Keywords: Ethnicity, Extortion, Organized Crime, Discrimination
JEL Numbers: H30, I26, I38, J49, K14, K38, K42
Draft of April 15, 2019
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard Law Schoolramseyer@law.harvard.edu

On the Invention of Identity Politics:
The Buraku Outcastes in JapanBy J. Mark Ramseyer*

Abstract: Using 14 national censuses and a wide variety of first-hand accounts, I trace thetransformation of Japan's putative outcastes and their nominal human rights organization into aheavily criminal extortion machine. Scholars have long described 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 from poor farmers
with distinctively dysfunctional norms. Others may or may not have shunned them out of concern
for purity, but they certainly would have shunned many of them for their involvement in crime andtheir disintegrating family structures.
The modern transformation of the buraku began in 1922, when self-described Bolsheviks
lauched a buraku "liberation" organization. To fit the group 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, andpioneered a shakedown strategy that coupled violent accusations of bias with demands for massive
amounts of money. Selective out-migration and spiraling 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, those burakumin with the highest legitimate career options
abandoned the community and merged into the general public instead.

* Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard Law School. I gratefully acknowledge the helpfulcomments and suggestions of Christina Davis, Fabian Drixler, Maren Ehlers, Yoshitaka Fukui, Andrew Gordon, Colin
Jones, Louis Kaplow, Curtis Milhaupt, Yoshiro Miwa, 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.

Ramseyer: Page

2

I. Introduction
According to most accounts, the Japanese "burakumin" trace their ancestry to a guild of
17th century tanners and leather-workers.1 By Japanese religious strictures, these ancestors had
worked within a ritually unclean world. Given the pervasive but rarely articulated Japaneseobsession with ritual purity (these conventional accounts explain), modern Japanese continue todiscriminate against their present-day descendants. Centuries later, they still shun marriages withthe burakumin and avoid hiring them when they can.
The "burakumin" (i.e., people of the "buraku") do not differ visually from other Japanese.
They do not speak a separate language. They do not worship a private deity. Solely out of thiscenturies-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 toconfirm the eternal plasticity of social norms and the boundless human capacity for bias, exclusion,and ethnic cruelty.
In fact, the ancestors to most burakumin probably did not tan animal skins or work in theleather trade. They did not work in a guild. Instead, most burakumin trace their ancestry a loose
collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers. The 19th and 20th 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 thepoorer burakumin were quick to take offense, quick to escalate any quarrel to dangerous levels,and quick to avoid costly investments in work or eucation. They formed communities withastonishingly 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 the last decades of the 19th 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 AnarchoSyndicalist cells. They created one for their own still largely inchoate communities. Marxist
historians were characterizing the earlier Tokugawa period as feudal, and in German Ideology
Marx had placed feudal workers in guilds. For their own group, the young burakumin intellectuals
dutifully invented a fictive ethnic identity as a leather workers' guild.
Over the course of the ensuing decade, these young intellectuals and the criminal
entrepreneurs who followed them began to couple accusations of bias and discrimination withcredible threats of serious violence. In the process, they began to extort ever-increasing amountsof 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 the guise of their human rights group) found easy to divert.
1

The politically correct term in Japanese is "dowa"; the standard English language term seems to remain"burakumin."Ramseyer: Page

3

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 tolegal and illegal careers. In the process, they increased the incentives for buraku men with thelowest opportunity costs to crime to drop out of school and invest in criminal skills. Many of them
then stayed within the community, joined the organized crime syndicates, and leveraged theircollective pressure to induce the government to increase transfer payments still further. Still moreyoung burakumin left school to join the syndicates; the now higher criminal pressure (and lower
buraku educational achievements) induced the government to raise transfer levels higher still; andso it went. An unholy spiral ensued.
Through this identity politics, the buraku leaders (acting still through their nominal humanrights group) thrust their community violently into the public eye. Massive public hostility ensued,of course. Before the 1920s, the buraku had constituted nothing more than a set of loosely
identified, indigent communities whose poorer residents followed often dysfunctional norms of
behavior. Those burakumin who chose instead to behave by broader Japanese social norms often
did well, but chose not to leave. Instead, many opted to stay within the community 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 to Albert Hirschman's [1970] term) a low-cost "exit"
option. Those burakumin who perceived a comparative advantage in criminal careers stayed todivert the government subsidies to their private accounts. Increasingly, those with the best options
for careers in the Japanese mainstream abandoned the community instead.
As a group, the burakumin have received substantial attention in the West -- whether fromscholars broadly concerned with questions of inclusion and bias, or from public intellectuals like
Nicholas Kristof (1995). The burakumin are also, howevever, a group that these scholars andintellectuals profoundly misunderstand. Fundamentally, they misunderstand it for reasons that
trace themselves to a basic unfamiliarity with the economics of social behavior pioneered byscholars like Hirschman and Becker, and expanded by the hundreds who followed.
In the article that follows, I explore the dynamic logic to the social transformation of thisgroup: (i) to the spiralling descent of the burakumin with the lowest paying legitimate options into
organized crime and ever-higher levels of government extortion; and (ii) to the selective migrationof those burakumin with the highest paying legitimate job options out of the buraku and into
mainstream society. In Ramseyer & Rasmusen (2018), Eric Rasmusen and I describe the modern
phenomenon in detail; in the article that follows, I explain how this phenomenon came to be.
After surveying the English-language literature on the buraku (Section II), I summarize its
modern connection to organized crime and shake-down politics (Section III). I then describe to
its roots in the 17th-19th centuries, and note its tenuous connection to the leather industry (Section
IV). I discuss the increasing contact between the buraku and other Japanese communities in thelate 19th 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 the buraku asa sharply defined ethnic group, and to the inauguration of violent identity politics. In 1922, fringeleft burakumin redefined the buraku as a leather workers' guild. The history they created waslargely fictitious -- they had invented it to fit the demands of Marx's German Ideology. But
criminal entrepreneurs quickly commandeered the group and used this new ethnic identity for fullscale shake downs (Section VII). Public hostility followed, and with it a selective out-migration
as burakumin hoping for mainstream careers left the group en masse (Sections VIII, IX).

Ramseyer: Page

4

II. Buraku Scholarship
A. Premodern:
Japanese scholars tell accounts of the pre-modern buraku that differ fundamentally fromthose they tell of the modern buraku. On the buraku's pre-modern history, scholars have compiled
an increasingly sophisticated and intellectually independent 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 20th century, buraku historians began to exhibit a refreshingintellectual independence. Apparently, mob-affiliated leaders in the buraku left historians largely
alone. Perhaps they thought heterodoxy in 17th and 18th century history posed less of a threat
than in scholarship about the 20th. Whatever the case, over the past half century historian havecompiled a thoughtful and sophisticated body of work. Economic historians like Akira Hayami,
Osamu Saito, and Masanori Takashima brought modern social science to a field once locked in19th century ideology. To the history of the buraku itself, scholars like Toshiyuki Hatanaka,
Midori Kurokawa, and Takashi Tsukada brought a 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. Maren Ehlers (2018, forthcoming) examines the "hinin"
communities in Fukui prefecture along the Japan Sea. Michael Abele (2018) studies the 19th
century transformation of a suburban Osaka buraku that would become the center of theslaughterhouse industry. Noah McCormack (2013) draws particularly on work by Hatanaka tocraft his own thoughtful account of the buraku transition from late Tokugawa to early Meiji.
B. Modern:This is not the way buraku history once was, and it is not the way modern-buraku studies
are today. Work on the modern buraku by serious Japanese scholars barely exists. The reason is
simple, and lies in the leadership of the self-described Burakumin Liberation League (BLL). The
BLL styles itself the human rights champion for the buraku, but from time to time has also
maintained deep ties to the organized crime syndicates. Against scholars who would deviate fromits own declared orthodoxy, it takes a ruthless approach.
Serious scholars have better things to do than to quarrel with the BLL and the criminal
syndicates. Writers tied to the Japan Commuist Party (JCP) can and do 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
from both the JCP and the BLL typically find other things to study instead. Put most crassly, most
non-JCP scholars who do write about the modern buraku produce entirely predictable work of atbest dubious veracity. Japanese routinely dismiss them 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 researchgroups. UC San Diego anthropologist Joseph Hankins (2014) recently published a book based on
his University of Chicago dissertation. In the course of researching the study, he interned for ayear and a half with a BLL-affiliated organization. The BLL, he enthusiastically tells his readers,seeks tirelessly to integrate the burakumin cause into the international human rights movement andto shift Japan to a more “multicultural” vision.
Alastair McLauchlan (2003, p. 113) wrote his book after interviewing 21 burakumin
selected for him by the BLL. The 21 seem to have convinced him that the "BLL is clearly theRamseyer: Page

5

champion of the Buraku [X]." It has, he declares, "unquestionably worked tirelessly to improvethe circumstances of the buraku residents ..."
Sociologist Christopher Bondy (2015, p. 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, p. 156.). And about that "silence" on the partof mainstream scholars and journalists, he concludes that the "media are agents that silence public
exposure to buraku issues" and cause "both symbolic and literal marginalization" (20s15, p. 4).
Of the Western scholars of the buraku, senior Oxford historian Ian Neary (2010, p. 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, p. xx). He continues toparticipate in BLL-affiliated study groups to this day (Teraki & Kurokawa 2016, pp. 1-2). In his
biography of BLL godfather Jiichiro Matsumoto, he effuses that Matsumoto "campaigned against
the prejudice and discrimination 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 for anyone
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 oflibraries. The first-hand accounts of the buraku that I quote have similarly been accessible toanyone 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 20th century. 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 their own experiences within themob-dominated buraku. Mainstream journalists began describing the way mob-connected BLL
leaders massively diverted government subsidies to their private accounts -- though (reflecting theviolence the BLL could wreak) several of them did choose to publish pseudonymously: e.g., Asahi
shimbun press (1982); Ichinomiya & Group K21 (2007, 2012, 2013); Terazono, Ichinomiya &Group K21 (2004).
Western scholars almost entirely missed (or chose to ignore) these accounts of BLL
corruption. . Few mention the crisis at all. Neary (2010, p. 298 & n.5) cites several books in aclosing footnote to his biography but insists that the BLL manipulated the allocation of thegovernment subsidies in order "to ensure that the funds were used to the maximum benefit of
Buraku communities... . It would," he continues (2010, p. 239) "be a research project in itself toreview and assess these allegations" of corruption. Absent "any independent analysis it is difficult
to tell whether the amount of corruption has been greater (or less) than that which is normal in
Japan ...." Others (e.g., Rankin 2012) simply dismiss the accounts of the mob-BLL ties as"distasteful insinuation."
2

Discussed in Section VI.B., below. Similarly, the Suiheisha violently attacked the police for allowing 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 (Sansai 1966a, p. 3).

Ramseyer: Page

6

D. The Conventional Account:Reflecting the strong ties that the BLL maintains with Western scholars, most of thesescholars 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 otherssometimes called them by the pejorative "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 like other peasants.
Writes legal scholar Frank Upham (1988, p. 79), the kawata "were forbidden to marry commoners,
to live outside their designated ghettos, or even to serve as commoner's servants. They could noteat, 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 fromconcepts found in the Shinto or Buddhist religions," biographer Ian Neary (1989, p. 2) writes.
Granted, explains historian David Howell (1996, p. 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 ofdeath."3 After all, observes historian Herman Ooms (1996, p. 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
Timothy Amos (2011, p. 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 as a groupnot even quite human. "The more than 250 years of internal stability during this [Tokugawa]
period," explains Upham, "rigidified a formerly 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 theiroccupational monopoly in the leather trade. Legally emancipated, they would now facecompetition in work they had earlier controlled as a monopoly (e.g., Upham 1988, pp. 79-80). For
another, they would pay taxes. As outcastes, they had avoided any tax liability. Now they would
owe taxes like everyone else (e.g., Hankins 2014, p. 21).
At the close of the 19th century, some burakumin worked in the tanning sector or the newly
created butchering industry, but even those working elsewhere faced discrimination all the same.
Mainstream Japanese forced them into crowded and unsanitary urban ghettos. They barred themfrom their firms. They refused to let their children marry them. Isolated by this pervasive bias,
the burakumin 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
3

Note that Hatanaka (1990), McCormack (2013), and Ehlers (2018) all carefully describe the way that thenotion 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.
4
Upham(1988, p. 79); see Howell (2005, p. 34); Ooms (1996, p. 244).

Ramseyer: Page7

adopted a policy of collective denunciation (kyudan). Faced with an expression of prejudice, theywould together "denounce" the perpetrators. Through their united pressure, they would force thespeakers to come to terms with their own privilege. They would insist that the local governments
recognize the systemic and institutional bias, and their moral responsibility to rectify the structuralinequities that they had created. They would demand the water supplies, sewage, fire truck access,and schools that the brutally discriminatory state had denied 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 by relentlessly attacking expressions of bias throughgroup denunciation, the BLL largely eliminated open prejudice from polite discourse. From thelocal and eventually national governments, it extracted the infrastructural investments enjoyed byother Japanese. It recovered the collective identity of the buraku community, and fostered its pride.
In time it would come to work with its international counterparts in the United Nations andelsewhere to promote a more broadly inclusive and "multicultural Japan" (Hankins, 2014).
Still, insist Western writers, systemic and institutional bias persists. As New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof (1995) put it, the burakumin are "discriminated against simply because
they were the descendants of people whose jobs were considered ritually unclean, like butchering
animals, tanning skins, making leather goods, digging graves and handling corpses." And to carryout this discrimination, modern Japanese identify the burakumin by residence. A burakumin is aperson who lives (or whose family once lived) in an identifiable buraku ghetto.
Given that Japanese discriminate by residence, a burakumin ought logically to be able toescape the bias by moving. Yet that simply "has not been the case," insists Howell (1989, p. 179).
As anthropologists George de Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma (1967, p. 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
to forge for himself an entirely new identity and in some cases fabricate a past so that hewill not be disadvantaged by his lack of ancestry.
Burakumin who attempt this feat, continue de Vos and Wagatsuma (1967, p. 242) live in"constant fear of exposure." They (1967, p. 252) recount one informant who had "a friend who
had tried to pass as a government officer but had somehow failed, left his job, and though auniversity graduate, is now running a store in a Buraku." He had tried several times to pass, buteach time he had returned. Each time, "[t]he friend 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 westernJapan. 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 poorest residents of those
prefectures in which they do reside.
Yet many burakumin do live profoundly fractured lives. Non-marital childbirth is far morecommon than among other Japanese. Drug use is more widespread. Crime is more virulent,Ramseyer: Page

8organized 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 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. Except for the 193536 census, the government has kept all data below the prefectural level rigidly confidential. The
neighborhood-level data from that 1935-36 census has apparently been available for some time toresearchers affiliated with either the BLL or the Japan Communist Party. The data briefly surfaced
in late 2015 (and were used in Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018), but only because a buraku activist
fighting the League posted the census on the internet (see Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018, pp. 22122).
[Insert Table 1 about here.]
Readers should take the numbers with caution. No one offers a precise definition of the"burakumin" -- or anything close. Nor could they. As the discussion below elaborates, the term
has always been a loose identifier for what simply amounts to a dysfunctional under-class. A
Japanese on the down-and-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 of the neighborhood could always slide out. Given this context,
definitional disputes are inherently pointless.
Although some detectives may try to trace a person's ancestry back to the late 19th century(Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018), most people just ask whether someone comes from a family withlong ties to an identifiable buraku district. One journalist asked a detective how he decided
whether someone was a burakumin. They are burakumin "if their parents were burakumin," hereplied, "or if they came from a buraku." After all, he explained, "if they're currently living in aburaku, then they're burakumin" (Kadooka 2005, p. 50;). A 2005 Osaka survey asked the samequestion. Of the respondents, 50.3 percent replied that they looked at a person's address, 38.3
percent 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, p. 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 backbelow 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 to time, scholars
have given credence to the number. Yet the number is not a modern calculation. In fact, it is nota calculation at all. It dates instead from the founding of the BLL's predecessor in 1922. The
organizers had begun the group -- called the Suiheisha -- in March. Already by that April, theyRamseyer: Page9

had included the number in a manifesto, and soon were adding it to their anthems besides (Keiho
kyoku 1922, pp. 54, 68-69). The best-known of their hymns to liberty proclaims:5
Shouldering the burdens of mission and light,
Three million brothers break the shackles of slavery ...
Ethnographer Yutaka Honda (1991, p. 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 some burakumin, Shoken Hirano -- at the time a selfdeclared anarchist, but one whom the organization would soon expel (nominally for spying for thepolice 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, inTable 2 I report the prefecture-level totals for each of the 14 censuses.
[Insert Table 2 about here.]
Note parenthetically that Tokyo has several buraku. It never had many, but has claimed since the1950s 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, and1993 censuses. Obviously, the indexed numbers are most reliable for those prefectures with large
numbers of burakumin. Where a prefecture 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.
The buraku have long been a regional rather than national phenomenon, but the shifts since1868 have concentrated the burakumin population still further. When the Meiji government took
power in 1868, burakumin tended to live in the west. From 1868 to the founding of the Suiheisha
in 1922, the number of burakumin grew massively in Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Hyogo (site ofKobe), in the inland-sea-adjacent prefectures of Okayama, Hiroshima, Ehime, and Kochi, and in
the northern Kyushu prefecture of Fukuoka. Since 1922, the buraku have grown more
spectacularly still in Osaka and Fukuoka. In 1868, 29 percent of the burakumin lived in the fiveprefectures of Osaka, Nara, Hyogo, Okayama, and Fukuoka. By 1993, 46 percent of theburakumin 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 canand do exit the group. There's is the classic case of Hirschman's (1970) easy exit. When scholars
5

Kaihoka [Song of Liberation], https://ehime-c.esnet.ed.jp/jinken/09kaihouka.pdf.
Western scholars give the number much more credence than it deserves. For example, Hankins (2014, p.
3) writes that "the BLL extrapolates a number from historical records, tracing lineages of "outcastes" from theTokugawa period ... The BLL's standard is one of lineage and residence 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 thegovernment planned to distribute its subsidies. Because the Tokyo government decided to allocate the money byindustry (e.g., tanning) rather than location (see Hankins, 2012), it did not report the number of burakumin in theprefecture.
6

