ABSTRACT
The homogeneity myth potentially leads to the mistaken conclusion that Japan is a two-tier society: a unitary, monolithic mainstream that marginalizes and discriminates against social outsiders. Two concerns should be raised. First, the mainstream itself is problematic, since any given individual belonging to this massive category partakes of so many clashing identities. Second, each minority, depending on historical contingencies, has been treated differently by society at large. Regardless of the intellectual hollowness of the mainstream-versus-minority perspective, powerful social forces have established this binary view in Japanese studies. Japanese academics and intellectuals usually distinguish between the different meanings of ethnocultural, bioracial, and political identity. However, the average Japanese often allow, perhaps encouraged by political leaders, the multivocality of certain terms to mutate into ambiguity. Consequently, very different concepts are conflated. Due to its central role in the history of modern Japanese identity, a good place to begin is with the chameleon term minzoku. The core meaning of minzoku is a people.
