Of Skins and Workers

PRODUCING THE BURAKU

FRAMING DISCRIMINATION

In July 2005, Doudou Diène, United Nations (UN) special rapporteur on contemporary racism, officially visited Japan to examine the socioeconomic and cultural status of minority groups in Japan. Among the groups he visited on his nine-day trip were the Buraku people. Diène met with leaders of Buraku political organizations and visited Buraku neighborhoods. He was warmly welcomed with emblematic displays of Buraku ways of life: he attended a drum-making workshop, visited a tannery, and was guest of honor at a dinner that featured motsu nabe (offal stew) and local dances.

Diène's office used these visits, along with historical and contextual research, as the basis for a report later submitted to the United Nations that provided recommendations for the Japanese government as to how it might improve the situation of domestic minorities. Throughout this process—of arranging and conducting Diène's visit, of searching out contextual information, and of scripting and revising the report—Diène's offices leaned heavily on support from the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), founded in 1988 by the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) as a conduit for internationalizing the BLL's mission to eliminate discrimination. IMADR has close relations with other Japanese minority organizations and populations, but its primary constituency remains the Buraku people.

In partnership with Amnesty International Japan, IMADR handled the minutiae of Diène's visits and provided assistance with drafting, revising, and circulating his report. IMADR staff members helped establish Diène's itinerary, using their network through the BLL to set up meetings withnational and local leaders of the organization and to arrange visits to the variety of Buraku and other minority cultural events Diène attended across Japan; they also organized the interpretation between Japanese and English, and sometimes Japanese and French, for Diène's entire mission to Japan. Effectively, IMADR created and maintained the logistical and linguistic framework through which Diène was able to experience and understand the situation of minorities in Japan; conversely, it created the framework through which Japanese minority groups, including the Buraku, achieved international representation.

This work of creating and maintaining the relationship between organizations such as IMADR and its Buraku constituency has formative effects on all involved. Organizations such as IMADR seek to create politically solvent representations of marginalized populations in Japan. They speak in the language of rights, culture, and identity; they maintain the company of like-minded organizations, both domestic and international; and they collaborate across the boundaries of the marginalized to effect political solidarity and to combat discrimination. In so doing, they make themselves recognizable as particular kinds of political and ethical actors. On the other side of this rhetorical frame stand populations that serve as evidence in arguments about the enduring presence of social marginalization. In the Buraku situation, this includes tannery and slaughterhouse workers; it includes people who might not work in a traditionally Buraku industry but who were raised by Buraku parents or in a Buraku district; and it, at times, includes people who might not have the inclination or the tools to recognize themselves as Buraku. Even as the nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers develop and fulfill desires, aspirations, and selves in their labor, so too do the people who lead lives taken up as evidence of the Buraku minority.

Between 2005 and 2007 I spent several months working in each of these kinds of venues. I served as an intern at IMADR for a year and a half and apprenticed in a tannery for half a year. I worked the trades that I was simultaneously studying, subjecting my body and time to the demands that these workplaces foist on those they employ. One of the tasks I collaborated on at IMADR was building a website that would represent Buraku and other minority issues to international audiences. I spent my time at the factory learning how to make leather, from utterly raw and still bloody hide to a finished sheet of tanned and dyed leather. My time in each of these locations was relatively brief, and my financial and emotional support came from other locations; in no way does my experience equal a lifetime spent slinging skin or preparing reports in the name of dismantling discrimination. However, devoting myself to the production of website and leather gave me a sense of the rhythms, demands, pleasures, and challenges operative in each situation.

These venues articulate two different regimes of labor and value, each associated with a particular historical moment, a complementary political formation, and each taking on a gendered aspect. The masculinized labor of the factory floor sits against the Internet-savvy, feminized care of the liberal, multicultural office work; Fordism is set against post-Fordism; the politics of labor and unions contrasts with the politics of identity and human rights. The work of this framing happens within these boundaries, simultaneously asserting them, policing who might be feminized and who masculinized, what might count as Fordist and what might count as beyond that moment. This is a work that cuts across any neat divide between the material and the immaterial. Both the knowledge-producer, who spends most of her day seated, typing at a desk, and the tannery worker, who spends his day hefting wet hide, must use their bodies in particular ways to produce artifacts that can circulate beyond them.

The uneven coupling of these trajectories—for the production of a website is always framing the production of leather, even as it depends on it—opens a window into the formative labor of multiculturalism, into the types of people and organizations, the ethical orientations and forms of life that are required in the labor of representing stigmatized labor. It also opens a window into the staging of the aforementioned contrasts—of a Fordist moment of factory labor against a moment of liberal care—so key in the staging of Japan's modernity.

This chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the book. It is a first pass at understanding the myriad, sometimes conflicting and...