Ramseyer: Page 10
insist that burakumin 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 neverreturned.
For in massive numbers, Burakumin leave. As Figure 1 shows, they have been leaving theburaku since the 1930s. From 1921 to 1993, the Japanese general population increased from56,665,900 to 124,937,786 -- a growth of 124 percent. During the same period, the number ofburakumin grew from 829,675 to 892,751 -- a growth of 7.6 percent. Suppose the buraku grew at
the same rate as the rest of the Japanese population. After all, first-hand observers usually note ahigher-than-average birthrate among the buraku, not lower. If the buraku birthrate tracked that of
the rest of Japan, by 1993 its population would have reached 1,862,141. In effect, over theintervening 72 years at least 1 million burakumin had vanished into the general population.
[Insert Figure 1 about here.]
Second, the buraku will necessarily include farmers and exclude professionals. Farmers
invest in land, and land is obviously location-specific. Should a farmer 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 a buraku. 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 their educational
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.
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 arenot. They are not impoverished. They are not dirty. They do not lack in-door plumbing, adequate
space, fire protection. They are not distinctive at all. Given the accounts, a visitor might expect aslum. 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, thedistrict 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
organized crime 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 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 havedisappeared 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 theprefectural 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Ramseyer: Page 11
burakumin in a prefecture and several indices of personal welfare. For burakumin concentration,
I use the most recent 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 the minimum
cost of living. Tomuro (2016) calculates the number by first estimating the minimum costof living per prefecture, and then assessing the number of households with income belowthat measure.
HS-College Rate, 2010: Students proceeding to college in 2010, divided by total
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 2011).
I include selected summary statistics in Table 3. For the convenience of the reader, I repeat theseand all later variable definitions in Table 4.
[Insert Table 3 about here.][Insert Table 4 about here.]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 population living below the poverty line. To explore this andother questions of correlation (obviously not causation), in Table 5 I hold constant population
density and 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 moreburakumin do have a higher fraction of people in poverty.
[Insert Table 5 about here.]
Second, far more non-burakumin live in poverty than burakumin. Where Kensaku Tomuro(2016) estimates a 2012 national poverty rate of 18.3 percent, by the 1993 census only 0.71 percent
of all Japanese were burakumin. Consider Kochi, the rural prefecture with the highest fraction of
burakumin -- 4.3 percent of households, or 13,800. With a poverty rate of 23.7 percent, 76,300 of
the households live in poverty. 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 percent, or 48,500 households.
With a poverty rate of 20.6 percent, 435,000 households are in poverty. Again, even if all
burakumin lived in poverty, most of the poor families in Fukuoka 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Ramseyer: Page 12
the cities than in rural villages, but population density held constant, burakumin are not associatedwith lower access to sewage lines (Part A, Reg. (1)). Neither -- in unreported regressions -- arethey associated with less access to running water. As an index of educational access, takeuniversity education: burakumin are not associated with lower rates of college 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
for men (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 have higher mortality rates; Reg. A(6)). Neither are they associated withhigher unemployment rates (unreported regression).
3. Troubling markers. -- a. Summary statistics. Other data, however, suggest a troubling
picture. In Table 6, I examine the social 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 this Table 6, I report summary
statistics that compare various rates directly between burakumin and non-burakumin, again at theprefectural level. I take the statistics from the government survey that yielded the 1993 census(Somu cho 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, of course (see Table 2), and on most of themeasures only about half of the prefectures submitted reports.
[Insert Table 6 about here.]
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 of workers in agriculture (8.43
percent of the burakumin, 8.42 percent 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 to earn 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 associatedwith several indices of dysfunctional behavior. I use the following variables:
Crimes per capita, 2010: Number of Criminal Code violations (Keisatsu cho
2011), divided by total population.
Meth crimes per capita, 2011: Number of crimes involving methamphetaminesin 2011 (Keisatsu cho 2011), divided by total population.
Welfare dependency, 2010: Number of households on public assistance in 2010
(seikatsu hogo; Kosei 2011a), divided by number of households.
Illegitimacy rate, 2009: Number of non-marital births in 2009, divided by totalbirths (Kosei 2010).
Divorce rate, 2010: Number of divorces in 2010, divided by number of marriages(Kosei 2011b).
In simple pair-wise correlation, the concentration of burakumin is significantly associated with thenumber of methamphetamine crimes per capita, the fraction of the population on public assistance,
the fraction of non-marital births, and the divorce rate.

Ramseyer: Page 13
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 of methamphetamine crimes (Reg. B(2)).
Methamphetamines are the drugs most widely abused in Japan, and ones whose distribution isheavily tied to the organized crime syndicates. The burakumin concentration rate is also correlated
significantly with 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 aremodest. Consider an increase in the fraction of burakumin from .5 percent (roughly the fractionin the suburban Tokyo prefecture of Saitama) to 1 percent (the fraction in Osaka). The coefficienton burakumin conentration of .0822 suggests an increase in the crime rate of .0004 on a prefecturelevel median of .0103. It suggests an increase in the non-marital birth rate of .0007 on a prefecturelevel median of .0210.
4. Crime and corruption.8 -- 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: the risk of virulent retaliation was just too large. Under the rubric of"denunciation," buraku leaders responded to criticism with tactics that were both brutal and violent.
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, aMatsuzaka city council representative observed that many residents objected to buraku subsidies(detailed below) as "reverse discrimination" but were "too frightened to say anything because they
were afraid of being harassed by burakumin." "I'm frightened too," he added.
To BLL activists, the representative was perpetuating the "stereotype that the burakumin
are 'frightening'" (Miyamoto 2013, pp. 91-96). With no apparent sense of irony, they marched into
city hall and demanded he be punished. The city council meekly convened a disciplinarycommittee, and declared the comment about being frightened "discriminatory." Thereupon, therepresentative duly thanked the burakumin for doing what they did. "If this problem had notoccurred, I do not believe I would have had the opportunity to study the buraku problem," heexplained. "From now on, I would like to study the buraku problem as intently as possible, and to
dedicate my life to the realization of the goal of 'Matsuzaka: The city that protects human rights.'"
To justify their brutal control over speech, BLL activists rely on two principles. Postwar
BLL leader Zennosuke Asada (1979, 251) articulated the first as a formal proposition at the 1956
BLL annual meeting: "Every day-to-day problem that arises in the buraku -- everything
disadvantageous to burakumin -- results from discrimination." The second principle is not one the
BLL ever formally adopted, but plays an equally central role and is similarly attributed to Asada:
only a burakumin 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
played a central part in that crime. Through its shake-down strategies, the BLL induced thenational government to distribute to burakumin 15 trillion yen ($125 billion at the 2002 exchangerate) over the course of 1969 to 2002, mostly as construction projects. Through at-best thinly

8

For a much fuller account, see Ramseyer & Rasmusen (2018).

Ramseyer: Page 14
veiled threats of violence, it then arrogated to itself the power to allocate the money as it wished(described in detail in Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018).
The BLL awarded the construction contracts to firms that joined its Buraku Construction
Association. In return, the firms paid the association 0.7 percent of the contract amount. To some
BLL leaders, the firms paid tribute beyond the 0.7 percent fee. One prominent burakumin, forexample, apparently demanded 3 to 5 percent of the contract (Kadooka 2012, p. 96; Mori 2009,
pp. 78, 180).
Nominally, only burakumin firms joined the BCA. In practice, mainstream firms vied tojoin as well. Profits on the government-funded buraku construction contracts were so high, inother words, that mainstream firms paid to become burakumin firms. Sometimes a firm hired awell-known burakumin leader to serve as president; other times, it simply paid a bribe (Mori 2009,
pp. 180-83).
Routinely, BLL leaders sold the government the land for these projects at massively
inflated prices. They also routinely diverted construction funds to themselves through shellcompanies. To do so, they first formed a corporation. That corporation joined the BCA andpartnered with a mainstream construction firm. The two firms bid on the government contract
together, and upon winning the bid the shell corporation took its cut and left the mainstream firm
to do the work (Ramseyer and Rasmusen 2018).
c. Organized crime. The flamboyant corruption surrounding the buraku subsidies madeclear what many Japanese understood but rarely said in public: the mob was a creature of theburaku. "The great majority of the minority groups earn an honest living," writes burakumin
journalist Nobuhiko Kadooka (2012, p. 28). "But most men in the organized crime syndicates are
members of minorities like the Koreans or the burakumin."
Incendiary as Kadooka’s statement may seem, members of the burakumin community, thesyndicates, and the police consistently report that burakumin men comprise a majority (mostestimates put the fraction at 50-70 percent) of the syndicate memberships (discussed in detail at
Ramseyer & 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 chose to join themob. The size of that fraction during the years of the targeted subsidies discloses an enormous
diversion of young talent -- a diversion from life in the legal sector into fundamentally criminal
behavior. At the height of the mob in the late 1980s, 20 percent of the 20-29 year old burakumin
men would have been part of the mob, and 25 percent of men in their 30s. "The buraku," asKadooka (2012, p. 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 family collapse become so central
to the buraku? When -- and why -- did the group's nominal human rights leadership start to overlap
with the membership in the organized crime syndicates?
Modern historians of Tokugawa (1600-1868) agricultural villages make clear where theroots 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 theancestors of the modern burakumin never dealt with dead animals at all. Instead, they farmed. As
Usui (1991, p. 20) put it in his study of Hyogo prefecture:Ramseyer: Page 15
In Hyogo, the business of the buraku was agriculture. Overwhelmingly, the members of
the buraku 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 theya 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," ashistorian Seisuke Fujisawa (Higashi 2018, p. 115) put it, is "clearly wrong."
B. Kawata and Hinin:
Most of these Tokugawa ancestors to the burakumin described themselves as "kawata" inwestern Japan, "chori" in the east, and faced the pejorative epithet of "eta." A smaller distinctgroup went by the term "hinin" (see Ehlers, forthcoming). In some communities at some times,
itinerant beggars, peddlers, and entertainers went by still other terms. Aside from kawata, chori,and hinin, historian Minoru Watanabe (1965, pp. 101, 338) catalogs nearly forty different names
for the various lower-class communities.9
Conventionally, mid-20th century historians of the outcastes focused on the kawata and thehinin. The kawata skinned dead cattle and horses and worked in the leather trade, they wrote. The
hinin policed villages, manned the jails, and carried out punishments. The kawata were born into
their group; the hinin 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 theirstatus. Although some did, others either found themselves assigned the status as criminal
punishment or descended into the status as vagrants. And under specified conditions, some of thehinin could return to the status 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 witha kawata employer. In time, they and their descendants 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 to enter theindustry.12
And some kawata exited their status and became commoners. Sometimes and in somecommunities, 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 theirhomes, 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 thespectrum. The data being what they are, historians of the kawata generally focus on one or several
villages at a time. In the course of their essay, they detail village landholdings. Generally, they9

See generally Saito & Oishi (1995, pp. 52, 62); Ehlers (forthcoming); Ohnuki-Tierney (1989).
E.g., Minegishi (1996, pp. 44-46, 56); Watanabe (1977, pp. 135, 335); Tsukada (2007); Hasegawa (1927,
p. 10). On the hinin more generally, see Ehlers (2018); Tsukada (2007).
11
Ishii (1994, p. 91); Tsukada (2001, p. 3); Sansai (1961, p. I-444); Ozaki (1982, p. 154); Takayanagi (1979,
p. 20); Minegishi (1996, pp. 129-30).
12
Hatanaka (1997, pp. 110-11). And in other places, hinin became kawata over time, or no one distinguishedthe two groups at all (Watanabe 1977, pp. 63, 127; Hatanaka 1997, pp. 110-11).
13
Watanabe (1977, p. 127); Hatanaka (1997, pp. 69-80, 110-11); McCormack (2013, p. 53).
10

Ramseyer: Page 16
find that most kawata were among the poorer villagers. The kawata sometimes supplemented theirfarm income with by-employment, though rarely in the leather industry (Watanabe 1975, pp. 10506). 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 Yukiya Ozaki (1982, pp. 89-92) assembles records of riceproduction in a Nagano village in 1736. The village contained 27 kawata and 23 commonerfamilies. They produced (one koku equaled 180 liters):
Less than
1-3
Over
1 kokukoku
3 kokuTotal
Kawata11
12
427
Others103
1023
Historians have compiled a wide variety of these village land-holding and rice-production surveys,
but they almost always tell the same story: the average kawata farmer was poorer than the averagecommoner, 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, pp. 343-44).
When the late Tokugawa government did try to stop transfers, farmers simply negotiatedtransactions that circumvented the limits. Saito (2009, p. 171; ital. orig.) explains how they did
this:Tokugawa peasants were not allowed to sell land if the sale were made "inperpetuity." This ban on the permanent sale was interpreted by contemporaries to meanthat peasants were allowed to sell a parcel of land for a limited period of time, which inpractice meant 'pawning' (shichiire).
3. Landownership. -- Successful kawata routinely owned much of the land they farmed.15
Claims by historians to the contrary, explains Usui (1991, p. 22), stem from "two or three[Tokugawa] bakufu decrees and assorted domainal edicts." Commoners routinely transferredpaddies, and so did the kawata.
An increase in a kawata's land holdings could cause conflict over the village commons, but
not because of the kawata status itself. Rights to the village commons mattered because theybrought access to fertilizer, firewood, and water. The conflicts arose when kawata developed newland, 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, p. 393).
4. The disposition of dead animals. -- Within a farming village, typically one or several
households held the right to skin the horses and cattle that died within a designated area.16 Thisskinning right 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 theholder a right to the proceeds of the skinning. In most the villages, the farmers who held the shares
14

E.g., Hatanaka (1990, p. 84); Teraki (1997, pp. 75, 111); Usui (1991, pp. 162, 176-77, 285); Minegishi(1996, pp. 30-31).
15
Usui (1991, p. 20); Hatanaka (1997, p. 10); Kyoto buraku (1995, p. 305); Minegishi (1996, pp. 32, 330).
16
Watanabe (1997, p. 104); Mae (1975, pp. 217-18, 225); Saito & Oishi (1995, pp. 67, 72).

Ramseyer: Page 17
tended to be among the wealthier kawata. Some acquired shares when a borrower defaulted on aloan. Some bought 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 theexpertise or equipment necessary for the task. Those who held the shares entitling them toparticipate in the skinning instead sold the hides (and other byproducts) to specialty tanners inneighboring towns. These were the men who had invested in the skills and equipment necessary
to turn the skin into 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., leather-backed
sandals), they competed with commoner firms. Buyers regularly switched their orders between
kawata and commoner sellers, and workers themselves migrated among the two types of firms(Minegishi 1996, p. 120; Matsuoka 1975, pp. 16, 41).
D. Migration:
Those burakumin without land to till could, and did, move. In doing so, they joined theircommoner peers. During the Tokugawa period, the population grew. From 17 million in 1600 to
34.5 million in 1874, over the Tokugawa period as a whole the Japanese population doubled (Saito& Takashima 2015a, p. 8).
And as the population grew, Tokugawa peasants migrated. Daughters and second or thirdsons without a farm to inherit left their villages. Some apprenticed themselves to a trade. Someleft for distant villages with unclaimed land. Bands of poorer farmers left en masse to build new
paddies and start new villages.
The government did not stop this movement. Mid-20th-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 Osamu Saito (2009, pp. 184185):[The a]ctual policies taken by domain lords varied from province to province andalso from period to period, but the administrations' attitude became unmistakably
permissive towards individual mobility. ... [T]he incidence of out-migration increased
over time and, ... the rural-urban flow of people became substantial in the latter half of theTokugawa 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 Hiroshi Watanabe (1977, p. 154)
put it, "the movement of people into and out of the unliberated [i.e., kawata] villages during thelate Tokugawa period was enormous."19
As peasants (both commoner and kawata) migrated, first metropolitan centers and thensecondary rural towns grew and flourished. During the first half of the Tokugawa period, farmers
moved to the large cities like Osaka and the newly established political capital of Edo (i.e., Tokyo).
During the second half, the farmers moved to smaller regional centers. Estimates demographer
Akira Hayami (2009, p. 102), "perhaps 70-80 thousand people were pulled to the cities each year"
17

Watanabe (1977, pp. 114, 304); Matsuoka (1975, pp. 19-20, 24-25); Mae (1975, pp. 204, 225); Saito &Oishi (1995, p. 120); Usui (1991, p. 205).
18
Minegishi (1996, p. 226); Watanabe (1977, p. 191); Saito & Oishi (1995, p. 124).
19
See, e.g., Kyoto buraku (1995, pp. 364-67); Tsukada (2001, pp. 11, 14-15, 30); McCormack (2013, p. 51).

Ramseyer: Page 18
during the 17th century. From 60,000 in 1600, by 1721 the population of Edo had reached 1.1
million. By then, "Osaka's and Kyoto's populations had each reached 400,000."20
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-20th century
historians (both Japanese and Western) described Tokugawa society as a world structured by arigidly hierarchical neo-Confucian four-plus-outcaste class 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-18th century. They never pursued
it at a more than superficial level. And they never even purported to regulate "outcaste" behavior
until 1778.21
What is more, continue social historians Yoichi Saito and Shinzaburo Oishi (1995, pp. 3233), the Tokugawa 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 halfa century thereafter, it rarely reappeared. Only in late-1920s history texts did the "four-plusoutcaste" formula begin to appear widely (Saito & Oishi 1995).
2. Sumptuary decrees. -- On the advice of their neo-Confucian advisers, late 18th and early
19th 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 the decrees, they purported toregulate what people would wear and what they would do.
Most commonly, the Tokugawa elites targeted wealthy merchants. These successful men
and women were badly out-of-step with their newly theorized social status below farmers andartisans, and government officials tried to restrain their conspicuous consumption. Wealthy
kawata were out-of-step with their theorized status too, and from time to time government officials
tried to curb their conspicuous behavior as well.
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 themout of an excess of repressive power. They issued them in a last-ditch attempt to slow the pace ofsocial 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, pp. 37679). Had merchants lived impoverished lives, no government official would have bothered to tellthem to live modestly. Had kawata lived immiserated lives, no government official would havebothered to tell them to live modestly either. According to the Kyoto Buraku History ResearchInstitute (1995, p. 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 ofstatus. The bakufu was trying to drag the world back to the old order.
20
21

See Saito & Takashima (2015a, pp. 7, 16); Takashima (2017, pp. 192-93, 198); Hayami (2009, p. 102).
See Saito & Oishi (1995, p. 20); Watanabe (1977, pp. 6-7).

