Japan’s Levelers: Building Alliances, Forging Identities

• In Event: Solidarities of the Weak

Abstract

The decade of the 1920’s saw the growth of radical movements around the world inspired in part by the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia. In Japan the movement against social discrimination reached a new stage with the formation of the Suiheisha or the Leveler’s Association of Japan, in 1922. In India, the U.S trained Dr B.R. Ambedkar began to fight social and economic discrimination from 1926. The fight against discrimination was being waged across the globe, even as new nations were being formed and these struggles provide a way to think about modernity in Asia from the perspective of the marginalized.
In this paper I will focus on the Suiheisha’s emancipatory agenda, which was shaped by Buddhism and anti-colonial ideas. It recognized the discrimination suffered by Koreans and Taiwanese in the Japanese empire, fought discrimination within the Buddhist sects, for instance in the Honganji sect a Black Robe Association (Kokui Domei) was formed, and formed a woman’s auxiliary association. The thinking of the members of the Suiheisha was shaped by the 1918 Rice riots that ,radicalized many in the movement as did the entry of revolutionary ideas after WWI of Willsoniain self-determinism, Christian socialism, and Marxism.
The Dalit movement in India, similarly was radicalized by the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the influences of the movement of ‘people of colour’. In both cases we find that they were articulating an alternative agenda to the state sponsored project of modernity. Placing their struggle within a comparative and global perspective provides a way of thinking about discrimination with an Asian and global framework.

Author

• Brij Tankha, Institute of Chinese Studies