Introduction

Women from Buraku areas face both Buraku and gender discrimination, a situation frequently called “overlapping” or “multiple” discrimination. Research has revealed that the oppressed, demanding an outlet for their dissatisfaction or for the need of establishing their own identity, frequently can adopt an oppressive attitude toward other people in weak standing.

In the case of women from Buraku districts, this issue is evident both at the quotidian level and, as I will describe later, in the fact that many Buraku women have been excluded from literate culture. While there has been little research on this issue that draws upon social science literature, there has been a great deal of recent research based upon interviews etc. that recognizes the situation in which Buraku women are placed.[i] In addition to this research of contemporary problems, we might argue that it is necessary to re-examine the Women’s Suiheisha movement, the only Buraku women’s pre-war organization, based upon the analytic of “multiple discrimination.” The history of the Women’s Suiheisha, though, was short and never developed a constant or broad base.[ii] Despite this, the fragility of the movement is to no small degree a characteristic shared by all women’s movements of modern Japan, and if this point stands out when compared to other women’s movements, we must pay particular attention to the situation in which Buraku women were placed.

In this endeavor, it is necessary to provide first an outline history of the Women’s Suiheisha movement. As is commonly known, the national Suiheisha was born on March 3, 1922, with the declaration that “the time has come when we can be proud of being Eta” and, calling upon this “pride,” an appeal to Buraku people throughout the country. In social movements of the time, in which there was still little participation on the part of women, Buraku discrimination was an issue that pervaded all aspects of life for women and children, making the participation of young men and women, and particularly women, one of the defining characteristics of the Suiheisha movement. It is possible to divide the history of the Women’s Suiheisha movement, born on March 2, 1923, into three periods.

The first period was marked by proactive participation on the part of women, starting with the adoption of the “motion to establish a national Women’s Suiheisha” at the 2^nd national Suiheisha meeting held on March 2^nd of 1923, followed by the appearance of female lawyers at Suiheisha meetings throughout the country. The second period, initiated with the adoption of the “motion to develop the Women’s Suiheisha” at the third national Suiheisha meeting in 1924, saw the formation of the Kanto Women’s Suiheisha headquarters in October of the same year, the organization of Saitama and Gunma prefectural branches of the Women’s Suiheisha, and in May of the next year, 1925, the establishment of the Fukuoka Women’s Suiheisha. In the third period, the Women’s Suiheisha fell into stagnation. Following 1926 on the national level there was also a call for a tremendous expansion and development of the Women’s Suiheisha movement; however, these efforts did not yield results, and in an environment increasingly affected by backlash against left-wing movements, e.g. the 3.15 incident of 1928, the May 1928 adoption of the “motion to establish a women’s Suiheisha branch” was the final such adoption, following which the Women’s Suiheisha’s institutional activities fell off completely.[iii]

Through this Suiheisha movement, which I will describe more fully in following paragraphs, women began to protest the existence of a “wall of double, triple discrimination," in the background of which stood this reality for Buraku women. If I were to present the situation in which Buraku women were placed, which I have indicated up to this point, it would look something akin to the following.

First of all, Buraku women, like Buraku men are affixed with the social label of “Burakumin” and face discrimination as such. Second of all, these women, when they face society as individual women, are not exempt from sexual discrimination, and Buraku districts themselves certainly are not liberated zones free of all forms of discrimination. These districts too, under the “family system,” are male dominated. Third of all, as is evidenced by interview records, it is also difficult for men to find jobs in Buraku districts, adding to the weight a woman must carry in being responsible for the home and forcing her into over-work. Male dominance within the house is typically greater according to the oppression they suffer from outside Buraku, and it is not uncommon for men to rule over women accordingly.

1. The Foundation of the Women’s Suiheisha Movement and its Geographic Expansion

The Women’s Suiheisha was born at the second national meeting of the Suiheisha, held in Osaka in 1923, the year following the establishment of the national Suiheisha. This was done, above all, as a means of organizing as much of the Buraku public as possible. The fact that the Suiheisha thought of the organization of a Women’s Suiheisha as, above all, part of an attempt to improve Suiheisha forces is evident in the following quote taken from a conversation between Suzuki Yuko and Sakamoto Seiichiro.

If women do not awake to Buraku issues, the Suiheisha will not advance. If you actually go around and take a look at the Suiheisha’s promotion activities, there are cases of men being held back from participating by women. Given this situation, we thought of establishing a Women’s Suiheisha.[iv]

Here, delays in women’s consciousness are seen as an obstruction to the expansion of the Suihei movement. Women’s eyes must be opened to prevent that obstruction from happening. The Women’s Suiheisha is expected to play the role of enlightening men, presupposing that such a movement would exist essentially to help the men’s Suiheisha movement take root. While being known as the Women’s Movement, this organization was not really intended to liberate women from discrimination. The large number of issues facing women were never given serious consideration, reflecting the reality of a Suiheisha controlled by men.

