Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
48
lists ceased to be freely available for public perusal. However, cases of discriminatory
practices through illegal consultation of these lists continued, in particular with private
companies and detective agencies to inquire into the background of job applicants in
recruitment, individuals in case of marriage or areas in case of real estate.
Since the late 1960s, the identification of buraku areas by the government was
characterized by the official denomination as
D
ō
wa chiku
(literally, assimilation area) that
served to identify the areas for implementation of affirmative actions and the 1969 Special
Measures Law, aimed at improving the infrastructures and economies of buraku areas. These
policies lasted until 2007. Nowadays, many cases of discriminatory attacks continue online
and include messages about buraku areas and people, as well as the use of internet maps and
search engines to obtain and share personal information on names and housing location of
members from these communities.
Despite the heterogeneity of the discourses and approaches towards the issue
throughout history, categorization of the buraku districts still remained linked to ideas of
dirtiness, separation and habitants’ engagement in unskilled occupations. These same factors
are taken and transformed by buraku networks, associations and individuals through the
implementation of urban development programmes and local activities. These initiatives aim
at re-constructing the ‘buraku’ as the ‘hometown’, thereby re-formulating the idea of the
‘buraku’ through readable and commonplace signs. They do so by drawing upon positive
principles that relate both to the locality, local attachment, community-based relationships on
the one hand, and ‘national’ social, cultural and economic values (e.g. traditional industries,
‘national cultural landscapes’) on the other.
The shift of interest in the urban community dimension that occurred in the 1990s in
Japan became the framework for these spaces of representation. In particular, the national
community measures adopted in the 1960s by the Liberal Democratic Party (e.g.,
machi
and
furusato zukuri,
‘town and hometown making’ programmes), ‘human rights enlightenment
activities’ (Mutafchieva 2009; Amos 2011), as well as the projects sponsored by the
Agency
for Cultural Affairs
(hereafter ACA), represent the institutional framework in which I
understand these practices.
Cultural Landscapes and Hometown Making Programmes
Machi zukuri
(literally town-making) programmes were initially conceived as an ideological
counterpart to the city planning programmes back in the 1960s, and were intended as a social
