| Working through Skin examines labor and minority issues in Japan, in a transnational context. In particular, it focuses on the Japanese leather industry and the political movement of people associated with this industry. In the past three decades this group, the Buraku, have gained increased international recognition as a minority, which allows their political organizations to put new pressure on the Japanese government. At the same time, though, the forms of stigmatized labor -- such as leatherwork and meat production -- that mark these people as a minority are leaving Japan, following cheaper labor costs to China and India. Political successes in arguing about labor, then, are coming at the moment that labor is transforming dramatically.;Based on 28-months of ethnographic research with the leading Buraku political organization and a leather tannery in eastern Tokyo, Working through Skin argues that, in the Buraku situation, labor is shifting from a set of stigmatized practices to a social identity, and that the work of making leather is being replaced by the work of making a multicultural Japan. The dissertation develops a theory of the "labor of multiculturalism" that addresses how new arguments about labor are being made in the language of multiculturalism and contextualizes this theory within global circulations of industrial capital and multicultural political action.;My dissertation focuses on how the Buraku liberation movement conducts politics in this changing situation. Treating their international efforts as communicative processes of self-redefinition, I examine what the Buraku political organization mobilizes around, how they mobilize, and how they justify their claims. In order to provide such an analysis, I explore three themes over the five substantive chapters of the dissertation: the material and symbolic practices involved in creating or not creating signs of Buraku identity; the interplay between choice and obligation in Buraku political strategy presently and historically; and finally the affective dimensions of international solidarity -- both mediated by the UN and not. Most directly, the first two chapters address the first theme, chapters two and three address the second, and chapters four and five address the final theme. Across the work, I articulate a theory of the labor of multiculturalism to characterize the current Buraku situation and speculate on the co-constitution of multiculturalism and neoliberal capitalism. |
