()

()

()

()

()

.***.**(.e-)(.e-).*(.).**(.)Burakumin PC.e-(.e-)




.**.*(.e-)(.)
Density.e-(.e-).e-***.e-***(.e-)(.e-).e-**(.–e).e-**(.e-)
ExogamyTaxpayer, PC

.e-

.e-(.e-)(.e-).*.***.***.**.**.

.

(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)(.).***−.

.

.

.

.*.*(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)(continued )50

J. M. Ramseyer

Table 7: (continued )Population Growth–

−.e-−.

(.)(.)–

.e-−.e-(.)(.)–
n
Adj R

.
(.).
(.)















.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

F statistic

.

.

B. Murders:
Dependent variable: Murders, PC








OLS

OLS

SLS

OLS

SLS

OLS

SLS

()

()

()

()

()

()

()

.e-**.e-***(.e-)(.e-)

Burakumin, PC.e-(e-).e-**.e-*(.e-)(.e-).e-**.e-*(.e-)(.e-)Density.e-(.e-)−.e-−.e-(.e-)(.e-).e-(e-).e-(.e-)
ExogamyTaxpayers, PC.e-

.e-(.e-)(.e-).e-

.e-

.e-−.e-−.e-−.e-−.e-(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)−.e-.e-.e-.e-.e-−.e-−.e-(.)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)(.e-)

Population
growth–

.e-

.e-(.e-)(.e-)(continued )On the Invention of Identity Politics

51

Table 7: (continued )–

.e-

.e-

(.e-)(.e-)–
n
Adj RCDW F

.e-

.e-(.e-)(.e-)















−.

.

.
.

.

.
.

.

.
.

Statistic
Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. Correlation coefficients, orregression coefficients followed by standard errors. All regressions include a constant term.

In the 2SLS estimates, the Burakumin PC variable is instrumented by Burakumin PC 1868,
Shirayama shrines, and Hinin fraction. 1884 is the earliest national census, and 1886 is theearliest year for which crime data are available. The murders for 1886 include batteries.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

and on general population density (Density). To capture the level of integration
between the burakumin and the general public, I include the rate of intermarriage between the burakumin and commoner populations (Exogamy; unfortunately, available only for 1921). To proxy for per capita income levels, I include
the fraction of the population paying taxes in 1923 (Taxpayers PC):
Total crime PC: Total crimes for given year, as provided in Naimu daijin(appropriate year), divided by total population.
Murders PC: Total murders for given year, as provided in Naimu daijin(appropriate year), divided by total population. For 1886, murders include
battery.
Exogamy: Number of marriages between burakumin and commoners in
1921, divided by all marriages involving burakumin in 1921, as provided in
Naimu sho (1921).
Taxpayers PC: Number of taxpayers in 1923, divided by the total households, as provided in Okura sho (1923).
Although burakumin concentration did not correlate with observable crime in
1868, by 1907 the two variables correlated strongly. Obviously, a wide range of
qualifications are again in order – the ecological fallacy with prefecture-level
data, unobserved variables, the fact that the data mix buraku and non-buraku
murders, and so forth. And as in 2010 (see Table 5.B., above), crime rates do
track urbanization: the higher the population density, the higher the rate ofcrime. Crucially, however, in 1907 they also tracked the relative number ofburakumin in a community. In the first column of Table 7 Panels A and B, I

52

J. M. Ramseyer

regress (with OLS) 1886 crime rates (the first available year) on burakumin
density, population density, the exogamy rate, and the number of taxpayers
per capita.39 The coefficient on burakumin density is not statistically significant
for either total crimes or the murder rate. In the second column, I add the rate of
population growth since 1884, and conduct the same exercise for 1907. Note:
Population growth: fractional growth in total prefectural population
since 1884.
In 1907, the coefficient on Burakumin PC is significantly positive: the higher thefraction of burakumin in a prefecture, the higher the rates both of total crimes
generally and of murders specifically. The magnitude of the effect is modest: anincrease in burakumin concentration from 0.5 % to 1 % increases the prefecturelevel crime rate by 0.00136 on a prefecture-level median of 0.00925. Note that
total crimes are a distinctly urban phenomenon: the coefficient on population
density is positive and significant. The significance of the Burakumin PC
variable is robust to serially dropping Taxpayers PC, Exogamy, andPopulation growth.
Whether burakumin choose to leave the community or to remain burakumin
may plausibly depend in part on opportunities in the criminal sector. If so,
Burakumin PC is endogenous to Total crime PC and Murders PC. To address
this phenomenon, in the third column of Panels A and B, I instrument the 1907
value of Burakumin PC with its 1868 predecessor, with a proxy for the locationof Tokugawa-era buraku communities (Shirayama shrines), and with the fraction of burakumin in 1868 with hinin backgrounds (Hinin fraction). I thus add:
Shirayama shrines: The number of Shirayama shrines (said to have beena marker of the traditional location of burakumin communities), from
Kikuchi (1961:691).
Hinin fraction: Fraction of hinin among the 1868 burakumin, as given in
Buraku mondai (1980). Note that the hinin are said to have migrated out of
the buraku communities during the late nineteenth century.
The coefficient on the instrumented Burakumin PC for 1907 is significantly
positive for both Total crimes PC and Murders PC.

39 I use the exogamy rate in 1921 and the taxpayer fraction in 1923 because of data availability.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

53

D The rice riots
1 Prices
In 1918, burakumin across a wide range of prefectures brought violent crime tothe center of public attention. Rice prices had trebled in a year, and urban
residents rioted en masse. At the head of the many of the crowds – and at thehead of the most violent crowds – were the burakumin. If anyone had notconnected burakumin to crime before, in 1918 the newspapers did it for them.
The stimulus was not poverty. For farmers, the higher rice prices obviouslytranslated directly into higher profits (Shakai 1938:54). To that income, theyroutinely added profitable textile-related by-employment besides. Yet urban
residents enjoyed higher income as well. Incomes in the cities had soared.
During the first decades of the century, the economy had boomed: young men
and women moved to the city, and there earned high wages.
Granted, growth temporarily stalled in 1918. The indexed cost of living inTokyo rose from 100 in 1914 to 174.3 in 1918, while wages had risen only to 160.
But the standard of living would soon soar again, as it had been soaring since
the late nineteenth century. Take the ratio of wages to the cost of living,similarly indexed at 100 for 1914. As of 1918, the ratio had in fact declined
slightly to 95. Yet by 1921 it would climb to 135, and by 1924 to 150. Discounted
for the cost of living, real wages rose 50 % over the decade from 1914 to 1924
(Shakai mondai shiryo kenkyukai, 1938:54,57).
For poorer Japanese, rice had only recently become a staple anyway.
Traditionally, many of the poor had eaten barley and millet, and sold their rice asa luxury good. With their newfound prosprity, however, famers and urban workers
shifted a larger and larger share of their diet from barley to rice (Harada, 1989:87).
In response to this new demand (boosted further by army procurement), theprice of the luxury-turned-widespread-staple climbed. But supply was fixed, atleast in the short-run. With their children earning high wages in the city, farmers
lacked the labor with which to expand production. Boost demand and cap
supply, and prices will rise. And so they did.

2 The riots
The protests began in a Toyama fishing village in July; the riots themselves
started in Kyoto and Nagoya on August 10. In Kyoto, those riots lasted 23 days,in Hyogo 12 days, in Nara 14 days, and in Fukuoka 34 days. They ended nationally in mid-September. In due course, prosecutors would investigate 8,200

54

J. M. Ramseyer

people, and judges would find 4,200 guilty. Despite the rampant burglary andarson (a capital offense where cities contain densely packed wooden homes) andoccasional deaths, judges imposed relatively lenient punishment: no death
sentences, and only three life imprisonments.40
Mobs pillaged and burned stores, warehouses, and wealthy homes, andleading the riots were the burakumin. Contemporary journalists and police
placed them at the head of the mobs, and modern scholars confirm that role
(Takayama, 2005:66–69). Police reported upwards of 9,300 burakumin participating in the riots in Osaka alone. In Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo and Nara, burakumin
averaged 30 to 40 % of the rioters (Mitani, 1985:82). And within the mobs,
journalists and police placed the burakumin among the most violent.41
At root, the riots were not about protest; they were about looting andextortion. Most often, the mobs targeted rice dealers, merchant houses, andwealthy homes. There, they used the threat of arson to extract cash or price cuts.
If their targets hesitated or refused, they looted the building, drenched it with“oil” (probably kerosene), and burned it down. Operating through what one
observer called “theft rings,” women and children followed the mobs to cart
away valuables. If a mob torched a home during the night, the women andchildren appeared early the next morning to take any valuables that remained.42
Mobs took this violence, arson, and extortion far across the country. Whenfiremen arrived, they sometimes attacked the firemen. In Fukui, they destroyed
the homes of the mayor and police chief, and burned down the police station. In
Kobe, they torched 27 of the Suzuki shoten trading firm’s buildings. In towns inFukuoka prefecture, they threw dynamite, and fought off the army with guns.
They rioted on the largest scale in Osaka prefecture. There, mobs sometimes
20,000-strong extorted money, looted merchant safes, and torched buildings.43

E The buraku in 1920
1 Incomes
The average burakumin in 1920 (and 1930) were still poorer than the general public.
As during the Tokugawa period, they were not all poorer; incomes of the burakumin
and the general public overlapped considerably. But take the 1920 Diet election.

