ABSTRACT
After two years researching the educational experiences of immigrant youth in the Tokyo/Kanto area, I returned to Osaka with a radically different perspective on marginalization and a deeper understanding of how the treatment of Burakumin and the treatment of foreigners are intertwined. While immersed in the Kanto worldview, I remained frustrated by the stonewalling of discussion around not only the existence of and discrimination experienced by Burakumin but any awareness that “multicultural curriculum” or Human Rights Education owed its popularity, if not its small measure of success, to the Buraku liberation movement of the 1960s and the ongoing struggle to rectify prejudicial governmental and social policies. Working with educators in Kanto/Tokyo who lacked this historical perspective created a distorted sense of reality for many, including progressive immigrant youth, to see their precarious situation as unique. Their assumption held that discrimination was a new phenomenon, that the battle lines were drawn: “the Japanese” against immigrants. 1 Little did they realize there existed an entire population of Japanese Nationals, the Burakumin, who were continuing to experience different, but equally harmful, levels of exclusion.
