‘Children of Kinegawa’ and the transformation of the ‘buraku identity’ in Japan

The monkey performances

The monkey performance, which was revived in the late 1970s by a group of artists, ethnologists and the BLL in the Yamaguchi Prefecture, became very popular through the media and entered the official designation of intangible cultural property in 2004. Monkey trainers come into contact with a large audience all over the country by performing in diverse locations (e.g. parks, theatres, schools and on television). The Monkey Dance Company (Sarumaiza), in particular, performs the most ‘traditional’ style of training ⁹ in non-fixed locations (e.g. streets, parks, temples, schools, cultural institutes and local festivals) and interacts with the entire population. As a result of its growing success during recent decades, the Company changed its militant approach from a ‘contribution to the solution of the buraku problem’ (as part of BLL’s buraku cultural activities) to an entertaining ‘contribution to the development of Japanese tradition’. Children are the main audience, described by the trainers as ‘new generations’ capable of ‘creating and passing on new meanings’ of the practice. Their enthusiasm and positive reaction play a strong role in convincing the trainers to address the performance as a collective moment of production of ‘Japanese culture’ in which the entire population participates. The monkey trainers implicitly translate the ‘buraku’ into the ‘Japanese’, without mention of the buraku issue and without questioning the ‘Japanese culture and tradition’. By contrast, as I show, activists in Kinegawa play with children’s multiple backgrounds and build a third kind of identification that constantly crosses the boundaries of ‘the buraku’, ‘the Japanese’ and other registers.

Kinegawa community initiatives

Kinegawa (today known as Higashi Sumida) is an important pig leather, oil and soap industrial area, in the east of Sumida Ward (Tokyo). ¹⁰ The area became a ‘buraku’ when urbanization policies were implemented by the city at the end of the 19th century, when leather factories and workers were relocated from the old buraku district (Asakusa) to the suburban areas of Arakawa and Higashi Sumida. The immigration of ‘newcomers’ and the emigration of buraku residents further modified the demographic composition of the district throughout the 20th century. Currently, people living in Higashi Sumida include Chinese, South Asian (Filipinos, Thai, Malaysian, Bangladeshis), Africans, and Japanese. The Korean community is an important part of the surrounding context, and participates in many local activities, while other Japanese individuals commute from various parts of the city to work in the industrial area.

In this context, community-based programmes include the Sumida Kodomokai organization and school activities ¹¹ which are intended for children of various backgrounds. They are framed within the context of the Dōwa/Human Rights Education, the Kaiho Kodomo-kai (the BLL children’s liberation organizations), the nationally framed ‘town-making’ measures (local events), as well as independent grassroots initiatives (museum). The source of Kinegawa community activism is represented by the past experiences and memories of the former Kinegawa Elementary School, which was opened in the district in 1936 and had been operating as a Dōwa Education Institute since 2003. The school was closed as a result of increasing discriminatory attacks against the ‘children of Kinegawa’ ¹² by children living in the surrounding areas, and the phenomenon known as ekkyo (not sending one’s children to schools where buraku children are enrolled to avoid their identification as ‘burakumin’). In 2004, after the school’s closure, teachers and part of the community decided to maintain the memory of the ‘children of Kinegawa’ and of ‘Kinegawa education’ by founding the Archives Kinegawa Museum on the ground floor of the building. The exhibition includes the history and educational experiences of Kinegawa, with leather-tanning machinery displays, artefacts, pictures (of workers in the factories and children crafting leather objects) as well as children’s diaries. Sumida Kodomokai is one of the children’s organizations established by the BLL throughout the country to involve communities in addressing discrimination issues. Children and their families gather on Saturdays in the BLL’s building located in the nearby district, and meet with teachers and BLL supporters to cook, draw, play, do crafts, visit factories and discuss various topics (e.g. daily life, discrimination). Once a year, children also participate in summer camps. Regular Kodomokai child members number approximately 15, and are aged between 3 and 13. Sometimes, for special events (e.g. theatre plays), children and friends (buraku and non-buraku) from the entire ward also join them.

