The Politics of the Fight against and the Denouncement of the Magazine "All-Romance" for a Discriminatory Story: A Rethinking about the History of the Buraku Liberation Movement after WWII

YAMAMOTO Takanori
Abstract:
The fight to denounce the discriminative story in the magazine "All-Romance", which arose in Kyoto in 1951, was an epoch making event in the Buraku liberation movement after WWII. The fight has been widely viewed as a model for struggles against the discriminative policies of local and national governments since then. Studies about the incident have trended to reconfirm this interpretation. But since 1980s, some work has been done to modify the generally held view. Nevertheless these studies are problematic in that the arguments are done inside the frame of a single history, the history of the Buraku liberation movement. I think that it is impossible to reveal the conditions from which the successful fight emerged, using this point of view. In this paper, I will examine the actual facts of the fight, and I will reinterpret the fight in relation to other social movements and in the context of national and international politics in order to reveal the processes that formed the social movements of the postwar era.


Keywords: Buraku liberation movement, Dowa policy, Social movement, Occupation