長年ご愛顧いただいた『角岡伸彦　五十の手習い』は、

場所を変えて再開いたしました。

下記で”再会”できます。

ご報告まで。

https://note.com/kadooka/n/n5f260c4aa127

ダーバン＋20キャンペーン キックオフ・イベント

日本のレイシズムを可視化する〜ラムザイヤーはここにいる！

日 時：2021年4月17日（土）　11:00-13:00
方 式：オンライン（zoom）　
参加費：無料
申込み：https://bit.ly/3lRR6Ek
主催：「ダーバンから20年：日本のレイシズム・コロニアリズム・セクシズムを
解体する」キャンペーン（仮称）
（略称：ダーバン＋20キャンペーン）　
+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:++:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:
■プログラム■
司会・趣旨説明：　藤岡美恵子 （法政大学非常勤講師／「ダーバン＋20キャンペーン」呼びかけ人）　
１部：ラムザイヤー論文に見るレイシズム、コロニアリズム
部落差別　　角岡伸彦（フリーライター）
沖縄差別　　親川志奈子（沖縄大学非常勤講師／琉球民族独立総合研究学会共同代表）
朝鮮差別　　伊地知紀子（大阪市立大学教員）　
関東大震災朝鮮人虐殺　　加藤直樹（作家）
２部：ダーバン宣言から見る日本のレイシズム、コロニアリズム　
総括コメント：　上村英明 （恵泉女学園大学教員／「ダーバン＋20キャンペーン」呼びかけ人）
参加者との質疑・討論／「ダーバン＋20キャンペーン」の紹介・賛同呼びかけ
+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:++:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:-:+:

米国のブラック・ライヴズ・マターや、欧州の奴隷貿易や植民地支配の負の遺産を克服しようという試み——近年、レイシズムと植民地主義に正面から向き合う運動が世界中で注目を集めています。一方日本では、差別撤廃を訴えるマイノリティの声に対して執拗なヘイト・スピーチが繰り返され、社会全体でも「レイシズムNO！」の声は残念ながら大きくはありません。

20年前、レイシズムと植民地主義を世界的課題として話し合う画期的な会議がありました。南アフリカのダーバンで開かれた「人種主義、人種差別、外国人排斥および関連するあらゆる不寛容に反対する世界会議」（略称：ダーバン会議）です。ダーバン会議は、人種差別がジェンダーなどの他の要因と絡み合う「複合差別」の視点や、目の前にある差別は奴隷制や植民地支配など過去の歴史と切り離せないことを示すなど貴重な成果を残しました。

ダーバン会議が示した地平を想起しつつ、近代日本がつくってきた差別構造を解体するためのキャンペーンの枠組みを議論していた矢先、米国ハーバード大学のラムザイヤー教授による「慰安婦」や沖縄、部落、在日朝鮮人などに関わる不正確な論文がニュースになりました。レイシズム、セクシズム、コロニアリズムが交差するラムザイヤー教授の主張はしかし、日本で私たちが日常的に目にする光景です。ラムザイヤーはどこにでもいるのではないでしょうか。キックオフ・イ
ベントでは、このラムザイヤー論文を題材に日本のレイシズムを可視化するとともに、ダーバン＋20キャンペーンのこれからをお伝えします。ぜひご参加ください。

＜実行委員会＞　稲葉奈々子（上智大学）　上村英明（恵泉女学園大学）*　清末愛砂（室蘭工業大学）　熊本理抄（近畿大学）*　乗松聡子（『アジア太平洋ジャーナル・ジャパンフォーカス』　エディター）　藤岡美恵子（法政大学）*　藤本伸樹（ヒューライツ大阪）　前田朗（東京造形大学）*　矢野秀喜（強制動員問題解決と過去清算のための共同行動事務局）*　渡辺美奈（アクティブ・ミュージアム「女たちの戦争と平和資料館」(wam）)　　　2021.3.26現在／＊は呼びかけ人

連絡先：「ダーバンから20年：日本のレイシズム・コロニアリズム・セクシズムを解体する」キャンペーン（仮称）（略称：ダーバン＋20キャンペーン）　
email: durbanRCS@gmail.com

Text by: Kadooka Nobuhiko (A freelance journalist)
———–

   Professor Mark Ramseyer at Harvard University wrote a paper in which he says that the comfort women licensed by the military during the Second World War were prostitutes of their own accord, and his viewpoints invites serious counterarguments. I read the following two papers which deal with the Buraku matter, citing my books:

“Outcaste Politics and Organized Crime in Japan: The Effect of Terminating Ethenic Subsidies” (with Eric B. Ramusen as a coauthor, 2017)

“On the Invention of Identity Politics : The Buraku Outcastes in Japan” （2019）

     In these two papers they insist that the Buraku residents are violent, and they have extorted subsidies from the national and local governments, the money transferred to criminal groups. I have been raised in a Buraku community, and I have collected information on the Buraku matters, so I have a strong feeling that their rough developments of logics. As for the second paper, I verified its contents in my blog (Kadooka Nobuhiko’s records of learning, in my fifties, from May to December, 2020).