Children participating in school programmes (e.g. visits to factories, craftwork, diary-writing) and other local events include Japanese, migrant and children of inter-ethnic marriages (South Asian and Chinese origins), some of who do and some of who do not suffer buraku discrimination. Korean children are mostly enrolled in the Korean school in the area, yet meet with other fellows during exchange lessons, community events or the playground. In particular, the children participating in Sumida Kodomokai are children living in Higashi Sumida and/or with parents working in the local industries. Buraku discrimination, in this context, is based on having residence in the district (and past enrolment in the Kinegawa Elementary School), parents’ work and association with material regarded as ‘dirty’ (i.e. leather, meat). In these cases, migrant children may be exposed to similar discrimination experienced by their Japanese friends, during everyday interaction in schools, sport-clubs and playgrounds with their peers. According to Iwata Akio, ¹³ it is necessary for children to cross ethnic differences and develop a sense of local belonging based on positive factors, in order to cope with discrimination. To this end, the activists try to involve the community in setting up the school’s agenda, and give particular consideration to those ‘positive’ aspects of the ‘buraku identity’ that may contribute to building continuity between the community and the nation.

I have organized findings under these recurrent themes raised by children and adults, namely ‘the hometown’ and ‘the factory and the leather’. I simultaneously examine teaching and recreational methods and children’s narratives in order to illuminate the mutual relationship between children and adults in identity discourses. I herein include testimonies of children of various backgrounds (Japanese, Filipino, Thai, Korean) subject to buraku and ethnic discrimination, as well as testimonies of non-buraku teachers and buraku supporters, in order to illustrate the diversity of participation in the context of, and in relation to, a buraku.

The hometown

Children’s imagery of the surrounding environment, and their relationship with the local community, are priority interests of buraku activism. By writing about their daily life, children identify, describe and reflect on certain aspects they consider important. The way children talk about their locality informs, and is informed by educational strategies. Children’s daily preoccupations influence the choice of educational priorities for the organization of the activities. These, in turn, provide children with the opportunity of rethinking about the surrounding environment. Before the reconstruction of the town in 1969, a recurrent exercise was for children to imagine how to reconstruct the district. Interestingly, children’s past diaries describe the reconstruction with different perspectives from the ones offered by the educational historical documentation. The textbook Our Town: The History of Kinegawa identifies external factors (immigration, industrialization and urbanization) as the cause of both Kinegawa’s degradation and transformation into a ‘leather town’. Children’s compositions in the ‘Kinegawa Topography’ collection describe the district before the reconstruction:

I would like to change my town Kinegawa on the following points. First, there is this bad smell. But if we put tops on the ditches the smell would go away. . . . there is garbage everywhere around. If each of us take a bit more care, the town could easily become beautiful. (Child from third grade)

People should be careful not to throw garbage everywhere, so that the town could look nicer . . . I think that to make the town nicer all of us should collaborate. (Child from fifth grade)

Kinegawa is a very dirty place, and for this reason it stinks. That’s why when strangers come here, they often say ‘it stinks!’ . . . In future, I wish people could stop saying that because it is very bad. I wish we could keep our town clean in future. (Child from fifth grade)

Children describe the ‘dirtiness’ not as the result of ‘external factors’, but as partly due to the behaviour of the community. ‘The smell’ is the smell of the ditches and garbage, features that the residents can modify. The increase in the number of factories and their size and the modernization of the leather industry are described by children as positive aspects. Dominant features like touristic spots (Tokyo tower, Ginza district) are also employed to create a parallel between the hometown and the rest of the city. These are illustrated in the chapter ‘The future of the town’:

Even if in our hometown there are now only little factories, maybe in the future there will be famous ones too. . . . there will be a bridge as a fast way of getting across the river, and a new high building like the Tokyo tower. (Child from sixth grade)

With a big effort we can change our small factories into big ones. What cannot be made by handicraft anymore could be finally produced by new machines. (Child from fifth grade)

I wish the streets were reconstructed with new speed-ways like the one in Ginza district. (Child from fifth grade)

The recent series, entitled ‘Children of Kinegawa’, contains descriptions of factories and explicit concerns about discrimination. The following examples illustrate how children try to position themselves, the community and their environment ‘differently’, in spite of what other people might think about their home, the odour and neighbourhood. Children demonstrate awareness of these dynamics and intervene, not only by bringing to light their experiences in this regard, but also by inverting the code of normality, or even proposing others. The inversion of attributes (the smell) by describing opposite personal feelings or employing images of everyday objects (shoes) can represent a strategy to reposition their environment:

I lived in an oil factory until the fourth grade . . . I really liked that home. It was a bit small inside, as there were four people in a six by four and a half square meter space, but still I liked it a lot. Early in the morning, I used to wake up to the sound of cars and the smell of the oil and I did like it. (Child from fifth grade)

For a younger child in the third grade, it is knowledge that might help change the common perspective of Kinegawa:

I live in a place called Kinegawa that is full of leather and oil factories. That is why it smells a lot. Everyone says that it smells bad. . . . If they could only get to know Kinegawa a bit better . . .

A child in the first year of junior high school, aware of the possible reaction of new friends towards the home, tries to reformulate what friendship might be like:

Now that I have changed schools and have new friends, I cannot show my home. My friends’ fathers do normal jobs, so they might think that my father is dirty. However, if I ever met a friend who could think differently and who I could be at ease with while showing my home, I would really like to show it. I would like to have a friend like this.

In other cases, universalizing principles (‘we are all human beings’) are employed to redefine people in the community despite the discrimination:

When I play in front of my place, I see that people pass holding their nose with a handkerchief. ‘People living in Kinegawa are dirty’ or ‘Kinegawa children are all stupid’, are the kind of bad things people say about us, and I wonder why. People here are human beings like everyone else.

Children try to go beyond or absorb the social constraints they might experience in their everyday life which represent critical forces in the management of certain identification factors. They position themselves in a ‘third space’ of meanings, in which group-oriented or fixed cultural alternatives are rejected in favour of personal or human qualities selected from their own environment or outside imagery.

Children’s representation of life in a buraku area shapes the museum’s exhibits: their writings are used as a relevant part of the documentation and as labels displayed under some of the pictures to guide visitors inside the factory.

The factory and the leather

Mai, Kira and Nami ¹⁵ are 13-year-old girls, who are Thai, Filipina and Japanese respectively, and the oldest members of the Sumida Kodomokai group in 2008. In the past, they were students at the Kinegawa Elementary School. We play in the gymnasium of the BLL building and talk about my travels in Japan and the neighbourhood. We continue the conversation initiated during one of the last discussions held with the rest of the group and a couple of teachers a few weeks earlier, when children were required to think about what to show a stranger to the neighbourhood. During the discussion, the factories (kawaya-san) are particularly mentioned and, as soon as teachers emphasize the importance of the leather industry in the country, the focus moves to the topic of leather and oil. All those present, adults included, are invited to make a list of the objects usually produced with these materials. Children participate with enthusiasm and in particular mention bags, shoes, and food. In the gymnasium, Mai continues to talk about the neighbourhood:

If you have been in Kinegawa you would have noticed the strong odour. This is the odour of the factories. This is the odour of the leather. . . . The leather is used to make the taiko drums, for instance. The taiko, the traditional Japanese drums.

I tell them about my visit to Archives Kinegawa and Nami explains:

There are pictures of children making drums. We used to make drums with our friends and teachers at school. The school in Kinegawa was such a great fun. We used to spend lots of time playing, not only studying.

The work of leather-tanning in the factory, and the experience of craftwork at school are important aspects defined as ‘difficult’, ‘impressive’ and ‘funny’ in most of the children’s comments. The factory and the school become the spatial continuum of each other: the factory as an alternative occasion of learning and the school as an alternative moment of production. During the visit to the leather factory, children observe the practice and learn about leather-tanning. At school, they then learn about the use of the leather produced in the factory, and are required to repeat the movements to craft little objects. The imitation and repetition of the movements, however, are not mere reproduction, but an opportunity to intervene creatively in defining the practice. Through the craftwork, children shape personal perspectives and convert what they first perceived as someone else’s skills and ‘hard work’ into personal manifest practices and active collaboration with their peers at school. The procedure has to be challenging but should not discourage the child. As a matter of fact, the crafting process becomes an interactive moment of multiple collaboration in which the child should not feel distant from others but needs the presence of adults or other children in order to conclude the procedure. These activities make ‘the school’ a fun place where children can learn about the many uses of the leather and craft nice items, such as coloured drums or little purses. Thanks to the interaction between adults (workers in the factory, parents ¹⁶ and teachers) and children, the factory and the school become places where negative attributes and experiences can be transformed. Negative attributes are not dramatized, but are changed, rejected or downplayed in favour of positive experiences and elements (hard work, useful objects, fun and learning). Some of the children’s comments and some of their recent diaries illustrate this transformation:

Can you make a taiko drum? It is so difficult and requires lots of patience. . . . When I visited the leather factory for the first time I was impressed by the hard work required to tan the leather.

Making the taiko was very difficult. . . . I thought ‘if I try hard, maybe I can make it’. When it was done I was so happy.

I think that it smells, but it is the smell of the leather that we all use, so I don’t say that it smells.

The tanned leather serves to make school bags and shoes. People should consider that if there is no Kinegawa, there is no leather.

The oil can be used for making food, soap, instant noodles, bread, margarine, cookies and perfumes. I think that the oil is very useful.

Teachers and members of the BLL put great emphasis on the objects’ usefulness and define buraku occupations as the ‘culture of everyday life’. This is an integral part of the collective agenda addressing discrimination that has particularly influenced educational programmes and material. This form of cultural promotion crosses the boundaries of the ‘buraku’ and opens the path for multiple inclusive registers of identification: ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘human’. These initiatives have to be understood in the light of Japan’s recent emphasis on social and ethnic diversity. Reflecting the shift towards new meanings of the ‘buraku identity’, the activists promote ‘buraku culture’ through programmes such as museums and community events. At the same time, as illustrated by the monkey trainers performing for a national audience, they limit the use of the term ‘buraku’ and underplay buraku’s cultural specificity in order to connect more easily with the national culture. ¹⁷ Children are actively involved in this process, since activists draw on the young generation’s experiences to transform the meaning of the ‘buraku identity’. In addition, children’s diverse experiences and their description of the neighbourhood and parents’ work are characterized by a lack of direct mention of the ‘buraku’. This lack convinced teachers and activists to further analyse the changing environment in which children interact, as well as to widen the scope of action from discrimination to the promotion of buraku industries and the locality. In this regard, the activists pride themselves on the community’s engagement with the hometown and, in particular, underscore buraku industries’ contribution to the hometown’s national reputation.

The souvenir at the end of the factory visit (e.g. little items, pieces of leather) is another element that children mention with enthusiasm, and use to renegotiate their perspective. Keiko Karibe, teacher at the Tokyo Korean Fourth Pre-Intermediate School, recalls a comment by Yo, a Korean child, illustrating the contradiction between the bad feeling about the practice and the pleasure in the present:

I don’t know how the people in the leather factory can manage not to throw up, or how they don’t even hold their noses against that smell. But I was happy when I got a piece of leather as a present . . . if I go back there I want more.

The reference to the smell is also used to discriminate against non-buraku children, especially Korean children, whose parents mostly work in Korean restaurants or in the meat-packing industry. Korean food, like kimchi, ¹⁸ is often part of non-Korean children’s jokes about the smell. The similarity of discrimination with their ‘buraku’ peers is identified by various Korean children in the neighbourhood. This led to the organization by teachers of joint lessons between schools (including Kinegawa Elementary School in the past) and exchange events. ¹⁹ During these classes, children spend time together, share experiences and read diaries. These moments are important to make children confront other children’s opinions and develop personal strategies to position themselves and cope with possible difficult situations. Children are aware of, and put particular emphasis on, the contradictory reactions to the source of discrimination. They are also aware of the discrimination faced by their peers from different backgrounds. In this regard, a ‘buraku’ child criticized the negative comments made by a Japanese peer:

I don’t understand why he said that kimchi stinks while passing in front of the [Korean] school, as there is no kimchi in the school.

Another ‘buraku’ child reacted strongly to the comment made by a Korean peer and qualified it as illogical and unduly critical:

It is terrible what he [Yo] said. And absurd that then he wants the leather [as a present].

Children put great emphasis on the crafting process, the end product as well as the pleasure of experiencing the material (‘first you see the skin and you think it stinks but then you see the leather tanned and you actually like it’). The transformation from the raw material to the product became the centre of buraku activism and education and moved the focus of the teaching from knowledge-delivery about separate ‘cultures’ to learning through handicraft as an inclusive process. As already mentioned, ‘work’ and ‘manufacturing’ skills represent important ‘values’ defining the ‘Japanese uniqueness’ in technological innovation, which are sponsored by national policies. These principles also supported local activists to identify both with ‘the buraku’ and the ‘nation’, thereby marking a third position in which the buraku is simultaneously described as ‘special’ and ‘normal’. In the narratives discussed in this article, ‘work’ as a process (e.g. crafting, cooking) and quality (mastery, skills and hard work) refers to the practitioners – a parent, a neighbour or an ‘ethnic attitude’ – and makes what is otherwise ‘other’ appear to be ‘special’. At the same time, ‘work’ in terms of results (everyday life, ‘Japanese tradition’) helps create continuity with the ‘non-buraku’ and make ‘the buraku’ appear as ‘normal’.