Let me tell you the story of Kimie my wife’s aunt, born in the early 1930s. Unfortunately, Kimie died eight years ago. My wife’s family was comfortable. In her grandfather’s generation, the whole family had moved to Kobe, because they disliked being Burakumin and wanted to be economically successful. Fleeing air raids on Kobe, the family returned to their hometown. Kimie's father died of illness, and the business could not be rebuilt. Life was harder, but they were not entirely destitute. I do not know if Kimie has ever used the word "Buraku," but her family did meet discrimination.
This story is not about that.
About three years before she died, I was relaxing in Kimie’s house when a local official visit. We happened to know each other. While she tidied herself up (her sense of pride), I kept him company. I showed him her new system kitchen, half-mocking its disproportionate opulence. It was “Scandinavian.”
After the local officials left, Kimie complained about my bragging. In her view, “If our life was better than theirs, seken (the neighbors) wouldn’t feel good about it. That’s why we don’t tell them. That’s why they don’t say anything. Seken doesn’t think we’re rich, that’s a wise way to live.” She feared that if her quality of life was known, she would be envied and harassed. This is a top-secret strategy to live. It is a logic of strategic self-mutilation embedded with experiences of discrimination. In other words, she has a self-image of being above others on the periphery. However, she feared that either the neglect of existence or the pity due to discrimination and poverty would turn into hostility due to the ‘Buraku and wealthy’ combination. For her, pity is preferable hostility.
It was the habit of the family, which had acquired economic, cultural and educational capital while being discriminated against. They instinctively avoid the negative evaluation that ‘that person is flaunting his economic power and ability.’ Embedded in this is the complexity of Buraku discrimination. It is easy to call it an oversimplification. But for Kimie, the specific memory of it vivid. She was no memories of poverty herself. Nor had she had sad memories of not being able to go to school. But she did have memories of the horrors of ‘discrimination and ridicule’ that came with poverty. She also knew, strangely enough, that the prominent businessman who is uchira (associate: fellow, i.e. Burakumin) is subjected to tremendous discrimination in the bourgeois world. That is a collective memory.
The old woman’s strategic choices represent, for that family, the rational activity of a ‘wise way of life’ based on their shared memory. This memory shapes their everyday self-presentation [Goffman, 1959], wherein the actor directs their behavior according to the criteria they deem ideal (rational) for the observer—in this case, the seken. They live with this self-presentation due to Buraku discrimination.