This paper examines frameworks for thinking about difference. Such frameworks are much more than ideas in people’s heads. They structure how we perceive and act upon the world. I am particularly interested in how difference in Japan can effectively be represented in international venues, and what frameworks allow for stigmatized Buraku issues to represent Japan internationally. Multiculturalism is one such framework and is arguably the dominant way in which difference in Japan is conceptualized internationally. There have been a handful of other such frameworks that are now declining in relevance, such as a class-based Marxist analysis that analyzes the relationship between caste and class. And, there are contemporaneous frameworks, such as “discrimination based on work and descent” that operate in different ways from multiculturalism.

In this paper, I focus on multiculturalism. First, I offer an explanation of how I understand this term and what it presupposes. Then, I briefly trace its rise in three venues: English language academic literature, among agencies that fund such research, and among Japanese activist organizations. I identify three characteristics of this framework, which I call enlistment, equilibration, and authenticity, and I explore the demands and possibilities that each places on the Buraku people (as a category of person) and those who speak in their name. I close with some thoughts on what kinds of people have the authority to use this framework, multiculturalism, to talk in the name of Buraku people.

My paper is particularly relevant to our conference. One goal of our conference is to forge international solidarity among scholars working on Buraku issues and foster solidarity among different groups across the globe. My paper is intended to be an analysis of the conditions under which we do this, and the tools that are given to us to do this. I take it as a premise of my own that multiculturalism, as a framework of thinking about difference, is already in the air we breathe, whether we intend to or not. I hope that this paper will allow us to think more critically about the tools we take as natural in our analysis of Buraku issues.

Multiculturalism defined

First, it is important to distinguish the concept multiculturalism from the word “multiculturalism” and its Japanese translation “Tabunka kyosei.” The concept that I am calling multiculturalism is not dependent on the use of these words. The English word “multiculturalism” and, to an even greater degree its Japanese translation “Tabunka kyosei,” invoke images of culture fairs. Attendees can sample the dress, food, dances, and other cultural artifacts of ethnic or minority groups, and walk away feeling like they understand the culture of those groups. The concept of “multiculturalism,” as I use it here, is broader than this interpretation. It includes such culture fairs and their very shallow, commodified presentation of culture, but it also includes some very basic thoughts about what it means to be human: assumptions of individual human equality, human rights, and the relationship between individuals and groups.

In my conceptualization, which is largely indebted to the work of Charles Taylor (1994), multiculturalism lies at the tense intersection of two premises. The first is a premise of universalism and the equal dignity of all citizens. The second is the premise of difference, that each individual has his or her own identity and his or her own way of living. Both of these premises were made possible with the collapse of formal social hierarchies that happened with the Meiji Restoration. Prior to that humans were assumed to be different, per their social caste and identified accordingly. With the collapse of this system, identity became personal, caste-based honor was replaced with innate human dignity, and humans assumed titular equality.  These two premises are in tension with each other. To quote Taylor, “The premise of equality critiques the premise of difference for violating the equal treatment of all individuals; the premises of difference critiques the premise of equality for ignoring and thereby violating the innate differences among the identities of human beings.” The concept of human rights itself lies at the intersection of these two antagonistic premises: first it arrogates an equal dignity to all human beings; then on the basis of that dignity it requires that we give space to each individual to have his or her own different identity. In other words, from the viewpoint of human rights, every one of us is equally entitled to our own identity.

Multiculturalism is the elaboration of this tension on the level of the group, and the identity of a group is its culture. From its viewpoint then, the above sentence can be reworded as, each group is equally entitled to its own culture. Frequently the groups are limited to those that have suffered some form of social exclusion and are called “minorities,” thereby leaving the non-marked groups out of the analysis. Multiculturalism, then, is a way of thinking about groups as necessarily equal but each in possession of its own culture, which must be recognized and valued in order to grant equal recognition required by the premise of equality. As we will see, recognition as an appropriate multicultural group provides concrete benefits and challenges. The question is what does it take to be recognized as a group in this context; how do you have to appear in order to appear multicultural?

Academic Representations

I turn first to English-language academic literature on Buraku issues. Such work was sparse in 1979. At that time, there were only two academic books in English that dealt with ‘shameful’ Buraku issues: the now seminal 1967 Japan’s Invisible Race by DeVos and Wagatsuma and the 1977 response to it, The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin by Yoshino and Murakoshi. Over the next 15 years, these works were followed by a smattering of other texts such as Upham’s 1980 Ten Years of Affirmative Action for Japanese Burakumin, Hane’s 1982 Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, Ohnuki-Tierney’s 1987 The Monkey as Mirror, and Neary’s 1997 Burakumin in Contemporary Japan. The more political of these works take as their primary ‘enemy’ the erasure of the Buraku, mediated variably through optical or auditory metaphors as either invisibility or silence. However, be it from more political, historical, or structural perspectives, each of these works focuses primarily on ‘outcaste’ or Buraku issues, with elaborations of those specific contexts demanded by the perspective.

In 1979, there was one English-language work, though, that took a slightly different tack from this other line of inquiry and was published in a venue different from these academic texts. Seven years after the publication of Japan’s Invisible Race, DeVos and Wetherall published a report for the Britain-based Minority Rights Group entitled, Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Koreans and Ainu. This work, which came out in 1974, set its investigation of “Burakumin” in a context of Japanese minorities, prompted by a recognition of similiarity between Japan and other countries: “[W]e are becoming more aware of how Japanese society resembles other societies in the manner that it supports discrimination against indigenous, aboriginal, and foreign minorities” (DeVos and Wetherall, 3). It also contained a smaller work by Edward Norbeck that performed the same operation entitled, Little-Known Minority Groups in Japan.

It was not until the mid-1990’s that such a contextualization of Buraku issues as minority issues, similarly found in countries throughout the world, became widespread in English-language academic literature. Harkening back across two decades to its namesake, Weiner’s 1997 work Japan’s Minorities: The illusion of homogeneity is one of the hallmarks of this change. This work took as its task not the elucidation of the situation of a particular population but rather “a historically contextualized analysis of ‘otherness’ in Japan with reference to its principal minority populations,” who Weiner lists out as: “Ainu, Burakumin, Chinese, Koreans, Okinawans, and, of most recent origin, Nikkeijin” (1997:xiii). ‘Otherness’ is a central organizing category that allows for the creation and linkage of a variety of populations called and conceptualized as ‘minority.’ Furthermore, in Weiner’s work, the figure of ‘otherness’ is taken to be manifestly inherent in Japan, a country which “[d]espite a master narrative of ‘racial’ and cultural homogeneity . . . is home to diverse populations” (ibid.). What DeVos and Wetherall were beginning to be aware of in 1974, Weiner takes as a given in 1997.

Additionally, though, Weiner’s description projects a discursive and political enemy not present in DeVos and Wetherall’s work: the figure of homogeneity. Not at all mentioned in the original Japan’s Minorities, the figure of a homogenous Japanese nation-state becomes a central figure in Weiner’s work and in similar work that follows. The several years following Weiner’s Japan’s Minorities saw the publication of Lie’s 2001 Multiethnic Japan, Befu’s 2003 Hegemony of Homogeneity, and we are anticipating the arrival of Fukuoka’s Minorities of Japan. All of these works use a multicultural analytic framework, in which different minority groups are offered together as evidence of an otherness capable of toppling the figure of homogeneity. Additionally, these works show a tendency to naturalize this framework of difference. For example, Lie goes so far as to say that, “Japan has always been multi-ethnic,” a statement which takes a present-day framework of thinking about difference in Japan, projects it back in time, and posits it as a natural characteristic of Japan. This ahistorical move is one of the characteristics I talk about later. 

In this academic venue, then, two changes are evident: one with the amount of representation of Buraku issues (there has been a marked increase in Buraku visibility in English language academic literature over the past decade) and another change in the way in which this information is presented (i.e. from a stand-alone issue to an issue that fits squarely in with other minority populations in Japan, all cast as ‘otherness’ in a move to de-thrown the specter of homogeneity).

The Conditions of Possibility of Research: Funding

A similar change is evident in the decisions of funding agencies that make possible research representing Japan on an international level. Take for example the Japan Foundation. The Japan Foundation was established in 1972 as a special legal entity with the goal of undertaking international cultural exchange, and they make such exchange possible with some of the most generous grants to foreign scholars doing research in Japan. Over the past 5 years, the Japan Foundation has funded on average 175 graduate students, researchers, professors and lecturers per year to do short and long term research in Japan. These recipients then go on to publish papers, teach, lecture, or present papers about Japan all over the world. In effect this foundation creates intellectual ambassadors, and de facto helps decide the range of representably Japanese topics – be it ramen, radical art movements from the 50s and 60s, or Buraku politics, all of which are topics that have garnered Japan Foundation funds over the past five years.