   The series had 12 volumes, and I reorganized the volumes as follows. The process of rewriting ended on February the 22. I hope this writing will help study Ramseyer’s papers. I referred to  the following website:

 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/rle-2019-0021/html

　Citations from his paper are indicated with angled brackets. ＜   ＞

 ◎ Listing of the antisocial acts of Buraku communities

   In general, Buraku-min residents have been defined as the offspring of humble classes of Eta and Hinin during the feudal era. On the other hand, Ramseyer insists that＜They are descended from dysfunctional communities of poor farmers in the nineteenth century, and of the urban poor in the  20th.＞ (p. 84) He continues: ＜During the 1920s, young intellectuals from the burakumin upper class invented  for the group a large fictive identity.＞

  The main content of his paper is that poor farmers had been suffered from pervasive discrimination, then inaugurated an organization and began to plunder government subsidies.

＜Several writers left careful first-hand accounts of the late 19th and early twentieth century buraku＞(p.44).

　Then Ramseyer cites or summarizes descriptions from various papers and books.

＜”quick to anger”.  They routinely claimed to have been “wronged.” They “often lied.” And because they so often lied themselves, “they never trusted anyone”＞(p.45)

＜Theft was everywhere. Gambling was ubiquitous, and run by gangs controlling discrete territories. Rape was common, and incest was rampant.＞(p.45)

＜House of Peers member Ryukichi Endo reported in 1912 that burakumin could be extremely jealous＞(p.47)

   It would be common sense of the researchers to be conscious with the social background when citing other authors’ writings. But Ramseyer is quite unconscious with such backgrounds when he continues discriminatory statements without any footnotes. In addition, he points out that Buraku communities are antisocial with citing many writings, but these contain those of slums. It is certain that Buraku communities and slums have different histories. However repeatedly Ramseyer emphasizes that slums are antisocial, it is not the case with Buraku communities.

   For example, there is a citation from Japanese Lower Societies by a journalist Yokoyama Gennosuke (Kyobunkan, 1898), which is a collection of information on slums: Ramseyer says “burakumin were hot-tempered and quick to take offence” (p. 47), but there is no original text in Yokoyama’s book.

　Suzuki Umeshiro wrote in his book Observation of the poor slum of Nago-machi, Osaka that theft was one of the traditional occupations. Ramseyer says, however, that it was “one of the traditional occupations” among Osaka burakumin (p. 48）. Suzuki wrote about a slum in Osaka, and it had nothing to do with Buraku communities.

＜Family structure, in turn, had collapsed. Wrote journalist Bungo Sakurada (pseudonym Koji Taiga) in 1893, men of the Osaka buraku “regularly abandoned their children, left their wives, and moved on-several times over the course of their lives”＞(p.48)

　Ramseyer summarizes the contents of Sakurai’s book An exploration of a poor, starving, cold slum (Nippon Shimbun-sha, 1893), but the book is about a slum, not a Buraku community. Ramseyer says that 14% of Burakumin (25% of men) had criminal records in Aichi prefecture, but his reference An investigation of inferior houses, vol. 2 is also about slums, not about Buraku communities.

◎ Arbitrary citations to fit into his own opinion

   The above points would be enough to have doubts on Ramseyer’s papers, but his manner of citations also has problems. Takahashi Sadaki (not Sadakichi) was one of the founders of the Zenkoku Suiheisha (National Assembly of the Horizon), which was founded in 1922 to abolish the Buraku discriminations. Takahashi wrote the book History of one thousand years of Buraku communities (Kouseikaku, 1924), and Ramseyer cites the paragraph about violence, crime and promiscuous sexual relations such as follows:

＜Burakumin “are suspicious, and display eta konjo”, wrote Takahashi . “They have no inclination to save, and are always broke. Many are criminals. By instinct, they act as a group and resist social pressure. ＞(p.46).

The original text is:

(1) They are shy, and they have what is called the Eta spirit. They don’t try to save money, so they are always poor. There are many criminals in communities. They tend to stand together and rebel against the ordinary society.

　Ramseyer arbitrarily added an adverbial phrase ‘by instinct.’ Naturally, it is outrageous to add words of the citer. In addition, the added phrase shows how Ramseyer sees Buraku communities.

　When we read Ramseyer’s paper, it seems that the founder of the Zenkoku Suiheisha had a bad feeling against Buraku communities, and other interpretations are impossible. Before the citation (1), however, there is a paragraph such as follows:

(2) Sympathetic participants of the antidiscrimination movement point out drawbacks of Burakus. The environment in Burakus is unclean. Too many people live unhealthily in small houses. Many suffer from  trachoma.

