Millie Creightonfrom people so categorized in Japan’s historic Edo era ( 1600 – 1868 ).
They were discriminated against because they were itinerant, rather
than belonging to a place, or because their occupations dealt with
the dead—considered a source of pollution. Although the discrimi-
natory status has supposedly been “erased” in modern Japan, in ac-
tuality, it remains. Burakumin are identifiable through residency af-
filiation or masked information on family registries. For the group on
the bus, this trip involved an exploration of identity in relationship
to issues they were struggling with as Burakumin in Japanese society.
I had allowed myself to be influenced by the suggestions, and indeed
enthusiasm, of my informants. I had boarded the bus with a general
plan and purpose but without a truly “clear idea of exactly where [I
was] headed” (Wolcott 1999 , 38 ).^3 In hindsight, it became clear that
I learned much more accompanying this group of young Burakumin
on their identity travels through Hokkaido ̄ than I could have doing
anything else with those few remaining days.
Among the discussions I recall best were those that they wanted to
teach me, as a foreigner who was also a professor of Japanese stud-
ies, about the reality of being Burakumin. One young man discussed
the yearnings of his existential quest for identity in terms of his objec-
tions to the imperial symbols of the Japanese state. He explained that
as a Burakumin he was opposed to symbols of the emperor standing
as symbols of Japan. Symbols of the emperor tend to be used in Ja-
pan to reinforce the cultural assertion of Japan as a homogenous, or
one-people, nation (tanitsu minzoku) (see Weiner 1997 ). Minority
objections to the symbols were one aspect of protest against the song
long used by Japan as the “national anthem,” Kimigayo, a song of
tribute to the emperor, and the flag long used as the “national flag,”
Hinomaru, or the “circle of the sun” flag with a red circle on a white
background. The symbols have also long been regarded as question-
able by many in Japan because of their associations with pre–world
war II colonialism and military atrocities conducted under symbols
of the emperor.^4 Befu ( 1992 ) points out that given the questionable
nature of these symbols, for decades after the war, Japanese searched
for other identity symbols. The issue would again take center stage
in Japan at the closing of the twentieth century, when in 1999 , after