However, the women who were part of the Suiheisha, on top of shouldering the above expectations from the general Suiheisha, also saw themselves as Suiheisha activists and vigorously helped develop the movement. At the second national Suiheisha meeting, Sakamoto Kazue of Nara who had proposed the founding of a Women’s Suiheisha, expressed the opinion that, “Men alone cannot run the Suiheisha. Women too must be involved.” At the second general meeting, Okabe Yoshiko, the women’s representative known for pledging, “Come out, a brave mother of samurai, a daughter just like Jean of Arc” at the founding meeting of the Suiheisha,[v] said that “freedom and liberation are gained by our own efforts. It is these efforts themselves that are the power of all Burakumin. Women, arise! For the end of double, triple discrimination and oppression.” Holding forth that women should no longer be dependent on men, she urged women to realize the role they played in the movement for liberation from discrimination.[vi] At that time, the “double, triple discrimination and oppression” faced by Buraku women had not become a common analytic framework and had not been fully examined. However, the simple fact of pointing out its existence and stating that “we cannot allow discrimination between men and women” (Sakamoto Kazue) is a great first step in breaking through the wall.

In the second period, following the adoption of the “motion to develop the Women’s Suiheisha” at the third national Suiheisha meeting, the general assembly proactively attempted to bring women together. One such attempt involved the inclusion of a “women’s column” in the “Suiheisha Newspaper” published after the meeting, which continued through the fifth volume in October of 1924 (However, the column was not published in the magazine’s fourth volume). This decision, at the beginning of the movement, encouraged the participation of women in the movement, and it also revealed issues such as the following: “We Buraku women, who work nonstop from sunrise to sunset, making rice and barley, breaking our bodies in a variety of industries, how long shall we be insulted as commoners, and despised as impoverished?”[vii] Slight though it may be, it was here that the lives of Buraku women started to be told.

During this period, the Suiheisha, alongside the expansion of the influence of the 1923-founded Suiheisha Youth Movement, changed from being an “organization of the unorganized” to a more centralized model, started to develop a recognition of themselves as proletariat, and started actively participating in the proletariat movement. In the midst of this, most of the women in the Suiheisha also developed a class consciousness and leaned toward creating district-level Suiheisha organizations. On October 1, 1924, the Saitama Prefectural Women’s Suiheisha was born, and around the same time the Gunma Prefectural Women’s Suiheisha and the Kanto Women’s Suiheisha were organized.[viii] On November 1^st of the same year, Kyushu also founded its first preliminary Women’s Suiheisha in Fukuoka Prefecture. May of the following year, 1925, saw the formalization of this Fukuoka Women’s Suiheisha.[ix]

Though Mie Prefecture never formed a Women’s Suiheisha, the regular publication of the Mie Farmer’s Association of Japan and the Mie Prefecture Suiheisha, “The Patriot” (started in March 1924) placed comparatively proactive emphasis on women’s issues.[x] “The Patriot” reflects the movement’s switch to a “proletarian” movement around this time, limiting participation to “those with jobs of elementary school teacher and below, women, and farmers.” They also sent out reporters to record and publish conversations with women. One women, introduced as a “real peasant” with only “an elementary school education,” stated that “my husband, his father, and his mother have no love for me,” and, based on her own experiences, critiqued the inequalities between men and women that women had to bear under social “sanction and criticism,” describing in her own words the contradictions of a society that oppresses its peasants, a society that gives rise to people who cannot make a living except for prostitution.[xi]

2 The Neglect of “Women’s Issues” in the movement for “Solidarity with the Proletariat”

The second stage of the Women’s Suiheisha movement, along with the progress of women’s consciousness and the growth of the general movement, saw the Women’s Suiheisha spread into rural areas, and is appropriately described as the period during which the most attention was given to women’s issues within the Suiheisha. However, as we have already seen, this consideration did not reach fully to the quotidian problems faced by Buraku women. There are two possible reasons for this.

First, as the Suiheisha and the Women’s Suiheisha both started to lean toward the proletarian movement, there was a tendency to subsume women’s issues under class issues. The aforementioned main-stream of the Suiheisha, in an environment increasingly influenced by Marxism, began to believe that liberation from discrimination would come with the achievement of a socialist society, and in line with this shift in movement ideology, began putting less effort into denouncing discrimination and more into supporting one wing of the proletarian movement. The Suiheisha, which had developed sessions denouncing discrimination since its inception, met with a wall of discrimination in the form of resistance to their denunciation sessions and were confronted with the difficulties in striking out that way. Also, in following the proletarian movement, they had to set aside their self-consciousness as “Burakumin.” It is also appropriate to say that in the proletarian movement as well Buraku discrimination and prejudice was deeply rooted, and that understanding of Buraku issues was thin.

If we look at this situation, it seems a foregone conclusion that the peculiarities of women within the Buraku liberation movement would not simply be neglected but totally abandoned.

