1st Edition

The Buraku Issue and Modern Japan The Career of Matsumoto Jiichiro

By Ian Neary Copyright 2010
    272 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    272 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Written by an internationally recognized specialist on Buraku studies, this book casts new light on majority-minority relations and the struggle for Buraku liberation. Ian Neary focuses on the Burakumin activist, left-wing politician, family company manager and arguably the most important Buraku leader of the twentieth century: Matsumoto Jiichiro.

    Based on primary material reflecting recent research, each chapter locates Matsumoto Jiichiro’s experience within the broader developments in Japan's social, political and economic history and illuminates dimensions of its social history during the twentieth century that are frequently left unconsidered.

    As an examination of Buraku history this book will appeal to scholars and students of Japanese political and economic history, ethnic and racial studies, socialism, social thought and social movements.

    1. The Early Years  2. Matsumoto and the Suiheisha  3. From Prison to the Diet  4. Matsumoto Jiichirô: Dietman 1936–41  5. Matsumoto and the War in the Pacific  6. Matsumoto and Occupied Japan  7. Matsumoto in the 1950s  8. His Last Years: The 1960s

    Biography

    Ian Neary is a Faculty Fellow at St Antony's College and a Lecturer in the politics of Japan at Oxford University, UK.

    "Ian Neary deserves our praise and gratitude for his sustained effort to chart the contours of a problem that is compelling both as a human rights issue and as a subject with the potential to teach us so much about Japanese society, politics, and history [...] With his publication of this new biography of Matsumoto Jiichiro (1887 - 1966), he has greatly enriched our understanding of preward buraku activism, while also providing an account of how the movement developed through World War II into the 1960s." -- Daniel Botsman, Yale University, in Monumenta Nipponica, 66:2 (2011)