Promoting Social Harmony

Equal rights on paper do not guarantee an equal place in everyday life. In this booklet from 1926, historian Kita Sadakichi examines the exclusion faced by Buraku communities in housing, work, education, marriage, and ordinary friendship. He asks why material improvements have failed to bring genuine emancipation.

Drawing on personal encounters and historical arguments, he insists that ignorance and habitual avoidance can combine into powerful oppression, even when individuals deny any intention to harm. His account also considers the Suiheisha movement, its denunciations of discrimination, and the tensions between protest and reconciliation.

The proposed remedy is active contact: personal friendship, intercourse between households, and even preferential hiring and shopping as recompense for past exclusion. Yet these proposals sit beside paternalistic demands for improvement and an ideal of complete assimilation. This unabridged translation preserves both the reforming force and the limits of that outlook.