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Dancing Lessons from God
decades of protests and resistance, the government passed the Kokikok-
kaho (flag and anthem act) legislating Kimigayo, song of reverence to
the emperor, and the Hinomaru flag as Japan’s official national an-
them and flag despite the decades of protest and resistance over these
symbols. Since Japan was already using these symbols in international
events, many outside Japan would not be aware of these internal de-
bates over them. The process of legislating the symbols to official sta-
tus also again involved the figurative erasure of minorities and minor-
ity issues in Japan, and a reassertion of a one-people nation under the
father figurehead of the emperor.
The young Burakumin man talked about the concept of kegare,
or “pollution.” The reason, he believed, that Burakumin did not like
imperial symbols was that they reinforced ideas of pollution as be-
ing in the blood and in the descent line. The emperor, he explained,
is supposed to be pure, but purity cannot exist in society unless there
is something else. For the emperor to be perceived as pure, there has
to be something in society to take on the impurity, and hence some-
thing must exist as impure. This young man saw Burakumin as having
been used as the residual reservoir of impurity to construct the con-
trasting purity of the emperor and others in Japanese society. Thus,
he felt the construction of Japanese identity in terms of symbols of
the emperor was a source of prejudice against Burakumin because it
maintained the need for them to fill the role of sacrificial scapegoat
of contrasting impurity. This is why he was opposed to imperial sym-
bols as symbols of the state, or of Japanese culture. He went on to
describe how this projection of inherited impurity left some Buraku-
min to wonder why they were born at all, if it meant they had to live
under this conceptualization.
As I listened, I thought that this young man, who had probably not
read, or maybe even heard of, major anthropological figures who
dealt with the opposing structural contrast of purity and pollution,
such as Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger ( 1969 ), or Claude Lévi-
Strauss in Structural Anthropology ( 1973 a, 1973 b), was able, none-
theless, to set up clearly the oppositional contrasts of purity and pol-
lution and also to put a reality to how they affected people’s lives.
Devos and Wagatsuma had done early research on Burakumin when
