by miho kim, founder, NDT
Our Objectives
“…by introducing the term ‘hisabetsu Nikkei’ referring to a group of diverse communities that are structurally subordinated by the dominant system of power that is ‘Japan’ today, to cultivate shared awareness and analysis; and honor the relevance and moreover, the very centrality of their voices, to help lead the broad-based social movement for social justice and liberation; deconstruct Japan’s unique and distinct system of oppression that is the Tenno-sei or ‘imperial ideology,’ so as to understand the root causes of racialized injustice in Japan; and based on this shared critical systemic analysis of oppression, craft strategies for grassroots empowerment, unity and solidarity, and cultivate people’s own voices to shape the movement for collective liberation.”
Carving out the Grassroots Space In the Movement Ecosystem
In February 2002, I was asked to take Manami Kishimoto, a Burakumin activist from Japan visiting the U.S., to meet Yuri Kochiyama who was living in Oakland, CA, and interpret for her to say hello and pay her respects. Yuri shed tears, grabbing her hands, saying, "thank you for coming all the way from Japan to educate me about the horrible racism being suffered by Burakumin. During my entire time living in Harlenm, where Japanese people visited all the time, not once did I hear about the racism that persisted inside Japan to this day, against Koreans or Burakumin. I am ashamed as a person of Japanese descent, that Japan could be so cruel and still oppress your people." Manami, too, was moved to tears, claiming that not once was she ever thanked for raising the issue of Burakumin discrimination, but instead, looked at with a frown, as if she was causing disharmony and engaging in causing disturbances.
Manami shared the ongoing campaign by the Buraku community to win justice for Kazuo Ishikawa, a wrongfully-incarcerated Buraku man for a rape and murder of a teenage girl In his town in May of 1963. Now released on parole, Kazuo was continuing to insist on his innocence and seeking a fair retrial, while the prosecution was said to possess piles of evidence that piled up as high as several meters to which his defense was denied access. Yuri pledged to do her part, asking us to keep her informed and to relay her message of solidarity to Kazuo upon Manami's return to Japan.
This was the beginning of what ended up being a regular liaison role between grassroots communities in the U.S. and Japan that were similarly facing racism and erasure in their respective societies.
In 2008, a first U.S.-based Zainichi Korean organization was established, which we named Eclipse Rising. A small group of us varying in ages 20-70+, all residing/studying in the U.S. at the time, decided to organize a solidarity tour from the U.S. to Japan, specifically for the purpose of directly connecting oppressed communities fighting against racism and fight for systemic change. Manami Kishimoto played a crucial role, alongside members of Eclipse Rising with our own existing contacts mostly in Japan's Zainichi communities, in shaping our itinerary. Five of our members went on the first pilot tour, and the second pilot took place a few years later. Since then, while group-based organized tours were not organized, we continued to facilitate exchanges between interested individuals and small groups between the Pacific, as well as shuttle messages of solidarity and updates between Yuri and the Buraku communities, including Kazuo Ishikawa and his base of supporters, of which Manami was part. As years went by, our informal netwroks expanded throughout Japan, as far as Okinawa, a critical flashpoint in the fight against Japanese colonial racism and US militarism.
By 2019, It had become evident to us that the preexisting US-Japan exchanges were predominated by mainstream national and corporate interests that served to advance trans-Pacific relationship-building aligned with cultivating appreciation and embrace of Japanese and U.S. nationalisms. Of the more civic-oriented programs, such as Nikkei diasporic initiatives, seemed to operate on the premise of Japan as a genuine democracy, complicit with Increasingly mainstream Japanese official narrative that Japan's militaristic past was either just that -- a thing of the past and therefore Irrelevant to how to understand the present -- or, simply a fabrication, an unequivocal rejection of historical truth. In other words, none of these 'pipelines' whether It be through various sister-city enterprises or civic organizations or the government-funded ones, would facilitate an Introduction to Japan's ongoing subordination of Its post-colonial ethnic minorities such as the Zainichi, or colonial governance over Ainu and Okinawan terriotiries and participation In struggles to achieve a genuine end to Japan's colonial legacies for justice, for nikkei diaspora (or any one else) genuinely committed to practice of the principles of the indivisibility of justice.