Over the course of my two years of fieldwork, I interviewed several employees of the Japan Foundation and encountered a firm belief that the Japan Foundation is not political in its funding decisions. Rather, they argued, the Japan Foundation does not represent, it merely presents. The difference here seemed to hinge upon the assumptions that ‘representation’ entails a change in the object of study in the process of representation, whereas ‘presentation’ is the ‘objective’ transference of knowledge. The former can have a political charge, the latter is merely an objective act. Accordingly, the employees argued, the Foundation grants money to those scholars who seem most likely to produce solid, objective academic work.

This belief in objective academic excellence aside, there are trends apparent in the Japan Foundation’s funding history. According to the Japan Foundation recipient database, which is available online and which stretches back 36 years to their 1972 inception, none of the scholars mentioned above who work on Buraku issues has received support from the Japan Foundation.[1] In fact, of the thousands of scholars to receive aid from this foundation in its history of granting aid, only four research anything even remotely related to Buraku issues, and those four are all clustered in the past six years. One 2001 recipient did research on ideas of pollution in medieval Japan, and two, in 2004 and 2005 respectively, did research on present day multicultural education and city planning, which I imagine would have to consider Buraku issues. Then that leaves me – the only person in the Japan Foundation’s 36-year funding history (according to the website) to receive money for graduate research directly on Buraku issues.

The lack of Buraku-studying Japan Foundation Fellows cannot be explained by a lack of Buraku-studying Japan Foundation applicants. One can safely assume, given this foundation’s position as major funder, all of the people mentioned above applied for Japan Foundation aid. Furthermore, in an interview with a person who has sat on the foundation’s fellowship board, I was told that there are always at least one or two applicants per year whose projects address Buraku issues. So why now, in really only the past few years, has the Japan Foundation decided to fund a Buraku-focused research project? While it might be personally appealing to believe in the ‘objective academic excellence’ theory put forth by the Japan Foundation employees, it is hardly plausible that absolutely no applicant between 1972 and 2004 was qualified to research present-day Buraku issues. Furthermore, if we consider this funding decision within the context of the recent upsurge in studies of ‘minorities’ of Japan, and note that my project, as well as the two moderately Buraku-related projects from the past two years, all use ‘multiculturalism’ as part of their analytical framework, another answer seems more likely. Something has changed in the way Japan can be appropriately and effectively represented internationally. And it is appropriate and effective for even the supposed non-political, objective Japan Foundation to recognize and represent a Japan that is multicultural.

Please note here that I am not claiming that the Japan Foundation or any of its employees have consciously or strategically decided to advance the Buraku cause recently and allow for international representation. Nor am I claiming that they strategically blocked the representation of Buraku issues for the past 27 years. Instead I am arguing that politics can be and is done independent of volition. What I am calling a ‘shift’ in funding tendencies by the Foundation presupposes a social context in which the Buraku-inclusive ‘multicultural’ representation of Japan is appropriate. This shift also entails such a social context, effecting a global view in which Buraku issues can in some fashion come to represent Japan on an international stage – a global view in which Buraku issues can be a boon and not merely shameful as it was for the director of the Japan Buddhist Federation. While the Foundation’s funding decisions might not be intentionally or strategically political, the decisions presume and create political possibilities.

Activist Representations of Japanese Difference

During my two years of fieldwork, with the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) and at a leather tannery in east Tokyo, I saw a similar tendency toward multiculturalism. Present-day Buraku activist groups display a decided tendency to present Buraku issues within a context of other minority populations in Japan. As Ian Neary notes (1997), over the past fifteen years, the focus of the leading Buraku political organization, the Buraku Liberation League has shifted from just Buraku issues, to issues of human rights. As has that of the rival, and considerably weaker, communist party group, which in 2002 renamed itself, removing any reference to Buraku issues from its title, instead focusing on ‘human rights.’ Both of these groups use ‘human rights’ as a category to bring together previously disparate populations, all of which now are seen to be facing similar rights violations as a result of their ‘minority’ status. The Buraku Liberation League has gone so far as to establish a separate organization, IMADR, which it did in 1988, with the intent of “internationalizing its manifesto of respect for all people.”

