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Japan's Invisible Race - Caste in Culture and Personality (Paperback)
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Japan's Invisible Race - Caste in Culture and Personality (Paperback)
Series: Publications of the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies
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Modern Japanese share a myth to the effect that they harbor in
their midst an inferior race less "human" than the stock that
fathered their nation as a whole. These pariahs, numbering more
than two million, are segregated by caste just as firmly as the
Negro is in the United States. The present volume, to which several
Japanese and American social scientists have contributed, offeres
an interdisciplinary description and analysis of this strangely
persistent phenomenon, inherited from feudal times. Its main thesis
is that caste and racism are derivatives of identical psychological
processes in human personality, however differently structure they
may be in social institutions. It finds that what it terms status
anxiety, related to defensively held social values, leads to a need
to segregate disparaged parts of the population on grounds of
innate inferiority. Until the time of their official emancipation
in 1871, the so-called eta were distinguished visibly by their
special garb. Today few clues to their identity are visible; yet,
they remain a distinguishable, segregated segment of the population
and bear inwardly, in a psychological sense, the stigma resulting
from generations of oppression. This volume traces the story of the
outcastes in complete detail--their origin, their stormy
post-emancipation history, and their present leftist political
significance. Large populations of outcasts live in urban ghettoes
within the major cities of south-central Japan. In some of these
metropolitan centers they comprise up to 5 percent of the
population but contribute 60 to 65 percent of unemployment and
relief roles. They have periodic trouble with the police; they
manifest a delinquency rate more than three times that of the
ordinary population; their children do poorly in school; they are
subject to various forms of job discrimination; and few marriages
are successfully consummated across the caste barrier. Some try to
escape their past identity by becoming prostitutes or by entering
the underworld. Those who survive discrimination to achieve status
in society either live in fear of exposure [if they are "passing"]
or overtly maintain their identity in proud isolation. Some who
live in rural communities have achieved equal economic status with
their neighbors but not full social acceptance. In their
theoretical closing discussion the authors offer a challenging
critique of Marxian class theory in introducing the concept of
"expressive" exploitation--that is, the psychological use of a
subordinate group as a repository of what is disavowed by the
values of a culture in a caste society--as distinct in form and
function from the "instrumental" economic or political exploitation
of subjected minorities in class societies. Contributors:Gerald
BerremanJohn B. CornellJohn DonoghueEdward NorbeckJohn PriceYuzuru
SasakiGeorge O. Totten This title is part of UC Press's Voices
Revived program, which commemorates University of California
Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and
give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to
1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship
accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title
was originally published in 1966.
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