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Doing Violence to Buraku History: J. Mark Ramseyer's Dangerous Inventions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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We are researchers with strong concerns about J. Mark Ramseyer's (hereafter JMR) article “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan.” We are active in various disciplines and have published work on aspects of Buraku history and literature, as well as the history of slums, deviance, and marginality. The article comprises one part of a larger body of writing by JMR in recent years that has been critiqued and refuted for its misrepresentations of sources, which have in turn created larger historiographic misunderstandings that reproduce discrimination against Burakumin. At the same time we raise these questions, in Japan, scholars and representatives of the Buraku community have openly rejected the author's writings on Burakumin, including this 2019 article. They have specifically questioned his research methods; his use (and abuse) of evidence; his characterizations of people, problems, and processes; and the validity and truthfulness of his various claims about (1) the status of pre-modern Buraku occupations and social mobility, (2) the origins and nature of the Suiheisha, the first nationwide Buraku social movement, and (3) the character and impact of government Dōwa subsidies on Buraku communities since the 1960s.
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References
Notes
1 J. Mark Ramseyer, “On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan,” Review of Law & Economics 16:2 (2019): 1-95.
2 See, for example, the four responses to JMR's work on comfort women at Alexis Dudden, ed., “Supplement to Special Issue: Academic Integrity at Stake: The Ramseyer Article - Four Letters (Table of Contents)” in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Volume 19, Issue 5, Number 2, March 1, 2021. Also Jeannie Suk Gersen, “Seeking the True Story of the Comfort Women: How a Harvard professor's dubious scholarship reignited a history of mistrust between South Korea and Japan,” New Yorker, February 25, 2021.
3 See the responses contained in this special issue, and Buraku Kaihō Dōmei Chuō Honbu, “Māku Ramuzaiyā ronbun ni taisuru chūo honbu kenkai,” Kaihō shinbun, April 5, 2021.; also The International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism Statement: “Problem of Ramseyer's Article on Buraku: from the Perspective of Human Rights and Non-Discrimination,” March 8, 2021; and Kadooka Nobuhiko, “Hinkon naru seishin: Haabaado Dai kyōju no chingakusetsu” (parts 1-12, May-December 2020), along with a summary (February 22, 2021) and “A review of Professor Mark Ramseyer's papers on the Buraku Issues” (March 2, 2021), all at Gojū no tenarai (blog).
4 In the live Google document version of our article, we provide a list of such errors.
5 J. Mark Ramseyer, “A Monitoring Theory of the Underclass: With Examples from Outcastes, Koreans, and Okinawans in Japan,” (January 24, 2019), 2.
6 J. Mark. Ramseyer, “Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan,” European Journal of Law and Economics (2021).. For a brief discussion of the Moynihan report, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 40-41.
7 J. Mark Ramseyer, review of Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law, by Mark D. West, Monumenta Nipponica 66, no. 2 (2011): 383. Accessed April 15, 2021.
8 Song Sang-ho. “(LEAD) Harvard Professor Ramseyer to Revise Paper on 1923 Massacre of Koreans in Japan: Cambridge Handbook Editor.” Yonhap News Agency, February 20, 2021. For another example of this anti-Korean writing, see Ramseyer, “Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership.”
9 De Gruyter Statement on Publication Ethics, (accessed April 12, 2021). Also see the COPE guidelines.
10 Amy Stanley, Hannah Shepherd, Sayaka Chatani, David Ambaras, and Chelsea Szendi Schieder, “‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’: The Case for Retraction on Grounds of Academic Misconduct,” February 18, 2021.