   Then follows the citation (1). That is to say, the grammatical subject of ‘they’ is not the author Takahashi, but the participants of the antidiscrimination movement. The paragraph after the citation (1) is:

(3) When we think these drawbacks were true as a matter of fact, they should be ascribed to the oppression of the ordinary society against us. In other words, the ordinary society makes us to be put in such situations.

   This paragraph tell us that the drawbacks in Buraku communities do NOT come from Burakumin themselves, but DO come from the ordinary society. That means Ramseyer utterly ignores the original author’s intentions, and arbitrarily cites parts of the paragraphs which fit into his opinion. To summarize, his ways of citations and summarizations are not academic.

◎ High criminal rate and collapse of family systems

   Why does Ramseyer emphasize the antisocial nature of Burakus even though the citations are arbitrary?  Because it is convenient for his opinion to assume that Burakumin people would be antisocial and violent. He defines Burakumins as follows:

＜Crucially, only partly did Japanese treat burakumin status as a loosely inherited status; instead , they also used the term to describe a particularly  dysfunctional pattern of behavior . Only partly, in other words, did they call someone a burakumin if his parents had been burakumin; in part, they called him a burakumin (regardless of his ancestry) if he exhibited the constellation of characteristics associated with the classic buraku; they called a neighborhood a buraku if its residents lived by the “cracker” - like code they called “eta-konjo”: if it suffered from extremely high crime rates, and if its famillies had largely collapsed.＞ (p.60-61)

   When there were high criminal rates and the collapse of family systems, those who were concerned were the Burakumins … I wonder if such assumptions were true or not.

   He presents the statistics of the national government in 1921, but it shows that the only one instance of the higher criminal rate was identified in Osaka Prefecture: 73.4 cases in the 100 thousand population, against 225.4 in Burakus. In Hyogo Prefecture, on the other hand, it was less than half: 76.7 in general and 36.2 in Burakus (see p.60) . He forcibly identifies that there were some relationships between crimes and Buraku communities, but we can find no logical evidences at all.

  Ramseyer mentions about the Buraku discrimination as follows:

＜If many Japanese avoided marrying or hiring them in the early post-war years, the reason for that avoidance was massively over-determined. If ever ethnic discrimination were rational, it was rational here. Given the place that violent crime, illegitimacy, and the criminal syndicates played in the buraku, one hardly needs any notion of ritual purity to understand why some Japanese might not have wanted to marry or hire a person from the group.＞ (p.72)

  He ascribes the rationality of the Buraku discrimination to crimes and criminal organizations. I strongly doubt the intellectual level of this professor at Harvard.

◎ Denunciation – a profitable blackmail strategy

   As for the foundation of the National Horizon Movement (Zenkoku Suiheisha), an antidiscrimination assembly, in 1922, Ramseyer mentions as follows:

＜Within these－poor not destitute－communities, identity politics broke violently into the  open in 1922. Over the course of  the decade, young intellectuals from the buraku upper class and criminal buraku entrepreneurs would together invent for the still-only-loosely identified communities a new, more sharply defined, and largely fictitious collective persona.＞(p.61)

　He insists that they started a new business considering their situations as Burakumins.

＜In the process, they would lauch(sic)  a  lucrative  shake-down strategy that would reward those burakumin who chose to invest in criminal rather than mainstream careers; that would drive out burakumin who chose to live by standard Japanese behavioral norms instead; that would profoundly escalate public hostility toward the group; and that would generate ever-increasing levels of organized crime and public subsidies.＞(p.61-62)

　He insists that they began to make money by the denunciation movement. There were some cases in which discrimination affairs were settled by money. Ramseyer lists some of such scandals, but he does not show how many cases of the denunciation affairs were scandals. It would be similar to an assertion that Japan is a dangerous country because there are so many murder cases.

◎ Typical cases of the easiest money

    As a typical case of the easiest money, he refers to the denunciation affair in Nagano Prefecture in 1924. In an elementary school, one of the pupils called a Burakumin child “Eta.” The child told his parents that, and the affair became more serious. Buraku people ＜attack the police for not stopping the taunts. Finally, they would turn to the local government for not administrering the schools appropriately－and settle for subsidies to the local buraku.＞ (p.70-71)

　In the reference which he lists, however, there is no mention to the attack of the police station. The Buraku party only wanted to have enlightenment lectures, and they did not want subsidies of more than ever. As for the typical cases of the easiest money, though he refers to, it would not be persuasive at all.