Ramseyer: Page 19
3. Burakumin land ownership and taxes. -- The late-Tokugawa bans on kawata landownership reflect the same phenomenon. As historian Toshiyuki Hatanaka (1997, p. 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 theirwealth into large-scale landholdings (Kyoto buraku 1995, p. 375). As Watanabe (1977, p. 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 their harvest.23 They paid these taxes atthe same rates as everyone else.
F. Making Sense of Kawata:
As this account makes clear, most burakumin do not trace their ancestry to people who
specialized in ritually unclean jobs. Most do not trace their lineage to tanners, executioners, orleather workers. A few do, but not most.
Most burakumin instead trace their ancestry to poor farmers. Since the 1920s, Japanese
historians of the kawata usually interpreted the “kawa” to refer to leather. The Japanese term forleather is indeed "kawa," so when writing “kawata” these scholars have used the Chinese character(kanji) for leather. Yet "kawa" also refers to river. The characters assigned to leather and riverdiffer, of course, but homonyms are common in Japanese and 17th century peasants rarely wrote.
For them, "kawata" was not a written term; it was spoken.
Historian Hiroshi Watanabe (1977, pp. 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 theTokugawa period, large swaths of potential paddy land remained undeveloped (Watanabe 1977, p.
120).
At their eventual destination, the migrants would have settled on the unused parcels.
Because of the risk of floods – particularly during the typhoon season – farmers often left landalong the river undeveloped. Migrants looking for unclaimed land near a town or village would
have found it on the river banks. 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
22

Watanabe (1977, p. 189); Saito & Oishi (1995, pp. 156-58); Usui (1991, p. 22); Uchida (1975, p. 310).
Hatanaka (1997, p. 10); Watanabe (1997, p. 189); Minegishi (1996, p. 330); Kyoto buraku (1995, p. 275);
Usui (1991, p. 22).
24
The genesis of the derogatory "eta" is unclear. Some writers (e.g., Takahashi 1927, p. 85) have suggested
that it might be a corruption of "etori," meaning those who scavenge through cadavers for pet food (contra Yanagida
1913, p. 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 the character) "e", however, is a rare and complex 18-stroke character that does not even fall within thestandard 2200 characters taught through 12th grade. Japanese encounter it -- if they encounter it at all -- only inuniversity readings. The notion that semi-literate 17th century peasants would have used the Chinese reading of an
obscure 18-stroke character to invent a derogatory term for other peasants is implausible on its face. See generally
Kida (1918, p. 80).
23

Ramseyer: Page 20
impoverished ancestors migrated to the area, the available (cheapest, if not free) land lay by theriver.
As the migrants settled in the dry river bed (called kawara) or along the river banks, they
became “kawara mono” – people of the river bed.25 Because “ta” refers to rice paddies, once theybuilt paddies by the river they became "kawata" -- farmers with paddies along the river (Hasegawa
1927, p. 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, theywould 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, some of 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 directly from 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, p. 12).
Coups being what they are, residents in several areas remained uneasy. During the firstfew years, some rioted over the changes. They rioted over taxes, the draft, prices, school tuition.
In some places, they rioted over the 1871 eta-hinin edict as well (Takayama 2005, p. 27; Kobayashi
1985, p 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. Overthe course of these five decades, the two populations increased at roughly the same rate. From1868 to 1921, the number of total burakumin grew by about 70 percent to 830,000. From 1872 to
1921, the general population grew by 60 percent.
Apparently, few burakumin abandoned their status during those five decades. To be sure,some commoners joined the buraku and replaced those who left. But that caveat aside, the factthat the aggregate number of burakumin grew at 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, they found (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, thatfigure (in constant yen) had soared to 199 yen (Ohsato 1966). Some of the people who arrived in
25

Watanabe (1977, p. 122); Usui (1991, p. 63); Saito & Oishi (1995, pp. 64-66).
Some kawata lived in kawata-only villages (Usui 1991, p. 39). For the most part, these were villages that
had been newly created in the Tokugawa period. There, they exploited new paddies (Usui 1991, pp. 144-45, 354-56).
Enough land had remained unfarmed at the start of the Tokugawa period, notes Watanabe (1977, p. 120) that the
kawata who created these paddies sometimes acquired very fertile land.
26

Ramseyer: Page 21
the cities found jobs in the enormous and diverse universe of small firms. Others worked in themassive new textile factories. In 1898, 30.5 million people (71 percent of the population) lived intowns of fewer than 5,000 people. By 1920, only 27.1 million still lived in towns that small, andthe number constituted but 48.9 percent 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, p. 37).
Burakumin moved in parallel with the rest of the population -- from the countryside to thecities, 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, p. 168; Bahara 1984, p. 138). The most prosperous
built homes in comfortable neighborhoods and ran thriving businesses. The poorest settled in city
slums (Buraku 2018, pp. 27, 30, 43).
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 even as they amassed their wealth. By choosing to identify with thecommunity, these most 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, andcontinued 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 percent) had incomes high enough to hold first-class voting
rights (Uesugi 2010, pp. 101-02; Anon. 1918). Of the 1500 buraku households there, nine had
those rights (0.6 percent). 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 the faculty of the Kyoto Imperial University (Torigai 1988,
p. 70).
C. Contact and Conflict:
1. Introduction. -- As the economy grew, so too did inter-regional travel, trade, andmigration. With this increased movement came contact between buraku communities and the restof 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 a code 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 remain common
among a wide variety of under-class groups across the world, of course. The groups subsist in partthrough predation on more mainstream communities, and -- to the extent that they do so -- thenorms serve them passably. Obviously, however, the norms did not mix well with the more
broadly shared Japanese standards of behavior. As contact between the two communities
increased, so did hostility.

27

Watanabe (1977, p. 168); Suzuki (2016, p. 27); Nara ken (1970, p. 102).

Ramseyer: Page 22
2. Mergers. -- The Meiji government precipitated the first major collision between buraku
and commoners in 1888. Tokugawa era towns and villages had been small collections ofhouseholds, and as of 1888 there remained 71,000 of them. Of these municipalities, 800 had no
residents at all, 2,800 had 1 to 10 households, and another 12,000 had 11 to 30. Nearly 70 percentof the 71,000 towns and villages had fewer than 100 households.28
For these municipalities, the Meiji government intended a wide range of administrative
tasks. Many of the 71,000 simply could not bear the cost of their new responsibilities (Nakajima
2013, pp. 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 sizeand serviceable wealth. By 1889, it had merged the 71,000 into 15,800. In doing so, however, it
precipitated vehement resistance across the country. 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, it would -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 thecountry over.29
Given that the buraku villages tended to be poor, prosperous villages fought mergers withthese villages as well. Some of them also may have objected to merging with the village becauseof its buraku status, but the question was massively over-determined. Wealthier villages foughtmergers with poorer villages everywhere, buraku and commoner alike.
To buraku villagers, though, these rejections represented pure bias. In May of 1922, theSuiheisha would hold the first of its Nara denunciations (kyudan) in the village of Taisho (Naimu
sho 1922, p. 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 the other buraku villages that would merge, a substantial number of households weredelinquent in their taxes (Naramoto 1955, pp. 66-67). Forty years later, the perceived insult
remained raw. As the official BLL publishing house would write in 2009 (Asaji 2009, p. 43; seealso Amagasaki 1988, p. 229), "it was because the burakumin were nakedly excluded" throughthese 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 19th century into most of the 20th, children
from the buraku tended to lag far behind their non-buraku peers in academic achievement. At theoutset, Meiji-era villages (both mainstream 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 the many 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 days a month. An observer in Amagasaki city (Hyogo prefecture) noted a
28

See Yokomichi (2007, p. 2), Kitagawa (1940, pp. 267, 275).
See Kitagawa (1940, pp. 275, 280); Takayose (2006, pp. 150-51, 154-55).
30
See Naramoto (N.D., p. 71); Naramoto (1955, p. 2); Higashi (2018, p. 293).
31
E.g., Aoki (1982, pp. 34-35, 47); Naramoto (1955, pp. 98-99); Higashi (2018, p. 294).
29

Ramseyer: Page 23
similar problem in the 1880s; so did another writer in 1912. In Osaka's Kamagasaki slum in 1919,
over 70 percent 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 ateacher 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, their fathers 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 haveencountered 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.
4. Crime and the discovery of the buraku. -- And as inter-regional contact grew,
government officials -- in historian Midori Kurokawa's (2016, p. 68) words -- "discovered" theburakumin. 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, p. 69). The minnistry focused first on the crime andsecondarily on the widespread trachoma (Kurokawa 2016, p. 71). "Because of the prevalence ofcriminals within the buraku," noted the governor of Mie Prefecture in 1907, "the communities
cannot avoid the wariness with which the rest of society 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 first-person 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 ofprefecture-level regressions. When the n is small and partitions coarse, the empirical results arenecessarily suggestive. One can -- and should -- worry about a wide range of obvious
qualifications. Crucially, however, the empirical results match exactly the substance of the firstperson accounts.
B. First-Person Accounts:
1. Kagawa. -- Several writers left careful first-hand accounts of the late 19th and early
20th 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
32

See Kohara (1910, pp. 1452-54) (Nara); Amagasaki (1988, pp. 250, 357, 380) (Amagasaki); Sugihara &Tamai (1986, p. 77) (Osaka); Endo (1912, p. 277) (1912 observation).
33
See Kohara (1910, pp. 1440, pp. 1452-53).

Ramseyer: Page 24
bankrupt before he turned adult. As a child, he contracted tuberculosis. In 1909, he moved to alarge buraku slum in Kobe to work as a Christian minister and community organizer. There, hewould in time marry and settle into an eight square meter apartment.34
Steadily, Kagawa acquired a national reputation as a champion of the poor. When militantburakumin set out to organize the liberation movement that would become the Suiheisha, they met
in Kagawa's home. They admired him, and so did other burakumin. Among the possible founding
leaders for the new organization, Kagawa enjoyed strong popular support (Torigai 2002).
Yet Kagawa did not join that Suiheisha founding leadership, and broke with it almost
immediately. From the start, the new group adopted a "denunciation"-based extortion strategy.
Kagawa was appalled. "I'm preaching a gospel of love," he complained. "You're teaching a gospelof hate" (Torigai 1988, p. 126). The Suiheisha responded in kind. Sadakichi Takahashi had been
one of group's earliest organizers, and served as a secret representative to the Comintern. Kagawa,
he declared in 1927, might as well be "telling laborers to work hard and become capitalists"(Takahashi 1927, p. 236). He was nothing but "a running dog for the ruling class."
Half a century later, the publishing house Kagawa had founded decided to reprint 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." Thepublishing 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 join in "addressing the problem of buraku discrimination."35
In the uncensored version of his 1915 study, Kagawa had made three sets of observations
relevant here. First, his burakumin neighbors were "quick to anger." They routinely claimed tohave been "wronged." They "often lied." And because they so often lied themselves, "they nevertrusted anyone" (Kagawa 1915, pp. 100, 300-02, 361).
Second, crime infested the buraku. Theft was everywhere. Gambling was ubiquitous, andrun 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 theprefecture as a whole. Although urban crime attracted the most attention, crime rates in the ruralburaku were higher than among comparable farm villages as well.36
Third, family structures in the buraku had largely collapsed. Husbands and wives routinely
deceived each other. "Wives would work as prostitutes," observed Kagawa, "and lie about it totheir husbands." Prostitution was common. At one point, he recalled, the woman living in theapartment across the alley 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 her life.37
Reflecting the combination of widespread crime and family disintegration, parents
sometimes (Kagawa suggested often) killed their babies. They did so by transferring their infants(called moraigo) to specialists. Those specialists might then sell the children among themselves
several times, but usually the babies eventually died (Kagawa 1915, pp. 637-43). Wrote Kagawa(1915, p. 639):

34

See generally Torigai (1988, pp. 21-22, 48-51).
Kirisuto (1991, p. 1; see also pp. 2, 25-26); Torigai (1988, p. 6; 2002, pp. 160-61).
36
See Kagawa (1915, pp. 101, 223, 323, 359, 364-65, 563-68); Kagawa (1919, 467-68) (Hyogo rate is for351917).

37

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

Ramseyer: Page 25[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 justget 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 one of 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, pp. 54-56).
2. Other observers. -- a. Introduction. Kagawa was not the only observer to documentwide-spread hyper-sensitivity, violence, crime, and promiscuity within the buraku. Already by thelate 19th century, a large range of scholars and journalists had described the same characteristics.
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, anddisplay eta konjo" (see Section b., below), wrote Takahashi (1924, pp 223-24). "They have no
inclination to save, and are always broke. Many are criminals. By instinct, they act as a groupand resist social pressure. Unless these characteristics change, others in society will obviously
dislike burakumin."b. Culture. Contemporaries (like Takahashi himself) identified among the burakumin of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries a style of behavior they freely called "eta konjo" -- an "etaessence" remarkably like the "cracker" culture of 19th century southern poor whites: anunwillingness to invest long hours in strenuous effort (whether employment or schooling); an
apparent eagerness to take offense; and a tendency to escalate any quarrel to dangerous levels andbeyond.38
Of the students of buraku culture, the most prominent was easily University of Tokyo
professor Kunio Yanagida. Widely celebrated as the most perceptive student of rural Japanesevillages on the cusp of the transition from Tokugawa to modern, Yanagida noted in 1913 that theburakumin brought a fundamentally "antisocial approach" to community life (Yanagida 1913, p.
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,p. 242 [1906]) dismissed it as wildly exaggerrated:[Shimazaki Toson's] distinction between the general commoners and the newcommoners [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 not exist .... 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 nothave caused a dispute as extreme [as Toson described].
Late 19th-century writers routinely complained about how eagerly burakumin fought.
"There are many reasons" burakumin find themselves excluded from society, wrote anotherobserver in 1889 (Toson 1889, pp. 78-80; not Shimazaki Toson). "Of those, if we list simply themost 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 journal that whenburakumin find themselves injured, they exaggerate their injuries, demand compensation, and turn38

See generally McWhiney (1988); McDonald & McWhiney (1980).

Ramseyer: Page 26
violent. They are, he concluded, suspicious, unreflective, and unrestrained (Kohara 1910, p. 1440).
House of Peers member Ryukichi Endo reported in 1912 that burakumin could be extremely
jealous (Endo 1912, p. 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, p. 258).
Observers similarly complained that burakumin would not exert effort. If hired, claimed
Endo, they promptly quit (Endo 1912, p. 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 morethan 20 or 30 minutes at a time. Concluding that a two-hour stint of work was never going tohappen, he dismissed them all within a month (Kohara 1910, p. 1441).
c. Crime. By virtually all contemporaneous accounts, turn-of-the-century burakumin wereheavily involved in crime. The crime could be serious. Take the massive nation-wide arson andextortion 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, pp. 178-79), a burakumin crowd
beat him up. When a policeman intervened, they beat him up too.
Theft, declared journalist-social-reformer-banker-politician Umeshiro Suzuki (1880, Sec.
10) in 1888, was "one of the traditional occupations" among Osaka burakumin. They operated inrings, he explained, under the direction of a boss (Suzuki 1988, p. 29). More generally, during one
seven-month period in 1886, (Suzuki 1880, Sec. 10) police arrested 603 residents of Osaka's Nagoslum for theft -- 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 percent of the burakumin in the prefecture (25percent of the men) had a criminal record (Aichi 1928, p. 79).
d. Family. Family structure, in turn, had collapsed. Wrote journalist Bungo Sakurada(pseudonym Koji Taiga) in 1893 (Sakurada 1893, p. 14), men of the Osaka buraku "regularly
abandoned their children, left their wives, and moved on -- several times over the course of theirlives." Conversely (Sakurada 1893, p. 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, p.
35) "Of ten couples, seven or eight will freely have sex with other people." It all began early,
noted Kohara (1910, p. 1438). "Already by age 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 police chiefs, theydescribe the buraku as a place of impulsive violence, crime, and disintegrating family ties. Thatsaid, self-appointed burakumin leaders have spent the last 80 years of the 20th century accusing
other Japanese of virulent 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 20th century burakumin did indeed live withina brutally violent world. By 1907, the association 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) and on generalRamseyer: Page 27
population density (Density). To capture the level of integration between the burakumin and thegeneral 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).
[Insert Table 7 about here.]
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 inorder -- the ecological fallacy with prefecture-level data, unobserved variables, the fact that thedata 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 of crime.
Crucially, however, in 1907 they also tracked the relative number of burakumin in a community.
In the first column of Table 7 Panels A and B, I regress (with OLS) 1886 crime rates (the firstavailable 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 foreither total crimes or the murder rate. In the second column, I add the rate of population growthsince 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 the fractionof burakumin in a prefecture, the higher the rates both of total crimes generally and of murders
specifically. The magnitude of the effect is modest: an increase in burakumin concentration from
0.5 percent to 1 percent increases the prefecture-level crime rate by .00136 on a prefecture-level
median of .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 isrobust to serially dropping Taxpayers PC, Exogamy, and Population 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 forthe location of 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 been a markerof 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 19th century.

39

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

Ramseyer: Page 28
The coefficient on the instrumented Burakumin PC for 1907 is significantly positive for both
Total crimes PC and Murders PC.
D. The Rice Riots:
1. Prices. -- In 1918, burakumin across a wide range of prefectures brought violent crimeto the 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 the head of the most violent crowds -- were
the burakumin. If anyone had not connected burakumin to crime before, in 1918 the newspapers
did it for them.
The stimulus was not poverty. For farmers, the higher rice prices obviously translated
directly into higher profits (Shakai 1938, p. 54). To that income, they routinely added profitabletextile-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 in Tokyo rosefrom 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 19th 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 ofliving, real wages rose 50 percent over the decade from 1914 to 1924 (Shakai 1938, pp. 54,57).
For poorer Japanese, rice had only recently become a staple anyway. Traditionally, manyof the poor had eaten barley and millet, and sold their rice as a luxury good. With their newfoundprosprity, however, famers and urban workers shifted a larger and larger share of their diet frombarley to rice (Harada 1989, p. 87).
In response to this new demand (boosted further by army procurement), the price of theluxury-turned-widespread-staple climbed. But supply was fixed, at least 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 people, and judges would find 4,200 guilty. Despite therampant burglary and arson (a capital offense where cities contain densely packed wooden homes)
and occasional deaths, judges imposed relatively lenient punishment: no death sentences, and only
three life imprisonments.40
Mobs pillaged and burned stores, warehouses, and wealthy homes, and leading 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, p. 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 percent of the rioters (Mitani 1985, p. 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 and extortion. Most often,
the mobs targeted rice dealers, merchant houses, and wealthy homes. There, they used the threat
40
41

See generally Shakai (1938, pp. 2-4, 91-95, 102-04, 439).
See Shakai (1938, pp. 94, 132, 197, 216, 259, 260, 379, 391).

