Embodying Difference: The Making of Burakumin in Modern Japan
Author: Timothy D. Amos
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The burakumin, Japan’s largest minority group, have been the focus of an extensive yet strikingly homogeneous body of Japanese language research. The master narrative in much of this work typically links burakumin to premodern occupational groups engaged in a number of socially polluting tasks like tanning and leatherwork. This narrative, when subjected to close scrutiny, tends to raise more questions than it answers, particularly for the historian. Is there really firm historical continuity between premodern outcaste and modern burakumin communities? Does the discrimination faced by these communities actually remain the same? Does the way burakumin frame their own experience significantly affect mainstream understandings of their plight? Embodying Difference is the result of a decade-and-a-half-long search for answers to these questions. Based on an extensive array of original archival material, ethnographical research and critical historiographical work, it argues that there needs to be a fundamental reconceptualization of the buraku problem for two main reasons. First, the master narrative is built on empirically and conceptually questionable foundations and second, mainstrea...