All of these venues – the academic work, the funding agencies, the activist organizations – are sites in which Japan achieves international representation, and each of them displays a strengthened tendency to realize that representation in the figure of the Buraku population, progressively more contextualized as one minority group among many. The Buraku population is still stigmatized and seen as an inappropriate representative of Japan. However, here in these three very influential venues the Buraku population is recruited to exactly that type of representative role. Erving Goffman notes this seemingly oxymoronic characteristic of stigma in more general (and more metaphorical) terms in his seminal work, Stigma (1963). He explains that while stigma can serve to limit the social authority of a person bearing the stigmata, it also opens the possibility that that person might make a career out of her or his stigma. As one does so, that person suddenly has the ability to take what to that point had been a liability and, in Goffman’s words, “play golf with it.”

In academic and activist circles internationally, multiculturalism now provides such a venue to play golf with Buraku stigma. What then are the terms of that golf game? That is to say, who can use Buraku stigma to play, in what venues can they do so, and how is that play regimented? If we turn to the fight for a multicultural Japan, we can see certain patterns across the relevant venues that give clue to what the terms of the new game might be.

The Terms of Multicultural Representation: Enlistment, Equilibration, and Authenticity

First off in the academics’ works, ‘the myth of homogeneity’ is a primary target, and ‘otherness’ is the primary tool to its dismantlement. The more that otherness can be identified and substantially characterized, the less chance this myth of homogeneity has of continuing to flourish, the less chance these minorities have of remained silenced or marginalized. In the past several years, I have had the opportunity to be part of the planning of two compendia of ‘minorities’ in Japan. The first was a prospective project led by Fukuoka Yasunori of Saitama University. He felt that the situation of minorities in Japan had yet to be correctly transmitted overseas and wanted to produce an English-language book to fill that gap. A team of five Japanese researchers would write essays on minority populations in Japan, and I would translate the work into English. The second project was one I was requested to do as part of my internship at IMADR. This project, though it did not come to fruition, was to be an English-language description of a pointedly non-academic list of minorities in Japan: how it is, in the process of the building of the modern Japanese nation-state they came into being, and a description of their present situations – all done in collaboration with the described groups themselves.

In both of these projects, the organizers and I had conversations about who, which groups, to include, and who, given space and time constraints, to not include this time around. In the case of the project at IMADR, the line was drawn at groups who have a prominent relationship with the formation of the Japanese nation-state, which we decided were Burakumin, Ainu, Koreans, Ryukyu-ans, and potentially late-coming migrants (other populations might be added later, after this base is established). The former project with Professor Fukuoka extended beyond these ‘basic’ populations, and went on to include leprosy patients and people with mental and physical disabilities, along with similar plans for future projects treating other populations.

A comparable dilemma motivated conversations behind the reconstruction of the Osaka Human Rights Museum Liberty. In November 2005, I visited their recently re-opened exhibit with two representatives from the United Nations, leaders from Indian and African outcaste communities, and Buraku activist leaders from the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Institute. We toured this hall of fame of Japanese minorities, on display for Japanese and foreigner alike, and with written explanations for literate Japanese and Anglophones alike. This new exhibit takes all the afore-mentioned populations and adds to them victims of environmental disasters, sexual minorities, and atomic bomb survivors, with the same proviso of ‘more to come.’ Indeed the issue of open-endedness pervades every instance, in academic or political fora, of the urge to wield ‘otherness’ against the myth homogeneity. The project is open-ended, and like the acronym describing sexual minorities in the United States, which is now at lgbtqqit,[2] or the general list of ‘minority groups,’ based on race, class, gender, religion, nationality, etc, the lists get longer, and can never be quite enough.

As a result of this extended enlistment of minorities, new venues for solidarity and networking are springing up among activist populations. Buraku youth are summoned to appear alongside Korean youth on minority panels; new friendships and political possibilities are envisioned where before there was struggle and competition. With the enactment of the Special Measure Laws in 1969, municipal and national funds were directed to either registered Buraku neighborhoods or Buraku industries. In Kanto this legislature, which directed funds to industries, led to strong leather and slaughterhouse unions. Even now the union at the largest slaughterhouse in the country, which is located in Shinagawa, has secured for its workers the status of public employee and enviable 6-hour workdays. In Kansai, though, this legislature was directed more at communities, which has led to a much greater visibility of Buraku communities in that part of the country (and to the myth that Buraku issues are predominantly limited to Osaka, Kyoto, and environs). These communities, if they registered themselves as Douwa neighborhoods, achieved major successes combating the intense poverty they faced. They have established welfare centers, centers for the care of the disabled and for the elderly. Occasionally, though, these funds have led to a ‘reverse discrimination,’ where people in neighboring areas resent the funds flowing into Buraku areas and not into their own. When these neighbors have been Zainichi Koreans, for example, these tensions are cast along group-lines. Historically, this situation contributed to a tension between Buraku and Zainichi Korean populations; and the two groups have had a history of mutual antagonism. However, successive iterations of the SML became less and less Buraku focused, opening the administrative window to other groups. And, in March of 2002 this set of laws came to its final end, signaling the end of Buraku-dedicated funds on a national level. Projects now operate under a broader umbrella of human rights, and Buraku and Zainichi Koreans, as well as whatever other groups might find themselves enlisted, are eligible for other benefits. This shift makes it easier for ongoing efforts to ameliorate the sometimes antagonist history of this two groups. Likewise, Buraku youth and Korean youth find themselves collaborating to organize minority panels.

