DŌWA POLICY – THE RE-EXAMINATION OF THE BLL

BURAKU LIVING ENVIRONMENTS were transformed and the characteristics which for a long time had been linked to the discriminated communities – the dirt created by dire poverty, the areas seen as breeding grounds for disease, their so-called moral deprivation – were all swept away. However almost in their place people started to point out the unfairness of the Dōwa projects policies. It is not just the BLL but any organization that makes political demands and then has them granted cannot help but become absorbed to some degree into the structure of the state. In the case of the BLL, its demands for a Dōwa policy which would make improvements to the living environment had been one of the central pillars of its strategy from the 1950s so that it was all the more likely that it would encounter this problem.

Within these circumstances there were demands for a re-examination of the movement's post-war history. One of these came from a historian of China, Fujita Yoshikazu, who in 1987 published, Dōwa wa Kowai ko – chitaikyō o hihan suru (Dōwa is Scary: criticisms of the Chitaikyō) (Aun Sosho). This raises in the title of the book one of the discriminatory ideas current at the time. And, as suggested in the sub-title, the trigger that prompted Fujita to write the book was the report on the implementation of Dōwa that was produced by the Chitaikyō commit tee in February 1986. The full title of this committee was the Regional Improvement Policy Advisory Committee and it had been set up by the Prime Minister in 1982 composed of senior bureaucrats representing each of the main ministries concerned with Dōwa administration plus a small number of academics and experts but no representatives of the Buraku movements. It replaced a similar committee – the Dōwa Taisaku Kyōgikai – which had contained representatives of the movement until its abolition in 1979.

The Chitaikyō report pointed out that while the ‘reality of the Dōwa areas has been significantly improved’, new problems had emerged. These were: Firstly, the loss of the autonomy of the administration which has become tied to the movement groups (in practice the BLL). Secondly, that the enactment of the policy had inhibited the development of self-improvement and independence of the residents of these communities.