RACISM AND MORAL TRAINING

TOMEOKA KŌSUKE WHO was in charge of the Buraku Improvement Policies within the Naimushō was a Christian educated at Dōshisha school, Kyoto which in 1920 would become Dōshisha University. In part, his involvement in social policy administration was linked to his devotion to the moral and ethical teachings of Ninomiya Sontoku on the repayment of kindness. There has already been much published about Tomeoka pointing out the prejudices that he held about people in the Buraku communities (Fujino 1986, Murota 1998). He wrote that ‘their lifestyles resembled those of the aboriginals of Taiwan’. He held both the colonial Taiwanese aboriginals and people of Buraku communities in contempt. He thought, ‘they are ignorant and full of superstition’, ‘they are negligent and moreover dishonest’ and their communities are hothouses for crime. He even went as far as to suggest that there is something different about their physiological organs which is why they have so many twins.

His understanding of the problem even had an influence on Kagawa Toshihiko who was another Christian and social activist. Kagawa wrote in Studies on the Mentality of Poor People, ‘They (the Burakumin) are dirty and many suffer eye diseases… we can say that they have a sense of themselves as a single race.’ ‘They are a kind of degenerate race among the Japanese – or a slave race, an ancient race that has fallen behind the times.’ (Kagawa Toshihiko Zenshū Vol 8) Similar to the understanding of Takeba Toraichiro of Mie discussed earlier, this exposes the limits of these ‘devoted pioneers’. The very act of plunging into an asymmetrical relationship of engaging with and assisting the ‘weak’ by charitable activities inescapably was based on feelings of their own superiority. Such feelings were probably not unusual.

This understanding of the essential inferiority of the discriminated Buraku communities is usually explained in a way that has ‘racial’ characteristics with genetic elements at the core around which the acquired characteristics of customs, hygiene and habits took shape. This way of thinking about the Buraku issue was introduced through newspapers and permeated into the thinking of the Japanese people at large.