At the same time that these news opportunities become available, new complications also arise. Certainly for IMADR and most likely for the Osaka Human Rights Museum and other organizations, the work and expenditure increase as the lists proliferate, and new forms of worry about discrimination or marginalization, this time by not including a group on one of these lists, appear. The list of minorities that IMADR most frequently deals with includes: Zainichi Koreans, Burakumin, Okinawans, Ainu, recent migrants, and women. However, to IMADR’s own occasional chagrin and to other groups’ potential umbrage, IMADR does not have projects focusing on sexual minorities. As the list of minorities expands, IMADR faces the threat of critique for noninclusiveness, strategizes in response, and hires with hopeful excitement interns like myself who “happen to be sexual minorities.”

The second characteristic I would like to discuss is one I call ‘equilibration.’ Even as multicultural logic lists out longer and longer lists of minority populations, it also equilibrates them under a rubric of ‘otherness’ and human rights, an ironic side-effect of an effort struggling against homogeneity. That equilibration entails an assumption that all of these groups rallied and maintained against the figure of homogeneity might sit nicely next to each other, innocuously separated by commas. At the same time that this pulling together of groups opens possibilities, it also opens arguments. Before an interview with an liberation league leader, I was told by a Buraku friend not to mention during my interview the fact that I date men. This friend explained that the leader was “of the old guard” and would perhaps shut rather than open the door for me on account of an announced homosexuality. I have found in the past year researching in Japan that this phenomenon is not limited to the so-called old guard; the leveling approach of human rights still does not always go down smoothly and can cause discomfort, if not outright argument, with its intimations of similarity.

Another term of the game is the demand for authenticity. The enlistment and equilibration of new minority populations is also, in the hands of academics and activists, accompanied by a demand for demonstrability of groupness. The ability to demonstrate requires a yardstick against which to measure. This yardstick is an idea of what the minority group is or should be. At times this yardstick is generated by statistics, an average of individual characteristics of the group. These characteristics might be about living situation, average income, or education level. They might also be about experience of discrimination. As a statistical average, this yardstick creates an idea of ‘normal’ or ‘authentic’ for the minority group. Such statistics are attentive to the changes of history and context; however, as agglomerate numbers, they still produce an idea of the group ‘normal’ that no one individual can ever be. There will always be a distance between the individual and the group ‘normal,’ always a sense of lack or difference between the two, and individuals will be defined in according to that norm they can never reach. Moreover, since the group norm is necessarily characterized by being wounded, economically or psychologically, by discrimination, minority individuals must always define themselves with respect to that woundedness. They must either answer questions about how they have been discriminated against, or account for why they have not had that experience. In either case, the onus of proof is on the individual.

At other times, this yardstick is less sociological or contextual and instead more cultural and naturalized as part of that group’s identity. A minority group is thought to have long-running group characteristics, which are called culture. One of the rights of the minority group is to have that culture ‘recognized,’ which is actually a form of demand to appear in a certain way, but frequently is cast as merely recognizing natural cultural facts (cf. Markell 2003, Povinelli 2002). When the yardstick is cultural, the fight becomes to have cultural elements positively identified, rather than stigmatized. For example, the indigenous Ainu population has its own traditional language, cuisine, and way of life. Historically, certainly during the process of the building of the Japanese modern nation-state, these characteristics were held in scorn and became the basis for widely held anti-Ainu prejudice. The fight against homogeneity and for multiculturalism includes a recognition of the value of these erstwhile scorned characteristics. Enlisted minorities then are summoned to have a culture, and it is best if that culture be something easily demonstrable or even better, easily purchased – to be handed out at diversity fairs as food, sold as a garment, or performed as a dance. In the Buraku example, eating motsu nabe and building taiko suddenly become ‘cultural’ activities, whereas before they were simply things people did. In any case, this is culture not to be lived but culture to be displayed. Or perhaps, more correctly, it is a new culture of display.