40 See generally Shakai (1938:2–4, 91–95, 102–04, 439).
41 See Shakai (1938:94, 132, 197, 216, 259, 260, 379, 391).
42 See Shakai (1938:97, 178, 216, 230, 260).
43 See Shakai (1938:98, 101,128, 180, 184).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

55

Eligibility to vote turned on tax liability, and over the country as a whole 5.42 %(3.07 million) of the population voted. Within the buraku, eligibility rates ranged
from Ishikawa where 0.17 % of the burakumin voted, to Chiba’s 3.32 %. The mean ofburaku eligibility rates across the prefectures came to 1.55 %.
Or take the size of farms. Historian Haraguchi (2014:393) reports the following distribution of farm sizes across Japan in the mid-1930s:

Under / cho

/ to  cho

 cho & over

 %


 %


%


BurakuAll Japan

Note that one cho equals 9,917 square meters. As the voter eligibility
data suggest, burakumin farmers tended to be among the relatively
poorer farmers.

Historian Aoki (1998:21) compares the area cultivated within Nagano prefectureby burakumin and all farmers in 1931:

less than / cho
/ to  cho to  cho
 cho & overTotal

All Nagano
Households%

BurakuminHouseholds%

,
,
,
,
,

.
.
.
.


,



,

.
.
.
.


The farm sizes for the Nagano public track the numbers in Haraguchi’s national
totals, while buraku farmers in Nagano tilled smaller farms than burakumin
elsewhere. Other scholars (e. g. Yoshida, 1997:82–85) survey still more locations,but reach a similar general conclusion: burakumin farmers tended to be poorer
than the general public, but not uniformly; many burakumin were richer thanthe poorest of their neighbors, and a few were actually quite wealthy.

2 Other indices
By many other observable indices, however, the burakumin as a whole in the 1920s
and 1930s seemed not to face observably worse circumstances than their nonburaku peers. In Table 8, I regress various prefecture-level indices of social welfareDensity 

Burakumin PC 

Dependent variablenAdj. R

Taxpayers PC

Exogamy

DensityBurakumin PC

Dependent variable−.e-(.e-).e-(.e-)

Suicides ().
(.)−.
(.)
.

.e-
(.e-).e-**(.e-)

Illegitimacy−.e-(.e-).**(.)−.
(.)
.

.e-**(.e-)

Table 8: Buraku and social welfare, Pre-World War II.

−.e-(.e-).
(.).
(.)−.

.e-(.e-).e-(.e-).e-***(.e-)

Dysentery ()B. Variables from  and .
(.).
(.)
−.

−.e-(.e-)−.e-(.e-)

DivorceA. Variables from  and .e-(.e-).e-(.e-)

Tuberculosis ().
(.)−.*(.)
.

.e-**(.e-).e-(.e-)Infant Mortality−.e-(.e-)−.
(.)−.
(.)
.

−.e-(.e-)

56
J. M. Ramseyer.e-(.e-).**(.)−.*(.).
(.)

.

Male

−.***(.e-).
(.).

Height−.e-(.e-).
(.)−.*(.).*(.)
.

Female.e-(.e-).e-(.e-)−.
(.).
(.)

−.

Male

WeightC. Physical Size, Age , −.
(.).
(.)
.

.e-(.e-)−.
(.)−.
(.).*(.)
.

Female.***(.)−.*(.).
(.).
(.)

.

Male

Female.e-(.e-)−.
(.).
(.).
(.).

Chest Circumference−.
(.).
(.)
.

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. Regression coefficients followed by standard errors. OLS
regressions. All regressions include a constant term.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

Adj. R:

Taxpayers PC

ExogamyDensity 

Burakumin PC 

Dependent variablenAdj. R:

Taxpayers PC

ExogamyOn the Invention of Identity Politics

57

58

J. M. Ramseyeron the number of burakumin per capita, on population density, on the exogamyrate (as an index of burakumin-commoner interaction), and on the number of
taxpayers per capita (as an index of income). The obvious qualifications to prefecture-level data apply. I create the following dependent variables:
Suicide rate: Number of suicides in 1934, divided by the total population,from Naikaku (1935).
Dysentery rate: Number of deaths from dysentery in 1933, divided by the
total population, from Naimu sho (1933).
Tuberculosis rate: Number of deaths from tuberculosis in 1933, divided
by the total population, from Naimu sho (1933).
Height: Height of boys and girls at age 7, 1933, as reported in Monbu sho(1937).
Weight: Weight of boys and girls at age 7, 1933, as reported in Monbu sho(1937).
Chest circumference: Chest circumference of of boys and girls at age 7,
1933, as reported in Monbu sho (1937).
Consider the regression results in Table 8. I again control for income, population
density, and exogamy. At the prefectural level, infant mortality is correlated withpopulation density (it is an urban phenomenon), but not with the fraction of
burakumin in either 1921 or 1935 (Panel A). Suicide rates are not correlated withthe density of burakumin (Panel B). Death rates from dysentery are correlatedwith population density (again, it is an urban phenomenon), but not with thefraction of burakumin (Panel B). Death rates from tuberculosis are not associated with the fraction of burakumin (Panel B).
In general, the average size of children will reflect their nutritional history.
Yet burakumin density is not negatively associated with the heights, weights, or
chest circumferences of seven year-old boys and girls. Instead, it is significantly
positively associated with the chest circumferences of the boys (Panel C).

3 Non-marital births
Despite no observable signs of poorer public health (according to these measures)
than among their non-buraku peers, by 1922 the burakumin were indeed associatedwith the most basic characteristic of community dysfunction – the fraction of nonmarital births. To be sure, communities varied in how promptly newly weds registered
their marriage. But controlling for income, population density, and exogamy, thefraction of burakumin in both 1921 and 1935 were positively correlated with nonmarital birth rates (Table 8 Panel A).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

59

Similarly, take the non-marital birth rates specifically for burakumin and for thegeneral public (Naimu sho, 1921). Among the public in 1920, prefecture-levelillegitimacy rates ranged from 0.54 % in Miyagi to 15.9 % in Osaka, with theprefectural numbers averaging 8.1 %. Among burakumin in 1921, those prefecturelevel rates ranged from 2.01 % in Shizuoka (with 14,000 burakumin residents) to theastonishing 60.7 % in Okayama (43,000 burakumin), with the prefectural numbers
averaging 19.6 %. If we compare the illegitimacy rates for several key prefectures(1920 for the general public, 1921 for the burakumin), those numbers were:

General public
Fukuoka
Hyogo
Osaka
Hiroshima
Okayama
Kyoto

. %
.
.
.
.
.

Burakumin
. % (, burakumin)
. (,). (,). (,). (,). (,)4 Crime rates
During the 1920s and 1930s, burakumin density was again prominently correlated with crime rates. In 1921 the burakumin were only 1.46 % of the general
population. Even in the large urban centers of Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo andFukuoka, they comprised less than 3 % of the population. Nonetheless, evenat the prefectural level, higher percentages of burakumin were indeed associatedwith significantly higher rates of crime.
In the fourth and sixth regressions of Table 7 Panels A and B, I use OLS. The
coefficient on the density of burakumin (in percentages; Burakumin PC) is
positive and significant for both 1922 and 1935 for both total crimes and themurder rate. Because – as described earlier – burakumin density is plausibly
endogenous to the crime rate, I use the instrumented values of burakumin
concentration in the fifth and seventh regressions. The coefficient on the instrumented Burakumin PC is positive and significant for both 1922 and 1935. For themurder rates, the coefficient on the instrumented Burakumin PC is significantly
positive for both 1922 and 1935. The actual magnitude of the effect is, again,
modest. An increase from about 0.5 % burakumin to 1 % would increase theaggregate prefecture-level total crime rate by about 0.0014 on a prefecture-level
median of 0.0286.

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J. M. Ramseyer

From these prefecture-level crime rates, turn to the rate of crime specifically among the burakumin (Naimu sho, 1921). For the general public in
1922, the combined battery-murder rates (the buraku data offer only the sumof the two) ranged from 15.8 per 100,000 population in Okinawa to 95.8 inFukuoka, with a prefectural mean of 41.7. Among burakumin in 1921, thecombined battery-murder rate ranged from 6.9 per 100,000 in Shizuoka (with
14,000 burakumin) to 231.7 in Miyazaki (2,600 burakumin), with a prefecturalmean of 74.7. If we compare six key prefectures (1922 for the general public,
1921 for the burakumin), the combined battery-murder rates per 100,000
population were:

General public
Fukuoka
Hyogo
Osaka
Hiroshima
Okayama
Kyoto

.
.
.
.
.
.

Burakumin
. (, burakumin)
. (,). (,). (,). (,). (,)Among the six key buraku prefectures, only in Hyogo was the battery-murderrate lower in the buraku than among the general public.