The 2019 tour was conducted for a small group of young Nikkei (and a non-Nikkei Jewish pro-Palestine ally) activists and spanned from Okinawa to Fukuoka to Osaka. In 2023, NDT partnered with San Francisco Comfort Women Justice Coalition (CWJC) and organized a delegation of a dozen participants and played speaker roles in various commemorative events seeking justice for the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and Massacre of Koreans and Chinese, which the Japanese govenrment denies any responsibility to this day. The tour spanned from the Kanto region (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, etc.), Osaka, and Kyushu (Fukuoka and Nagasaki), during which course some elected officials and local civic organizations that we had built relationships and alliances with through the years, joined.
As of writing this text, It seems that there Is definitely a unique niche for something like NDT, which centers the voices of the lived people who possess by virtue of their own lived survival, unique wisdom and Insights about the history of struggle In Japan, the Issues that afflict them today, as well as how best to craft strategies forward to grow our movement for justice. For the diaspora, rather than shaped Into living vessels through which to promote Japanese nationalism and its dominant narrative of history or capitalist agency to feed its global soft powers, we need opportunities to learn about, and directly connect with, the very people whose lives testify to the illusion of post-war Japan as post-Imperial, democratic, and post-racial. By situating the oppressed peoples' perspectives of both Japan and the U.S. In a common plane of view and frame of analysis, we can better Identify the workings of Imperialist systemic Intent. We understand that It Is not a coincidence that American white elites who shaped settler expansion Westward were also in the forefront of the colonial settler migration of Ainu territories to the north, or that the racialized colonized peoples of Japan and their reality of racial subordination was nullified by 'colorblind' rhetoric and policies just In the ways that we have seen In the United States. After all, hegemonic power knows no borders, relying on preexisting structure of oppression In given locales and colluding activiely with collaborators who benefit from this structure on the ground to maintain the hierarchy for control. This tour helps provide a glimmer of Insight Into how specific Issues on the gorund that are seemingly unrelated actually serve as part and parcel of the tentacles through which the hegemonic power maintains Its grip throughout Its expanding areas of Influence.
That said, each location has distinct ways In which hierarchy Is justified and maintained. While the U.S. operates on the Ideological basis of white supremacism, Japan has long maintained a system of Tennō-sei or 'Imperial Ideology.' On the face of It, Tennō-sei is not easily translatable for those familiar with US racism because most historically oppressed peoples In Japan are racially no different from the dominant Japanese (Wajin for Ainu, Yamatonchu for Okinawan, or simply Japanese for Zainichi Koreans/Chinese, and ippan-jin, loosely translating as the general public, for the Buraku-min). It Is both a caste system and a racial hierarchy determined by not only a vertical axis but a horizontal, distance-based axis as well. When the GHQ dismantled Imperial Japan, Tenno-sei as an Ideology and a logic for the new post-war social order was largely kept untouched. Understanding Japan's unique system of oppression Is a condition for an accurate systemic analysis from which to draw historical conclusions and Inform the future direction of our solidarity.
