AIMING FOR SOCIALISM

AS WE SAW in the previous chapter the force that drove the Suiheisha movement forward was pride in being ‘Burakumin’. However, many of those who joined the movement also had a strong desire to be accepted as fellow subjects or citizens. This idea of wanting to be treated ‘the same’ strengthened the influence of socialism within the movement but it began to express itself in different forms.

In November 1923 Takahashi Sadaki and Kishino Shigeharu created the National Suiheisha Youth League. Takahashi was a follower of Yamakawa Hitoshi, had been a core member of the JCP when it was formed in 1922 and indeed had personally taken part in the founding of the party. In his thinking most people within Buraku communities were propertyless tenants or workers – proletarians – who would achieve liberation from discrimination with the advent of socialism that would be achieved in solidarity with the proletariat outside the Buraku communities and following struggle alongside comrades in the tenants unions and labour union movement. In other words, he took the view that Buraku discrimination would disappear when an equal society was realized in which there were no inequalities of wealth, and class antagonism between capitalist and worker, tenant farmer and land owner had disappeared. This socialist thinking was influential with the Suiheisha groups formed in Osaka, Nara, Kyoto and Mie and gradually the youth league established itself in a dominant position within the movement's central headquarters.

In 1924 in the middle of his attempts to convert the Suiheisha to a class struggle position based on a socialist perspective, Takahashi, then only nineteen, published a book, Tokushū Buraku Issenenshi [A Thousand Year History of the Special Buraku]. The book was banned immediately after publication but was re-published quite soon thereafter with the title changed to Tokushū Burakushi and with blank squares in place of the banned phrases.

REACTIONS TO THE SUIHEISHA – THE SERADA VILLAGE INCIDENT

The kyūdan strategy – censure campaigns against discrimination – had been promoted since the foundation of the Suiheisha but there was a feeling that it was reaching its limits while in the background there was growing support for the ideas of the Youth League.