VII The invention of identity politics, 1922–1945
A Context
As the 1910s closed, the burakumin were poor but not destitute. They tended tofarm smaller plots than others. They tended to earn lower incomes. But not all
burakumin were poor, and those doing well continued to identify with thecommunity and to contribute to its social and economic infrastructure. At theprefectural level the buraku were associated with higher rates of crime and nonmarital births, but not with noticeably higher rates of suicide, diphtheria, tuberculosis, or malnutrition.
Crucially, only partly did Japanese treat burakumin status as a loosely
inherited status; instead, they also used the term to describe a particularlyOn the Invention of Identity Politics

61

dysfunctional pattern of behavior. Only partly, in other words, did they callsomeone a burakumin if his parents had been burakumin; in part, they called
him a burakumin (regardless of his ancestry) if he exhibited the constellation ofcharacteristics associated with the classic buraku: they called a neighborhood aburaku if its residents lived by the “cracker”-like code they called “eta-konjo”: if
it suffered from extremely high crime rates, and if its famillies had largely
collapsed.
The way a city’s residents could respond to a slum illustrates the way they
could use the term “eta” and “buraku” to describe behavior rather than lineage.
In Kobe and Kyoto, for example, poor workers – whether burakumin or no –who moved to the city found cheap housing in what had been buraku districts.
As they did, writes activist (but nonconformist) historian Fujino (2009:23–24),
others subjected them to “the same discrimination they imposed on the burakumin.” By contrast, in Yokohama poor migrants created two large slums inareas with no burakumin core at all. Notwithstanding their lack of any historicconnection to the burakumin, Yokohama commoners called the residents ofthese two slums “eta.” “Eta mura,” they named the neighborhoods, or eta
districts (Fujino 2009:24–29). Apparently, the people in the areas lived by thenorms associated with the buraku – and other citizens responded by callingthem eta districts.
Bear in mind the obvious implication this poses for Tables 7 and 8: if the
public used “buraku” and “eta” in part to describe behavior rather than identify
lineage, then the conclusion that pre-1920 buraku status correlated with crimeand illegitimacy becomes straightforwardly circular. Yes, neighbors called aneighborhood a buraku because their predecessors had called them buraku
districts for decades. But sometimes they simply called a neighborhood a buraku
because it showed high rates of crime and illegitimacy.
In 1922, all this would begin to change.

B The Suiheisha
Within these – poor but not destitute – communities, identity politics broke
violently into the open in 1922. Over the course of the decade, young intellectualsfrom the buraku upper class and criminal buraku entrepreneurs would together
invent for the still-only-loosely identified communities a new, more sharply
defined, and largely fictitious collective persona. In the process, they would
lauch a lucrative shake-down strategy that would reward those burakumin whochose to invest in criminal rather than mainstream careers; that would drive out
burakumin who chose to live by standard Japanese behavioral norms instead; that

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J. M. Ramseyer

would profoundly escalate public hostility toward the group; and that would
generate ever-increasing levels of organized crime and public subsidies.
In November of 1921, several young burakumin from the Nara town ofKashihara banded together to launch a “liberation” movement. Their commoner
peers were forming a wide swath of Bolshevik and Anarcho-Syndicalist cells,
and these young men wanted one of their own. They would call it the Zenkoku
Suiheisha, they decided: the National Levellers. Toward that end, they would
first redefine the buraku as an “outcaste” community with roots in a leatherworkers’ guild and a history of unmitigated discrimination.
Come March 1922, the burakumin intellectuals held a 4,000-strong rally in
Kyoto and announced the group’s formation. Obviously echoing the Communist
Manifesto, they urged their cohorts to action. “Burakumin of the nation, unite!,”they proclaimed (Kyoto, 1922:3; Hasegawa, 1927:12–13, 17).
The young men immediately established a central office in Kyoto. Over thecourse of the first year, they would form offices in eight of the more prominent
burakumin prefectures, including Osaka, Hyogo, and Nara. Over the next several
years, they would establish still more.
To all slurs everywhere, the young men vowed to respond with “tettei
kyudan,” or “total denunciation” (Kyoto, 1922; Hasegawa, 1927:17). They had
in fact invented the term “kyudan,” but apparently meant to evoke by it something close to the “self-criticism” that the Red Guards and Khmer Rouge would
later enforce in the P.R.C. and Cambodia. Should anyone insult a burakumin,they would rally their cohort to mob violence. If lucky, the speaker would escapewith no more than ritual self-abasement. Occasionally, he would face brutal
violence and a financial shakedown.
The term was new, but the strategy was not. Burakumin had been using thetactic for several years. In 1909, they attacked a village mayor in Okayama over aclaimed slur (Watanabe, 1965:717). In 1916, they rioted over a demeaning local
newspaper article near Fukuoka (Takayama, 2005:53–58; Fukuoka, 2003:58–60).
And in 1910, they took offense at what a Kyoto village mayor had called them,and promptly beat him to death (Kyoto Buraku, 1995).
As the allusion to the Communist Manifesto suggests, the founders of thegroup placed their loyalty in the fringe left. The Bolsheviks had taken power in
Russia in late 1917. By the early 1920s, a large assortment of groups on the farleft were trying to organize workers and (in many cases) foment revolution in
Japan. Police did their best to monitor them all. They watched the Suiheisha as
one of the many.
By 1924, self-styled Bolsheviks seemed to have taken over the Suiheisha. As
in many of the 1920s fringe groups in Japan, relative moderates, Anarchosyndicalists, and Leninist Bolsheviks had fought for control over theOn the Invention of Identity Politics

63

Suiheisha. And as in so many other such groups, it was a fight the Bolsheviks atleast initially seemed to have won.44 The event that precipitated the Bolshevik
takeover involved a purported police spy. Among the moderates, declaredinsurgents in late 1924, was a paid police informant. In the ensuing chaos, theBolsheviks purged the incumbents and took control.

C The ideological origins of the fictive past
The orthodox buraku history of itself – the history (detailed in Section II, above)on which virtually all Western accounts rely – dates from this period. In the
1920s and 30s, Japanese intellectuals sought to write histories that fit within theelaborate schematic that Marx and Engels had outlined. Those most loyal to theParty sought to meet the more detailed instructions from the Comintern as well.
For most scholars, the Marxist schematic entailed describing the Tokugawa
period as one or another variant of feudalism. Necessarily, this required characterizing the Tokugawa government as a rigidly hierarchical regime. The
description of the social order as incorporating a pervasively binding fourclass-plus-outcaste formula followed: the Tokugawa regime enforced a fixedstatus hierarchy, and consigned the kawata to the bottom of the ladder.
Second, the schematic entailed describing the regime as ruthlessly exploitative, and the peasants as bleakly immiserated. Toward this end, writers characterized the Tokugawa economy as contracting, and the kawata as the mostdestitute of all. The Tokugawa regime left farmers brutally impoverished, inother words, and the kawata poorer still.
Third, ideological fidelity required describing the Tokugawa industrial andcommercial world by the guilds Marx had placed at the heart of German
Ideology. That Suiheisha activists and allied intellectuals defined the buraku
through an imagined ancestry in the leather-working craft, explains historian
Kentaro Minegishi (1996:224–25), reflects this importance of German Ideology. To
fit the history Marx had outlined in the essay, in other words, activists andwriters transformed the kawata into the leather-working guild. A few village
kawata had indeed handled dead carcasses. A few town kawata had tanned
leather. Marx required guilds, so guilds it would be: the kawata became theleather-worker’s guild.
Starting in the 1920s, historians of the buraku began to track this newly
created identity politics. Sadakichi Takahashi started the enterprise, writes
historian Kurokawa (1989:92–97), with his 1924 history of the group. Born to a
44 See Hasegawa (1927:93–94, 102–03, 148); Takayama (2005:199–204).

64

J. M. Ramseyerburaku, Takahashi had helped found the Suiheisha. Soon thereafter, he would
travel secretly to the U.S.S.R. where he would join the Soviet Communist Partyand serve on Comintern. Of the academic historians, continues Kurokawa,
University of Kyoto historian Kiyoshi Inoue was easily the most prominent. So
loyal was he that he worked not just to describe a buraku experience that
followed traditional Marxist principles, but to create a buraku history that fit
within the confines of Comintern’s 1932 mandates to boot.
To modern scholars, these mid-century Marxist premises can lead to what
seem odd debates. Marx traced peasants to serfs, and serfs to slaves. Can theburakumin trace their ancestors to prehistoric slaves (e. g., Watanabe, 1965:16–
18; Kikuchi 1961:56)? Answer: no. Sixteenth century warlord Oda Nobunaga
faced several violent peasant rebellions. Might he have banished buraku ancestors to outcaste status as punishment for participating in the rebellions (e. g.
Funakoshi, 1976; Teraki, 1996:chs. 4–5)? Answer: again, no. Nobunaga usuallyjust slaughtered his opponents. And did the class hierarchy come first, andassignment to the despised occupation follow? Or did the occupation comefirst, and the class structure follow (Teraki, 1996:19–20; Watabane, 1963:8–9)?
Answer: Marxism faded from the universities before historians reached aconsensus.
From time to time, the most militant of the buraku activists (e. g. Asada,
1979:297–98) claimed that the Tokugawa government deliberately consigned
their ancestors to outcaste status in order to let it oppress the broader peasantclass more effectively. As Neary (1989:18; see also Ohnuki-Tierney 1989:94)
articulated it (apparently with approval), the regime treated the burakumin
badly so that “the rebelliousness of the peasants and urban dwellers would be
reduced with the reminder that there was a group which was even worse off thanthey were.” This was not, however, a theory that many serious Japanese scholars
ever endorsed (see Saito and Oishi, 1995:56).

D The geography of the Suiheisha
1 The exercise
To examine which communities organized Suiheisha branches, I begin withsimple OLS (again, the usual caveats for prefecture-level data apply). I findthat burakumin formed the branches: in communities where the concentrationof burakumin was high; in urban areas; in areas with a cohort of wealthy
burakumin; and in areas with relatively more hostile ties to the general
population.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

65

As dependent variable, I take the number of Suiheisha branch offices in aprefecture in 1933, a decade after its formation:
Suiheisha BO 1933: The number of branch offices of the Suiheisha, as
given in Watanabe (1965).
As controls, I take the values of the explanatory variables immediately prior to
the Suiheisha’s national formation. For the basic model, I posit that the numberof branch offices would reflect the fraction (in percentages) of burakumin in the
population (Burakumin PC 1921), the extent of the group’s integration into thegeneral population (Exogamy 1921), the urbanization of the prefecture (Density
1921), and the fraction of wealthy families within the buraku. As a proxy for thefraction of wealthy burakumin, I create:
Buraku prefectural voters PBC (per burakumin capita) 1921: The number of burakumin eligible to vote in the prefectural elections (suffrage
depended on income), divided by the number of burakumin, as given in
Naimu sho (1921).
Additionally, I construct:
Buraku crime rate, PBC: Number of burakumin committing a crime in1921, divided by the number of burakumin, as given in Naimu sho (1921).
Buraku public assistance, PBC: Number of burakumin on public assistance in 1921, divided by the number of burakumin, as given in Naimu sho,1921).
Buraku agricultural ratio: Number of burakumin households engaged inagriculture in 1935, divided by the number of burakumin households, as
given in Chuo Yuwa (1936).
Anti-liberation riots: 1 if the prefecture experienced any riots opposed to
the 1871 liberation edict, 0 otherwise, as given in Inagaki et al. (1993). The
variable proxies for the extent of local hostility toward the buraku at theclose of the Tokugawa period.

2 Results
I report the resulting regressions in Table 9. They suggest a couple of straightforward conclusions. First, the coefficient on the number of burakumin percapita is positive and significant: burakumin tended to organize Suiheisha

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Table 9: The location of Suiheisha branches.
A. Basic Regression
Dependent variable
Burakumin PC 
Exogamy 
Density 
Buraku Pref’l votersn:Adj. R:

Suiheisha branch offices, .***(.).
(.).**(.e-).***(.)
.

B. Additional Regressions: Regressions of the number of Suiheisha branch offices in  on
the control variables given in Panel A, and the following additional independent variables
MurderTot Crime
Buraku Cr
B illegit
B divorce
rate 
rate 
rate 
rate 
rate 
Coef.
S.e.
Adj. R,
(,).
B public
assist .
(.).
Burakuagricul.
(.).
Burakusize 

.
(.)
.
Hinin
frac

−.
(.).
Anti-lib
riots .

Coef.
S.e.
Adj. R−.
(.).

.
(.).

−.
(.).

−.
(.).

−.
(.).

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. OLS
regressions. Regression coefficients followed by standard errors. All regressions include a
constant term.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

branches in areas with relatively high concentrations of the group. Second, thecoefficient on population density is positive and significant: the Suiheisha werea urban phenomenon.45
Turn to two somewhat more curious observations. First, the coefficient on
the fraction of burakumin rich enough to vote is positive and significant:

45 If I instead use the number of burakumin (rather than the number of burakumin per capita),
then the coefficient on the number of burakumin is strongly significant, and the coefficient on
density is no longer significant.

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67

Suiheisha branches were more common where wealthy burakumin formed alarger fraction of the buraku. Recall the early disputes within the Suiheisha
between the Bolsheviks and Anarcho-Syndicalists. Engaging in a debate along
those lines entails at least a passing acquaintance with Trotsky, Lenin,
Kropotkin, and Proudhon. Necessarily, a familiarity with those names andideas entails a background in a home with a commitment to education (e. g.
Aoki, 1982:74).
Second, the coefficient on the exogamy rate is insignificant: the number ofbranches seems not to have been correlated with the level of interaction between
the buraku and the general population. In fact, however, the observation misleads. The pairwise correlation between the exogamy rate and the number ofbranches was −0.26, almost significant at the 10 % level. Burakumin, in otherwords, seem to have been less likely to establish Suiheisha branches in areas
where they freely mixed with the population. The coefficient is statisticallyinsignificant in the regression only because of the strong correlation among
the independent variables.
None of the following independent variables is associated with the establishment of a Suiheisha branch (see Panel B). With buraku income (proxied by
the fraction of voters) held constant, Suiheisha branches were not associatedwith crime rates. Similarly, they were not associated with buraku illegitimacy
rates, buraku divorce rates, or welfare dependency in the buraku. They were notassociated with the fraction of burakumin in agriculture or with the size of theburaku. They bore no relation to the ratio of hinin to kawata in the buraku in
1868. And they were not associated with any anti-buraku riots in the wake of the1871 liberation decree.

E From Bolsheviks to opportunists
1 Matsumoto
If the anarchists were no match for the Bolsheviks, the latter would soon proveno match for the buraku criminal underworld. Over the next several years,
control over the Suiheisha would shift again, this time from the Bolsheviks toa largely apolitical cohort of criminal entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs, inturn, would then use the group’s new fictitious history to extort increasingly
large sums from private firms and local governments. Selective out-migration
followed: the logic follows classic Becker – burakumin with the lowest opportunity costs to criminal careers stayed; those with the most to lose from this newcollective criminal identify left, and migrated into the general public.

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In early 1923, the head of a construction firm in Fukuoka, Jiichiro
Matsumoto, organized the all-Kyushu branch of the Suiheisha. His was a meteoric rise. By early 1925, he chaired the national Suiheisha Central Committee.46
Recall the 1924 discovery of a “police spy.” Obviously, the police might
indeed have paid an insider to monitor the fringe-left group. Obviously too,
the Bolsheviks might have used the story of a police spy to purge theirmoderate rivals. Hasegawa (1927), however, thought a police informant
unlikely. Hasegawa served as a career prosecutor – probably within an elitecohort. Apparently, he had worked extensively on Suiheisha crime. In the mid1920s, the central personnel office seems to have seconded him to a researchpost, and commissioned him to compile the information available on thegroup into a book-length reference for prosecutors nation-wide. Hasegawa
produced an astonishingly perceptive text. He did not dismiss outright thepossibility that the police might have paid an insider. He thought it more
likely, however, that Matsumoto and his allies had simply invented the story
to take control themselves.47
Historian Neary (2010:1) tells us that 1970s burakumin families kept
Matsumoto’s portrait on their “god shelf” next to the photographs of theirdead ancestors. To be sure, no one so dominated the pre-war buraku movement
as this flamboyant, bombastic, and sometimes bizarrely violent Matsumoto. Yet
no one so epitomized the buraku criminal underworld either. Hasegawa(1927:181) himself remarked in 1927 that “many people think of him as the donof an organized crime syndicate.” Consistent with that description, he noted that
Matsumoto had already bought out a local geisha from her employment contractand installed her as his mistress (Hasegawa, 1927:181).
Born in 1887 to a buraku farm family near Fukuoka, at age 16 Matsumoto left
Kyushu for middle school in Kyoto. Ordinarily, children would have left at age
13. Matsumoto might have left for Kyoto voluntarily, observes his otherwise
sympathetic biographer Fumihiko Takayama. But he suspects that – for whatever reason – he left because he no longer could safely stay (Takayama,
2005:29).
A few years later, Matsumoto sailed for north China. He loaded drugs onto apull-cart, and declared himself a peripatetic “First Class Japanese Military
Physician.” He conducted tests, he diagnosed, and he sold his patients medicine. Demand was high. “The stuff sold,” his later secretary explained. “You
could put tooth-brushing powder in a packet and call it stomach medicine. It’d
46 See Hasegawa (1927:52, 84); Fukuoka (2003:67).
47 Hasegawa (1927:77–78, 84); for a more conventional interpretation, see Bayliss (2013:207
n.93); Asaji (2009:ch. 8).

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69

still sell.” Unfortunately for Matsumoto, fraudulent doctors peddling fake medicines gave Japan a bad name. In 1910, the Japanese consulate threw him out of
the country (Takayama, 2005:38–39).