Ramseyer: Page 29
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 and children appeared early the next morning totake any valuables that remained.42
Mobs took this violence, arson, and extortion far across the country. When firemen 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 in Fukuoka prefecture, they threw dynamite, and fought off the army
with guns. They rioted on the largest scale in Osaka prefecture. There, mobs sometimes 20,000strong 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 generalpublic. As during the Tokugawa period, they were not all poorer; incomes of the burakumin andthe general public overlapped considerably. But take the 1920 Diet election. Eligibility to voteturned on tax liability, and over the country as a whole 5.42 percent (3.07 million) of the population
voted. Within the buraku, eligibility rates ranged from Ishikawa where 0.17 percent of theburakumin voted, to Chiba’s 3.32 percent. The mean of buraku eligibility rates across theprefectures came to 1.55 percent.
Or take the size of farms. Historian Hideo Haraguchi (2014, p. 393) reports the following
distribution of farm sizes across Japan in the mid-1930s:
Under 1/2 cho 1/2 to 1 cho
1 cho & over
Buraku51%
32%
9%
All Japan
34
34
32
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 Takaju Aoki (1998, p. 21) compares the area cultivated within Nagano prefectureby burakumin and all farmers in 1931:
All Nagano
BurakuminHouseholds %Households % .
less than 1/2 cho
74,880
36.3
1,761
72.9
1/2 to 1 cho
79,162
38.4
460
19.0
1 to 3 cho
49,53224.1
183
7.6
3 cho & over
2,443
1.2
13
0.5
Total
206,017
100
2,417
100
The farm sizes for the Nagano public track the numbers in Haraguchi’s national totals, whileburaku farmers in Nagano tilled smaller farms than burakumin elsewhere. Other scholars (e.g.,
Yoshida 1978, 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; manyburakumin were richer than the poorest of their neighbors, and a few were actually quite wealthy.
2. Other indices. -- By many other observable indices, however, the burakumin as a wholein the 1920s and 1930s seemed not to face observably worse circumstances than their non-buraku
42
43

See Shakai (1938, pp. 97, 178, 216, 230, 260).
See Shakai (1938, pp. 98, 101,128, 180, 184).

Ramseyer: Page 30
peers. In Table 8, I regress various prefecture-level indices of social welfare on the number ofburakumin per capita, on population density, on the exogamy rate (as an index of burakumincommoner 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, asreported in Monbu sho (1937).
[Insert Table 8 about here.]Consider the regression results in Table 8. I again control for income, population density,and exogamy. At the prefectural level, infant mortality is correlated with population density (it isan urban phenomenon), but not with the fraction of burakumin in either 1921 or 1935 (Panel A).
Suicide rates are not correlated with the density of burakumin (Panel B). Death rates fromdysentery are correlated with population density (again, it is an urban phenomenon), but not withthe fraction of burakumin (Panel B). Death rates from tuberculosis are not associated with thefraction 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 sevenyear-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 tothese measures) than among their non-buraku peers, by 1922 the burakumin were indeed
associated with the most basic characteristic of community dysfunction -- the fraction of nonmarital births. To be sure, communities varied in how promptly newly weds registered theirmarriage. But controlling for income, population density, and exogamy, the fraction of burakumin
in both 1921 and 1935 were positively correlated with non-marital birth rates (Table 8 Panel A).
Similarly, take the non-marital birth rates specifically for burakumin and for the generalpublic (Naimu sho 1921). Among the public in 1920, prefecture-level illegitimacy rates ranged
from 0.54 percent in Miyagi to 15.9 percent in Osaka, with the prefectural numbers averaging 8.1
percent. Among burakumin in 1921, those prefecture-level rates ranged from 2.01 percent in
Shizuoka (with 14,000 burakumin residents) to the astonishing 60.7 percent in Okayama (43,000
burakumin), with the prefectural numbers averaging 19.6 percent. If we compare the illegitimacy
rates for several key prefectures (1920 for the general public, 1921 for the burakumin), thosenumbers were:
General public
Burakumin.
Fukuoka
7.2%
14.8% (69,000 burakumin)
Hyogo
10.0
19.3 (108,000)
Osaka
15.9
22.5 (48,000)
Hiroshima
7.3
13.0 (40,000)

Ramseyer: Page 31
Okayama
Kyoto

10.6
13.4

60.7 (43,000)
21.7 (42,000)

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 percent of the general
population. Even in the large urban centers of Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo and Fukuoka, they comprised
less than 3 percent of the population. Nonetheless, even at the prefectural level, higher percentagesof burakumin were indeed associated with significantly higher rates of crime.
In the fourth and sixth regressions of Table 7 Panels A and B, I use OLS. The coefficienton the density of burakumin (in percentages; Burakumin PC) is positive and significant for both
1922 and 1935 for both total crimes and the murder rate. Because -- as described earlier -burakumin density is plausibly endogenous to the crime rate, I use the instrumented values ofburakumin concentration in the fifth and seventh regressions. The coefficient on the instrumented
Burakumin PC is positive and significant for both 1922 and 1935. For the murder rates, thecoefficient 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 percent
burakumin to 1 percent would increase the aggregate prefecture-level total crime rate by
about .0014 on a prefecture-level median of .0286.
From these prefecture-level crime rates, turn to the rate of crime specifically among theburakumin (Naimu sho 1921). For the general public in 1922, the combined battery-murder rates(the buraku data offer only the sum of the two) ranged from 15.8 per 100,000 population in
Okinawa to 95.8 in Fukuoka, 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 prefectural mean 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
Burakumin.
Fukuoka
95.8
103.8 (69,000 burakumin)
Hyogo
76.7
36.2 (108,000)
Osaka
73.4
225.4 (48,000)
Hiroshima
36.5
49.8 (40,000)
Okayama
40.3
42.0 (43,000)
Kyoto
48.9
52.2 (42,000)
Among the six key buraku prefectures, only in Hyogo was the battery-murder rate lower in theburaku 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 to farm
smaller plots than others. They tended to earn lower incomes. But not all burakumin were poor,and those doing well continued to identify with the community and to contribute to its social andeconomic infrastructure. At the prefectural level the buraku were associated with higher rates ofcrime and non-marital 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 dysfunctional pattern of behavior. Only

Ramseyer: Page 32
partly, in other words, did they call someone a burakumin if his parents had been burakumin; inpart, they called him a burakumin (regardless of his ancestry) if he exhibited the constellation ofcharacteristics associated with the classic buraku: they called a neighborhood a buraku 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 theterm "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 Yutaka Fujino(2009, pp. 23-24), others subjected them to "the same discrimination they imposed on theburakumin." By contrast, in Yokohama poor migrants created two large slums in areas with noburakumin core at all. Notwithstanding their lack of any historic connection to the burakumin,
Yokohama commoners called the residents of these two slums "eta." "Eta mura," they named theneighborhoods, or eta districts (Fujino 2009, pp. 24-29). Apparently, the people in the areas lived
by the norms associated with the buraku -- and other citizens responded by calling them 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 conclusionthat pre-1920 buraku status correlated with crime and illegitimacy becomes straightforwardly
circular. Yes, neighbors called a neighborhood 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 intellectuals from the buraku upper classand 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 who choseto invest in criminal rather than mainstream careers; that would drive out burakumin who chose tolive by standard Japanese behavioral norms instead; that 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 of Kashihara 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, theywould first redefine the buraku as an "outcaste" community with roots in a leather-workers' guild
and a history of unmitigated discrimination.
Come March 1922, the burakumin intellectuals held a 4,000-strong rally in Kyoto andannounced the group's formation. Obviously echoing the Communist Manifesto, they urged theircohorts to action. "Burakumin of the nation, unite!," they proclaimed (Kyoto 1922, p. 3; Hasegawa
1927, pp. 12-13, 17).
The young men immediately established a central office in Kyoto. Over the course of thefirst 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.

Ramseyer: Page 33
To all slurs everywhere, the young men vowed to respond with "tettei kyudan," or "total
denunciation" (Kyoto 1922; Hasegawa 1927, p. 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 aburakumin, they would rally their cohort to mob violence. If lucky, the speaker would escape withno 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 the tactic forseveral years. In 1909, they attacked a village mayor in Okayama over a claimed slur (Watanabe
1965, p. 717). In 1916, they rioted over a demeaning local newspaper article near Fukuoka(Takayama 2005, pp. 53-58; Fukuoka 2003, pp. 58-60). And in 1910, they took offense at what a
Kyoto village mayor had called them, and promptly beaten him to death (Kyoto buraku 1995).
As the allusion to the Communist Manifesto suggests, the founders of the group placed
their loyalty in the fringe left. The Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia in late 1917. By theearly 1920s, a large assortment of groups on the far left were trying to organize workers and (inmany 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, Anarcho-syndicalists, and Leninist
Bolsheviks had fought for control over the Suiheisha. And as in so many other such groups, it wasa fight the Bolsheviks at least initially seemed to have won. 44 The event that precipitated the
Bolshevik takeover involved a purported police spy. Among the moderates, declared insurgentsin late 1924, was a paid police informant. In the ensuing chaos, the Bolsheviks purged theincumbents 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 the elaborate schematic that Marx and Engels
had outlined. Those most loyal to the Party sought to meet the more detailed instructions from theComintern 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 incorporatinga pervasively binding four-class-plus-outcaste formula followed: the Tokugawa regime enforced
a fixed status hierarchy, and consigned the kawata to the bottom of the ladder.
Second, the schematic entailed describing the regime as ruthlessly exploitative, and thepeasants as bleakly immiserated. Toward this end, writers characterized the Tokugawa economy
as contracting, and the kawata as the most destitute of all. The Tokugawa regime left farmers
brutally impoverished, in other words, and the kawata poorer still.
Third, ideological fidelity required describing the Tokugawa industrial and commercial
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, pp. 224-25), reflects this importance of German
44

See Hasegawa (1927, pp. 93-94, 102-03, 148); Takayama (2005, pp. 199-204).

Ramseyer: Page 34
Ideology. To fit the history Marx had outlined in the essay, in other words, activists and writers
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 the leather-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 Midori Kurokawa (1989, pp.
92-97), with his 1924 history of the group. Born to a buraku, 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 Party and 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 the burakumin trace their ancestors
to prehistoric slaves (e.g., Watanabe 1965, pp. 16-18; Sansai 1961, p. I-56)? Answer: no.
Sixteenth century warlord Oda Nobunaga faced several violent peasant rebellions. Might he havebanished 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 usually just slaughtered
his opponents. And did the class hierarchy come first, and assignment to the despised occupation
follow? Or did the occupation come first, and the class structure follow (Teraki 1996, pp. 19-20;
Watanabe 1963, pp. 8-9)? Answer: Marxism faded from the universities before historians reacheda consensus.
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 inorder to let it oppress the broader peasant class more effectively. As Neary (1989, p. 18; see also
Ohnuki-Tierney 1987, p. 94) articulated it (apparently with approval), the regime treated theburakumin badly so that "the rebelliousness of the peasants and urban dwellers would be reducedwith the reminder that there was a group which was even worse off than they were." This was not,however, a theory that many serious Japanese scholars ever endorsed (see Saito & Oishi 1995, p.
56).
D. The Geography of the Suiheisha:
1. The exercise. To examine which communities organized Suiheisha branches, I begin
with simple OLS (again, the usual caveats for prefecture-level data apply). I find that burakumin
formed the branches: in communities where the concentration of 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.
As dependent variable, I take the number of Suiheisha branch offices in a prefecture 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 number of branch offices would reflect
the fraction (in percenetages) of burakumin in the population (Burakumin PC 1921), the extent
of the group's integration into the general population (Exogamy 1921), the urbanization of theRamseyer: Page 35
prefecture (Density 1921), and the fraction of wealthy families within the buraku. As a proxy forthe fraction of wealthy burakumin, I create:
Buraku prefectural voters PBC (per burakumin capital) 1921: The number ofburakumin 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 in 1921,
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 theextent of local hostility toward the buraku at the close of the Tokugawa period.
2. Results. -- I report the resulting regressions in Table 9. They suggest a couple ofstraightforward conclusions. First, the coefficient on the number of burakumin per capita is
positive and significant: burakumin tended to organize Suiheisha branches in areas with relatively
high concentrations of the group. Second, the coefficient on population density is positive andsignificant: the Suiheisha were a urban phenomenon.45[Insert Table 9 about here.]Turn to two somewhat more curious observations. First, the coefficient on the fraction of
burakumin rich enough to vote is positive and significant: Suiheisha branches were more common
where wealthy burakumin formed a larger fraction of the buraku. Recall the early disputes within
the Suiheisha between the Bolsheviks and Anarcho-Syndicalists. Engaging in a debate along thoselines entails at least a passing acquaintance with Trotsky, Lenin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon.
Necessarily, a familiarity with those names and ideas entails a background in a home with acommitment to education (e.g., Aoki 1982, p. 74).
Second, the coefficient on the exogamy rate is insignificant: the number of branches 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 theexogamy rate and the number of branches was -.26, almost significant at the 10 percent level.
Burakumin, in other words, seem to have been less likely to establish Suiheisha branches in areas
where they freely mixed with the population. The coefficient is statistically insignificant 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 associated with crime rates. Similarly, they were notassociated with buraku illegitimacy rates, buraku divorce rates, or welfare dependency in theburaku. They were not associated with the fraction of burakumin in agriculture or with the size ofthe buraku. 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 the 1871 liberation decree.
45

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

Ramseyer: Page 36

E. From Bolsheviks to Opportunists:
1. Matsumoto. -- If the anarchists were no match for the Bolsheviks, the latter would soon
prove no match for the buraku criminal underworld. Over the next several years, control over the
Suiheisha would shift again, this time from the Bolsheviks to a largely apolitical cohort of criminal
entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs, in turn, 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 tocriminal careers stayed; those with the most to lose from this new collective criminal identify left,
and migrated into the general public.
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 thenational 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 thestory of a police spy to purge their moderate rivals. Nei 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 mid-1920s, the central
personnel office seems to have seconded him to a research post, and commissioned him to compile
the information available on the group into a book-length reference for prosecutors nation-wide.
Hasegawa produced an astonishingly perceptive text. He did not dismiss outright the possibility
that the police might have paid an insider. He thought it more likely, however, that Matsumotoand his allies had simply invented the story to take control themselves.47
Historian Ian Neary (2010, p. 1) tells us that 1970s burakumin families kept Matsumoto's
portrait on their "god shelf" next to the photographs of their dead ancestors. To be sure, no one sodominated 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, p. 181) himself remarked in 1927 that "many people think of him as the don of an organizedcrime syndicate." Consistent with that description, he noted that Matsumoto had already bought
out a local geisha from her employment contract and installed her as his mistress (Hasegawa 1927,
p. 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 haveleft 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, p. 29).
A few years later, Matsumoto sailed for north China. He loaded drugs onto a pull-cart, anddeclared himself a peripatetic "First Class Japanese Military Physician." He conducted tests, hediagnosed, 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 still sell." Unfortunately for Matsumoto, fraudulent doctors peddling fakemedicines gave Japan a bad name. In 1910, the Japanese consulate threw him out of the country(Takayama 2005, pp. 38-39).
46

See Hasegawa (1927, pp. 52, 84); Fukuoka (2003, p. 67).
Hasegawa (1927, pp. 77-78, 84); for a more conventional interpretation, see Bayliss (2013, p. 207 n.93);
Asaji (2018, ch. 8).
47

Ramseyer: Page 37

2. Violence. -- Back in in Fukuoka, in 1911 Matsumoto organized a construction firm. His
older brother managed the business, and he coordinated the workers. Much of the work he did forthe local railroad (Takayama 2005, p. 46). The bidding could cause disputes, and in March 1923
Matsumoto's workers quarreled with employees from the rival Matsuo construction firm. Bothfirms worked for the local railroad. But the custom, according to the BLL's otherwise hagiographic
account (Buraku 1987, p. 74), was for the firms to rig the bid with the understanding that thewinning firm would share its profits with the losers. The Matsumoto firm had won the bid, andnow 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 beat him 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 police arrested thirty Matsumoto employees. They
arrested Matsumoto himself too, but eventually discharged him on grounds that he had not been at
the scene of the murder.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, he should resign. Tokugawa would have none of it, so Matsumoto senta young Suiheisha member to Tokyo with a gun and a knife. When the police stopped the wouldbe assassin, they discovered Matsumoto's role. Matsumoto acknowledged his part in theassassination attempt, and served four months in prison. In fact, however, the attack continued
anyway: another of 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, pp. 47-49). Post-war BLL leader Zennosuke Asada (1979, pp. 34-35, 52)
recalled carrying guns to Suiheisha events. He recalled his colleagues carried guns. Perhaps tied
to the number of construction firms in the buraku, the Suiheisha also had access to explosives.
Asada remembered bringing 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 for the occasion.50
3. Extortion. -- The Suiheisha's denunciations (kyudan) shaded into simple extortion fromthe start. Once Matsumoto took control of the national Suiheisha, members of his Kyushu branchbegan shaking down local firms. From 1925 and into 1926, police counted eight times that the
Fukuoka Suiheisha threatened denunciations and settled for cash (Hasegawa 1927, pp. 56-62). For
48

Takayama (2005, pp. 144-47); Buraku (1987, p. 74); Fukuoka (2003, p. 68).
Hasegawa (1927, pp. 29, 43-45); Takayama (2005, pp. l82-198, 203); Fukuoka (2003, p. 68).
50
BLL-oriented scholars claim the police planted the dynamite (e.g., Bayliss 2013, p. 208 n.995). Hasegawa(1927, pp. 30, 38) writes that the Suiheisha coerced a colleague into confessing that the police paid him to plant the
dynamite. Consistent with this narrative, the government prosecuted the Suiheisha member for coercing that colleague
into confessing.
49

Ramseyer: Page 38
the Suiheisha more generally, however, local governments promised the easiest money. Very few
denunciations involved actual discrimination. Instead, most just concerned pejorative epithets,
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, pp. 1-2).
In the typical case, one child would call another "eta." The burakumin child would
complain to his parents. The parents would obtain an apology from the other child's parents. Theyand others from the buraku would then demand an additional apology from the teacher for notteaching the children properly. They would demand an apology from the school principal for notsupervising the teachers properly. They would attack the police for not stopping the taunts. Finally,
they would turn to the local government for not administering the schools appropriately -- andsettle for subsidies to the local buraku (Aoki 1998, p. 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 the growth of the Suiheisha,reported the Kyoto police (Kyoto fu 1924, p. 258), commoners stopped distinguishing betweensocial and anti-social burakumin. Instead, they now viewed all burakumin suspiciously. "Nevermind 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 fu 1924, p. 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, in order to discharge the burakumin they have, some employers
announce that they face a business downturn and lay off all of their employees. They thenhire back only the ordinary 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 and women who contributed to
the group's social and economic infrastructure. Recall from Figure 1 that from 1870 to 1935, theburakumin population grew in tandem 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 Albert 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 thecommunity (to exercise Hirschman's "voice"), they would have needed to confront Matsumoto andthe 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 began to exit in massive numbers.
VIII. The Shake-down Politics of the Post-war Buraku
A. 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

Ramseyer: Page 39
retained its fringe-left patina, but only as a patina. First and foremost, the BLL was an organization
dedicated to using the threat of violence to shake down governments and extract buraku-specifictransfer payments. By manipulating construction and land-sale contracts, the League's leadersthen 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, the grouprenamed itself the Buraku Liberation League.
The BLL was about identity politics. It was not about class politics, and the distinction
matters. The defining characteristic of the BLL was its relentless focus on subsidies specificallyfor the buraku. It did not push for subsidies to the 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, the burakumin
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 areasadjoining the inland sea -- of poor farmers. If many Japanese avoided marrying or hiring them inthe early post-war years, the reason for that avoidance was massively over-determined. If everethnic 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 ofritual purity to understand why some Japanese might not have wanted to marry or hire a personfrom 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" of the mob, wrote burakumin journalist Nobuhiko
Kadooka (2012, pp. 53-54). "Some people marched into battle under the [Suiheisha-BLL's
distinctive emblem of a] crown of thorns out of anger toward discrimination. Others marched withplans to make 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 Seiichi Sugiyama (1951), the story told of 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, andcompassionate human bonds. And in the love across class lines, he located the promise ofreconciliation between the Korean and buraku communities, and of the redemptive 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 an interim 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.

