Burakumin

Abstract: Until the mid-1970s, deaf people in Japan had few legal rights and little social recognition. Legally, they were classified as minors or mentally deficient, unable to obtain driver's licenses or sign contracts and wills. Many worked at menial tasks or were constantly unemployed, and schools for the deaf taught a difficult regimen of speechreading and oral speech methods rather than signing. After several decades of activism, deaf men and women are now largely accepted within mainstream Japanese society. Deaf in Japan, a groundbreaking study of deaf identity, minority politics, and sign language, traces the history of the deaf community in Japan, from the establishment of the first schools for the deaf in the 1870s to the birth of deaf activist movements in the postwar period and current "culture wars" over signing and assimilation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with deaf men and women from three generations, Karen Nakamura examines shifting attitudes toward and within the deaf community. Nakamura suggests that the notion of "deaf identity" is intimately linked with the Japanese view of modernization and Westernization. The left-affiliated Japanese Federation of the Deaf embraces an assimilationist position, promoting lip-reading and other forms of accommodation with mainstream society. In recent years, however, young disability advocates, exponents of an American-style radical separatism, have promoted the use of Japanese Sign Language. Nakamura, who signs in both ASL and JSL, finds that deafness has social characteristics typical of both ethnic minority and disability status, comparing the changing deaf community with other Japanese minority groups such as the former Burakumin, the Okinawans, and zainichi Koreans. Her account of the language wars that have erupted around Japanese signing gives evidence of broader changes in attitudes regarding disability, identity, and culture in Japan.

Abstract: The writer Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992) rose to fame in the mid-1970s for his vivid stories about a clan scarred by violence and poverty on the underside of the Japanese economic miracle. Drawing upon the lives, experiences, and languages of the burakumin, the outcaste communities long discriminated against in Japanese society as a defiled underclass, Nakagami's works of fiction and non-fiction record with vitality and violence the realities - actual and imagined - of buraku culture.In this critical study of Nakagami's life and oeuvre, Eve Zimmerman delves into the writer's literary world, exploring the genres, forms, and themes with which Nakagami worked and experimented. These chapters trace the biographical thread running through his works while foregrounding such diverse facets of his writing as his interest in the modern possibilities of traditional myths and forms of storytelling, his deployment of shocking tropes and images, and his crafting of a unique poetic language.By bringing to the fore the literary urgency and social engagement that informed all aspects of Nakagami's creative and intellectual production, from his works of prose and poetry to his criticism, this book argues eloquently and effectively for us to appreciate Nakagami as a distinctive and relevant voice in modern Japanese literature.

Abstract: Foreword 1. Ethnoscapes and the Discourse of The Other in 21st Century Japan David Blake Willis 2. The Racialization of Japan William Wetherall 3. Positioning Oneself in the Japanese Nation State: The Hokkaido Ainu Case Katarina Sjoberg 4. A Perfectly Ordinary Ethnic Korean in Japan? Kyo Nobuko 5. The Marvelous in the Real: Images of Burakumin in Modern Japanese Fiction Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel 6. From Ethnic Ghetto to 'Gourmet Republic': The Changing Image of Kobe's Chinatown and the Ambiguity of Being Chinese in Modern Japan Tsu Yun Hui 7. Japanese- Brazilian Migrants in the Land of Yen and the Ancestors- Between Priviledge and Prejudice Angelo Akimitsu Ishi and Jornal Tudo Bem 8. Okinawan Diasporic Identities: Between Being a Buffer and a Bridge Wesley Ueunten 9. "Becoming a Better Muslim" Identity Narratives of Muslim Foreign Workers in Japan Akiko Onishi 10. Self as Other: Internationalism as Resistance Among Japanese Women Karen Kelsky 11. Transgressing Women: Reading Narratives of "Filipina Brides" in Japan since the 1980s Nobue Suzuki 12. Dejima: Creolization and Enclaves of Difference in Transnational Japan David Willis 13. Narratives of Living in the Borderlands of Race and Nation in Japan Stephen Murphy- Shigematsu

Abstract: This article provides an overview of the state of the field of racial and other minorities in Japan – a field that has developed in English mostly since the 1990s The construction of race in Japan conflates race, ethnicity, language, culture, class, and citizenship As a result, the majority “Japanese” are constructed against “foreigners,” both categories implying the aforementioned characteristics Minorities in Japan lack some or all of the aforementioned traits: most are seen as racially different from Japanese but some are marginalized in other ways that support hierarchical social organization After reviewing scholarship that analyzes the meaning of race in Japan, I briefly describe the major minority groups: Ainu, Okinawans, Burakumin, ethnic Koreans, foreign workers, Japanese Brazilians and mixed race Japanese