Terminology
Purpose of the term ‘hisabetsu’ (discriminated-against) as prefix to the broadly used term ‘Nikkei’ simply meaning “from Japan” or “of Japan” is to name the common positionality among this diverse group of people; they all have in common the root systemic nature of oppression that manifest in respective realities of injustice and subordination in the polity we know as “Japan.” Thus, as diverse and distinct as they are, as peoples, have a shared agenda and cause to forge solidarity to eradicate the very root source of oppressive power that is designed to place and keep them ‘discriminated against.’ It was originally inspired from the term “people of color” to unify the diverse communities of people impacted by white supremacism as the root system of oppression in the United States. While Japan also had a state-rooted system that ensured perpetration of racial hierarchy in Japan, in the Japanese vernacular among Japanese speaking activists, there was no equivalent to refer to those “otherized” by Japanese empire and the ideology that engendered it. We all are in this anachronistic place in history, wherein the physical empire of Japan itself as ceased to exist as of its defeat in WWII, and yet, the ideology and the system that created the racial theory, and hierarchy in accordance, remains in place, in spite of the dawn of the new era of liberal democracy in post-war Japan. By making the systemic racialization itself invisible, racialized existence also becomes invisible. The term ‘hisabetsu’ therefore makes the racialized existence of our oppressed communities visible but not only that, illuminates necessarily the cause of their oppression and brings imperial Japan’s Yamato supremacist ideology and belief of inherent inferiority of non-Yamato races, not a thing of the bygone era of WWII -- and the Japanese Empire as we once knew it -- but of this very present-day moment.
Another important aspect of the unifying term “hisabetsu” for us is the premise in our analysis that a genuine, lasting solution to our injustices as racialized minorities is one that requires eradication of the very system that keeps us down. And when that happens, then all communities oppressed by that system is free from the century-old grip of Tenno-sei rule. Inversely, if one of the hisabetsu communities are not free, then neither are others. In Japanese there is a term “運命共同体(unmei kyoudoutai)“ (a collective existence of shared fate and destiny) and the Zapatistas have a refrain popularized among American leftists (among others), “somos Zapatistas! Zapatistas son nosotros!” (“We are Zapatistas! And Zapatistas are us!”). Besides resonant with a fundamental principle of unity and solidarity in our social justice movement, these references all premise a practical dimension to our struggle – that the challenges are intertwined, and that unity is a rational consequence of our understanding that we are up against a common target.
Lastly, with reference to ‘hisabetsu’ and Tenno-sei as our common target, it would be remiss if we did not name the elephant in the room – – the United States via its military, most visibly and tangibly, such as in Okinawa and outlying islands, as a wizard behind closed doors dictating Japan's governance. During Allied occupation in the immediate aftermath of WWII, US military determined the legal status of the formerly colonized subjects of the Japanese empire, such as Koreans and Taiwanese, that still remained in the colonial metropole – that is, the Japanese ‘mainland.’ How to dispose of these former subjects, newly freed and liberated as nationals of the territories liberated from Japan’s colonial rule, was entirely a US military discretion. Okinawa became its war trophy. Conquest relies on, and benefits from, preexisting forms of oppression in the targeted society, and Japan was no exception. The US as victors of war preserved the Tenno-sei as a unifying source of identity of the Japanese people. The assumed superiority over the non-Japanese ‘others’ that Japanese did not hesitate to enslave or exploit as disposable labor or even human 'sex toys' in service of "Empire" surely provided a steady thread of continuity amidst the chaos and turbulence of post-war Japan after its empire’s utter demise.
Why do we choose to identify as "Nikkei"?
We choose the term “Nikkei” precisely because of the nature of Tenno-sei and its preservation through post-WWII to today that ensnarles ALL people who share a stake In Japan's future as complicit In this Inherently unequal, unjust system. In addition, many members of our communities have migrated abroad as a direct impact of colonization and racism. Seven decades after the purported ‘end’ of the era of Imperial Japan, members of our communities are still being displaced and uprooted from their homes due to denial and deprivation of fundamental equality, access to justice, opportunity, etc. In other words, humans by definition are beings of dignity, and leaving Japan behind is in some circumstances the only chance at claiming life with dignity.
By identifying uniformly as “Nikkei” we choose to defy relevance of national borders and political belongings such as citizenship or genetic lineage or other ancestral claims of indigeneity, to determine the nature of our relationship. What is relevant to us is the fact that we are ‘of’ Japan and negatively impacted by the very system that Japan embodies as key function of national identity, unity and organization. Geographically scattered about, there is cause for a “we” comprised of us diverse groups of people of Nikkei and ‘hisabetsu Nikkei’ alike, and believe our solidarity only makes us stronger in eradicating Japan’s system of oppression as we know it, to replace with a genuinely post-war Japan that is also post-imperial, marked with authentic inclusion in a culture of tolerance.