Ramseyer: Page 40
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 wentfrom 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, p. 184). The sanitation department assured
buraku leaders that he obviously deserved criminal punishment (Kyoto 1991, pp. 474-75).
Sugiyama never published another story. An official "outrage" his apparently seldom-read lovestory has remained ever since.
C. The Sayama Murder:51
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 the way that they enabled thatwing to keep the threat both visible and credible. Most sessions were relatively small-scalecampaigns, but a few took public stage. Perhaps the most bizarrely violent of the denunciations
involved a rape and murder in suburban Tokyo.
In 1963, a family in the town of Sayama found a ransom note in their front door. Theirhigh 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, andburied 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 tothe police. After long interrogation (but not torture), he confessed to the kidnapping, rape andmurder. The court sentenced him to death (commuted to life in prison on appeal), he served time,and in 1994 the government released him on parole.
The BLL transformed Ishikawa into a buraku hero, an innocent victim of police bias. In
fact, Ishikawa fairly obviously played a key part in the rape-murder. 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. Theyinterrogated him for an astonishing month and a half without an attorney present. They may evenhave tricked him into making the confession that he did. But they pretty clearly had the right man.
Other circumstances do suggest that Ishikawa may not have raped and killed her alone.
Two days after the police located the girl's body, one of the workers on her family farm was founddead in an empty well. The police called it a suicide, and explained that he had drunk pesticideand 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 with a knife. Four months after the
district court sentenced Ishikawa to hang, 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
farm where Ishikawa had once worked lay dead on the train tracks. In 1977, one of Yoshie's
51

Much of the material below is from Ramseyer (forthcoming); Kanno (2009).

Ramseyer: Page 41
brothers was found hanged. And again in 1977, unidentified assailants beat to death a journalist
covering Ishikawa's case.52 But the handwriting and illiteracy patterns in the ransom demand andIshikawa'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 of violence 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 the home of the judge
presiding over the high court appeal. In 1976, they attacked that high-court judge in his car withbats, and in 1977 tried to firebomb the home of the judge handling the Supreme Court appeal. In
1979 they tried to firebomb a Ministry of Justice housing complex. In 1990 they did firebomb thehome of the district court judge who initially sentenced Ishikawa to death. And in 1995 the homeof the high-court presiding judge finally burned to the ground.
D. The Communist Purge:
Through the All Romance dispute, BLL leaders decisively raised the level of funds 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 the national government (e.g., Amagasaki 1988, p. 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 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 totheir private accounts, they needed to control the distribution of the contracts. They needed, as
they would put it, to be the "one window" for the funds. Necessarily, they also needed to exclude
all other potential intermediaries. In particular, they needed to exclude their rivals in the Japan
Communist Party (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 of1969, they demanded that the city government give them exclusive control over the money. Whenthe 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 through the night.
They cut his gas, water, and telephone lines. They scaled his wall and climbed onto his grounds.
Eventually, the mayor acquiesced (Nakahara 1988, pp. 128-29; Ichinomiya & Group K21 2013, p.
270).
The BLL moved from city to city. As necessary -- again, according to its critics -- itrepeated the tactics. When it faced the Habikino city government (in Osaka prefecture), BLL
52

See, e.g., Kanno (2009, pp. 301-03; Jiken kankeisha ga 6nin jisatsu, henshi shita Sayama jiken [TheSayama 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, pp. 298-299), and a variety of other sources on the internet.

Ramseyer: Page 42
members occupied city hall for 122 hours, and confined the mayor for 22.54 They did not obtain
control everywhere, and when challenged they could lose in court.55 In time, most (not all) cities
dismantled the one-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 JCP-allied teachers in the city of Yata.
There, they harangued the JCP teachers in front of 200 burakumin for 12 hours. But if these Yata"denunciations" were the best known, the 1974 "denunciations" against JCP teachers in Yoka wereperhaps the most cruel. The JCP has never been the most reliable of sources, but when burakumin
writer Yoshihiro Uehara (2014, ch. 3) travelled to Yoka decades later to interview those involvedin the event, he found reports of extensive violence. Anthropologist Thomas Rohlen (1976, pp.
685-86) was in the area doing field work at the time. According to his account, by the time thedenunciations were over, twelve of the JCP teachers had broken bones, including broken vertebrae.
Thirteen of them needed at least six weeks of hospitalization. Five more were hospitalized for amonth, 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 earn by joining
the mob, the national subsidies lowered his incentive to stay in school, leave for university, andmerge into the Japanese mainstream. In Ramseyer & Rasmusen (2018), we explored thisphenomenon through the 2002 termination of the 1969 national subsidies. More specifically, weused the 1935 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-migration levels. 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 mostdramatically in those 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 generaldeterminants of buraku out-migration over the final three decades of the 20th 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 specifically from the buraku (Subsec. D.). I
find that large subsidies substantially slowed the pace at which burakumin migrated into thegeneral public.
At root, the government subsidies constituted the pay-off funds to the local criminal
syndicates. Consider Gary Becker's general models of human capital and crime. Where subsidies
were small, young men earned low returns to criminal careers. Necessarily, they were more likely
to stay in school, perhaps leave for university, locate a job in the mainstream sector, and exit theburaku. By contrast, where subsidies were large, the same 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 in the buraku, and join the criminal syndicates.
In the process, they generated an unholy spiral: the government responded to the higher numbers
54

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

Ramseyer: Page 43
of nominally "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 evenhigher; 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 out-migration (Table 10): in whichburaku did population fall, and in which did it increase? I take as the dependent variable the buraku
population at the time of the various censuses, indexed by the burakumin population in 1921. The
variable thus 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 (seeTable 4). They capture the extent of burakumin concentration (Burakumin PC), the average sizeof buraku communities (Buraku size), the degree of urbanization (Density), the extent to whichburakumin 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 of a criminal subculture (Murders PC). I take values as near as possible
to the beginning of buraku militancy in the 1920s.
[Insert Table 10 about here.]
Preliminarily, note that out-migration rates were lower from farming communities: thecoefficient 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 willbe less likely to move than those who invest in their human capital.
The regressions suggest (obviously do not prove) that burakumin were most likely to moveout of the community and join the Japanese mainstream where they faced the lowest costs ofinvesting in a legal relative to an illegal career. On the one hand, burakumin were less likely toleave the buraku where they were at farther social distances from the general public or (what isanalytically the same thing) where the buraku provided a relatively all-encompassing social world.
Thus, the coefficient on the number of Burakumin per capita in 1921 is positive: burakumin
were less likely to leave communities with the highest density of burakumin. Similarly, thecoefficient on Buraku size in 1921 is positive: 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 thegeneral 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 -.52, significant at more than the 1 percent level. Conversely, the coefficient on
the 1920 Murder rate is positive: burakumin were less likely to leave those buraku with relatively
high criminal opportunities. Similarly, the coefficient 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 theirneighbors, young burakumin had relatively cheap access to the information, training, andRamseyer: Page 44
education necessary to build profitable careers in the mainstream sector. Where they lived in large
buraku with little contact with the outside world, they had less access to that information. Withhigh 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 national subsidies in Ramseyer &Rasmusen (2018), I do not repeat the exercise here. Instead, I examine the prefectural subsidies
that preceded the national 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 the following 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 of burakumin, as
provided in Zenkoku buraku (1998). The source does not detail 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).
[Insert Table 11 about here.]
Urban prefectures distributed the highest subsidies per burakumin capita (Panel A): thecoefficient on prefectural Density is positive for all periods, and significantly so in three of the
four. Prefectures with higher concentrations of burakumin paid higher subsidy levels: thecoefficient on Burakumin PC is similarly positive for all periods, and significantly so for three.
Curiously, all else held equal, the prefectures with more Suiheisha branch offices in 1933 paid
the least subsidies: the coefficient on the number of branch offices is negative in all periods, andand significantly 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 most impoverished buraku. Yet the fractionof buraku on public assistance, the burakumin illegitimacy rates, and the fraction of burakuminwith the income entitling them to vote are all insignificantly different from zero.
Note two further observations. First, the governments may have paid the largest subsidies
in areas where tensions between the burakumin and the other residents were highest. The factors
used in the Panel A regressions held equal, the governments paid higher subsidies where local
residents had rioted against buraku 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 to those 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 PanelB regressions is similarly insignificant.

Ramseyer: Page 45

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 theamount of prefectural subsidies, and examine the effect that subsidy levels had on the pace atwhich burakumin chose to leave buraku and merge into the general public.
[Insert Table 12 about here.]
The Table 12 regressions suggest that the prefectural subsidies slowed the pace at whichburakumin joined the general public. In the first four regressions in Table 12, I regress theburakumin population indexed by 1921 values on the level of subsidies per burakumin (Subsidies
PBC), burakumin concentration (in percentages; 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 is .28, significant at the 7 percent level; between 1963
population and 1947-62 subsidies .33, significant at the 3 percent level; between 1967 populationand 1947-66 subsidies .52, significant at the .1 percent level, and between 1971 population and1947-68 subsidies .55, significant at the .01 percent level. The magnitude of the effect is not trivial.
Suppose we increase the level of subsidies from those paid in Saitama (.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 with which burakumin
are rooted to their community. Accordingly, I instrument the level 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 voters 1921, Anti-liberation riots, and Shirayama shrines. In the last four
regressions of Table 11, I report the two-stage least squares results. Here too significance levels
and the Cragg-Donald Wald F statistics are sensitive to the variables used. Nonetheless, thecoefficients on the subsidy levels are positive and significant in all four regressions: the higher
the rate of subsidies, the lower the level at which burakumin leave to join the mainstream Japanesesociety.
One can interpret the results in two very different ways. On the one hand, this phenomenon
is consistent with a ruthlessly straightforward explanation: if the government 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 5 shows, more burakumin staying is associated withhigher crime rates. And as detailed elsewhere (Ramseyer & Rasmusen 2018), for much of the
post-war period the mob dominated the BLL, and used its control over construction contracts todivert large portions of the funds to their private accounts. During the peak of the mob in the
1980s, 20-25 percent 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 tocriminal careers, the subsidies caused young burakumin to drop out of school, join the mob, andpursue buraku-specific criminal careers. Where subsidy levels were lower, young men stayed inschool, left the buraku for university, and pursued mainstream careers instead.
X. Conclusions

Ramseyer: Page 46
The burakumin illustrate a group that has received substantial attention in the West, yetremains widely misunderstood. Fundamentally, Western scholars and intellectuals miss the logic
to the buraku's transformation because they miss the basic economics of social behavior -- ofbehavior outside of the realm of classic markets.
Contrary to the accounts in the West, the burakumin are not outcastes, and probably neverwere. With few exceptions, they are not descended from tanners or leather-workers. They aredescended from poor farmers.
By the 1920s, the buraku developed a visible criminal fringe. Together with young
intellectuals from the burakumin upper class, these criminal entrepreneurs fashioned for the groupa largely fictive identity. To fit within the dictates of Marx's German Ideology, they declared theburaku the descendants of a leather worker's guild. Their ancestors had suffered unrelenting
discrimination, the leaders declared, out of a religiously inspired aversion to members of a ritually
unclean guild.
Over the course of the rest of the century, criminal leaders within the buraku embarked on
full-scale shake-down identity politics. They transformed their claims of pervasive discrimination
into violent extortionate tactics that brought 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 Japanese behavioral norms
had often done well, and had stayed within the community and helped to build its social andeconomic infrastructure. After the 1920s, they left. Under Hirschman's classic typology, they
faced trivial costs of "exit." As the criminal entrepreneurs increased the general levels of hostility
toward the group, burakumin pursuing legitimate careers simply moved out of the buraku andmigrated into the general public.
In turn, the young burakumin who invested in criminal careers caused the subsidies 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 numbersof 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 to raise the level oftransfer payments; and so it went. Burakumin who chose to live by the general behavioral normsof Japanese society left the buraku and migrated into the general public. Disproportionately, those
who chose to invest in criminal careers chose to stay.

Ramseyer: Page 47
Bibliography
Abele, Michael Thomas. 2018. Peasants, Skinners, and Dead Cattle: The Transformation of
Rural Society in Western Japan, 1600-1890. Ph.D. dissertation in History, University of
Illinois.
Aichi ken shakai ka. 1928. Furyo jutaku chiku ni kansuru chosa (II) [Survey of Poor Housing
Districts, II].
Akisada, Yoshikazu. 1974. 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.
Amagasaki buraku kaiho shi hensan iinkai. 1988. Amagasaki buraku kaiho shi [The Liberation
History of the Amagasaki Buraku]. Amagasaki: Aamagasaki dowa mondai.
Amos, Timothy D. 2011. Embodying Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Anon. 1918. Dozoku no bodo ni inshi shita burakumin no isho [The Will of a Burakumin who
Perished in the Group's Riot]. Tokyo Asahi shimbun, Sept. 11, p. 5.
Aoki, Takaju. 1982. Kindai buraku shi no kenkyu [Studies in the Early Modern History of the
Buraku]. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu jo.
Aoki, Takaju. 1998. Buraku mondai no rekishi to undo [The History and Movement Relating to
the Buraku Problem]. Nagano: Nagano ken buraku mondai kenkyu kai.
Asada, Zennosuke. 1979. Asada Zennosuke zen kiroku [The Full Record of Zennosuke Asada].
Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha.
Asahi shimbun sha, ed. 1982. Tochi korogashi [Land Sale Manipulation]. Fukuoka: Ashi shobo.
Asaji, Takeshi, et al. 2009. Motto shiritai buraku no rekishi [I'd Like to Know More About
Buraku History]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan sha.
Bahara, Tetsuo. 1984. "Nihon shihon shugi to burakumondai" ron [The Debate over "Japanese
Capitalism and the Buraku Problem], at 125-154. In Buraku mondai kenkyu jo, ed.,Burakushi no kenkyu [Research in Buraku History]. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu jo.
Bayliss, Jeffrey Paul. 2013. On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar
and Wartime Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bondy, Christopher. 2015. Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity inContemporary Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
Buraku kaiho jinken kenkyusho, ed. 2017. Hisabetsu mainoritii no ima [Current DiscriminatedAgainst Minorities]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan sha.
Buraku kaiho Osaka fu kigyo rengo kai, ed. 1978. Osaka ni okeru buraku kigyo no rekishi togenjo [The History and Present Status of Buraku Firms in Osaka]. Osaka: Buraku kaiho
Osaka fu kigyo rengo kai.
Buraku mondai kenkyu jo, ed. 2016. Mibun teki juen to buraku mondai no chiiki shiteki kenkyu[Studies in the Regional History of the Status Environent and the Buraku Problem.] Kyoto:
Buraku mondai kenkyu jo.
Buraku mondai kenkyu jo. 1980. Buraku mondai shiryo, vol. 1. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu
sho.
Chuo yuwa jigyo kyokai. 1936. Zenkoku buraku chosa [National Survey of Buraku] (labeled
Top Secret).
Ehlers, Maren. 2018. Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ehlers, Maren. Forthcoming. Outcastes and their Social Roles. In The Tokugawa World.
London: Routledge.