2 Violence
Back in in Fukuoka, in 1911 Matsumoto organized a construction firm. His
older brother managed the business, and he coordinated the workers. Muchof the work he did for the local railroad (Takayama, 2005:46). The bidding
could cause disputes, and in March 1923 Matsumoto’s workers quarreledwith employees from the rival Matsuo construction firm. Both firms worked
for the local railroad. But the custom, according to the BLL’s otherwise
hagiographic account (Buraku 1987:74), was for the firms to rig the bid
with the understanding that the winning firm would share its profits withthe losers. The Matsumoto firm had won the bid, and now refused to share
the profits.
Later on the night of the quarrel, three Matsumoto workers went to the inn
at which Kotaro Matsuo, owner of the rival firm, was staying. When Matsuo
came to the door, they beat him. They grabbed a bicycle that was there and beathim with the bicycle. Other Matsumoto workers joined the fray and attacked
Matsuo with swords. By midnight, he was dead.
While the Matsuo employees were attending his wake the next day, fifty
Matsumoto workers again stormed the group. They threw rocks, trampled doors,and drew swords. They left three of the Matsuo group badly injured. The policearrested thirty Matsumoto employees. They arrested Matsumoto himself too, but
eventually discharged him on grounds that he had not been at the scene of themurder.48
Heading the new Kyushu branch of the Suiheisha, Matsumoto announced
that the heir to the Tokugawa shogunate, Prince Iesato Tokugawa, should
return his imperial peerage. The burakumin suffered because of his ancestors’
brutal reign, declared Matsumoto. In remorse for their ruthless oppression, heshould resign. Tokugawa would have none of it, so Matsumoto sent a young
Suiheisha member to Tokyo with a gun and a knife. When the police stopped
the would-be assassin, they discovered Matsumoto’s role. Matsumoto
acknowledged his part in the assassination attempt, and served four months
in prison. In fact, however, the attack continued anyway: another of

48 Takayama (2005:144–47); Buraku (1987:74); Fukuoka (2003:68).

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Matsumoto’s followers travelled to Tokyo, broke into Tokugawa’s estate, andburned his house down.49
The Suiheisha seem to have had rare access to guns. Matsumoto procured
the handgun for Tokugawa’s planned assassin. Other Suiheisha sometimes
brought guns to their kyudan (Hasegawa, 1927:47–49). Post-war BLL leader
Asada (1979:34–35, 52) recalled carrying guns to Suiheisha events. He recalled
his colleagues carried guns. Perhaps tied to the number of construction firms inthe buraku, the Suiheisha also had access to explosives. Asada rememberedbringing dynamite to events. When Matsumoto started a dispute with local
reservists in 1926, the fight quickly escalated. Matsumoto and his colleagues
decided to blow up the military base, and Matsumoto obtained the dynamite forthe occasion.50

3 Extortion
The Suiheisha’s denunciations (kyudan) shaded into simple extortion from thestart. Once Matsumoto took control of the national Suiheisha, members of his
Kyushu branch began shaking down local firms. From 1925 and into 1926, police
counted eight times that the Fukuoka Suiheisha threatened denunciations andsettled for cash (Hasegawa, 1927:56–62). For the Suiheisha more generally,
however, local governments promised the easiest money. Very few denunciations involved actual discrimination. Instead, most just concerned pejorativeepithets, and many were schoolyard taunts among children. But from 69 kyudan
in 1922, the number reached 1,046 in 1924 and 1,025 in 1925 (Hasegawa,
1927:1–2).
In the typical case, one child would call another “eta.” The burakumin childwould complain to his parents. The parents would obtain an apology from theother child’s parents. They and others from the buraku would then demand an
additional apology from the teacher for not teaching the children properly. They
would demand an apology from the school principal for not supervising theteachers properly. They would attack the police for not stopping the taunts.
Finally, they would turn to the local government for not administering the

49 Hasegawa (1927:29, 43–45); Takayama (2005:l82–198, 203); Fukuoka (2003:68).
50 BLL-oriented scholars claim the police planted the dynamite (e. g. Bayliss, 2013:208 n.995).
Hasegawa (1927:30, 38) writes that the Suiheisha coerced a colleague into confessing that thepolice paid him to plant the dynamite. Consistent with this narrative, the government prosecuted the Suiheisha member for coercing that colleague into confessing.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

71

schools appropriately – and settle for subsidies to the local buraku (Aoki,
1998:143).

4 Consequences
The flamboyantly criminal turn in the Suiheisha obviously increased the wariness with which members of the public eyed the buraku. Faced with the group’s
tactics, they responded by doing their best to stay out of the way. With thegrowth of the Suiheisha, reported the Kyoto police (Kyoto, 1924:258), commoners
stopped distinguishing between social and anti-social burakumin. Instead, they
now viewed all burakumin suspiciously. “Never mind that most burakumin
opposed the Suiheisha,” the police reported. “The violent tactics of the
Suiheisha eliminated that sympathy.”
What is more, employers who had earlier hired burakumin began to discharge them. Kyoto police described the development in 1924 (Kyoto, 1924:260):
Large and small factories for fabric weaving, for spinning, for dying, for electrical goods,
for steel, for ceramics; road crews; gardeners; various merchants – all these employers had
been hiring ordinary citizens and burakumin alike. Since the Suiheisha movement began,
however, disputes over claimed discrimination have begun to arise between employees
and employers. Many employers have responded by not hiring any burakumin. In fact, inorder to discharge the burakumin they have, some employers announce that they face abusiness downturn and lay off all of their employees. They then hire back only theordinary citizens.”

And burakumin began to leave the community. Basic logic suggests that those
who left would have been among the more successful burakumin, the men andwomen who contributed to the group’s social and economic infrastructure.
Recall from Figure 1 that from 1870 to 1935, the burakumin population grew intandem with that of the general public. After 1935, the general population
continued to increase while the number of burakumin hovered at 1 million.
Burakumin did not have a lower birth rate; they simply left.
To use Hirschman’s (1970) classic distinction, burakumin faced low costs of“exit.” To leave the group, burakumin did not need to change their names, alter
their appearance, change their speech, switch religions. They simply needed to
move. To fight the leadership of the community (to exercise Hirschman’s“voice”), they would have needed to confront Matsumoto and the criminal
syndicates. Given the low cost of exit, burakumin who chose to invest in mainstream careers did not try to exercise voice. Instead, after the 1930s they
apparently began to exit in massive numbers.

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VIII The shake-down politics of the post-war
burakuA Introduction
The Suiheisha’s ties to the criminal underworld – ties that began with
Matsumoto’s ascendance in the 1920s – turned central after the war. The
group’s post-war successor BLL retained its fringe-left patina, but only as apatina. First and foremost, the BLL was an organization dedicated to using thethreat of violence to shake down governments and extract buraku-specifictransfer payments. By manipulating construction and land-sale contracts, theLeague’s leaders then diverted large fractions of that money to their private
accounts.
In early 1946, several former Suiheisha leaders – most prominently,
Matsumoto and Asada – reconstructed the group. They jettisoned the earlier
name, and called the new organization the Buraku Liberation National
Committee. Matsumoto himself had won election to the Diet in 1936. He now
won election again in 1947, this time under the Japan Socialist Party. In 1955, thegroup renamed itself the Buraku Liberation League.
The BLL was about identity politics. It was not about class politics, and thedistinction matters. The defining characteristic of the BLL was its relentless
focus on subsidies specifically for the buraku. It did not push for subsidies tothe poor. Many people were poor in 1950s Japan, and most were not burakumin.
A substantial minority of burakumin were not poor at all.
In the course of this discussion, bear two points in mind. First, as noted, theburakumin were not descended from any ritually unclean pre-modern guild.
Instead, they were simply descended from one only informally identified group –a group largely limited to the areas adjoining the inland sea – of poor farmers. Ifmany Japanese avoided marrying or hiring them in the early post-war years, thereason for that avoidance was massively over-determined. If ever ethnic discrimination were rational, it was rational here. Given the place that violent crime,
illegitimacy, and the criminal syndicates played in the buraku, one hardly needs
any notion of ritual purity to understand why some Japanese might not havewanted to marry or hire a person from the group.
Second, the construction projects afforded enormous opportunity for corruption. By the 1980s, it was an opportunity that had become flamboyantly
clear. “It wasn’t unusual for BLL members to be current or former members” ofthe mob, wrote burakumin journalist Kadooka (2012:53–54). “Some peopleOn the Invention of Identity Politics

73

marched into battle under the [Suiheisha-BLL’s distinctive emblem of a] crownof thorns out of anger toward discrimination. Others marched with plans tomake a buck through the [government-funded] buraku [construction] projects. In
any case, there was a time when the historic anti-discrimination group had
current or former members of the yakuza holding important positions.”

