Challenging the *state, embracing the nation: An ethnographic analysis of human rights in Japanese society

This study examines the contemporary politics surrounding the buraku issue in Japan to understand how local actors bring human rights to bear on their particular cause when the state obfuscates attempts to mediate disputes in the courts. Based on two years of participant-observation at organizational meetings and political demonstrations of Burakumin activists and interviews with residents of buraku communities, it is argued that a large measure of the successes of Burakumin in combating discrimination can be attributed to their reconfiguration of human rights at the local level. Rather than stress their status as an oppressed minority, Burakumin refract discourses of human rights through the dominant ideology of Japan as a racial and cultural monolith and combat discrimination by underscoring that they lack any markers of racial, ethnic, or cultural difference from other Japanese. However, more general models of human rights are also invoked to increase linkages with political organizations and human rights entities outside of Japan and exert external pressure on the state. This project contributes to human rights scholarship by rejecting the tenets of the universalism/relativism debate and illustrating how universal constructions of human rights can work in concert with particular formulations unique to a socio-political context.