11 JMR writes: “In fact, most burakumin are descended not from leather-workers, but from poor farmers with distinctively dysfunctional norms” (1). And again, “Instead, most burakumin trace their ancestry [to] a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers” (2). Further, “Most burakumin instead trace their ancestry to poor farmers” (38). Arising out of his claim that the majority of early modern Burakumin were poor peasants are several other additional claims: (1) discrimination of Tokugawa ancestors and modern burakumin has nothing to do with premodern ideas about ritual impurity or occupation-linked status; (2) very few kawata dealt with dead animals or worked with leather or as executioners; (3) there was a lot of social mobility between kawata and commoner settlements in the Tokugawa period, motivated by economic push and pull factors; and (4) government regulations and sumptuary edicts were issued only in the second half of the Tokugawa period and in response to kawata economic successes; therefore, discrimination against kawata cannot have been a big deal (if it existed at all, it was motivated not by contempt but by fears of kawata upward mobility).
12 For a concise summary of the early modern Japanese status system, see the introduction to Maren Ehlers, Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), and David Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For pioneering work on the issue of status marginality (mibunteki shūen), see publications by Tsukada Takashi and other members of the Status Marginality Research Group such as Shirīzu kinsei no mibunteki shūen. 6 vols. (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2000).
13 Yokoyama Yuriko, Edo Tokyo no Meiji ishin (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018), 50.
14 Suzuki Ryō, for example, building on the early work of Tsukada Takashi, Hatanaka Toshiyuki and others, argued that when the early modern outcaste system was legally eliminated in 1871, new policies pertaining to land and household registration led to a continuation of many former outcaste communities' subservient relationships to neighboring commoner communities. Suzuki Ryō, Kindai Nihon Buraku mondai kenkyū josetsu (Hyōgo: Hyōgo Buraku Mondai Kenkyūjo, 1985), 7-33.
15 Asao Naohiro, “Bakuhansei to Kinai no ‘kawata’ nōmin: Kawachi no kuni Saraikemura o chūshin ni,” in Asao Naohiro chosakushū, vol. 7 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004), 4-12.
16 Anan Shigeyuki, “Osaka Watanabe mura kawa shōnin no kōeki nettowāku: Kyūshū wo chūshin ni,” in Kokka no shūen: tokken, nettowāku, kyōsei no hikaku shakaishi, ed. Tamura Airi, Kawana Takashi, and Uchida Hidemi (Tokyo: Tōsui Shobō, 2015), 149.
17 Tokyo-fu shiryōkan no nijūni. Tokyo-fu, 1872-1875. Tokyo Metropolitan Archives, E-chishirui-085 [35]; Nakao Kenji, Edo shakai to Danzaemon (Osaka: Kaihō Shuppansha, 1992), 168; John Porter, “Cattle Plague, Livestock Disposal, and the Dismantling of the Early Modern Status Order,” in Revisiting Japan's Restoration: New Approaches to the Study of the Meiji Transformation. ed. Timothy Amos and Akiko Ishii (London: Routledge, Forthcoming).
18 A survey of compilations of source materials for kawata / eta / chōri villages for both eastern and western Japan turns up ample evidence that skins or secondary products linked to leatherwork or the labor and skills required to undertake the work were being sourced from these communities. In eastern Japan, see, for example, Saitama-ken Dōwa Kyōiku Kenkyū Kyōgikai, ed., Suzuki-ke monjo, 5 vols. (Urawa: Saitama-ken Dōwa Kyōiku Kenkyū Kyōgikai, 1977-78). For western Japan, see, for example, Harima no kuni Kawata-mura Monjo Kenkyūkai, ed. Harima no kuni kawata-mura monjo (Kyoto: Buraku Mondai Kenkyūjo, 1969).
19 A helpful discussion of pollution as an “elastic idiom” in early modern Japan can be found in Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 272-278. Ooms emphasizes that the idea of pollution could be played up or down in the context of social and political struggles.
20 See Ooms, ibid.; also Timothy D. Amos, Caste in Early Modern Japan: Danzaemon and the Edo Outcaste Order (London: Routledge, 2020), 71-86. Obviously we need to be careful about what we mean by the term “discrimination,” and distinguish between the changing meanings of how “discrimination” is defined across history. See, for example, Timothy D. Amos, Embodying Difference: The Making of Burakumin in Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011), 76-82; 97-100.
21 Minegishi Kentarō, “Kegare kannen to Buraku sabetsu (jō): sono fukabunsei to kegare kannen no itchi,” Buraku mondai kenkyū 161 (2002): 75-96; Minegishi Kentarō, “Kegare kannen to Buraku sabetsu (ge): sono fukabunsei to kegare kannen no itchi,” Buraku mondai kenkyū 162 (2002): 97-119.
22 The following 21-volume series includes many examples of such policies and practices. Harada Tomohiko, ed., Hennen sabetsushi shiryō shūsei (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1983-1995).
23 Nakao Shunpaku, Shūkyō to Buraku sabetsu: Sendara no kōsatsu (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobō, 1982), 288; Harada Tomohiko, Sabetsu to Buraku: shūkyō to Buraku sabetsu wo megutte (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1984), 12-13.
24 “Dannaiki mibun hikiage ikken,” in Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryō shūsei, ed. Harada Tomohiko and Kobayashi Hiroshi, vol. 14 (Tokyo: San'ichi Shobō, 1971), 477.
25 Tanaka Keiichi, ed., Shibata Shūzō nikki, vol. 2 (Niigata: Chōshikankō I'inkai, 1971), 297-298.
26 Okuma Tetsuo, “Gunma,” in Higashi Nihon Burakushi: Kantō-hen, ed. Higashi Nihon Buraku Kaihō Kenkyūjo, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2017), 246-247.
27 Hatanaka Toshiyuki, “‘Etagari’ ni tsuite: yōgo toshite no saikentō,” Ritsumeikan keizaigaku 57, no. 1 (2008): 60.
28 For an example, see Ehlers, Give and Take, 103; 107-111.
29 Maki Hidemasa, Mibun sabetsu no seidoka (Kyoto: Aunsha, 2014), 47-48.
30 Found in ibid., 49.
31 Amos, Embodying Difference, 160.
32 See, e.g., “On the Invention of Identity Politics,” 1, 3, 5, and passim.
33 Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Prewar Japan, 226.
34 See, for example, Joseph D. Hankins, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Christopher Bondy, Voice, Silence, and Self: Negotiations of Buraku Identity in Contemporary Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).
35 Mitani Hideji, Hi no kusari: Wajima Tametarō-den (Tokyo: Sōdo Bunka, 1985), 81. The claim in question is “burakumin averaged 30 to 40% of the rioters” and is cited as Mitani 82 in Ramseyer (84). However, the sentence develops thoughts and contexts from the previous page, and the term JMR translates as rioters, kenkyo-sha, actually means those rounded up by the police. The author's first name is misspelled as Hideshi in JMR's bibliography, which also lacks the subtitle. It should be noted that no sources for this estimate of 30-40% are listed. The full sentence explains why so many Burakumin participated in the so-called Rice Riots. It asserts that in places with many Buraku like Kyoto, Ōsaka, Hyōgo and Nara, upwards of 30%, and as much as 40% [of those rounded up] were Burakumin, and that moreover, of the thirty-five women who were rounded up, thirty-four were women from Buraku (82), a propensity linked a page earlier to actual suffering. The prize-winning portrait of Wajima combines “historico-social” (430) background from Mitani with the oral histories he had long heard from Wajima. About his method, Mitani writes: “the shifts in thinking and so on of the people who appear had to be filled out (補完する) based on the laws of human psychology” (430). In short, even apart from whether the narrator is correct about the percentage, this is a highly interpretive work; moreover, it is not clear whether it is the reminiscing subject Wajima or the creative narrator Mitani who put forth the figure of “upwards of 30%, and as much as 40%,” and which, if any, police report this may have come from. This figure cannot be extracted as a fact, in order to bolster a sequence of related claims, without even knowing the bare minimum of who made this claim and how they arrived at this judgment. For a discussion of Burakumin involvement in the Rice Riots, government responses, and efforts to depict the Burakumin as especially vengeful and violent, see Jeffrey Paul Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), 134-40. On p. 136, Bayliss writes: “The police responded as well by cracking down on disturbances in buraku areas with much greater severity than they applied elsewhere; as a result, roughly 10 percent of those arrested for involvement in the riots were burakumin, at a time when the minority comprised barely 2 percent of the total population of Japan.”