B All Romance
BLL leader Zennosuke Asada led the first major post-war government shakedown. In 1951, the All Romance pulp magazine published a short story called“Special Buraku.” Written by one pseudonymous Sugiyama (1951), the story toldof the tender (if somewhat maudlin) love between an idealistic young physician
and the daughter of a Korean moonshine brewer in a Kyoto buraku. Sugiyama
described the plight of the burakumin with sympathy and compassion. Despite
its poverty, he found in the buraku a cohesive community tied together by deep,
tender, and compassionate human bonds. And in the love across class lines, helocated the promise of reconciliation among the various communities, and of theredemptive power of love.
For Asada, the story offered the chance to monetize the identity politics that
the Suiheisha had invented. The key lay in the fact that the author worked as aninterim employee in the Kyoto sanitation department. His article was flagrantly“discriminatory,” declared Asada (1979, ch. 7; Morooka 1980, ch. 8). Given that
he worked for the city, Kyoto was responsible for the outrage. Buraku militants
attacked the mayor. They attacked the sanitation department. They attacked one
department after another.
And by all this, Asada and his cohorts were spectacularly successful. In
1951, the Kyoto governments had spent 11.4 million yen on the buraku. In 1952,
they spent 46.5 million (Zenkoku 1998, tab. 12). The buraku budget in adjacent
Osaka went from 2.4 to 4.1 million; Hyogo’s went from 0 to 8 million;
Wakayama’s went from 8.5 to 24.4 million; and Shiga, Okayama, Hiroshima,
Yamaguchi, Ehime, and Fukuoka all began lavishing substantial sums on buraku where before they had spent nothing at all (id.).
The hapless Sugiyama was apparently so much collateral damage. The
mayor quickly promised Asada he would fire him (Asada, 1979:184). The
sanitation department assured buraku leaders that he obviously deserved
criminal punishment (Kyoto 1991:474–75). Sugiyama never published anotherstory. An “outrage” his apparently seldom-read love story has remained eversince.

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C The Sayama murder51
To extort successfully, the criminal wing of the buraku needed to be able visibly
to threaten extreme violence. The role of the “denunciation” sessions lay in theway that they enabled that wing to keep the threat both visible and credible.
Most sessions were relatively small-scale campaigns, but a few took publicstage. Perhaps the most bizarrely violent of the denunciations involved a rapeand murder in suburban Tokyo.
In 1963, a family in the town of Sayama found a ransom note in their front
door. Their high school daughter Yoshie had not returned home, and her
kidnapper (or kidnappers) demanded money. The family tried to contact the
kidnapper, but found their daughter raped, murdered, and buried in a shallow
grave instead. Three weeks later, the police arrested a young unemployedburakumin named Kazuo Ishikawa. He ran with a bad crowd, had a criminal
history, and lied to the police. After long interrogation (but not torture), he
confessed to the kidnapping, rape and murder. The court sentenced him todeath (commuted to life in prison on appeal), he served time, and in 1994 thegovernment released him on parole.
The BLL transformed Ishikawa into a buraku hero, an innocent victim ofpolice bias. In fact, Ishikawa fairly obviously played a key part in the rapemurder. By making him a celebrity, the BLL ensured that a curious scholar could
easily locate the ransom note and Ishikawa’s handwritten confession (e. g.
Kanno, 2009). The bizarrely distinctive handwriting and illiteracy patterns in
the two documents indicate that the police almost certainly found the right man.
Given the higher rate of violent crime among the burakumin, they probably did
focus first on the buraku through a Japanese variant of racial profiling. They
may well have planted other evidence. They interrogated him for an astonishingmonth and a half without an attorney present. They may even have tricked him
into making the confession that he did. But they pretty clearly had the rightman.
Other circumstances do suggest that Ishikawa may not have raped andkilled her alone. Two days after the police located the girl’s body, one of theworkers on her family farm was found dead in an empty well. The police called
it a suicide, and explained that he had drunk pesticide and dived into the well.
Five days later, a farmer who had reported a group of three suspicious men to
the police on the evening of her kidnapping ended up dead too. The police
called this one a suicide as well: he had stabbed himself through the heart witha knife. Four months after the district court sentenced Ishikawa to hang,
51 Much of the material below is from Ramseyer (forthcoming); Kanno (2009).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

75

Yoshie’s older sister was found dead. She had drunk poison (maybe agricultural
pesticide), concluded the police. In 1966, a laborer on the Sayama pig farmwhere Ishikawa had once worked lay dead on the train tracks. In 1977, one of
Yoshie’s brothers was found hanged. And again in 1977, unidentified assailants
beat to death a journalist covering Ishikawa’s case.52 But the handwriting andilliteracy patterns in the ransom demand and Ishikawa’s other writings leave
little doubt that he was at least part of a gang that raped and killed the girl.
Guilty as the evidence seems to indicate he was, the BLL declared Ishikawa
innocent anyway, and turned the rallying cry into a national movement. With
allies among 1960s Trotskyite New Left, buraku leaders made their threats ofviolence as credible as could be.53 In 1969, demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails at the Urawa District Court and occupied the building. In 1974, they
organized a 110,000-strong mob in support of Ishikawa; broke into the Tokyo
High Court; attacked the court staff with steel pipes; and tried to fire bomb thehome of the judge presiding over the high court appeal. In 1976, they attacked
that high-court judge in his car with bats, and in 1977 tried to firebomb the homeof the judge handling the Supreme Court appeal. In 1979 they tried to firebomb a
Ministry of Justice housing complex. In 1990 they did firebomb the home of the
district court judge who initially sentenced Ishikawa to death. And in 1995 thehome of the high-court presiding judge finally burned to the ground.

D The communist purge54
Through the All Romance dispute, BLL leaders decisively raised the level offunds the Kyoto government spent on the buraku. They soon realized, however,that there were limits to how much they could redistribute from non-buraku
Kyoto residents. To raise the transfer payments higher, they needed to tap thenational government (e. g. Amagasaki, 1988:387).
Toward that end, the BLL began a strenuous decade-and-a-half campaign.
The process involved many steps, but the group reached its goal in 1969. That
year, the national government began a program to direct massive funds specifically to the buraku. By the time the government terminated the program in

52 See, e. g. Kanno (2009:301–03; Jiken kankeisha ga 6nin jisatsu, henshi shita Sayama jiken[The Sayama Case in which 6 People Connected with the Case Committed Suicide or Died Under
Mysterious Circumstances], available at: http://ww5.tiki.ne.jp/~qyoshida/jikenbo/057sayama.
htm.
53 See, e. g. Kanno (2009:298–299), and a variety of other sources on the internet.
54 I base this account heavily on Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018).

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J. M. Ramseyer

2002, it had spent 15 trillion yen (about $125 billion, at the 2002 exchange rate)on buraku projects.
Having obtained this national program, BLL leaders now needed to control its
allocation. The largest share of the funds would go toward construction projects. To
divert that money to their private accounts, they needed to control the distributionof the contracts. They needed, as they would put it, to be the “one window” for thefunds. Necessarily, they also needed to exclude all other potential intermediaries.
In particular, they needed to exclude their rivals in the JCP.
To acquire control over the allocation of the construction contracts, BLL
leaders attacked city governments in sequence. They began with the city of Suita
in Osaka prefecture. In June of 1969, they demanded that the city government
give them exclusive control over the money. When the city government balked,
according to BLL critics, they sent 300 BLL members. For three days, report
those critics, they surrounded the mayor’s house. They banged drums throughthe night. They cut his gas, water, and telephone lines. They scaled his wall andclimbed onto his grounds. Eventually, the mayor acquiesced (Nakahara
1988:128–29; Ichinomiya, 2013:270).
The BLL moved from city to city. As necessary – again, according to its
critics – it repeated the tactics. When it faced the Habikino city government (inOsaka prefecture), BLL members occupied city hall for 122 hours, and confined
the mayor for 22.55 They did not obtain control everywhere, and when challenged they could lose in court.56 In time, most (not all) cities dismantled theone-window policies, but the BLL continued to push for the control.
Simultaneously, the BLL needed to exclude the JCP from the money. The
most decisive break came immediately in 1969, when the BLL broke with JCPallied teachers in the city of Yata. There, they harangued the JCP teachers infront of 200 burakumin for 12 hours. But if these Yata “denunciations” were thebest known, the 1974 “denunciations” against JCP teachers in Yoka were perhaps the most cruel. The JCP has never been the most reliable of sources, butwhen burakumin writer Uehara (2014, ch. 3) travelled to Yoka decades later tointerview those involved in the event, he found reports of extensive violence.
Anthropologist Rohlen (1976:685–86) was in the area doing field work at thetime. According to his account, by the time the denunciations were over, twelveof the JCP teachers had broken bones, including broken vertebrae. Thirteen of

55 Nakahara (1988:128–29); Ichinomiya and Group K21 (2013:96–97, 270).
56 E. g. Maeda v. Nishiwaki shi, 887 Hanrei jiho 66 (Kobe D. Ct. December 19, 1977); Fukuoka
shi v. Matsuoka, 870 Hanrei jiho 61 (Fukuoka High Ct. September 13, 1977); see generally
Upham (1980:54–62).

On the Invention of Identity Politics

77

them needed at least six weeks of hospitalization. Five more were hospitalized
for a month, 15 for from two to three weeks, and 15 more for over a week.