Ramseyer: Page 48
Endo, Ryukichi. 1912. Nihonga [The Essence of Japan]. Tokyo: Soen gakusha.
Fujino, Yutaka. 2009b. Kindai Nihon no hajimari to buraku mondai no seiritsu [The Beginningof Early Modern Japan and the Creation of the Buraku Problem]. In Kurokawa & Fujino(2009, 15-47).
Fujita, Keiichi. 1987. Dowa wa kowai ko [On the Thought that the Burakumin Are Frightening].
Tokyo: Aun sosho.
Fujita, Keiichi. 1988. "Dowa wa kowai" ko tsushin, 13 {"The Burakumin Are Frightening"
Message 13. Available at: http://www.geocities.jp/kowaikou/13.htm
Fujita, Tomohiko. 1971. Senzen, sengo no dowa gyozaisei [Buraku Administration and Finance
Before and After the War]. Osaka shiritsu daigaku keizaigaku zasshi, 65: 1-35.
Fukuoka ken jinken kenkyujo. 2003. Matsumoto Jiichiro. Fukuoka: Nishi Nihon shinbun sha.
Funakoshi, Masaru. 1976. Hisabetsu buraku keisei shi no kenkyu [Studies in the Formation of
the Discriminated-Against Buraku]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan sha.
Hankins, Joseph D. 2014. Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan.
Oakland: University of California Press.
Harada, Keiichi. 1989. Komesodo no kenkyu no ikkaku [A Perspective on the Study of the Rice
Riots]. Buraku mondai kenkyu. 99: 81-94.
Haraguchi, Hideo. 2014. Hisabetsu buraku no rekishi to seikatsu bunka [The History and Life
Culture of the Discriminated-Against Buraku]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.
Hasegawa, Nei. 1927. Suiheiundo narabe ni kore ni kansuru hanzai no kenkyu [A Study in theLeveler Movement and Associated Crimes]. Shiho kenkyu, 5(4).
Hatanaka, Toshiyuki. 1990. Kinsei sonraku shakai no mibun kozo [The Structure of Status in
Tokugawa Village Society]. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyu jo.
Hatanaka, Toshiyuki. 1993. "Buraku shi" wo tou [Questioning "Buraku History"]. Kobe: Hyogoburaku mondai kenkyujo.
Hatanaka, Toshiyuki. 1995. "Buraku shi" no owari [The End of "Buraku History"]. Kyoto:
Kamogawa shuppan.
Hatanaka, Toshiyuki. 1997. "Kawata" to heinin ["Burakumin" and Commoners]. Kyoto:
Kamogawa shuppan.
Hatanaka, Toshiyuki. 2004. Minbun, sabetsu, aidentiti [Status, Discrimination, Identity]. Kyoto:
Kamogawa shuppan.
Hayami, Akira. 2009. Population, Family and Society inPre-Modern Japan. In Collected Papersof Twentieth-Century Japanese Writers on Japan. Kent, U.K.: Global Oriental.
Higashi Nihon buraku kaiho kenkyu jo, ed. 2018. Higashi Nihon no buraku shi III [The Historyof the Buraku of Eastern Japan III]. Tokyo: Gendai shokan.
Hirohata, Kenji. 2006. Senzen ki keisatsu kankei shiryo shu, I [Collection of Pre-war PoliceRelated Documents, Vol. I]. Tokyo: Funi shuppan.
Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Honda, Yutaka. 1991. Buraku shi wo aruku [Walking Buraku History]. Tokyo: Aki shobo.
Howell, David L. 1996. Ethnicity and Culture in Contemporary Japan. J. Contemporary Hist.,
31: 171-90.
Howell, David L. 2005. Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Ichinomiya, Yoshinari & Group K21. 2007. Osaka dowa tekoku no shotai [The Truth about the
Osaka Burakumin Empire]. Tokyo: Takarajima.

Ramseyer: Page 49
Ichinomiya, Yoshinari & Group K21. 2012. Dowa to boryokudan [The Burakumin and the Mob].
Tokyo: Takarajima sha.
Ichinomiya, Yoshinari & Group K21. 2013. Kansai dowa jinmyaku [Prominent Burakumin of
the Kansai Area]. Tokyo: Takarajima sha.
Ichinomiya, Yoshinari & Group K21. 2016. Yamaguchi gumi bunretsu no shinso [The Truth
about the Yamaguchi gumi Split]. Tokyo: Takarajima.
Inagaki, Yuichi, Nobuaki Teramoto, Kenji Nakao. 1993. Buraku shi wo do kangaeru ka [How toThink About Buraku History]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan sha (2d ed.).
Ishii, Ryosuke, ed. 1994. Edo jidai no hisabetsu shakai [Discriminated-Against Society During
the Edo Period]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.
Ito, Tauya. 2005. Cooperativeness and Buraku Discrimination." Electronic J. Contemp. JapaneseStud. vol. 5
Kadooka, Nobuhiko. 2005. Hajimete no buraku mondai [Buraku Issues for Beginners]. Tokyo:
Bungei shunju.
Kadooka, Nobuhiko. 2009. Tokoton! Buraku mondai [Tokoton! The Buraku Issue]. Tokyo:
Kodansha.
Kadooka, Nobuhiko. 2012. Pisutoru to keikan [A Pistol and a Crown of Thorns]. Tokyo:
Kodansha.
Kagawa, Toyohiko. 1915. Hinmin shinri no kenkyu [A Study of the Psychology of the Poor].
Tokyo: Keisei sha shoten.
Kagawa, Toyohiko. 1919. Seishin undo to shakai undo [Spiritual Movements and Social
Movements]. Tokyo: Keiseisha.
Kagaya Masumi. 2014. Meiji no hinkon wo meguru jojutsu [A Description of the Poverty
During the Meiji Period], Bungaku kenkyu ron shu, 32: 19-32.
Kanno, Ryoji. 2009. Saibanin jidai ni miru Sayama jiken [The Sayama Case, Examined in theAge of Jury Trials]. Tokyo: Gendai jimbun sha.
Keiho kyoku. 1922. Suiheisha undo jokyo [Circumstances of the Suiheisha Movement], Dec. 5,
1922. Reproduced in Hirohata (20xx, 43).
Keisatsu cho, ed. Various years. Keisatsu hakusho [Police White Paper]. Tokyo: Gyosei.
Keisatsu cho. 2011. Hanzai tokei sho [Crime Statistics]. As available on https://www.estat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Kida, Sadakichi. 1919. Tokushu buraku kenkyu [Studies of the Special Buraku]. Tokyo: Sekai
bunko (1968 reprint).
Kikuchi, Sansai. 1961a. Nihon no tokushu buraku [The Special Villages of Japan], vol. 1. Tokyo:
Tokyo shidan kai.
Kikuchi, Sansai. 1961b. Nihon no tokushu buraku [The Special Villages of Japan], vol. 2. Tokyo:
Tokyo shidan kai.
Kirisuto shimbun sha. 1991. Shiryo shu: "Kagawa Toyohiko zenshu" to buraku sabetsu[Materials: "The Complete Works of Toyohiko Kagawa" and Buraku Discrimination].
Tokyo: Kirisuto shimbun sha.
Kitagawa, Hiroshi. 1940. Jiji 50 nenshi [Fifty-Year History of Self-Government]. Tokyo:
Ryosho fukyu kai.
Kobayashi, Shigeru & Yoshikazu Akisada. 1989. Buraku shi kenkyu hando bukku [Handbook
on Research on History of the Buraku]. Tokyo: Yuzankaku shuppan, .
Kobayashi, Shigeru. 1985. Buraku sabetsu no rekishiteki kenkyu [Historical Study ofDiscrimination Against the Buraku]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.

Ramseyer: Page 50
Kohara, Shinzo. 1910. Nara ken ka ni okeru tokushumin buraku kaizo no hoshin [The Directionof Special Buraku in Nara Prefecture]. Kokka gakkai zasshi, 24: 1431-1476.
Kosei rodo sho. 2011a. Hihogosha chosa [Survey of Assisted People]. As available at:https://www.e-stat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Kosei rodo sho. 2011b. Todofukenbetsu seimei hyo [Life Expectancy by Prefecture]. Available
at: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Kosei rodo sho. Various years. Jinko dotai tokei [Vital Statistics]. Available at: https://www.estat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Kristof, Nicholas D. 1995. Japan's Invisible Minority: Better Off Than in Past, but Still Outcasts.
N.Y. Times, Nov. 30, 1995.
Kurokawa, Midori, & Yutaka Fujino, eds. 2009. Kingendai buraku shi [History of the Modern
and Early Modern Buraku]. Tokyo: Yushisha.
Kurokawa, Midori. 1989. Kindai Nihon to buraku mondai kenkyu no jokyo [Early Modern Japanand the Circumstances of the Study of the Buraku]. In Shigeru Kobayashi & Yoshikazu
Akisada, eds., Buraku shi kenkyu hando bukku [Handbook of Buraku Historical Studies].
Tokyo: Yuzankaku shuppan.
Kurokawa, Midori. 2016. Tsukurareta "jinshu" [The Created "Race"]. Tokyo: Yushikai.
Kyoto buraku shi kenkyu jo. 1995. Kyoto no buraku shi [The History of Kyoto Buraku], vol. 1.
Kyoto: Kyoto buraku shi kenkyu jo.
Kyoto buraku shi kenkyujo. 1991. Kyoto no buraku shi 2 [The History of the Kyoto Buraku, 2].
Kyoto: Kyoto buraku shi kenkyujo.
Kyoto fu keisatsu bu. 1922, 1924. Suihei undo no josei [The Circumstances of the Suiheisha
Movement]. Reproduced in Hirohata (2006).
Kyoto fu keisatsu bu. 1922. Suiheisha josei ippan [Some Thoughts on the Circumstances of the
Suiheisha]. Reproduced in Hirohata (2006).
Mae, Keiichi. 1975. Kinsei kawata no heigyuba shori ken [The Right of Tokugawa Period Kawata
to Dispose of Dead Cattle and Horses]. In Seiban (1975), at 199.
Matsuoka, Hideo. 1975. Buraku hogo seisaku ron hihan [Critique of Theory of Buraku Protection
Policy]. In Seiban (1975), at 13.
McCormack, Noah Y. 2013. Japan's Outcaste Abolition: The Struggle for National Inclusion and
the Making of the Modern State. London: Routledge.
McDonald, Forrest & Grady McWhiney. 1980. The South from Self-Sufficiency to Peonage:
An Interpretation. American Historical Review, 85: 1095-1118.
McWhiney, Grady. 1988. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press.
Minegishi, Kentaro. 1996. Kinsei hisabetsu min shi no kenkyu [Studies in the History ofDiscriminated-Against People in Western Japan]. Tokyo: Azekura shobo.
Mitani, Hideshi. 1985. Hi no kusari [Chains of Fire]. Tokyo: Sodo bunka.
Miyamoto, Masahito. 2013. Mirai he tsunagu kaiho undo [The Liberation Movement Tying Us
to the Future]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.
Miyazaki, Manabu & Akihiro Otani. 2000. Guriko Morinaga jiken [The Guriko Morinaga Case].
Tokyo: Gentosha.
Monbu kagaku sho. 2011a. Gakko kihon chosa hokoku sho [Report of Basic Survey of Schools.]
Available at: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Monbu kagaku sho. 2011b. Gakko hoken tokei chosa hokoku hyo [Report of Survey into School
Insurance]. Available at: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.

Ramseyer: Page 51
Monbu sho. 1937. Gakusei seito jido shincho, taiju, kyoi heikin ruinen hikaku, Meiji 33-Showa
9 nendo [Comparative Annual Averages of the Height, Weight, and Chest Circumferencesof Students and Children, 1900-1934]. Tokyo: Monbu sho.
Mori, Isao. 2009. Dowa to ginko [The Buraku and the Bank.] Tokyo: Kodansha.
Morooka, Sukeyuki. 1980. Sengo buraku kaio ronso shi, I [History of the Post-War Debates over
Buraku Liberation, I]. Tokyo: Takushoku shobo.
Naikaku tokei kyoku, ed. 1935. Jinko dotai tokei [Vital Statistics]. Tokyo: Tokyo tokei kyokai.
Naikaku. 1995. Naikaku iinkai chiiki kaizen taisaku ni kansuru shoinnkai giroku, No. 1 [Cabinet
Committee, Record of Subcommittee on District Renewal Policy], for 132d Parliament,
meeting of May 23, 1995.
Naikakufu. 2011. Kenmin keizai keisan nenpo [Prefectural Citizens, Economic Calculations
Annual]. Available at: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Naimu daijin kanbo bunsho ka. 1888. Dainihon teikoku naimusho dai 2 kai tokei hokoku [2dStatistical Report, Ministry of Interior, Great Japanese Empire].
Naimu daijin kanbo bunsho ka. 1909. Dainihon teikoku naimusho dai 23 kai tokei hokoku [23dStatistical Report, Ministry of Interior, Great Japanese Empire].
Naimu daijin kanbo bunsho ka. 1922. Dainihon teikoku naimusho dai 36 kai tokei hokoku [36thStatistical Report, Ministry of Interior, Great Japanese Empire].
Naimu daijin kanbo bunsho ka. 1924. Dainihon teikoku naimusho dai 37 kai tokei hokoku [37thStatistical Report, Ministry of Interior, Great Japanese Empire].
Naimu daijin kanbo bunsho ka. 1927. Dainihon teikoku naimusho dai 49 kai tokei hokoku [49thStatistical Report, Ministry of Interior, Great Japanese Empire].
Naimu sho 1922. Suiheisha undo jokyo [Circumstances of the Suiheisha Movement]. In
Hirohata (2006, 43).
Naimu sho, ed. 1933. Kokumin hoken ni kansuru tokei [Statistics Regarding the Insurance of
Citizens]. Tokyo: Naimu sho.
Naimu sho. 1921. Buraku ni kansuru shotokei [Statistics Regarding the Buraku]. Tokyo: Naimusho. Reproduced in Sanichi shobo, ed., Nihon somin seikatsu shiryo shusei [Collection ofMaterials Regarding the Japanese Poor] (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobo, 1980).
Naimu sho. 1922. Suiheisha undo jokyo [Circumstances of the Suiheisha Movement], Dec. 5,1922 (labeled Top Secret). Reproduced in Kenji Hirota, ed., Senzenki keisatsu kankei
shiryo shu [Collection of Pre-War Police Material] (Tokyo: Funi shuppan, 2006), p. 43.
Nakajima, Shigeru. 2013. Meiji ki Aichi ken no shichoson saihen ni tsuite [Regarding the
Reorganization of Municipalities in Aichi Prefecture During the Meiji Period]. Aichi
kenritsu daigaku daigakuin kokusai bunka kenkyuka ron shu, 14: 1.
Nakamura, Kazuo & Atsushi Terazono. 2007. Saraba! Dowa chudoku toshi [Farewell! Buraku
Poisoned City]. Kyoto: Kamogawa shuppan.
Nara ken, ed. 1970. Nara ken dowa jigyo shi [History of Burakumin Policy in Nara Prefecture].
Nara: self-pub.
Naramoto, Tatsuya. 1955. Mikaiho buraku no shakai kozo [The Social Structure of the
Unliberated Buraku]. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo.
Naramoto, Tatsuya. No date. Mikaiho buraku no shakai kozo [The Social Structure of the
Unliberated Buraku]. Buraku, 53: 70-79.
Neary, Ian. 1989. Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-War Japan: The Origins of Buraku
Liberation. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.

Ramseyer: Page 52
Neary, Ian. 2010. The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichiro.
Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge.
Neary, Ian. 2016. Buraku mondai to gendai Nihon: Matsumoto Jiichiro no shogai [The Buraku
Problem and Modern Japan: The Life of Matsumoto Jiichiro]. Sen'ichi Moriyama,transl. Tokyo: Akashi shoten.
Nihon gesui kyokai. 2011. Gesuido kotei [Statistics on Sewage.] Available at: https://www.estat.go.jp/regional-statistics/ssdsview/prefectures.
Nihon shakai undo tsushin sha. 1934. Shakai undo dantai gensei ichiran [Strength of Social
Movement Groups]. Tokyo: Nihon shakai undo tsushin sha.
Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformation in Japanese History
and Ritual. Princeton: Princeton Uiversity Press, 1989.
Ohsato, Katsuma. 1966. Honpo shuyo keizai tokei [Hundred-Year Statistics of the Japanese
Economy]. Tokyo: Bank of Japan.
Okazaki, Fumiki. 1950. Nihon jinko no jissho teki kenkyu [Empirical Study of the Japanese
Population]. Tokyo: Hokuryukan.
Okurasho. 1923. Shuzeikyoku dai 50 kai tokei nempo sho [50th Annual Report of the Tax Office].
Tokyo: Okurasho.
Ooms, Herman. 1996. Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Osaki, Tomohiro. 2016. New Law to Fight Bias Against 'Burakumin' Seen Falling Short. Japan
Times, Dec. 19, 2016.
Ozaki, Yukiya. 1982. Shinshu hisabetsu buraku no shiteki kenkyu [A Historical Study of theDiscriminated-against Buraku in Shinshu]. Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo.
Ramseyer, J. Mark & Eric B. Rasmusen. 2018. Outcaste Politics and Organized Crime in Japan:
The Effect of Terminating Ethnic Subsidies. J. Empirical Legal Stud., 15: 192.
Ramseyer, J. Mark. Forthcoming. Amerika kara mita Nihon ho [Japanese Law from an American
Perspective. Tokyo: Yuhikaku.
Rankin, Andrew. 2012. 21st-Century Yakuza: Recent Trends in Organized Crime in Japan (Parts
I and II), Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 10 (2012).
Rohlen, Thomas P. 1976. Violence at Yoka High School: The Implications for Japanese Coalition
Politics of the Confrontation between the Communist Party and the Buraku Liberation
League. Asian Survey, 16: 682-99.
Ryosuke, Ishii. 1994. Edo hoken taiseika no sabetsu [Discimination Under the Edo Feudal
System]. In Ishii (1994), at 89.
Saito, Osamu & Masanori Takashima. 2015a. Population, Urbanisation and Farm Output in Early
Modern Japan, 1600-1874: A Review of Data and Benchmark Estimates. Hitotsubashi
University RCESR DP 15-3.
Saito, Osamu & Masanori Takashima. 2015b. Estimating the Shares of Secondary- and TertiarySector Output in the Age of Early Modern Growth: The Case of Japan, 1600-1874.
Hitotsubashi University RCESR DP 15-4.
Saito, Osamu. 2005. Moidern Economic Growth Revisited: Japan and the West. LSE Dept.
Econ. Hist. Working Paper No. 16/05.
Saito, Osamu. 2009. Land, Labour and Market Forces in Tokugawa Japan, Continuity & Change,
24: 169-196.
Saito, Yoichi & Shinsaburo Oishi. 1995. Mibun sabetsu shakai no shinjutsu [The Truth about the
Status-discrimination Society]. Toyo: Kodansha.

