Abstract
The Burakumin ('Buraku' meaning 'hamlet', and 'min' meaning 'people') are a Japanese minority group that descends from the Tokugawa period outcasts. The Buraku people are currently involved in a struggle for liberation, which has been active for nearly 70 years, from their social position as objects of prejudice and conditions of socio-economic hardship. A great deal of research and interest has emerged in this group amongst both Japanese and non-Japanese researchers in recent years, and many theories and opinions as to their origins, their current situation, and their future conditions have emerged.
There has been considerable disagreement over the period and cause of their origins. Opinions as to the period of emergence of the ancestral groups of the Burakumin range from the 7th through to the 17th centuries, and theories to the cause range from social, to religious, to political reasons. The future of the Buraku liberation movement is also in doubt, and there is a general lack of research into their greatest current difficulties and future progression.
In this thesis I will be examining the various theories concerning the origins of the Burakumin and I will be linking the earliest outcast groups with the Tokugawa outcast class, which is known to be directly connected to the modem-day Buraku minority group, in order to discover how far the Burakumin can be traced back. This thesis will show that the origins of the Buraku people can be traced back as far as the Heian period and were primarily due to Shinto and Buddhist influences.
I will also conduct a case study of the origins of four of Japan's major performing arts (sarugaku, noh, kabuki and bunraku) and looking at the involvement of outcasts in their creation and development in order to provide a better picture of the social conditions of early outcast groups.
The second major topic that I will examine in this thesis is the future of the Buraku liberation movement. For this purpose I conducted three weeks ofresearch during a field trip to Japan in July and August 2000. I will be chiefly drawing on the interviews that I conducted in Japan with the people who are currently connected to the Buraku liberation movement, as well as recent research into modern Buraku conditions, in order to provide a picture of the current state of the movement, and a critical examination of its future.
Through this research I discovered that there is a current trend of change in direction with regard to the movement for Buraku liberation, but that there is a need for further critical examination from within the movement with regard to a number of issues such as education, internationalisation, legislation and combating discrimination. I also found that there is still a definite need for a representative organisation for the movement, and that claims that the primary liberation organisation, the Buraku Liberation League, is perpetuating a solution to the Buraku problem appear to be groundless.