ABSTRACT
Matsumoto was not the only one who was thinking about how to organise fellow members of the Buraku communities to protest about their poverty and discrimination.
Late in 1921 three young men from Kasuyabara village in Nara prefecture, Sakamoto Seiichiro¯, Saiko¯ Mankichi and Komai Kisaku, launched a call for the formation of a national movement of and for Burakumin through which they could fight for their liberation. They called their movement the Suiheisha (the Levellers’ Society). As we shall see, the Suiheisha later became involved with the socialist and social democratic movements, but these were only some of the influences on the founders of the movement. If, for example, we look at the document these three produced to get the movement going, ‘Yoki Hi no tame ni’ (‘For a better day’), there are long sections taken from an article on Buraku liberation written by Sano Manabu, a founding member of the JCP. The second section is mainly from a translation by the anarchist Osugi Sakae of a piece by the French pacifist Romain Roland on mass culture, and this is followed by a final section that is strongly influenced by a story of Maxim Gorky. It ends:
Get up and look. It is dawn. We must dispel the long night of rage, the grief, the enmity, the curses, the hazy bad dream. We must renew ourselves with new blood. Now let us climb the hill of purification from inferno to paradise. Now let us rush up this good hill. Those of you who suffer beneath the traditional status system . . . gather together. Receive the baptism of dawn. Worship the rise of the morning star of a better day. Get up and Look. It is dawn. (Watanabe and Akisada 1973: 21-4)
At best, it amounted to a call to arms, a statement of the need for Burakumin to do something for themselves. There is nothing here that analyses the plight of the Burakumin or that suggests how the movement might be organised. There is evidence of radical and foreign influences on this pamphlet, and all three of these young men had taken part in the short-lived Japan
Socialist League (Nihon Shakaishugi Do¯mei) formed in December 1920. On the other hand, Sakamoto had a few years earlier tried to escape discrimination in Japan by migrating to Manchuria. He soon returned, but the idea of escape remained attractive and at one point the three of them planned to ‘fly away’ from discrimination in Japan by migrating to Sulawesi, and to this end they formed the Tsubamekai (Swallow Association). Certainly at this time Sakamoto seems to have felt that at the heart of the problem was the fact that the Japanese people were ignoring the imperial will, expressed at the time of the Liberation Declaration, which after fifty years was still being ignored. If he was opposed to capitalism it was mainly because it had produced Buraku poverty and reproduced discrimination in a way that was contrary to the expressed wishes of the emperor (Takayama 2005: 96).