36 See Toriyama Hiroshi, “Problems with the References to Historical Documents in J. M. Ramseyer, ”On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku outcastes in Japan“ in this journal.
37 “Dannaiki mibun hikiage ikken,” 477; Saitama-ken Dōwa Kyōiku Kenkyū Kyōgikai, ed., Suzuki-ke monjo, vol. 1 (Urawa: Saitama-Ken Dōwa Kyōiku Kenkyū Kyōgikai, 1977), 64.
38 Ian Neary, “Burakumin in Contemporary Japan,” in Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, ed. Michael Weiner (New York, Routledge: 2009), 73-74; David Chapman, “Managing ‘Strangers’ and ‘Undecidables’: Population Registration in Meiji Japan,” in Japan's Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki Identification and Documentation, eds. David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogess (London: Routledge, 2014), 98.
39 “Etsuran kinshi no jinshin koseki? Netto ni sabetsuteki hyōgen, Hōmukyoku ga shuppinsha kara kaishū,” Chūnichi shinbun, April 4, 2021.
40 Noah McCormack, “Buraku Immigration in the Meiji Era - Other Ways to Become ‘Japanese’,” East Asian History, no. 23 (June 2002): 98.
41 Ibid., 107. See also Jun Uchida, “From Island Nation to Oceanic Empire: A Vision of Japanese Expansion from the Periphery,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 42, no. 1 (2016): 57-90. Uchida discusses an 1886 proposal to encourage emigration of Burakumin to the Philippines, where they could act as agents of Japanese imperial expansion.
42 Suzuki, Kindai Nihon Buraku mondai kenkyū josetsu.
43 For a more detailed general account of this period of history, see, for example, Chapters 9 and 10 in Teraki Nobuaki and Kurokawa Midori, Nyūmon Hisabetsu Buraku no rekishi (Ōsaka-shi: Kaihō shuppansha, 2016). Available in English as Nobuaki Teraki and Kurokawa Midori, A History of Discriminated Buraku Communities in Japan, trans. Ian Neary (Folkestone, Kent: Renaissance Books, 2019).
44 Teraki and Kurokawa, Nyūmon hisabetsu Buraku no rekishi, 171-211.
45 Suzuki, Kindai Nihon Buraku mondai kenkyū josetsu, 127-145.
46 For a brief discussion on this subject, see Noah McCormack, “Making Modern Urban Order: Towards Popular Mobilisation,” Japanese Studies 22, no. 3 (2002): 262-266.
47 See Kadooka, “Hinkon naru seishin.” Kadooka is a freelance journalist who has written frequently on the Burakumin. See also the Fujino statement in this dossier.
48 JMR cites Kagawa's 1915 Hinmin shinri no kenkyū as an authoritative description of conditions in Burakumin communities (44-46). On Kagawa's mistaken claims regarding the Buraku origin of slums in Tokyo and elsewhere, see Edward Fowler, “The Buraku in Modern Japanese Literature: Texts and Contexts,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 1 (2000): 12-13. Moreover, in using this source, JMR demonstrates an amateurish inability to read it correctly. He writes: “Reflecting the combination of widespread crime and family disintegration, [buraku] parents sometimes (Kagawa suggested often) killed their babies. They did so by transferring their infants (called moraigo) to specialists. Those specialists might then sell the children among themselves several times, but usually the babies eventually died (Kagawa, 1915:637–43)” (46). However, what Kagawa actually wrote is that infants from beyond the city – children of illicit relationships or of rape, including the offspring of “good people” – were brokered into households in the slums, where they would often be allowed to die. The incentive for the poor was a significant amount of money, sometimes up to five yen, which would otherwise be impossible to obtain. Both contemporaries and scholars have noted that these deaths were often due to poverty and negligence, not to intentional murder. See David R. Ambaras, “Topographies of Distress: Tokyo c. 1930,” in Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 187–217.