Ramseyer: Page 53
Sakurada, Bungo [Pseudonym: Koji Taiga]. 1893. Hintenchi kikankutsu tankenki [Explorationof Attractive and Unattractive Locations of the Poor]. Tokyo: Nihon shinbun sha.
San'sai Kikuchi. 1961. Nihon no tokushu buraku [Japan's Special Villages]. 2vols. Tokyo:
Tokyo shidankai.
Seiban chiiki kawata mura bunsho kenkyu kai, ed. 1975. Kinsei burakushi no kenkyu [Studies inthe History of Tokugawa Buraku]. Tokyo: Yuzankaku shuppan.
Sengo buraku no sabetsu jotai no haaku ni tsuite [Regarding Grasping the Actual Circumstancesof Discrimination Against the Buraku], p. 30. Publication information not given, butposted at: http://www.blhrri.org/old/info/book_guide/kiyou/ronbun/kiyou_0082-15.pdf
Shakai mondai shiryo kenkyukai, ed. 1938. Iwayuru kome sodo jiken no kenkyu [A Study of
the So-called Rice Riots Case]. Kyoto: Toyo bunka (1974 reprint).
Shigemitsu, Minoru. 1991. Yanagihara Ginko shi [History of the Yanagihara Bank]. Available
at http://suujin.org/Yanagihara/TimeofYBank3.html.
Shiomi, Sen'ichiro. 2008. Hinmin no teito [The Poor's Capital]. Tokyo: Bungei shunju.
Shiomi, Sen'ichiro. 2011. Shin: Buraku sabetsu wa nakunattaka? [New: Has Buraku
Discrimination Disappeared?]. Tokyo: Ryokufu shuppan.
Shiomi, Sen'ichiro. 2012. Do nakusu? Buraku sabetsu [How to Eliminate Buraku
Discrimination?]. Tokyo: Ryokufu shuppan.
Somu cho. 1995. 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.
Sugiyama, Seiichi. 1951. Tokushu buraku [Special Buraku], Oru romansu, Oct. 1951.
Reproducedat:
http://muhajirin.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/12/ee2f1b6fbc8a92429e8c92e641863a50.pdf.
Suzuki, Ryo. 2016. Chiiki shihai kozo no hatten [The Development of the Regional Control
Structure]. In Buraku mondai (2016), at 15-46.
Suzuki, Umeshiro. 1888. Osaka Nago-Machi hinmin shakai no jikkyo ki ryaku [Summary of
Circumstances of the Impoverished Society of Nago-cho, in Osaka]. Tokyo: Jiji shimpo.
Available at http://www.npokamo.org/kamamat/bunsitu/koten/sisatuki2.htm.
Suzuki, Umeshiro. 1918b. Koshitsu shakai shisei [New World for the Imperial Society].
Tokyo: Jitsu seikatsu sha.
Suzuki, Umeshiro. 1918a. Osaka Nago machi hinminkutsu shisatsu ki [Records of Observationsof the Impoverished Slum of Osaka's Nago machi] (written in 1888, reprinted as anappendix in Suzuki (1918b).
Takahashi, Fumihiko. 2005. Suiheiki [Record of the Levellers]. Tokyo: Shincho sha.
Takahashi, Sadaki. 1924. Hisabetsu buraku issen nen shi [A 1000 Year History of theDiscriminated-against Buraku]. Tokyo: Iwanami. Reprinted by Iwanami, 1992.
Takano, Akio. 2013. Kome sodo kenkyu to jugyo kaihatsu [Studies of the Rice Riots and theDevelopment of the Curriculum]. Kokufudai gakkai keizai kenkyu kai, 123 kai.
Takashima, Masanori. 2017. Keizai seicho no Nihon shi [Economic Growth in the Japanese Past.
Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai.
Takayanagi, Kaneyoshi. 1979. Edo jidai hisabetsu mibun so no seikatsu shi [A History of the
Way of Life for the Discriminated-Against Class During the Tokugawa Period]. Tokyo:
Meiseki shoten.
Takayose, Shozo. 2006. Meiji chiho zaisei shi, dai 5 maki [History of Meiji Regional Public
Finance, Vol. 5]. Tokyo: Keiso shobo.

Ramseyer: Page 54
Takeuchi, Yasuto. 2016. Shizuoka ken Suiheisha no rekishi [The History of the Suiheisha in
Shizuoka Prefecture]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan sha.
Teikoku chiho gyosei gakkai. 1922. Chiho gyosei nenkan [Regional Administrative Annual].
Reproduced in Yoshikazu Akisada, et al., eds., Kindai burakushi shiryo shusei 10[Collected Materials on Early Modern Buraku History, vol. 10].
Teraki, Nobuaki & Midori Kurokawa. 2016. Nyumon: Hisabetsu buraku no kenkyu[Introduction: A Study of the Discriminated-against Buraku]. Osaka: Kaiho shuppan
sha.
Teraki, Nobuaki. 1996. Hisabetsu buraku no kigen [The Origin of Discriminated-Against
Villages]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.
Terazono, Atsushi, Yoshinari Ichinomiya & Group K21. 2004. Dowa riken no shinso (I) [The
Truth of Burakumin Corruption]. Tokyo: Takarajima sha.
Tominaga, Kenzo. 2015. Buraku kaiho wo kangaeru [Thinking about Buraku Liberation]. Osaka:
Kaiho shuppan sha.
Tomuro, Kensaku. 2016. Todofukenbetsu no hinkon ritsu, waakingu pua ritsu, kodomo no hinkon
ritsu, hosokuritsu no kento [Trends Observed in Poverty Rates, Working Poor Rates, Child
Poverty Rates and Take-Up Rates of Public Assistance Across 47 Prefectures in Japan].
Yamagata daigaku jinbungaku kenkyu nempo. 13: 33-53.
Torigai, Keiyo. 1988. Kagawa Toyohiko to gendai [Toyohiko Kagawa and Today]. Kobe:
Hyogo buraku mondai kenkyu sho.
Torigai, Keiyo. 2002. Kagawa Toyohiko: Saihakken [The Rediscovery of Toyohiko Kagawa].
Osaka: Sogensha.
Toson, Uokyaku. 1889. Daien ishi ni tou [Challenging Daien Ishi]. Reprinted in Okiuchi(1991, 78).
Tottori Ruupu saiban de dai ikkai kohan [First Public Hearing in Tottori Loop Trial]. Buraku
kaiho domei Osaka fu rengokai.
July 13, 2016.
Posted at:
http://www.hrn.gr.jp/news/1790/.
Tsujimoto, Takeshi. 2007. Dowa chiku no tei gakuryoku [The Lower Education Level of the
Buraku Areas]. http://tsujimoto.asablo.jp/blog/2007/05/18/1515064
Tsujimoto, Takeshi. 2012. Dowa chiku no hinko ka [Increasing Poverty in Buraku Areas].
http://tsujimoto.asablo.jp/blog/2012/07/29/6525302
Tsukada, Takashi. 2001. Toshi Osaka to hinin [The City of Osaka and the Hinin]. Tokyo:
Yamakawa shuppan sha.
Tsukada, Takashi. 2007. Kinsei Osaka no hinin to mibunteki shuen [The Early Modern Hinin of
Osaka and Their Status Context]. Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo.
Uchida Kyushuo. 1975. Kawata fugo no jittai to yakuwari [The Truth and Function of Wealthy
Kawata]. In Seiban (1975), at 301.
Uehara, Yoshihiro. 2014. Sabetsu to kyoiku to watashi [Discrimination, Education, and I].
Tokyo: Bungei shunju.
Uematsu, Yasutaro. 1977. Ningen kaiho wo mezashite [Toward Human Liberation]. Tokyo:
Sokisha.
Upham, Frank K. 1988. Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Usui, Hisamitsu. 1991. Hyogo no burakushi, 1 [The History of the Hyogo Buraku, Vol. 1]. Kobe:
Kobe shimbun sogo shuppan sentaa.

Ramseyer: Page 55
Wakita, Osamu. 1991. "The Social and Economic Consequences of Unification." In John
Whitney Hall, ed., The Cambridge History of Japan, v. 4, at 96-127. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Watabane, Hiroshi. 1963. Mikaiho buraku no shiteki kenkyu [A Historical Study of the
Unliberated Villages]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan.
Watanabe, Hiroshi. 1977. Mikaiho buraku no keisei to tenkai [The Structure and Developmentof the Unliberated Villages]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan.
Watanabe, Minoru. 1965. Mikaiho buraku shi no kenkyu [The Study of Unliberated Buraku].
Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan.
Yamamoto, Noboru. 1984. Buraku sabetsu no shakaigaku teki kenkyu [A Sociological Study of
Buraku Discrimination]. Tokyo: Meiseki shoten.
Yamamura, Kozo. 1981. Returns to Unification: Economic Growth in Japan, 1550-1650, in John
Whitney Hall, Keiji Nagahara & Kozo Yamamura, eds., Japan Before Tokugawa: Political
Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650 327-72 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981).
Yanagida, Kunio. 1913. Iwayuru tokushu buraku no shurui [The Types of So-called Special
Buraku]. Kokka gakkai zasshi, 27: 753-82.
Yanagida, Kunio. 2017. Senmin ni sareta hitobito [The People Made Outcasts]. Tokyo:
Kawaide shobo.
Yokomichi, Kiyotaka. 2007. Nihon ni okeru shichoson gappei no shinten [The Progress ofMergers among Municipalities in Japan]. GRIPS & Jijitai kokusaika kyokai, Working
Paper.
Yokoyama, Gennosuke. 1898. Nihon no kaso shakai [Lower Class Society in Japan]. Tokyo:
Kyobunkan.
Yoshida, Eishi. 1997. Nara ni okeru "buraku shi no minaoshi" ["Reconsidering Buraku History"in Nara]. In Zenkoku buraku shi kenkyu koryu kai, ed., Tayo na hisabetsumin no sekai[The Diverse World of the Discriminated Against People]. 76-104. Osaka: Kaiho shuppansha.
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 by Year for All Buraku Districts, Together With the Basic Material of the1993 Prefectural Circumstances Survey]. Tokyo: Zenkoku buraku kaiho undo rengokai.

Ramseyer: Page 56
Table 1:

Burakumin National Population

National Population:
1868
1907
1921
1922
1935
1942
1946

492,409799,434
829,675
836,568
999,687
550,213
1,004,528

1958
1963
1967
1971
1975
1987
1993

1,220,157
1,113,043
1,068,302
1,005,129
1,119,278
1,166,715
892,751

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 nonenjibetsu gaikyo chosa narabi ni 1993 nen genzai no fukenbetsu gaikyo chosakiso 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.
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 of Materials Regarding the Japanese Poor](Tokyo: San'ichi Shobo, 1980).
Naimu sho, Suiheisha undo jokyo [Circumstances of the Suiheisha
Movement], Dec. 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 [AStudy of the Suihei Movement and of the Crimes Related to It], Shiho kenkyu,
vol. 5 issue 4, 1927.
Kobayashi & Akisada (1989).
Buraku mondai (1980).

(Continued on next page)Ramseyer: Page 57
Table 1:

National Population (Continued)

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 Circumstances of 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
Buraku mondai (1980).
Zenkoku buraku (1998).
1971
Zenkoku buraku (1998).
1975
http://douwachiku.com/wiki/zenkokunodouwachiku.
the survey to the Naikaku sori daijin.
Zenkoku buraku (1998).

The source attributes

1987
Senichiro Shiomi, Do nakusu? Buraku sabetsu [How to Eliminate Buraku
Discrimination?] (Tokyo: Ryokufu shuppan, 2012).
Kobayashi & Akisada (1989).
Zenkoku buraku (1998)
1993
Somu cho, Heisei 5 nendo dowa chiku jittai haaku to chosa [Survey toGrasp 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).

Ramseyer: Page 58

Table 2:

Burakumin Prefectural PopulationA.

1868-1958:
1868
1868 1907 1921 1921
1922 1935 1942 1946 1958
Prefecture Number Index Index Index Number Index Index Index Index Index
Hokkaido

00
Tohoku region
51.1 100
186 120.4

Aomori
Iwate
Miyagi
Akita
Yamagata
Fukushima

563 302.7
189
1,138
534
1,189 118.9
1,583 127.7

Ibaragi
Tochigi
Gunma
Saitama
Chiba
Tokyo
Kanagawa

Kanto region
3,527
80.8 132.6 100
4,368 94.7 122.0 124.7 165.9
4,493
34.3 76.3 100
13,114 97.0 121.0 68.4 133.4 124.7
15,627
63.7 79.6 100
24.516 90
122.4 116.2 94.5 94.5
8,599
30.6 82.9 100
28,139 101.3 116.8 85.3 116.8 169.0
9,579 370.1 149.4 100
2,588 100.3 136.5
145.4 57.1
5,124
66.9 109.1 100
7,658 95.9 94.7 40.7 81.5
7,412 130.0 113.1 100
5,712
94.5 45.0 94.5

NiigataToyamaIshikawa
Fukui
Yamanashi
NaganoGifu
Shizuoka
Aichi

3,581
1,430
11,740
2,242
3,908
6,080
975
7,709
11,128

Mie
Shiga
Kyoto
Osaka
Hyogo
Nara
Wakayama

Kinki region
13,38834.9 89.4 100
38,383 99.7 109.2 101.1 109.9 126.8
12,50148.4 91.9 100
25,819 108.3 109.6 88.6 141.8 156.6
24,44458.0 171.2 100
42,179 101.5 119.9 10.7 119.9 135.0
24,26550.7 72.8 100
47,909 108.3 217.8 97.3 128.5 250.8
46,18942.9 89.2 100
107,608 101.5 119.9 10.7 119.9 165.9
14,96245.8 84.4 100
32,678 102.5 114.6 76.0 114.6 169.8
29,696 82.3 91.3 100
36,072 103.2 134.8 1035 140.1 145.7

Tottori
Shimane
Okayama
Hiroshima
Yamaguchi

Chugoku region
4,599
24.2 88.3 100
19,022 97.2 115.7 104.1 132.7 150.0
9,283 143.0 140.9 100
6,492 155.6 120.1 53.9 121.6 110.6
24,27856.6 87.9 100
42,895 98.8 112.9 74.9 112.7 137.6
28,12370.1 110.6 100
40,133 102.7 118.8 39.2 97.8 118.0
14,17471.3 117.0 100
19,878 110.5 109.4 65.6 78.0 184.0

12.3 100
99.7 100

1,000 125
1,240 93.6

80.5

80.5

60.1

Chubu region
122.3 122.7 100
2,929 12.9 149.0 56.7 197.4
17.4 106.7 100
8,242 103.0 98.7
85.6
251.4 87.0 100
4,670 86.1 57.2 40.8 49.5
96.7 126.8 100
2,318 97.1 124.8 127.2 124.8 164.4
224.0 137.2 100
1,745 95.5 104.2 91.2 331.4
31.6 91.5 100
19,263 104.5 124.8 78.5 115.4 171.9
21.0 95.6 100
4,634 106.9 96.2 77.5 96.6 100.6
53.3 75.9 100
14,476 80.0 111.4 100.8 127.7 149.2
160.7 128.0 100
6,927 121.3 196.2
145.5(Continued on next page)Ramseyer: Page 59
Table 2:

Burakumin Population (Continued)A.

1868-1958 (Continued):1868
1868 1907 1921 1921
1922 1935 1942 1946 1958
Prefecture Number Index Index Index Number Index Index Index Index Index
Shikoku region
86.1 93.6 100
22,343 108.9 114.5 114.3 170.5 317.2
87.7 104.7 100
9,867 102.6 74.8 68.7 86.6 114.1
59.6 99.1 100
46,015 102.5 112.9 87.2 176.8 136.7
50.7 83.1 100
33,353 96.9 103.7 70.2 109.4 151.4

Tokushima
KagawaEhime
Kochi

19,232
8,649
27,414
16,894

Fukuoka
Saga
Nagasaki
Kumamoto
Oita
MiyazakiKagoshima
Okinawa

Kyushu region
32,59747.0 87.7 100
69,345 96.9 103.7
760
30.3 151.8 100
2,508 98.1 94.3
3,989 158.4 158.4 100
2,519 112.8 126.6
7,267
54.9 91.7 100
13,240 88.7 110.4
7,989 112.5 106.9 100
7,099 141.3 134.7
1,191
45.9 107.8 100
2,590 92.9 40.7
5,940
74.2 90.6 100
8,001 111.8 124.2
00

1963-1993:
1921
1963 1967 1971 1975
Prefecture Number Index Index Index Index

70.2 109.4 121.0
27.0 94.3 59.3
42.3
8.2 63.1 150.5
86.4 143.6 351.4
40.7
56.7 124.2 131.0

B.

1987 1993 1993
Index Index Number

Hokkaido
Tohoku region
Aomori
Iwate
Miyagi
Akita
Yamagata
Fukushima

186

1,000
1,240

IbarakiTochigi
Gunma
Saitama
Chiba
Tokyo
Kanagawa

4,368
13,11424,51628,139
2,588
7,658
5,712

21.4
Kanto region
127.7 108.7 25.8 80.04 156.5 105.4 4,604
127.3
159.8
165.6 80.1 10,508
148.0 133.8 123.9 126.6
127.7 111.2 27.249
147.5 118.0 130.7 141.8
143.5 124.2 34.946
168.2 130.4 130.1 123.3
125.8 87.5 2,264
25.1

29.1

31.6

66.1

53.7

3,065

(Continued on next page)Ramseyer: Page 60
Table 2:B.

