Voice, Silence, and Self

Reviewed by: Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan by Christopher Bondy Timothy David Amos (bio) Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan. By Christopher Bondy. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2015. xvi, 184 pages. $39.95. Are burakumin a Japanese minority group? The standard answer to this problem is of course “yes,” the proof being that there are many people in Japan who self-identify as burakumin. What is commonly meant when the answer is framed in this way, however, is that burakumin objectively exist in the world as a minority group, independent of any process of identification, and because the markers of “buraku-ness” are not obvious or easily decipherable, silence about them first needs to be broken in order for the outside observer to comprehend that reality. Japanese-language literature commonly adopts this kind of objectivist stance, one seldom disputed in activist literature of most political persuasions and often mirrored in Anglophone discussions of this topic. Recent writings on the buraku problem, however, while acknowledging the long history of outcaste peoples in Japan, tend to adopt more constructivist approaches, refusing to accept any simplistic linkage between premodern outcaste communities and modern buraku communities. The foundational idea underpinning this approach is that actions in the world built upon identification as burakumin generate a reality effect which is genuine enough, but this is different from affirming that burakumin objectively exist in the world in any straightforward sense. Within this emerging body of work, the “buraku problem” is understood as a form of identity constructed and negotiated in a society which is largely silent on the issue. Christopher Bondy’s Voice, Silence, and Self, building upon this latter approach, focuses on the opposing dynamics of formal community engagement (and disengagement) with the buraku problem in two districts identified as (or identifiable as) buraku areas. Bondy takes up an important research question—“how can one be a member of a minority group and not know it?”—and offers his readers a compelling answer: “a complicit society and the common social act of bracketing one’s identity” (p. 143). For Bondy, the contours of and silence surrounding the buraku issue in Japan are complex, defined by institutional, associational, and social factors, and burakumin negotiate the sharing of their identity in various life-stage social contexts through an active process of “bracketing”—a strategic mode of maintaining silence about one’s identity akin to the idea of “passing” (p. 11). To adequately understand this dynamic in the present requires knowledge of the struggle by burakumin to address the discrimination and various [End Page 223] injustices they have received at the hands of state and mainstream society in the past (chapter 2). Particularly important are the organized movements which emerged to combat these issues from the nineteenth century through to the present. Burakumin groups tended to either support a silence about discrimination and move toward a quiet integration or engage in vocal protest against discrimination through a united front of resistance which would lead to legal and social redress. These tendencies thereafter continued to be reflected in the differing stances of postwar buraku associations in their various pushes for recognition of their demands, the latter stance supported by the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) and the former stance by the Liberal Assimilation Association (JDK). Bondy completed longitudinal research at two fieldwork sites on multiple occasions spanning about 15 years (pp. 155–62). The first site was Kuromatsu, a community in western Japan strongly influenced by the JDK which supported the idea of complete silence about the buraku issue while advocating wider social integration. The second site, Takagawa, was a town in Shikoku dominated by the BLL which maintained a strong focus on the struggle for the elimination of buraku discrimination within a broader advocacy of human rights. Bondy demonstrates in chapter 3 that the different stances of the JDK and BLL are reflected most clearly in the differing ways they went about forging a sense of community through cultural festivals. The cultural events he witnessed and participated in during fieldwork in both communities were marked by what he termed “blended social action,” nonconfrontational, inclusive forms of

Aesthetics · Identity (music) · Identity negotiation · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Gender Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy