Walking to Liberty in Osaka : State, Community, and Burakumin in Contemporary Japan

Event details
Speaker : Dr Timothy Amos
               Visiting Fellow, Department of Japanese Studies, NUS
Date      : Monday, 18 February 2008
Time      : 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Venue    : AS4/03-28 (JS Meeting Room)

Abstract

Japan's largest Buraku organization, the Buraku Liberation League (BLL), is still energetically engaged in liberation activism. Facing an uphill battle to secure funding and declining youth membership, the BLL has reinvented itself over the last fifteen years through the idea of ‘human rights culture' (jinken bunka) – a term popularised in the Plan of Action for the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education (1995-2004). Perhaps the most striking example of BLL human rights cultural activism in Japan today is the Human Rights Museum, Liberty Osaka, located on the site of a historic outcaste community in Naniwa.

'Human rights culture,' however, is not merely a Buraku concern. National and local governments also engage in ‘human rights e nlightenment activities' (jinken keihatsu katsudō) and ‘human rights culture town development' (jinken bunka machizukuri) through the creation of posters, promotional videos, brochures, festivals, and monuments. Human rights promotional materials produced on national government, local community, and BLL levels, though, portray and articulate human rights culture in markedly different ways. This paper, through a comparative analysis of state, local community, and BLL cultural material related to the promotion of human rights, reveals the distinctive ways Burakumin are conceiving of their struggle for liberation in contemporary Japan.

About the speaker

Timothy D. Amos , PhD (ANU), MA (Tohoku), MEd ( Akita ), BAHons (Griffith)

Dr Timothy Amos is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Japanese studies at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on questions of marginality, alterity, and social stratification in Japan from the Tokugawa period through to the present, with a particular focus on historic outcaste communities. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Ambiguous Bodies: Japan's Burakumin , which examines the contemporary conditions of former outcaste communities in both eastern and western Japan. Dr Amos's two latest publications related to 19th and 20th centuries aspects of the Buraku problem appeared in Japanese Studies and Portal.