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  • The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichirō
  • Daniel Botsman
The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichirō. By Ian Neary. Routledge, 2010. 260260 pages. Hardcover £90.00/$140.00.

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 (1887-1966), 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. (1929-1968) in the United States, or B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) 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.1 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 [End Page 372] 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...

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