Reversed Realities for Hisabetsu Nikkei
2022 marked the 100th anniversary since the publication of the now-legendary Suiheisha Declaration, known as “Japan’s first national human rights document.”1 One major newspaper featured a centerfold dedicated to this commemoration, packed with commentary by select leading intellectuals in Japan. While lauding the significance of the declaration, and particularly the inspiring call, “time has come for us to be proud to be eta!,” not a single commentator even touched on the fact that even one hundred long years since the writing of this phrase, we have not yet achieved this in reality in our society today. Incidentally, not a single featured individual was of Buraku origin, but ippan-jin （一般人）.2
In this era of so much war, repression and violence, we ask is this not the moment now, to think about what this means. We are pained to see the media trumpet the sanitized praise about this declaration as if it is a mere relic of the glorious past. In the US context, perhaps an equivalent may be a centerfold in a major national newspaper to celebrate Juneteenth, featuring prominent Anglo figures praising its significance. And imagine a complete silence around lack of African American representation by the readership. This sheer weirdness is the very unnamed reality that contributes to the profound invisibility of Buraku-min today.
Or Imagine, In the Immediate aftermath of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, when several incidents of anti-Russian hate crimes were reported In Japan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the bold step of publicly urging calm and restraint via national news outlets. while this swift action should be lauded, the Irony Is not lost on Zainichi Koreans whose children have endured decades of hate speech, hate crimes, discrimination and other acts of violence and Intimidation consistently throughout Japan -- and their replete pleas for local law enforcmeent and national government to Intervene fell on deaf ears. Not only that, as If to rub salt on a wound, the Japanese government has eliminated Korean schools In Japan as the only non-Japanese school In all of japan from being eligible for public tuition subsidies. While French, Chinese, American, and other 'International' schools of which there are dozens throughout Japan receive this aid on par with other Japanese public Institutions, the reason cited for the Korean school-exclusion was due to "Its close association with the DPRK," Itself a dubious claim at best. To this day, anti-Zainichi bias or racism Is not even mentioned, nor Is anti-Okinawan or Ainu bias, on university campuses many of which host a student service facility dedicated to promotion of human rights on campus. When the Western world began to embrace LGBTQ rights, many of them quickly adopted a robust policy to be enforced on all campus staff, faculty and students to protect LGBTQ students -- again, an act that deserve to be applauded. At the same time, the omission of the historical minorities as the elephant In the room of public spaces tasked with promoting and protecting human rights of all people Is a clear pattern that has still evaded scrutiny, much less naming.
Historical denialism and erasure leads to erasure of the very existence of those who are living testaments to the history being erased. Concomitant to the erasure of victims Is the erasure of the acts committed by perpetrators. Therefore, historical denialism by the state is a state-sponsored attempt at cutting certain people out of the human family with regard to who belongs in society as a way to absolve Its past wrongdoing and claim a clean slate. It is no secret that the Japanese government, with unparalleled boldness since Shinzo Abe took hold of power in Japan, has stopped at nothing to obliterate three so-called “flagship wartime sins” by war-time militaristic Japan: a) mass suicide in Okinawa, b) ‘comfort women’/(particularly Korean) forced labor issue, and c) the Nanjing Massacre. Today the Japanese government officially denies that such things ever happened, at least as an official business of and by Imperial Japan. In addition, Japan continues to shamelessly propagate this myth globally that Japan is a homogenous nation, while on other hand, minority voices expressed through the arts like film, or Okinawan eisaa performances at Anime conventions in the US, etc., are officially promoted. Such performative tactics convey diverse rich artistic legacies of Japan in the context of a homogeneous Japan as well as present Japanese government as embracing multiculturalism, in line with the trends of the civilized international community.