＜The flamboyantly criminal turn in the Suiheisha obviously increased the wariness with which members of the public eyed the buraku. Faced with the group’s tactics, they responded by doing their best to stay out of the way.＞ (p.71)

＜And burakumin began to leave the community. Basic logic suggests that those who left would have been among the more successful burakumin, the men and women who contributed to the group’s social and economic infrastructure. Recall from Figure 1 that from 1870 to 1935, the burakumin population grew in tandem with that of the general public. After 1935, the general population continued to increase while the number of burakumin hovered at 1 million. Burakumin did not have a lower birth rate; they simply left.＞ (p.71)

　As far as we see the table on page 20, the population of Buraku increases and decreases. In addition, by what were some of Burakumins successful ?  He tells the reason why they left communities as follows:

＜To use Hirschman’s (1970) classic distinction, burakumin faced low costs of “exit”. To leave the group, burakumin did not need to change their names, alter their appearance, change their speech, switch religions. They simply needed to move. To fight the leadership of the community (to exercise Hirschman’s “voice”), they would have needed to confront Matsumoto [Jiichirou, the chairperson of the Zenkoku Suiheisha: KN] and the criminal syndicates. Given the low cost of exit, burakumin who chose to invest in mainstream careers did not try to exercise voice. Instead, after the 1930s they apparently began to exit in massive numberes.＞ (p.71)

　I wonder by which bases he insists that the liberation assembly and crime syndicates dominated Buraku communities. It would be his imagination to think that many Burakumins left their communities because they hated the liberation movement and crime syndicates.

◎ Crime syndicates dominated the Buraku Liberation League?

    The Zenkoku Suiheisha, established as what Ramseyer calls as “a masked fictive identity,” was reorganized and renamed as the Buraku Liberation League (BLL) after World War II.

＜First and foremost, the BLL was an organization dedicated to using the threat of violence  to shake down governments and extract buraku-specific transfer payments. By manipulating  construction and land-sale contracts, the League’s leaders then diverted large fractions of that money to their private accounts.＞ (p.72)

　It is characteristic with Ramseyer’s papers that some groups or organizations were crime syndicates themselves. His delusions seem to be out of control.

＜And as detailed elsewhere (Ramseyer and Rasmusen,2018), for much of the post-war period the mob dominated the BLL, and used its control over construction contacts to divert large portions of the funds to their private accounts.＞(p.84)

　It has been not the case that crime syndicates dominated the BLL. Within the Buraku liberation movement, however, there have been some who filled their pockets (see my book A Pistol and a Flag of Crown of Thorns: a report of the Asuka-kai affair). But it was only part of the BLL members. It is Ramseyer’s well-worn device to expand the part to the whole.

    The Special Measure Law for Social Integration was took effect in 1969, thus assistance for Buraku communities began. Ramseyer generalizes the projects kept on over 30 years as follows, and this is his conclusion.

＜I find that large subsidies substantially slowed the pace at which burakumin migrated into the general public.  

   At root, the government subsidies constituted the pay-off funds to the local criminal syndicates. Consider Gary Becker’s general models of human capital and crime. Where subsidies were small, young men earned low returns to criminal careers. Necessarily, they were more likely to stay in school, perhaps leave for university, locate a job in the mainstream sector, and exit the buraku. By contrast, where subsidies were large, young men earned higher returns to criminal careers. By increasing those illegal returns, the high subsidy levels apparently encouraged young burakumin men to drop out of school, stay in the buraku, and join the criminal syndicates.＞ (p.77)

　Why were the social integration projects set about?  Because many residents suffered from poor environments. Take the ratio of students who went on to senior high schools for an example. In the middle of the 1960s, the ratio was 70% as a whole, but it was half in Buraku communities. Thanks to the social integration projects, however, the gap was reduced to less than 5% after ten years. Apparently, the projects supported the influx of Burakumin people into the ordinary society instead of delaying it.

　It is certain that some Buraku people did not have to make efforts to get jobs due to the integration projects, which can be considered as a kind of a tendency to depend too readily. It is incredible other than for Ramseyer and those who skeptical about the social integration projects that the projects promoted the influx to crime syndicates.

　At one time, not a few members of crime syndicates were from Buraku communities. Some of them prey on the social integration projects. It is unreasonable as an academic thesis to generalize that crime syndicates dominated the BLL and some leading members filled their pockets. These are stories after frantically searching fragments from the materials, so they may be suitable as novels or films. They are not verified as the whole and parts.

  To take the violence of certain minority groups persistently up for discussion; to criticize the antidiscrimination movement as money making and to blame the national and local governments of lack of policies, ignoring the history and the actual conditions. 

   Are these things worth done by a professor at the prestigious Harvard University?  Or how about things done by one as a human being?  It is incredible that such a person teaches and instructs students at the university.

＜2021.3.2＞

Translation by Kadooka Kenichi