The so-called the “Three Heroes Bomb” incident occurred during the Shanghai Incident. In 1932, three soldiers attempted to blow up barbed-wire fence on the battlefield and were killed by their own bomb. Although the incident is mixed, with theories of a deadly assault and accident, the purpose of this essay is not to get to the truth of the incident, but rather how the incident was understood by society. First, the media celebrated them as gunshin, military gods. The public responded enthusiastically to the story of these military gods in films, novels, plays and songs. However, when it was “discovered” that two of them were Burakumin, the military god pictures were ripped from the walls of the general public houses. In contrast, the fervor in the Buraku did not subside. This zeal is considered to be a distorted expression of the desire to reject constructed differences and to be regarded as of the people, with severe discrimination and the desire for liberation from that discrimination as its background. Unfortunately, this was accompanied by active consent to and call-up for wars of aggression. Behind the gunshin was always the Emperor. In other words, many Burakumin of the time went to the battlefield as the Emperor's babies. The Burakumin has made the Emperor a representative for their own elevation and the elimination of Buraku discrimination.

Indeed, there was an affair in which Taisaku Kitahara, a member of the Zenkoku Suiheisha appealed directly to the Emperor about Buraku discrimination in the army. There were also large-scale struggles, such as the Fukuoka Regiment Affair, caused by the suppression of an anti-military struggle by soldiers from Buraku who denounced Buraku discrimination in the army. However, this author believes that the general trend is that the mental structure shown in the Three Heroes Bomb Incident is a strict fact. And it can be said that this continued to prevent the Burakumin from confronting the colonialism issue.

There are certain facts that the Burakumin should remember. It was when the Zenkoku Suiheisha, a campaigning organization for the elimination of discrimination and self-liberation, formed an alliance with the Korean minority Pekuchon’s organization, Hyŏngp'yŏngsa. From 1910 onwards, the Japanese imperialist policy was one of assimilation, oppression, racism and segregation. Dōbun dōshu dōkanai is a concept of ethnic oppression and assimilation, and its message can be understood as being stated in the context of self-identifying one's own cultural superiority as Japanese in relation to the Korean people. This was essentially Orientalism. It is thought that racism and Orientalism as the people of an Asian suzerain state clearly emerged from the founding period in the Zenkoku Suiheisha, which led the movement for the liberation of minorities who were subject to discrimination and oppression. Although activists of the Suiheisha advocated protest anti-Buraku discrimination, they were ultimately as ideologically vulnerable as ordinary Japanese. Looking back with reference to Michel Foucault, the Suiheisha ideology would also have been the only aspect in which they could think of a reason to kill enemies of state.

The post-war BLM which succeeded the Zenkoku Suiheisha also failed to realize its ideological vulnerability. Researchers who supported the BLM only praised that movement. For example, the Suiheisha Declaration of 1922 is said to be the oldest human rights declaration in Japan. However, in 1919, before the Suiheisha Declaration, the Korean independence movement had already published the Declaration of the March First Movement. The March First Movement was the largest independence movement that arose in resistance to the Japanese imperialist colonial rule (annexation of Korea) in 1910. Based on the principle of national self-determination, the movement appealed to the world about the injustice of Japanese colonial rule and announced that declaration at Pagoda Park in Seoul (at that time, Japan called it Keijo-fu). The Japanese Governor-General of Korea suppressed the movement with troops and police, resulting in thousands of deaths and nearly 50,000 arrests. This essay is not a scrubby discussion of which came first, the establishment of Suiheisha or the March First Movement. It is concerned with the positionality of the Burakumin. At the time, the Korean peninsula was under Japanese rule. So why is this March First declaration not also discussed within the BLM? By emphasizing the anti-military struggle of the soldiers from the Buraku and not criticizing the ideological vulnerability of Orientalism stemming from the inherent colonialism of Japanese imperialism, does this not diminish the value of the Suiheisha? Silence is a sin.