Such PR does little, if any, to impact the actual quality of existence for an individual such as Zainichi Korean who is born and raised in Japan for generations since end of WWII, and, contrary to popular assumptions in the West, are denied citizenship, and thus constitutional protections, as well as most basic equal protection guarantees such as equal housing, education, and employment. It is unfortunately too common that a Zainichi Korean receive the following comments by unsuspecting Japanese: “You speak Japanese so well!” (expressed as a complement); “So how long are you staying in Japan? When are you going back to Korea?” (an innocent question asked of any traveler, one may assume); or finally, god forbid if a Zainichi Korean criticizes the Japanese government or society, “if you don’t like it here then why don’t you go back to Korea?” These comments roundly expose assumptions by Japanese that Zainichi Korean do not belong in Japan, that they are merely foreigners, and that that is not questioned.
An equivalent in the US context may be something like a Caucasian person asking a black person, “wow your English is so good!” “So when are you going back to Africa?” or, “if you don’t like it here, then go back to Africa!” Curiously, such comments have indeed been quite common particularly as backlash against the Civil Rights Movement intensified in the United States. Zainichi Koreans not only lack a country to which they can return as their home, other than as ‘ancestral homes’ – and Asian Americans are too painfully aware that their ancestral home countries rarely end up feeling like a genuine return ‘home’ as one may define it -- but they lack a country on the only land they know as home. To change their life circumstances, however, they are legally barred from participating in electoral politics and thus unable to effect law and policy on issues that directly affect them. It may come as no surprise, then, that a survey of Zainichi Korean young adults revealed that a majority of respondents “regretted being born as Zainichi Korean.”3 Such internalized inferiority and shame is endemic, just as it was for the eta one hundred years ago.
Dudu Diene, UN Special Rapporteur, toured our oppressed communities throughout Japan and lambasted in his report the Japanese government for its utter failure in lifting the racialized minorities out of poverty, subordination, and exclusion.4 He remarked that there is ‘profound invisibility’ from which these communities suffer. In this context, the Decolonizing Nikkei program necessarily seeks to make our communities visible in the eyes of Japanese society and the world whose gaze of Japan helps define its people in return. The Tour is work to commit our history to collective memory in the present, and thus into the future and thus defy what is actively being erased by the state of Japan. When we are visible and have opportunity to shape our narrative as integral to the society we all live in today together, then and only then, can we share and shape future prospects of this place we today call "Japan."
Jinkan as Organizing Principle
The people who shaped, and influenced, the foundational analysis of NDT through the years had multiple discussions on the myriad forms of manifestation of the “profound invisibility” afflicting all of our communities. They manifest on the national level, and also community level, and interpersonally, and perhaps most insidiously, in ourselves as deeply personal, internalized manifestations of erasure. One may calim this is only a natural conclusion of an existence where nationhood of the country is predicated on their own erasure.
It is in this context that we saw the Suisheisha Declaration spoke to a deep knowing about this. The following refrain concludes the declaration:
Let there be warmth in human society. Let there be light in human’s hearts.
Racism and oppression rob warmth from human society, and light from the hearts of people. To reject our own humanity is to go dark, the precise end goal of forced assimilation that has been the invisible tool of conquest used by the Empire of Japan. The result is a darkness that swallows us whole, in a frigid climate hostile to human survival. In other words, we agreed, racism can kill. It destroys real human life. Japan’s strategies for erasing its track record of racism is via erasure of history. This is a murderous act upon us and our people.
To us, in this context, solidarity across our communities spread far and wide, across disparate manifestations of oppression, is ‘jinkan,’ which is a key concept underlying the Suiheisha Declaration. The kanji for jinkan is read “ningen” which means human beings; however, in the context of the Declaration, some choose to read it as “jinkan” that emphasizes not primarily the human being as the unit of existence but rather, the relationships between human beings as precise sites of humanity or the conditions that make any space hospitable for humanity In the first place. Harmonizing relationships between people, as a response to broken relations imposed upon people based on Tenno-sei’s racial hierarchy, is key to solidarity. In other words, consciously re-mapping the web of our relations based on shared agenda for liberation.
