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The Return of the Outcast(e) Map: Kobe, Cartography and the Problem of Discrimination in Modern Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Extract
In November 1968, the Mitsukoshi Department Store in Kobe found itself at the center of a major controversy. At the beginning of the month, it had joined with Mitsukoshi stores in Osaka and Tokyo in exhibiting and offering for sale reproductions of a selection of historical maps as part of a special event to mark the centenary of the Meiji Restoration. The idea was to give interested members of the public a chance to imagine, through the maps, what different areas of the country had been like at the time of the Restoration—at that moment, in other words, when Japan as a whole stood at the threshold of modernity.
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References
Notes
1 I am grateful to Timothy Amos and Joseph Hankins for their assistance and advice with the preparation of this article. Needless to say, all errors of fact and interpretation are my responsibility alone.
2 The importance of this incident is explained in Yoshimura Tomohiro, “Ezu no tenji kōkai to sono igi”, in Ōsaka Jinken Hakubutsukan, ed., Ezu ni egakareta hisabetsumin (Ōsaka: Ōsaka Jinken Hakubutsukan, 2001), 93. For a contemporary account, see, “Tonda Meiji hyakunen kinen: ‘Sabetsu no kochizu’ o sokubai,” Asahi shimbun (evening edition), November 13, 1968, 10.
3 On the Fukuhara-chō brothel district, see Hitomi Sachiko, Kindai kōshō seido no shakaishiteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha, 2015).
4 “Tonda Meiji hyakunen kinen,” Asahi shimbun (evening edition), November 13, 1968, 10.
5 On the background to this decree, see Noah McCormack, Japan's Outcaste Abolition: The Struggle for National Inclusion and the Making of the Modern State (London: Routledge, 2012). The relevant literature in Japanese is too vast to summarize here, but see, for example, Uesugi Satoshi, Meiji Ishin to Senmin haishi-rei (Osaka: Kaihō shuppansha, 1990).
6 On the Suiheisha, see Ian Neary, Political Protest and Social Control in Prewar Japan: The Origins of Buraku Liberation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). For an incisive social history of the origins of the Suiheisha in Japanese, see Suzuki Ryō, Suiheisha sōritsu no kenkyū (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyūsho, 2005). For a recent English-language study of Buraku politics in the context of the Japanese empire, see, Jeffrey P. Bayliss, On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).
7 Although it is a problematic text, and needs to be evaluated with care, English-language readers are able to get some sense of the situation as it stood in the late 1960s from George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, eds., Japan's Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
8 -Century Japan, ed. Peter Nosco and James Ketelaar (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 262-289.
9 For an overview of the process leading up to the passage of the Special Measures Law, see Ian Neary, The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan: The Career of Matsumoto Jiichirō (London: Routledge, 2010), Ch. 8. See also, Joseph D. Hankins, Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 162-5.
10 For a useful chronology of events in this period, including media reports, see Asada Zennosuke, Sabetsu to tatakaitsuzukete: Buraku kaihō undō gojūnen (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1969), 321-2. I am grateful to Timothy Amos for this reference.
11 For a general overview of the process leading up to the initial decision in 1968, see Neary, The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan, Ch. 8. For the Justice Ministry's 2008 ruling affirming that the early Meiji family records should not be open to public inspection, see