IX Out-migration and subsidies
A Introduction
By dramatically raising the level of income a young burakumin male could earnby joining the mob, the national subsidies lowered his incentive to stay inschool, leave for university, and merge into the Japanese mainstream. In
Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018), we explored this phenomenon through the2002 termination of the 1969 national subsidies. More specifically, we used the1935 census (the only one with local data) to construct a municipality-level panel
data set and examine the effect of the 2002 subsidy termination on out-migrationlevels. Because we did not have data on the level of migration specifically out of
the buraku at the municipality level, we looked at the relation between the total
migration from each municipality and the concentrations (based on 1935 data) of
burakumin. We found that post-2002 emigration increased most dramatically inthose cities with the highest concentration of burakumin.
In this Section IX, I exploit the 14 buraku censuses to study changes in the
population specifically of the buraku themselves. I begin by using the last four
censuses to explore the general determinants of buraku out-migration over the
final three decades of the twentieth century (Subsec. B.). I then examine the
distribution of subsidies among the buraku during the 1947–1969 period(Subsec. C.). Finally, I combine the data on out-migration with the data on the
1947–1969 subsidies to explore the effect of the subsidies on exit specificallyfrom the buraku (Subsec. D.). I find that large subsidies substantially slowed thepace at which burakumin migrated into the general public.
At root, the government subsidies constituted the pay-off funds to the local
criminal syndicates. Consider Gary Becker’s general models of human capitaland crime. Where subsidies were small, young men earned low returns tocriminal careers. Necessarily, they were more likely to stay in school, perhaps
leave for university, locate a job in the mainstream sector, and exit the buraku.
By contrast, where subsidies were large, young men earned higher returns tocriminal careers. By increasing those illegal returns, the high subsidy levels
apparently encouraged young burakumin men to drop out of school, stay inthe buraku, and join the criminal syndicates. In the process, they generated anunholy spiral: the government responded to the higher numbers of nominally78

J. M. Ramseyer“unemployed” young men with more generous subsidies; those subsidies in turncaused more young men to drop out of school, stay in the buraku, and enlist in
the mob; with still more “unemployed” men now in the buraku, the government
raised the level of subsidies even higher; and so forth.

B Out-migration
Before turning to the effect of the subsidies themselves (Tables 11 and 12), I use
the last four censuses to explore more general patterns of burakumin outmigration (Table 10): in which buraku did population fall, and in which did it
increase? I take as the dependent variable the buraku population at the time ofthe various censuses, indexed by the burakumin population in 1921. The variablethus captures the extent to which burakumin left the communities in the years
after 1921 and merged into the general public. As independent variables, I use
variables already defined (see Table 4). They capture the extent of burakumin
Table 10: Determinants of outmigration, 1971–1993 censuses.
Dependent variable: Buraku population indexed at , for –Burakumin PC 
Buraku size 
Density 
Exogamy 
B pref voters 
Buraku agri ratio
Suiheisha BO 
Murder, PC nAdj. R


.
(.)
.***(.).e-(.e-)−.
(.).
(.).
(.).**(.)−,.
(,)

.


.
(.)
.***(.).e-(.e-)−.**(.).
(.).***(.).**(.)
,
(,)

.


−.
(.)
.***(.)−.e-(.e-)−.
(.).
()
.***(.).
(.)
***(,)

.


.
(.)
.***(.)−.e-(.e-)−.
(.).
(.).***(.).
(.)
**(,)
.

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. Regression
coefficients followed by standard errors. All regressions include a constant term. Regressions
are OLS.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

79

concentration (Burakumin PC), the average size of buraku communities(Buraku size), the degree of urbanization (Density), the extent to which burakumin interacted with the outside community (Exogamy), buraku economic
welfare (Burakumin prefectural voters, PBC), the reliance on agriculture(Buraku agricultural ratio), the extent to which the local buraku endorsed
the BLL’s violent predecessor (Suiheisha branch offices), and the presence ofa criminal subculture (Murders PC). I take values as near as possible to thebeginning of buraku militancy in the 1920s.
Preliminarily, note that out-migration rates were lower from farming communities: the coefficient on the fraction of burakumin in agriculture in 1935
(Buraku agricultural ratio) is positive and significant. This phenomenon is an
artifact of the definition of burakumin by location. Human capital is mobile;
land is not. Necessarily, those who invest in agricultural real estate will be lesslikely to move than those who invest in their human capital.
The regressions suggest (obviously do not prove) that burakumin were most
likely to move out of the community and join the Japanese mainstream where they
faced the lowest costs of investing in a legal relative to an illegal career. On the one
hand, burakumin were less likely to leave the buraku where they were at farthersocial distances from the general public or (what is analytically the same thing)where the buraku provided a relatively all-encompassing social world. Thus, thecoefficient on the number of Burakumin per capita in 1921 is positive albeit notstatistically significant: burakumin were less likely to leave communities with thehighest density of burakumin. Similarly, the coefficient on Buraku size in 1921 ispositive: burakumin were less likely to leave large buraku than small.
On the other hand, burakumin were less likely to leave buraku where they
faced greater suspicion from the general public. For example, the coefficient on
the 1921 Exogamy rate is negative: the burakumin were more likely to leave
communities where they intermarried with the general public – where they had
relatively close and harmonious contact with the outside world. Note that the
pairwise correlation between the 1993 indexed buraku population and the 1921
exogamy rate is −0.52, significant at more than the 1 % level. Conversely, thecoefficient on the 1920 Murder rate is positive: burakumin were less likely toleave those buraku with relatively high criminal opportunities. Similarly, thecoefficient on the number of Suiheisha branch offices in 1933 is positive:
burakumin were less likely to leave communities where their predecessors hadorganized branches of the violent group.
Where the buraku were small and members maintained amicable relations
with their neighbors, young burakumin had relatively cheap access to theinformation, training, and education necessary to build profitable careers in
the mainstream sector. Where they lived in large buraku with little contact

80

J. M. Ramseyer

with the outside world, they had less access to that information. With high rates
of violent crime, they had access instead to information about illegal careers.

C Subsidies
In Table 11, I explore which communities received the targeted prefectural
burakumin subsidies. As Eric Rasmusen and I investigate the 1969–2002
Table 11: Buraku-specific prefectural subsidies (1947–1968).
A. Basic regressions
Dependent variable: Subsidies per burakumin capita, for years
Burakumin PC 
Exogamy 
Density 
B pref voters 
Buraku size 
Buraku agri ratio
Suiheisha BO nAdj. R

–
.*(.)−.e-(.)
.e-(.e-).
(.)
.e-(.e-).
(.)−.e-(.)
.

–
.*(.)−.
(.)
.e-***(.e-)
.
(.)−.e-(.e-)−.
(.)−.*(.)
.

–
.**(.)−.
(.).e-***(.e-).
(.)−.e-(.)−.
(.)−.**(.)
.

–.
.
(.)−.
(.)
.e-**(.e-)−.
(.).
(.).
(.)−.
(.)
.

B. Additional Independent variables
To the regressions on Subsidies, PC, –, I add each of the following additional
independent variables. The Table gives the resulting coefficient on that additional variable,
followed by the standard error and the resulting Adjusted R.
B Illegit
B public
Anti lib
Hinin
Kyudanrate 
ass rt 
riotsfrac 
rate 
.
(.)
.

−.
(.).

.*(.).

−.
(.)
.

.***(.).

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. Regressions are
OLS. Regression coefficients followed by standard errors. All regressions include a constant term.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

81

national subsidies in Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018), I do not repeat theexercise here. Instead, I examine the prefectural subsidies that preceded thenational program. Note that the censuses of 1946, 1958, 1963, 1967, and 1971
divide the period prior to the national subsidies into four segments. I use thefollowing dependent variable:
Subsidies PBC: The amount of the pre-1969 prefectural subsidies targetingburakumin (in 10,000 yen) over a given period, divided by the number ofburakumin, as provided in Zenkoku Buraku (1998). The source does notdetail the content of the subsidies further.
As independent variables, I take several values for each prefecture at the time of
the formation of the Suiheisha (or shortly thereafter). Among the variables
already defined, I use burakumin concentration (Burakumin PC), Exogamy,
population Density, the fraction of wealthy burakumin (Buraku prefectural
voters, PBC), the average size of buraku districts (Buraku size), the Buraku
agricultural fraction, and the number of Suiheisha branch offices. I also
construct the following new variables:
Buraku illegitimacy rate, 1921: Non-marital burakumin births in 1921,
divided by total burakumin births.
Kyudan rate, 1923–24: The number of denunciation sessions in 1923–
24, divided by the number of burakumin, as provided in Hasegawa(1927).
Urban prefectures distributed the highest subsidies per burakumin capita (Panel A):
the coefficient on prefectural Density is positive for all periods, and significantly soin three of the four. Prefectures with higher concentrations of burakumin paid
higher subsidy levels: the coefficient on Burakumin PC is similarly positive forall periods, and significantly so for three. Curiously, all else held equal, theprefectures with more Suiheisha branch offices in 1933 paid the least subsidies:
the coefficient on the number of branch offices is negative in all periods, and andsignificantly so in two of the four periods.
In Panel B, I add several other measures that might explain the subsidy
patterns. One might, for example, expect that the subsidies would go to the mostimpoverished buraku. Yet the fraction of buraku on public assistance, theburakumin illegitimacy rates, and the fraction of burakumin with the income
entitling them to vote are all insignificantly different from zero.
Note two further observations. First, the governments may have paid thelargest subsidies in areas where tensions between the burakumin and the other82

J. M. Ramseyer

residents were highest. The factors used in the Panel A regressions held equal,
the governments paid higher subsidies where local residents had rioted againstburaku liberation in the 1870s (Anti liberation riots), and where early
Suiheisha members had held the most denunciation sessions (Kyudan rate).
Second, some writers (e. g. Honda, 1991, 30) suggest that the subsidies went tothose descended from the kawata rather than the hinin. The Hinin ratio in 1868
is not significantly correlated with subsidy levels during any of the four periods
in pair-wise correlation, and the coefficient on the hinin ratio in the Panel B
regressions is similarly insignificant.