This tendency is particularly apparent in the third stage of the Women’s Suiheisha movement. In 1927, the rural base of the women’s Suiheisha started to falter and dissolve, and the proposal at the national Suiheisha meeting to rebuild the women’s movement as a women’s branch (in line with the switch of the Suiheisha from a national to a prefectural based organization at the 6^th national meeting in 1927), was not repeated at the 7^th national meeting in 1928. These proposals had been set forth by the Fukuoka Prefectural Women’s Suiheisha, and had always been introduced and explained by Nishida Haru. The Women’s Suiheisha movement in Fukuoka, the home to Nishida and others, also started to fall apart, and the women did their best to resist this, borrow from the power of the movement, and get through this difficult time.[xii]

However, the response of the general Suiheisha to the call for support from the women’s league was less than accommodating. This can be seen, for example, in the discussion surrounding the “motion to create national solidarity within the Women’s Suiheisha” presented by the Fukuoka Women’s league at the 5^th national Suiheisha meeting. In response to Kikutake Tori’s insistence that “men are completely disinterested in women’s issues. Even if a motion is passed in meetings, they make no attempt to actually carry it out. I would like them to think a little more intensely about women’s issues. In particular, I would like there to be a published survey of the Women’s Suiheisha,” Matsuda Kiichi, representative of the Suiheisha Proletarian League, stood at the podium and said the following:

Up until now, the Suiheisha has not, as one body, given its all to women’s issues. We cannot solve any of our issues without the cooperation of Buraku women, who have been unaware of the issues. We applaud women and agree that giving them an organization is one of the pressing needs of today. In this sense, I am in complete agreement.[xiii]

Kikutake pointed out the lack of interest in and programs for women’s issues within the general Suiheisha and presented concrete measures such as a survey of the Women’s Suiheisha or the devotion of newspaper space to women’s issues. However, while Matsuda outright admitted that men had not been proactive on women’s issues and made an open avowal to put more effort into organizing women, he demonstrated no real further understanding of women’s issues. There is a large ideological gap between Matsuda and Kikutake and other people of the Women’s Suiheisha who demanded a proactive stance toward the peculiar issues facing women. The type of stance seen in Matsuda was most likely shared by other men in the center of the Suiheisha at that time.

Given this attitude of the primary supporters of the Suiheisha, as well as the fact that the Suiheisha was attacked by suppression with the 3.15 and the 4.16 incidents, the issues of the Women’s Suiheisha were not met with any new proposals, and steadily faded away from the general movement, despite repeated demands made on the part of the women’s group.

This did not mean, however, that there was no evidence of women’s participation in the Buraku liberation movement post-1929. A Buraku in Matsusaka City in Mie Prefecture, comprised of the three areas of E, F, and G, saw, in E area, much participation on the part of women in the labor and red cross movements in collaboration with the National Union of General Workers Council (NUGWC) of Japan. These women were critical of men who did not participate in the proletarian movement, and made note of the fact that police did nothing in response to the prefectural authorities’ neglect of poor road conditions and lack of vocational assistance provision. The only means left to the police at this point was to allow the movement to be destroyed by suppression. Among these women, there was such an optimism for an equal society that would follow the “collapse of contemporary society” that they were willing to risk themselves in their devotion to the movement. However, placing so much belief in a future society led to a discounting of personal issues and improvements, and the particular problems of women, above all of Buraku women, were left behind in the process.

3. A Rebellion against Male Domination

One of the reasons why women’s issues did not garner sustained support was that the primary supporters of the movement, like all movements up until at least the 1920s, were relatively wealthy and well-educated, and therefore necessarily set apart from Buraku women. It as been pointed out that this is one of the reasons why the economic requests of the above decision were not filled.[xiv] However, the women primarily focused on themselves as “women” and forged out the first steps in approaching universal issues as “women.” It is certainly the case that the Women’s Suiheisha was led primarily by people relatively free of the fetters of the “household” or of economic distress. These women used the little space and knowledge given to them to their fullest extent and examined the situation of women with a penetrating eye, just as they used their own experiences to work to dismantle the “masculine oppression” supported by the “household” system. The women raised a beacon of rebellion to foment wide-ranging support. In order for the women to rise up, they first had to develop a sense of themselves as “women” and take as their initial departure point the irrationality of male dominance. If they had not done this, then, even if they did participate in the movement, they, like those who left their individual liberation with the liberation of the proletariat, certainly would not have been able to join with men in supporting the Suiheisha.

The sufferings of women who happened to be born in Buraku districts were represented with the abstract phrase “double, triple discrimination” and were rarely if ever given concrete voice; however, though it may have been short lived, their voice, which stood up against male dominance, was born in Buraku areas, and nurtured by the Suiheisha.

In Conclusion

There is no one identity for those people who face discrimination, nor is that identity only something imposed by other people. However, Buraku people were slandered under the name “Burakumin,” and their self-awareness as “Burakumin” is at least half imposed. That being the case, in order to combat that identity, they gave themselves as part of the proletariat to the labor and farmers movements, hoping to prove themselves “the same” as others. Buraku women were no exception. On the other hand, though, women were encouraged by Buraku men to recognize themselves as “women,” and those women who awoke to a strong sense of self, when they attempted to stand up in a society that had given rise to discrimination, encountered one thing they first had to break through: the wall of male dominance. The clear objections of the Buraku women first began as a struggle against gender discrimination. However, those objections faded with the fading of the Women’s Suiheisha, and as Japan entered into war, were lost in the myth of “homogenous nation” created by the ruling classes.