Asia Pacific Modern, 13. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014. xxii, 277 pp. (Figures.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28329-9.
Working Skin is a highly original treatise which explores one of the primary tensions pertaining to the contemporary Buraku problem in Japan: “that multicultural forms of political argument that authorize labor as a category of Buraku marginalization are gaining traction at the precise moment the labor that renders people stigmatized as Buraku is disappearing” (240). Based on the author’s extensive engagement in broad-ranging fieldwork activities, including working in the Buraku-affiliated NGO International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR) and a Tokyo leather tannery, the book offers perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically reflexive attempt by any scholar to date to wrestle with issues of contemporary Buraku liberation within the broader context of liberal multiculturalism and globalization.
As the introduction makes plain, multiculturalism is viewed as a liberal discourse employed by both Burakumin and non-Burakumin alike in recent decades to construct and manage issues pertaining to difference. Working Skin offers a study of what is termed “the labor of multiculturalism,” making sense of the differing, gendered conditions under which such multicultural signification takes place, the kinds of labour employed in the constitutive process, the bodies of content entailed in the production process, and the transformative power of that labour. Multiculturalism in the book is interpreted as a discourse that “disciplines and dominates the lives of people both at the margins and at the center of the nation-state” (17).
Chapter 1 analyzes and contrasts the different kinds of labour engaged in by employees in both the IMADR and a leather processing plant in Tokyo. The chapter shows how the different labour undertaken in both settings, which is both gendered and shaped historically by divergent practices of economic production, works to produce different bodies of Buraku subjects ultimately brought together under the same label. Chapter 2 focuses on the problem of the “non-production of signs of being Buraku” and the question of “how this non-production troubles the Buraku political movement” (62). Defining the desire of people not to want to identify as Burakumin “Ushimatsu” (based on the leading protagonist in Shimazaki Tōson’s novel Hakai), and identifying this tendency at various scales including both the individual and the geographical collective level, Hankins demonstrates the tensions this kind of ideology has for the Buraku Liberation League in its search for “complete liberation” (69), and establishes via a historical argument the ways in which such an idea has emerged in conjunction with a (neo)liberal politics that advocates multiculturalism.
Chapter 3 marks the commencement of a new section which shifts the focus of the book away from the production and non-production of Buraku signs to the kinds of content produced and the forms of labour undertaken to draw public attention to this difference. Here the focus is first on understanding the transformations in the criteria that have physically and conceptually determined Buraku identity (occupation, residence, and kinship), an analysis that is conducted through (among other things) the intriguing lenses of environmental critique and private detective investigations. Chapter 4 then moves on to introduce how attention to the signs of Buraku difference is constituted in two public settings important for the Buraku liberation movement: human rights seminars and denunciation campaigns. By focusing on the figure of the “sleeper” within a human rights seminar setting (members of the public allegedly in attendance of their own volition), and contrasting these figures alongside a public that needs to be forced to admit to both direct and indirect acts of Buraku discrimination, the chapter convincingly shows that rather than seeing both figures as mutually opposed or chronologically consecutive moments in a process of liberation, they can be productively understood as twin processes designed to constitute and discipline a Buraku public.
Chapter 5 marks the beginning of a third section in the book dealing with the transnational aspects of Buraku liberation and the attempts to create a basis for international solidarity. The chapter specifically focuses on the attempt by the Buraku Liberation League to develop international partnerships with various overseas groups by fostering a sense of the corresponding nature of their experiences of discrimination. The chapter offers an analysis of “Discrimination Based on Work and Descent,” a now officially recognized category of discrimination which emerged as the result of the political collaborations of various international partner groups including the Buraku Liberation League, and examines the kinds of labour undertaken in this project to create a universally recognizable subject suffering a unique form of discrimination. The chapter further explores the interpretative problems such a project poses, and the ways in which such an undertaking is both connected to and generated by broader liberal concerns.
Chapter 6 deals with a particular instance of what Hankins terms the “transnational solidarity project” (200) wherein a group with Buraku ties in Tokyo, through the English language tutelage and then interpreting efforts of the author, prepared for and embarked upon a journey to Tamil Nadu to strengthen ties with Dalit organizations experiencing what was projected by participants to be similar forms of discrimination. This chapter also looks to examine the kinds of labour undertaken to articulate a particular form of “wounded” subjecthood transnationally, the different forms such labour takes and the tensions they produce, as well as the work engaged in to forge solidarity between groups whose experiences of discrimination and movements towards liberation are at times jarringly different. The conclusion then seeks to tie the various sections of the book together by addressing important questions about why the labour of multiculturalism has gained traction and support from funding bodies in recent times and how it has worked to transform the Buraku subjects who engage in it.
Working Skin offers powerful insights into the nature of the contemporary Buraku liberation movement as well as addressing broader issues pertaining to constructing and managing difference in Japan. By asking original questions and then developing investigative methods and interpretative strategies that permit highly suggestive answers, the book sets a new gold standard for both studies of Burakumin and multiculturalism in Japan. The work’s exciting theoretical underpinnings and powerful conclusions suggest that it will also have a much broader appeal for scholars and students working further afield both in the disciplines of anthropology and history as well as in the various locations where they intersect.
Timothy D. Amos
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 446-448