The remodeled Osaka Human Rights museum presents exhibits with exactly this purpose of re-valuing the cultures of minorities. The Ainu corner shows Ainu clothing and language; the Ryukyu corner does the same, with patterns and sounds changed accordingly. Even the Buraku people, whose defining group characteristic is a relation to industries considered dirty, have a corner where leather tanning and drum making are put on display. This press for authenticity is not limited to international diversity fairs or museums, both of which have rather poor reputations for commodifying culture. As Buraku people receive greater and greater attention on the international scene, as representatives of Japan, more and more activist groups from abroad as well as UN representatives come to visit, and potential provide such benefits as protective international legislation or solidarity opportunities. These visits frequently include tours of minority populations, their living situations, and their cultural artifacts. Such visits and such a demand for culture prompts conversations and worries on the part of domestic activist groups about how ‘best’ to demonstrate Buraku-ness.

In this context, the demand for authenticity summons into displayed being a pivot point for individuals to fight against whatever shame they might feel because of their minority status. At the same time, however, it transforms a minority’s culture into one of display, with the constant worry that perhaps the display is insufficient to prove authenticity. It also creates a naturalized ideal type for each minority group, a yardstick frequently with cultural characteristics and characterized by woundedness, toward which each minority group must strive if they hope to garner the attention of international and national aid. Franz Fanon said that under colonialism the destiny of the black man was the white man (1967). In the case of multiculturalism, we might say that the destiny of the Burakumin is the displayably authentic, real Burakumin. Each is equally unobtainable.

One general effect of all three of these characteristics together is that different discriminations appear of the same type, based on cultures of display and discrimination, and are therefore easily combinable to understand the situation of a ‘multiple minority.’ In this framework, it is a common thought that we can understand the situation of a working class Buraku woman by combining our knowledge of what it is to be working class, plus being Buraku, plus being a woman. This mode of thought presupposes that we know what each of those categories are, independent of context. This approach eliminates the possibility that what it means to be a woman might be radically different for a person of the middle class or a person of working class background. Or that what it means to be Buraku changes completely depending on whether you are a woman or a man or neither. This type of thinking elides the complex changes in identity based on context. Furthermore, it focuses on the groups of people marked as ‘minority,’ and does not demand an analysis of the unmarked ‘majority,’ thus potentially ignoring or downplaying the role of wider society in creating the structures that oppression the minorities.

The Burakumin are still stigmatized; they face discrimination in marriage and employment, and they are seen by some members of the Japanese population as inadequate candidates to represent the country internationally. However, the category of Buraku provides academics, activists, and even large cultural institutions like the Japan Foundation access to a new authority in international venues. That access, though, is structured by demands of an always-not-enough enlistment of minorities, equilibration of those minorities, and demands of provable authenticity. The new terms of this golf game are, of course, conflicted. They entail both new possibilities as well as new complications. The players have also changed. Certainly Burakumin themselves are called to the tee, but they are not the only ones. Any actor who might occupy a role with the authority to represent Japan can use the stigma of Buraku to demonstrate the ‘multicultural’ dimension of Japan. And they can make their money to eat doing so. Not limited to Buraku activists, these actors include academics (particularly foreign ones such as myself), reporters, and major funding entities.

The matter of being Buraku, then, is not just a matter for the minority. It is a matter of Japan, in a way that now can prove, not only mar, its honor. Japan itself, immanent in the actors authorized to represent it in international venues, is making demands of stigmatized, shameful minorities to be visible now. And to be visible, as we have seen, in a very particular way that structures how one might play golf with Buraku stigma, for the advantage, and challenge, of the multicultural country.

Works Cited

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Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Grove Press.

Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of a spoiled identity. NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Povinelli, E. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition. Duke UP.

Su-Lan Reber, E. 1999. “Buraku Mondai in Japan.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 12 (Spring): 297-359.

Taylor, C. 1994. Multiculturalism. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Upham, F. 1980. “Ten Years of Affirmative Action for Japanese Burakumin: A preliminary report on the Law on Special Measures for Dowa Projects.” Law in Japan: An Annual 20, 39-87.

Weiner, M. 1997. Japan’s Minorities: The illusion of homogeneity. New York: Routledge.

Yoshino, R. and S. Murakoshi. 1977. The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin. Kyoto: Buraku Kaihou Kenkyusho.