D Subsidies and out-migration
In Table 12, I again exploit the fact that the government conducted five burakumin censuses from 1946 to 1971. I couple those multiple prefecture-level censuses with annual data on the amount of prefectural subsidies, and examine theeffect that subsidy levels had on the pace at which burakumin chose to leaveburaku and merge into the general public.
The Table 12 regressions suggest that the prefectural subsidies slowed thepace at which burakumin joined the general public. In the first four regressions
in Table 12, I regress the burakumin population indexed by 1921 values on thelevel of subsidies per burakumin (Subsidies PBC), burakumin concentration (inpercentages; Burakumin PC), Buraku size, and population Density. The resulting coefficients on the subsidy levels are positive for three of the periods, andsignificantly so in two. The significance levels are sensitive to the independent
variables used, but the underlying correlation is extremely strong. The pairwise
correlation between the indexed 1958 population and the 1947–57 subsidies is0.28, significant at the 7 % level; between 1963 population and 1947–62 subsidies 0.33, significant at the 3 % level; between 1967 population and 1947–66
subsidies 0.52, significant at the 0.1 % level, and between 1971 population and
1947–68 subsidies 0.55, significant at the 0.01 % level. The magnitude of theeffect is not trivial. Suppose we increase the level of subsidies from those paid in
Saitama (0.669) to those paid in Osaka (16.785). The size of the 1971 burakumin
population, indexed at 1921 = 100, increases by 15.8 (on a prefecture-level
median of 94.77).
Subsidy levels are, however, plausibly endogenous to the strength withwhich burakumin are rooted to their community. Accordingly, I instrument thelevel of subsidies with Burakumin PC, Buraku size, Density, Suiheisha
branch offices 1933, Kyudan rate 1923, Buraku public assistance PBC 1921,
Buraku illegitimacy rate 1921, Buraku divorce rate 1921, Buraku prefectural(.)(.e-)(.e-)
.

−.e-−.e-.
(.)(.)

.

(.).

(.e-).e-.
(.)(.)

.***

.



(.e-)−.e-

.
(.)(.)


.
.

.
.


.

.

.

.



(.)

.***.***(.)(.)

SLS

.**

.**(.)

SLS

.**(.).**.*(.)SLS

SLS
.***





.**

OLS



.

OLS



(.).**(.)−.OLS

OLS

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 % levels, respectively. Regression coefficients followed by standard errors. All regressions
include a constant term.
In Panel A, Subsidies, per burakumin capita are instrumented with Total burakumin 35/46/58/63, Suiheisha branch offices 33, Kyudan rate 23,
Buraku public assistance PBC 21, Buraku illegitimacy rate 21, Buraku prefectural voters 21, Anti-liberation riots, Suiheisha branch offices 33,
Buraku size 35/58/63, Density 35/46/58/63, Buraku Divorce rate 21 and Shirayama shrines.
Sources: See text and Table 1.

CDW F Statistic

Adj R

n

Density 

Buraku size 

Burakumin PC –

–

–

–

Subsidies, PBC





Dependent variable: Buraku population indexed at , for –Table 12: Prefectural subsidy (1947–1968) levels and out-migration.

On the Invention of Identity Politics

83

84

J. M. Ramseyer

voters 1921, Anti-liberation riots, and Shirayama shrines. In the last four
regressions of Table 12, I report the two-stage least squares results. Here too
significance levels and the Cragg-Donald Wald F statistics are sensitive to thevariables used. Nonetheless, the coefficients on the subsidy levels are positiveand significant in all four regressions: the higher the rate of subsidies, the lower
the level at which burakumin leave to join the mainstream Japanese society.
One can interpret the results in two very different ways. On the one hand, thisphenomenon is consistent with a ruthlessly straightforward explanation: if thegovernment subsidizes burakumin who choose to stay in a community but not
those who leave, more burakumin will choose to stay. On the other hand, as Table 5shows, more burakumin staying is associated with higher crime rates. And asdetailed elsewhere (Ramseyer and Rasmusen, 2018), for much of the post-war
period the mob dominated the BLL, and used its control over construction contracts
to divert large portions of the funds to their private accounts. During the peak of themob in the 1980s, 20–25 % of young burakumin men were members of the organized crime syndicates. As a result, the phenomenon fits a far less benign explanation: by raising the relative returns to criminal careers, the subsidies caused young
burakumin to drop out of school, join the mob, and pursue buraku-specific criminal
careers. Where subsidy levels were lower, young men stayed in school, left theburaku for university, and pursued mainstream careers instead.

X Epilogue
Fundamentally, Western scholars and intellectuals miss the logic to the buraku’s
transformation because they miss the basic economics of social and politicalbehavior. It is the economics of behavior outside of the realm of classic markets,
but behavior that is rational and strategic all the same. In this article, it is the
economics behind the invention and collapse of identity politics in a specificcountry – Japan. But its theoretical generality would suggest that it should
explain similar phenomena at other times, in other societies.
Contrary to the accounts in the West, the burakumin are not outcastes, andprobably never were. With few exceptions, they are not descended from tanners
or leather-workers. They are descended from dysfunctional communities of poor
farmers in the nineteenth century, and of the urban poor in the 20th.
During the 1920s, young intellectuals from the burakumin upper classinvented for the group a largely fictive identity. To fit within the dictates ofMarx’s German Ideology, they declared the buraku the descendants of a leather
worker’s guild. Their ancestors had suffered unrelenting discrimination, theOn the Invention of Identity Politics

85

leaders declared, out of a religiously inspired aversion to members of a ritually
unclean guild.
What the intellectual leaders invented, the criminal leaders exploited. With
this newly fashioned identity, they embarked on full-scale shake-down identity
politics. They coupled their claims of pervasive discrimination with violent
extortionate tactics and successfully extracted ever-increasing amounts of government subsidies. Predictably, they also triggered ever-increasing public hostility. Members of the public now did all they could to keep the group at bay.
Prior to the 1920s, burakumin who chose to live by traditional Japanesebehavioral norms had often done well, and had stayed within the communityand helped to build its social and economic infrastructure. After the 1920s, theyleft. Under Hirschman’s classic typology, they faced trivial costs of “exit.” As thecriminal entrepreneurs increased the general levels of hostility toward thegroup, burakumin pursuing legitimate careers simply moved out of the buraku
and migrated into the general public.
In turn, the young burakumin who invested in criminal careers caused thesubsidies to spiral. The higher the subsidies, the higher the returns young
burakumin earned from those criminal careers that exploited the identify politics. The higher relative returns caused increasing numbers of young burakumin
men to drop out of school, stay in the buraku, and join the criminal syndicates;
the higher number of nominally unemployed men caused the government toraise the level of transfer payments; and so it went. Burakumin who chose to liveby the general behavioral norms of Japanese society left the buraku andmigrated into the general public. Disproportionately, those who chose to invest
in criminal careers chose to stay.
And then suddenly it was all over. The identity politics that had created theburaku as a sharply defined phenomenon ended as abruptly as it had begun.
Ramseyer and Rasmusen (2018) details that collapse. Just as the identity politics
began with the invention of a history about a leather-workers guild, so it ended
in 2002. That year, the national government halted its buraku-specific subsidies.
As the absolute returns to criminal careers plummeted, the relative returns to
education rose. Rather than drop out of school and join the mob, young buraku
teenagers increasingly stayed in school. They finished high school, left theburaku for university, and never returned.
The BLL withered. With no money to distribute, membership fell from
200,000 during the subsidy years to 50,000. Today, more than half of themembers are over 60. And with the BLL, the organized crime syndicates withered as well. With no subsidies to divert, members no longered earned themassive rake-offs from the buraku construction projects. From 91,000 in 1991,

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the number of members and affiliates plummeted to 47,000 in 2015. By 2014,
three-quarters of the mob were over 40; 40 % were over 50.
Acknowledgements: I gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of Fabian Drixler, Maren Ehlers, Yoshitaka Fukui, Colin Jones, Louis
Kaplow, Curtis Milhaupt, Yoshiro Miwa, Gregory Noble, Richard Samuels,
Richard Sander, Steven Shavell, Henry Smith, Masanori Takashima, Frank
Upham, and David Weinstein, and participants in workshops at Harvard Law
School and Yale Law School.

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