For example, for those living in Yamato, the concerns faced by the Okinawan people afflicted by US military occupation rarely rise to levels of priority. The apathy itself makes them complicit with structural racism against Okinawa. As Manami Kishimoto said, “we don’t have to live along the fenceline and we have the luxury of forgetting about Okinawa’s base issues. Jahana Etsuko (of Ie-Jima, successor to peace activist Shoko Ahagon) said, ‘when you’re in Okinawa, you know when the war’s around the corner and we will be killed soon. But in Yamato, you will not realize you’re about to be killed, and next thing you know you’ll be dead. You are so far removed from the issue, you are not paying attention.’”
We conclude that jinkan is the only way we can live and survive together, NOT on each other’s backs, not blind to Okinawa’s imminent death as Yamato residents, but together, is to centralize the jinkan as sacred relationships and the very glue of foundation necessary to cultivate shared consciousness and analysis, and craft strategies for justice for all of us.
Rejecting the easy and tempting way to relate simply based on ancestry or ethnicity is key when it comes to formation of Nikkei consciousness, and has been an ongoing effort by various Nikkei activists in the course of our history. For example, the late Yuri Kochiyama reflected a memory of Malcolm X who remained her dearest friend and comrade to his last breath.
“When Malcolm (Malcolm X) returned from Mecca, praying side by side with blue-eyed brothers, he saw the potential for interracial solidarity across racial lines, you know. He said to me, ‘Yuri, we have to rethink black solidarity with our yellow brethren in Asia.’ I know what he meant by that is that while Japanese claimed to liberate Asians from the white imperialists invading Asia, we the people of color in the US were not being critical because Japanese were fellow people of color fighting white racism. But he started to be critical about Black-Yellow solidarity that he had sort of taken for granted until then, he was saying that we had to be more critical about what the Japanese empire was touting at that time.” She concluded, “if Malcolm wasn’t assassinated when he was, I believe we would have seen an evolution of solidarity between black and yellow people..." Then she looked up at me, grabbing my hands tight, saying, "I truly do believe Malcolm would have wanted to work with you." The "you" here is not just me as the physically present person before her, but all the voices that I had relayed to her from Japan, from Kazuo Ishikawa and other Buraku communities to Zainichi Koreans, hibakusha, so many whose histories were being chipped away from collective consciousness and historical memory In Japan to protect Its myth as a "beautiful nation" that could do no wrong. And the web amongst us all would extend to other Third World peoples defending against empire, Including Malcolm, Yuri, and many others.
Taking upon ourselves the task of cultivating ‘jinkan’ amongst our peoples allows us to appreciate common cultural heritage that heretofore had not been presented to us as such. One profound example involves the Tanko-bushi, beloved folk song and dance that is a popular staple of every Obon festival among Diasporic communities and Japanese alike. Visiting the birthplace of tanko-bushi and studying its history firsthand reveals that many of the coalminers were Korean and Chinese, and Buraku among the Japanese, all afflicted by abject poverty and in some cases, forced labor exploitation. Aso Taro, one of the most prominent politicians in Japan today, on his family company lot stands a memorial local Zainichi activists pressured him to erect there, for the remains of more than a dozen forced laborers and miners that were discovered covering dust. They all perished working In the coal mines owned by Aso. This memorial mentions nothing about them, but enshrines about a dozen unnamed human remains inside. Aso’s company lot land is filled with unknown numbers of human remains to this day. And the Japanese government and company refuse to even acknowledge the very existence of forced laborers, much less these human remains abandoned and forgotten to this day. Tanko-bushi lyrics could only have been composed by the group of coalminers like these unnamed victims, who, side by side, toiled away in brutal conditions day in and day out. We have come to appreciate and invoke a diverse group of laborers such as these, when singing the tanko-bushi, rather than the dominant narrative would like us to believe. We believe this is also one of many potent bases of a Nikkei identity grounded in the values of justice and liberation. A formation of a sense of this new Nikkei consciousness relies on our active cultivation of jinkan on our terms.