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On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity in Prewar and Wartime Japan by Jeffrey Paul Bayliss (review)

Jeffrey Bayliss’s On the Margins of Empire explains “the politics of minority identities in prewar and wartime Japan” (p. 388) within the wider context of modernization and imperialism by examining how mainstream stereotypes, mutual self-images, and international events and discourses shaped the construction of Buraku 部落 and Korean identities. The book offers an in-depth exploration of how Burakumin 部落民 and Koreans living in Japan during this period were variously marginalized and stereotyped, how class backgrounds within these groups influenced their responses to changing discriminatory social attitudes and to policies aimed at incorporating them into the Japanese empire, and how members of these groups came to view and interact with each other. The depth of the historical scholarship and the refined nature of many of the core arguments contained in this monograph are such that a proper review demands a summary of each chapter before examining what I consider the book’s most noteworthy features. Chapter 1 outlines how Meiji state-led attempts to modernize Japan impacted the ways society generally envisioned the place of Bura kumin and Koreans in the Japanese nation and empire. Bayliss focuses on how civilizational, racial, and other modern discourses variously affected understandings and treatments of these groups. There are conspicuous commonalities, such as the tendency to highlight “their supposedly pathological tendency toward behaviors that worked against the state’s agenda of social mobilization” (p. 75). Bayliss makes the argument that Burakumin and Koreans were on the receiving end of an extensive list of contradictory stereotypes that emphasized deviation from Japanese mainstream norms.