The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichirō (review)
pp. 372-374 | 10.1353/mni.
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Given the attention questions of discrimination and inequality
have received in other contexts, why is it that so little has been
written in English over the past sixty years about the so-called
buraku issue? Whatever the answers to this question, Ian Neary
deserves our praise and gratitude for his sustained effort to chart
the contours of a problem that is compelling both as a human rights
issue and as a subject with the potential to teach us so much about
modern Japanese society, politics, and history. Neary's earlier
book, Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-war Japan:
The Origins of Buraku Liberation (Manchester University
Press, 1989), remains the only real study we have of the Suiheisha
(National Leveler's Association) movement in English, and now, with
his publication of this new biography of Matsumoto Jiichirō
(), he has greatly enriched our understanding of prewar
buraku activism, while also providing an account of how the
movement developed through World War II into the 1960s.
So, who was Matsumoto Jiichirō and why does he matter?
The simple answer to this question is that from the 1920s up
until his death, Matsumoto was the single most prominent leader of
the buraku rights movement. From 1936 he was also an outspoken
parliamentary politician, who became a founding member of the Japan
Socialist Party after the war. To describe him as the Japanese
equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr. () in the United
States, or B. R. Ambedkar () in India would, no doubt,
require us to ride roughshod over too many basic questions of
context, and Neary is certainly not guilty of such simplistic
comparisons. What he does make very clear, however, is that without
Matsumoto it is difficult to imagine the Suiheisha, or its
successors, having gained anything like the influence and power
that they eventually did. His contributions in this regard were to
earn him widespread gratitude and respect in buraku communities,
and, in some cases, an even higher level of devotion: In his
opening paragraph Neary notes that there were buraku families "well
into the 1970s" who kept a photograph of Matsumoto in their homes
alongside those of deceased family members and the Meiji Emperor,
who was venerated for having issued the so-called "Buraku
Emancipation Edict" of 1871.
In recent decades, however, Matsumoto's career has been
subjected to new kinds of scrutiny and criticism. At a number of
points in the book Neary acknowledges the particular importance of
the work of zainichi Korean scholar Kim Jung-mi, who
has argued that Matsumoto's relationship to prewar Japanese
nationalism and imperialist aggression in Asia was a deeply
problematic one. Neary, for his part, is aware of the need to avoid
hagiography, but on the whole he clearly admires Matsumoto and
argues that Kim's critique goes too far. It is true, he
acknowledges, that Matsumoto should have done more to explain his
wartime activities. His decisions, for example, to join a
contingent of Diet members visiting the Imperial army in North
China in 1939, and to accept official state endorsement as a
candidate in the 1942 election, as well as important positions in
state-sponsored businesses, raise serious questions about the
extent of his collaboration with the wartime regime. At the same
time, however, Neary emphasizes that Matsumoto remained a stalwart
opponent of the rise of fascist-inspired totalitarianism into the
late 1930s, consistently speaking out against the "imperialist war
system" even after most other critics had fallen silent. In the
end, Neary suggests, Matsumoto probably did as much to resist the
militarist regime as anyone could have and still maintain a voice
in government policy making, and he was unwilling to give up that
voice precisely because of his commitment to improving the lot of
the buraku minority. In this regard, Matsumoto's position was
perhaps not unlike that of prominent advocates of women's rights,
such as Ichikawa Fusae, who saw the outbreak of war in 1937 "as an
opportunity to elevate the position of Japanese women within the
state. Like Ichikawa, Matsumoto was purged from public office
during the Allied Occupation (Neary suggests that this was
primarily due to the efforts...
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David Anderson, Hiroyuki Shimizu andChris CampbellDOI:&10.1111/cura.12142
Curator: The Museum Journal pages 5&26, Publication HistoryIssue published online: 27 JAN 2016Article first published online: 27 JAN 2016
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AbstractUnderstanding visitors' nostalgic experiences in museums as they make connections between museum objects and their life histories is of considerable interest to the museum field. This study employed a qualitative multiple-case narrative approach to understand the common characteristic themes about the nature of visitors' nostalgic recall, mediated though exhibits at a Shōwa era social history museum in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Five sustaining characteristic themes about visitors' nostalgic recall are exemplified through five visitor cases in this study, including, a) Objects tied to collective identity and values
b) Objects used or consumed as part of visitors' life- c) Objects associated with individuals d) Objects assoc and e) Objects that invoke vicarious nostalgia. The outcomes of this study contribute to the broader understandings of the power of museum objects to incite strong nostalgic recollections and more broadly to our understanding of visitors' long-term memories through their encounters with museum objects.PhilPapers
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