Burakumin Population (Continued)

1963-1993 (Continued):

Prefecture

1921
1963 1967 1971 1975
Number Index Index Index Index

1987 1993 1993
Index Index Number

NiigataToyamaIshikawa
Fukui
Yamanashi
NaganoGifu
Shizuoka
Aichi

Chubu region
2,929 71.7 61.9 33.6 28.7
35.9 24.7
8,242 11.0 40.2
4,670
8.3
2,318 156.5
151.9 152.5
152.5 113.7
1,745 135.5 40.1
20.1 16.8
19,263 120.6 105.8 99.3 116.0
116.2 82.3
4,634 89.5 88.0 93.8 92.8
92.8 83.9
14,476 124.6 25.1 86.7 76.1
76.1 50.0
6,927 153.9 126.7 95.7 88.9
147.4 128.8

Mie
Shiga
Kyoto
Osaka
Hyogo
Nara
Wakayama

Kinki region
38,383 125.7 111.1 111.1 111.8
111.9 93.5 35,905
25,819 151.3 141.3 136.5 139.3
140.3 136.6 35,277
42,179 131.9 124.4 117.2 122.2
123.0 96.2 40,561
47,909 186.0 274.5 278.6 299.1
299.1 182.4 87,385
107,608 152.0 151.3 138.9 142.2
142.4 109.0 117,297
32,678 171.8 182.9 186.5 190.3
190.6 155.9 50,933
36,072 128.4 131.3 13.4 130.1
131.8 115.0 41,465

Tottori
Shimane
Okayama
Hiroshima
Yamaguchi

Chugoku region
19,022 149.4 134.7 127.5 129.7
132.2 123.9
6,492 97.5 100.8 74.5 83.1
92.4 49.6
42,895 136.8 115.2 112.7 130.2
132.2 97.9
40,133 110.6 75.7 99.6 106.9
107.2 82.0
19,878 125.7 114.7 104.6 99.9
102.7 69.9

23,562
3,221
41,98632,89813,898Tokushima
KagawaEhime
Kochi

Shikoku region
22,343 159.2 128.2 131.7 142.8
149.4 134.7
9,867 104.1 97.8 93.3 85.5
86.2
7.6
46,015 97.1 96.3 90.1 94.8
97.8 71.6
33,353 130.6 121.1 117.9 126.8
133.0 105.1

30,103752
32,92335,061

Fukuoka
Saga
Nagasaki
Kumamoto
Oita
MiyazakiKagoshima
Okinawa

Kyushu region
69,345 165.1 175.9 176.7 191.6
196.1 161.2 111,784
2,508 55.7 50.6 60.6 60.3
63.9 50.8
1,273
2,519 13.9
4.8
14.2 11.6
292
13,2409.4 88.5 94.8 90.5
95.3 85.4 11,308
7,099 130.3 63.7 92.7 94.8
321.2 125.9
8,935
2,590
194.4 28.2
729
8,001 127.2 109.4 98.0 84.4
103.4 78.0
6,244
0
0

724
2,636
293
15,849
3,888
7,238
8,922

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

See Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 61

Figure 1

Note:
Source:1942 Census omitted because an outlier.
See Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 62

Table 3:Burakumin PC
1868
1921
1993
Density, 1921
Pref income PC, 2009
Crimes PC
1920
2010
Welfare rate, 2010Illegitimacy rate
1920
2009
Taxpayers PC, 1923
Exogamy, 1921
Suiheisha BO, 1933
B pref'l voters, 1921
Murder rate, 1920
Buraku agri ratio, 1935
Buraku size, 1921
Subsidies PBC, 1963-66

Sources:

Selected Summary Statistics

n

Min

Mean

Median

Max

44
46
46
46
47

0
0
0
2859
2.006

1.182
1.605
.957
24,803
2.606

.840
.912
.335
16,574
2.579

4.862
5.750
4.289
174,998
4.486

47
47
47

.005
.005
.007

.013
.011
.024

.011
.010
.021

.037
.019
.054

47
47
47
42
46
42
47
41
42
37

.005
.013
.009
0
0
0
4.98e-6
0
41.2
0

.081
.022
.030
.067
7.457
.017
.00003
.530
211.9
.735

.072
.021
.028
.025
0
.016
.00003
.537
168.2
.294

.159
.040
.059
.500
45
.037
.00007
.979
798.5
7.263

See text and table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 63
Table 4: Variables Used
Anti-liberation riots: 1 if the prefecture experienced any riots against the 1871 liberation
edict, 0 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 acrime, 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 theprefectural elections (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 7.
Crimes per capita: Number of Criminal Code violations, divided by total population.
Density: Total population, divided by area (100 sq. km)
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 5 F: Average height of girls, grade 5.
Height: Height of boys and girls at age 7.
Hinin fraction: Fraction of hinin among the 1868 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 bytotal population.
Murders PC: Total murders for given year, divided by total population.
Population growth: fractional growth in total prefectural population since 1884.
Poverty rate: The fraction of households living below the minimum cost of living.
Tomuro (2016) calculates the number by first estimating the minimum cost of living per prefecture,and then assessing 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).
(Continued on next page.)

Ramseyer: Page 64
Table 4: Variables (Continued)
Subsidies PBC: The amount of the prefectural subsidies targeting burakumin (in 10,000yen) 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 7.
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.

Ramseyer: Page 65

Table 5:A.

Modern Buraku

Social Welfare:(1)
Sewage(2)
Poverty

(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
HS-CollRate Life Exp F Hght Gr5F Inf Mort

Buraku PC 93-2.888(1.845).00016**(6.52e-5)

130.421**(56.224)-1.9995(5.106)

Density 93

5.90e-7*(2.98e-7)-1.32e-12(1.05e-11)

5.59e-7(9.08e-6)-5.33e-7
7.01e-7
1.03e-8**(8.25e-7) (1.37e-6) (5.37e-9)

Pref Inc PC09.092(.083)-9.86e-6*** 13.739***(2.92e-6)(2.520).0402(.229)-.3698(.3789)-.0074***(.0015)

Adj R2:

.27

.38

-.05

-.00

.36

Dependent variable.56

B. Indices of Dysfunction:
Dependent variable:
Crimes-11.849(8.454)

Meth Crimes Welfare dep Illegit

Buraku PC 93.0822***(.0295).00156***(.0005)

Density 93

1.11e-8**(4.77e-9)

Pref Inc PC09
Adj R2.2585**(.0987)

Divorce.1292**(.0574).7269**(.331)

2.87e-10*** 8.05e-8***(8.68e-11) (1.59e-8)

3.05e-8***(9.27e-9)9.17e-8*(5.36e-8).00296**(.00132).00002(.00002)-.0184***(.0044)-.0110***(.0026)-.0762***(.0149)

.43

.40

.38

.30

.44

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1
percent levels, respectively. n = 46, 47. OLS regressions. Correlation
coefficients, or regression coefficients followed by standard errors. All
regressions include a constant term.
Sources:-.0022(.033)

See text and Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 66

Table 6:Social Welfare, Burakumin and Others, 1993
(Summary Statistics)
BurakuminMedian Mean Max
3.055 4.028 25

Min
.20

OthersMedian Mean Max.645 .684 1.85

.8

1.15

1.113 1.3

69.13 98.6

47.9

67.2

69.25 76.5

243

271.6 532

119

278

265.1 420

22.8

32.1

32.66 42.1

25.3

33.7

34.02 42.6

36

0

13.7

21.94 71.1

4.4

28.35 31.89 77.1

Unemployment

22

3

5.35

5.58

12

3.5

4.75

5.05

Wages
Under 1 millOver 7 mill

23
23

10.7
1.5

21.7
2.9

21.2
3.47

28.3
7.2

12.7
4.5

15.2
7.2

15.23 17.9
8
13.3

Welfare depend

n
36

Min
.34

Single Mother HH

20

.8

2.15

2.09

Own Home

24

24.8

66.3

Lot Size24

160

Home Size

23

Sewage3.7

7Notes: Figures in bold where means of prefectural averages differ
significantly at 1 percent level. On other details, see text.
Sources: See 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); Zenkoku buraku kaiho undo rengokai, Zenkoku dowa chiku nonenjibetsu gaikyo chosa narabi ni 1993 nen genzai no fukenbetsu gaikyo chosakiso 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).

Ramseyer: Page 67
Table 7:

Buraku and Crime, Pre-World War II

A. Total Crimes, PC
Dependent variable: Total crime PC
1886
1907
1922
OLS
OLS
2SLS
OLS
2SLS
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
Burakumin PC
1858
3.126e-4(6.91e-4)
1907.00272*** .00190**(7.79e-4) (8.95e-4)
1921.00127** .0099*(5.35e-4) (.00059)
1935
Density
1884

2SLS
(7)
.

.00271*(.0015).00390**(.0017)4.78e-7***4.69e-7***(7.72e-8) (7.26e-8)

1921

1.02e-7** 1.00e-7**(4.08-e8) (3.77e-8)

1935
Exogamy.0132*(.0071)
Taxpayer, PC .3632***(.105)
Population Growth
1884-1908.0424***(.0130)-.0217(.213).0389***(.012).0311(.202)-7.78e-4(.0070)-.0021(.005)

1884-1921.0180**(.0084).1564(.138).0162**(.0079).1645(.128)

1.87e-5(.0032)-8.27e-5(.0030)1884-1935

F statistic

OLS
(6)

5.60e-8(5.93e-8)

1907n
Adj R2

.
1935

40
.36

40
.70

40
.69
21.13

38
.28

38
.27
22.76

1.18e-7
1.13e-7(8.48e-8) (7.89e-8)
.0185
.0251
(.026)(.0248).7026*.6880*(.411)(.382).00306(.0064).00380(.0060)

40
.43

40
.42
27.2

(Continued)

Ramseyer: Page 68
Table 7:

Buraku and Crime (Continued)

B. Murders:
Dependent variable: Murders, PC
.
1886
1907
1922
1935
OLS
OLS
2SLS
OLS
2SLS
OLS
2SLS
.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
.
Burakumin, PC
1868
5.27e-6(126e-5)
1907
3.54e-6** 3.21e-6*(1.60e-6) (1.81e-6)
1921
4.15e-6** 4.06e-6*(1.86e-6) (2.08e-6)
1935
1.23e-6** 2.10e-6***(5.04e-7) (5.88e-7)
Density1884
1.72e-10(1.08e-9)1907-2.05e-11 -2.42e-11(1.58e-10)(1.46e-10)
1921
1.94e-10 1.94e-10(142e-10) (1.30e-10)
1935
8.72e-12 5.25e-12(2.80e-11)(2.70e-11)
Exogamy2.62e-5
1.95e-5
1.81e-5-3.55e-6 -4.04e-6 -9.58e-6-4.72e-6(1.29e-4) (2.66e-5) (2.5e-5) (2.94e-5) (2.77e-4) (8.61e-6) (8.48e-6)
Taxpayers, PC -3.98e-5 6.278e-4 6.49e-4
3.145e-4 3.177e-4 -9.38e-5-1.047e-4(.0019)(4.37e-4) (4.08e-4) (4.81e-4) (4.44e-4) (1.14e-4) (1.31e-4)
Population growth
1884-1908
2.07e-52.01e-5(1.43e-5) (1.31e-5)
1884-1921
1.6e-5
1.6e-5(1.13e-5) (1.04e-5)
1884-1935
6.89e-7
1.23e-6(2.12e-6) (2.05e-6)n
Adj R240-.11CDW F Statistic

40
.23

40
.22
21.13

38
.21

38
.21
20.85

40
.14

40
.06
22.67

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 percent
levels, respectively. Correlation coefficients, or regression 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.

Ramseyer: Page 69
Table 8:A.

Buraku and Social Welfare, Pre-World War II

Variables from 1920 and 1935:

Dependent variable: Illegitimacy
Divorce
Infant Mortality
1920
1935
1920
1935
1920
1935
.
Burakumin PC
1921
4.70e-7**-8.98e-8
2.38e-7(2.07e-7)(1.39e-7)(2.08e-7)...1935
3.11e-7**
1.88e-8-7.68e-8(1.15e-7)(9.46e-8)(1.04e-7)
Density1920

2.99e-5(1.7e-5)

1935-1.58e-5(1.14e-5)-4.32e-7(6.73e-6)

4.23e-5**(1.71e-5)-4.32e-7-3.74e-6(5.52e-6)(6.09e-6)

Exogamy.00137(.0409).0866**(.0425).02974(.0273).01613(.0390).01595(.0411)-.05278(.0385)

Taxpayers PC-.6708(.7335)-.6008(.5080).3659(.4914).3587(.4170)-1.375*(.736)-.4641(.460)

n

41

41

41

41

41

41

Adj. R2

.11

.11

-.00

-.08

.07

.05

B.

Variables from 1933 and 1934:
Suicides (34)

Dysentery (33)

Burakumin PC 35-4.09e-10(2.61e-10)

2.33e-10
1.15e-9(6.72e-10)(2.43e-9)

Density 35

1.28e-8(1.52e-8)

1.29e-7***
1.13e-7(3.92e-8)-.000415***(9.63e-5)-.000158

Taxpayers PC.000357(.00116).004037(.00296).009489(.0107)nAdj. R2:

41
.27

41
.45

41
.04

ExogamyTuberculosis (33)

(1.42e-7)-.000541(.000248)(.000896)(Continued on next page)Ramseyer: Page 70
Table 8:C.

Buraku and Social Welfare (Continued)

Physical Size, Age 7, 1933:

Dependent variable:

HeightMale

WeightFemaleMale

FemaleChest Circumference
Male
Female .

Burakumin PC 35

3.95e-6-3.24e-6
1.37e-6
1.45e-6.001873*** 1.07e-6(3.36e-6) (5.20e-6) (1.51e-6) (1.22e-6) (.000405) (2.03e-6)

Density 35.0004652** .0004582
3.22e-6-.3804(.000196) (.000304) (8.83e-5) (.4516)-.0423*(.0234)-.000166(.000119)

Exogamy-2.320*(1.239)-3.402*(1.919)-.3549(.5577)-.3804(.4516)

195.60(149.31)1.2402(.7505)

Taxpayers PC

16.803(14.809)43.488*(22.927)

4.485(6.663)9.500*(5.396)1764.6(1783.9)

4.2487(8.967)

41

41

41

41

41

41

Adj. R2:

.38

.25

-.15

.15

.43

.00

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1
percent levels, respectively. Correlation coefficients, or regression
coefficients followed by standard errors. OLS regressions. All regressions
include a constant term.
Sources:

See text and Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 71
Table 9:A.

The Location of Suiheisha Branches

Basic Regression

Dependent variable:
Burakumin PC 21

Suiheisha branch offices, 1933
3.760***(1.088)
Exogamy 21
10.305(18.298)
Density 21.000112**(5.19e-5)
Buraku Pref'l voters541.60***(182.59)n:Adj. R2:

42.36

B. Additional Regressions: Regressions of the number of Suiheisha branch
offices in 1933 on the control variables given in Panel A, and the following
additional independent variables.
Murderrate 20

Tot Crime
rate 20

Buraku Cr
rate 21

B illegit
rate 21

B divorce
rate 21 .

Coef.
S.e.

96404
(137034)

29.194(336.52)

223.91(225.80)

6.3198(13.004)-11.884(24.084)

Adj. R2

.35

.34

.36

.34

.34

B public
assist 21

BurakuagriculBurakusize 21

Hinin
frac

Anti-lib
riots .

Coef.
S.e.

-528.87(864.44).8186(6.202)-.0023(.0130)-14.444(10.921)-.5976(2.447)

Adj. R2

.35

.34

.34

.37

.34

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

See text and Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 72
Table 10:Determinants of Outmigration, 1971-1993 Censuses

Dependent variable:
Burakumin PC 21
Buraku size 21
Density 21
Exogamy 21
B pref voters 21
Buraku agri ratio
Suiheisha BO 33
Murder, PC 20nAdj. R2

Buraku population indexed at 1921, for -1971
1975
1987
2.146
2.059
-4.731(5.51)(4.57)(6.66).2075***.2146***.2218***(.054)(.045)(.065)
4.63e-6
4.91e-5-2.84e-4(2.50e-4)(2.07e-4)(3.02e-4)-147.72-220.17**-.9738(107.84)(89.36)(130.38)
1122.05
34.230890.716(834.34)(691.40)(1009)
11.12255.716***82.693***(24.57)(20.36)(29.71)1.559**
1.495**
.6798
(.67)
(.55)
(.80)
-12658.19
4000332286533***(558979)(463213)(675845)
40
40
40
.57
.71
.51

1993
2.641
(3.62).1644***(.035)-1.13e-4(1.64e-4)-106.38(70.78)808.87(547.7)49.850***(16.13).6838(.44)
746935**(366915)40.69

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

Ramseyer: Page 73

Table 11:

Buraku-Specific Prefectural Subsidies (1947-1968)

A. Basic regressions:
Dependent variable: Subsidies per burakumin capita, for years
1947-57
1958-62
1963-66
Burakumin PC 21.0300*.1070*.4146**(.0150)(.0573)(.1810)Exogamy 21-4.16e-4-.7363-2.036(2.83)(1.73)(3.993)
Density 21
4.73e-7
1.34e-5*** 6.52e-5***(6.89e-7)(4.50e-6)(1.49e-5)
B pref voters 21
.8612
9.061
25.462(2.32)(8.489)(25.12)
Buraku size 21
1.732e-4-4.291e-4-3.46e-4(1.48e-4)(5.74e-4)(.0019)Buraku agri ratio.0296-.1177-.5073(.0679)(.2250)(.7251)
Suiheisha BO 33-5.235e-4-.0134*-.0530**(.0018)(.0071)(.0231)n
40
30
37Adj. R2
.13
.23
.47

1967-68.1369(.270)-3.956(7.92)
5.29e-5**(2.04e-5)-8.022(41.10).0021(.0030).2059(1.10)-.0188(.0299)
33
.37

.

B.

Additional Independent variables:
To the regressions on Subsidies, PC, 1963-66, 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 R2.
B Illegit
rate 21

B public
ass rt 21

Anti lib
riots

Hinin
frac 68

Kyudanrate 23.1737(1.75)-100.63(109.21).4747*(.276)-.0112(1.42)

230.34***(80.01)

.46

.47

.51

.46

.58

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

See text and Table 1.

Ramseyer: Page 74
Table 13:

Prefectural Subsidy (1947-1968) Levels
and Out-migration

Dependent variable: Buraku population indexed at 1921, for -1958
1963
1967
1971
1958
1963
OLS
OLS
OLS
OLS
2SLS
2SLS
Subsidies, PBC
1947-1957-3.150601.49***(87.70)(208.62)
1947-1962
11.84
47.89**(14.09)(21.80)1947-1966
6.271**(2.88)
1947-1968
3.154**(1.46)Burakumin PC 21 20.706** 13.975**19.653***
13.694***(8.51)(5.46)(4.71)(4.92)Buraku size 21
.168*
.0800
.0293
.102
(.094)(.067)(.062)(.067)
Density 21-2.222e-4 -2.138e-4 1.485e-4 -4.25e-5(4.06e-4) (2.87e-4) (2.56e-4) (2.76e-4)n
Adj R2

42
.25

42
.27

42
.49

CDW F Statistic

42
.46

1967
2SLS

1971
2SLS

9.50**(3.55)
6.173***(1.58)

40
.06

30
.06

37
.24

37
.30

1.52

2.49

6.66

14.13

Notes: *, **, ***: Statistically significant at the 10, 5, and 1 percent
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 andShirayama shrines.
Sources:

See text and Table 1.