ABSTRACT
At 9:30 a.m. on 22 November 1974, some fifty-two teachers at Yōka Senior High School in southern Tajima, an area in Hyōgo Prefecture, walked off the job, declaring that under the conditions prevailing in the school they were unable to teach. The immediate targets of their statement were members of a local branch office of the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaihō Dōmei, referred to hereafter as the league). The league’s student members at Yōka High School had been attempting since May to gain approval for a study group on burakumin problems at the school and at the time of the teachers’ walkout were engaged in a hunger strike over the issue. Emerging from Yōka High into the bright sun of that Friday morning, the teachers encountered a large gathering of league members. Shouting that the teachers were abandoning their responsibilities as educators, league members blocked their exit and ordered them back into the school. As one league account later succinctly stated, “The teachers resisted, which resulted in chaos. In this struggle, many people were injured.” 1 The “chaos” continued for some thirteen hours, during which time the teachers were forced back inside the school, formally denounced by the league, then compelled in extended sessions to acknowledge in writing that they had behaved discriminatorily toward burakumin. By the end of that long day, as many as sixty people, most of them teachers, had been injured, with forty-eight hospitalized.