49 Ian Neary, The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichirō (London: Routledge, 2010), 76-80.
50 For more on these organizations, see Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire, 93-102; 135-139; and Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Prewar Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 45; 58-59; 65-66; 119.
51 Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Pre-War Japan, 226.
52 Shimahara Nobuo, Burakumin: A Japanese Minority and Education (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 21.
53 See the critique of JMR's use of this reference and composite image at Kadooka, “Hinkon naru seishin VIII,” September 15, 2020.
54 Kimura Kyōtarō, Suiheisha undō no omoide (Kyoto: Buraku Mondai Kenkyūjo, 1975), 9-11.
55 George O. Totten and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, “Emancipation: Growth and Transformation of a Political Movement,” in Japan's Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality, ed. George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 41; Teraki and Kurokawa, Nyūmon hisabetsu buraku no rekishi, 190; 220; Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Prewar Japan, 59.
56 Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire, 139; Totten and Wagatsuma, “Emancipation,” 56; Ian Neary, Dōwa Policy and Japanese Politics (Routledge: Forthcoming).
57 See, for example, Kubota Kyoshin, “Senzen ni okeru dōwa chiku rinpo jigyō no rekishi (jō),” Buraku kaihō kenkyū 19 (1979): 65.
58 JMR writes: “In fact, most burakumin are descended not from leather-workers, but from poor farmers with distinctively dysfunctional norms. Others may or may not have shunned them out of concern for purity, but they certainly would have shunned many of them for their involvement in crime and their disintegrating family structures” (1). And again, “Like (to take but one example) the ‘crackers’ among the poor whites in the U.S. south, many (obviously not all) of the poorer burakumin were quick to take offense, quick to escalate any quarrel to dangerous levels, and quick to avoid costly investments in work or education. They formed communities with astonishingly high levels of crime. And only haphazardly did they invest in their own marriages and families” (2). And here: “during the early post-war years, the buraku leaders and organized crime syndicates began to work together to extract funds from local and prefectural governments” (4).
59 Craig Freedman and Luke Nottage, “You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off: The Chicago School of Law and Economics Comes to Japan” (16th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Wollongong, Australia, 2006), 8.
60 See Asaji Takeshi and Hirooka Kiyonobu, “Issues in Ramseyer's understanding of modern Buraku history and the Suiheisha” in this journal.
61 Suginohara Juichi, Buraku no genjō wa ima (Kyoto: Buraku Mondai Kenkyūjo, 1995), 13, 43, 53.
62 See Akuzawa Mariko and Saitō Naoko, “Letter to the Editors-in-Chief of the Review of Law and Economics: 'On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan” by J. Mark Ramseyer“ in this journal.
63 For example, the 1868 population is listed as 492,409 and one of the sources for this figure is listed as Akisada Yoshikazu (1974). Akisada, in his article, indicates that the population survey data presented in his article are figures based on the fuhanken (prefecture and domain) system of the 2nd and 3rd years of Meiji and are therefore basically different from statistics that emerge out of later fuken (prefectural) and gunchoson (county and township or village)-based survey data (55). Akisada states that these are “early modern” figures, while not denying the role they might have for helping us think about modern population figures. Akisada also indicates that there are three distinct “lineages” (keitō) to the data he presents and discusses discrepancies between the various statistics while offering cautionary notes. Ramseyer ignores these.
64 Freedman and Nottage, “You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off,” 23.
65 Mark Ramseyer and Eric B. Rasmusen, “Outcaste Politics and Organized Crime in Japan: The Effect of Terminating Ethnic Subsidies,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 192-238.. For more discussion on this point, see Akuzawa and Saitō, “Letter to the Editors-in-Chief of the Review of Law and Economic” and Ian Neary, “Professor Mark Ramseyer and the Buraku Question: an introduction” in this journal.