Abstract
In a globalized world where global human rights discourses have become an important rhetoric along with increasing international treaties and organizations, Kiyoteru Tsutsui’s fascinating book Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan offers a rich theoretical and empirical account of factors leading to social movements by Ainu, Zainichi, and Burakumin in Japan. All three groups have been considered as ethnoracial others throughout modern history in Japan, experiencing both subtle and overt marginalization; but Tsutsui’s book examines how they have fought for indigenous rights, basic citizenship, and policy advancement. The study is based on interview data with minority activists, international human rights activists, lawyers, scholars, and government professionals and archival data such as the activists’ own publications, and it brings a complex array of historical, geographic, and population backgrounds as well as organizational contexts into the discussion.
Tsutsui’s focus on the global-local interface has an added scholarly significance under the increasingly dominant discourses of global human rights, which started and have continually grown since the World War II independence movements in Africa and Asia that used western human rights values to shield themselves from fascism and the superpowers. Why and how could three minority groups in Japan expand their activism into the global arena, using international allies and pressuring local governments? How do global human rights assist local movements, and in what ways do local actors mobilize the various political, material, cultural, and other resources available in the global arena to alter their movements? Inquiring into such empirical and conceptual questions, Tsutsui’s book carries out complex theoretical investigations that are relevant to many sociologists of social movements, globalization, and political sociology.
The book takes a revealing look into the varying pathways and conditions of three groups’ social movements that have evolved over time, chronicling the turbulent history of Meiji Restoration and World War II and also investigating the contemporary global regime. His approach is fundamentally sociological, taking into consideration various structural factors such as how demographic change (i.e., the growing Ainu population), deepening democracy, and the increase in middle-class populations shape minority movements’ claim-making in the global arena. After long-lasting struggles and fights against continued prejudice and discrimination, three communities eventually gained recognition of their minority status, equal rights, and merits. In the process, three factors significantly stood out, namely political opportunities, resources mobilization, and framing, in explaining local activists’ strategies when addressing human rights problems and pressuring local Japanese authorities. Specific examples and details grounded in Japanese cases illuminate how international organizations such as the UN Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights have provided disadvantaged groups with new opportunities for claim-making (political opportunities), how material aid from foundation grants or government funding and human resources such as international activists, journalists, and researchers have played a role in giving advice and assistance for vulnerable groups (resource mobilization), and how international human rights documents and slogans, which are symbolic repertoires and vocabularies, benefit local actors when setting up their movements (framing).
Drawing on a brief historical review of the three major Ainu uprisings, the enactment of new policy and registration law, and the establishment of two Ainu organizations—Kaiheisha (1926) and the Hokkaido Ainu Kyokai (1930)—the chapter on Ainu, an indigenous group, examines the ways in which indigenous rights activists have gained access to international organizations. Tsutsui’s analysis emphasizes that exposure to global indigenous rights activism, Japan’s growing involvement in global human rights institutions, and the expanding transnational networks of indigenous rights activists have all played a role. As a consequence of various activists’ efforts, the Japanese government changed its political and policy stance from assimilation of Ainu to recognition of Ainu as a distinctive indigenous group. Rising indigenous rights movements in global society have functioned as a significant factor in the emergence and success of Ainu political activism, but it eventually consolidated various global human rights institutions and expanded norms for indigenous rights.
The second case that Tsutsui presents is Zainichi, colonial diaspora Korean residents in Japan. Tsutsui explains how Korean residents experience the issue of identity politics in Japan, through colonization history and geopolitical division between North and South Korea on the peninsula, and how they have attempted to overcome these challenges. Although two major Zainichi organizations, Soren-North Korea and Mindan-South Korea, existed during the early post-World War II period (1945~1960s), their different forms of political activism led to diverging consequences. Tsutsui’s analysis shows how Zainichi could transform their activism into a dynamic global movement by expanding through international allies, protesting abroad, and creating bilateral relationships between Japan and South Korea. The Zainichi case demonstrates norm consolidation in raising the standards of rights in Japan and norm expansion in prompting UN human rights institutions to produce new documents specifying the rights of noncitizen groups.
While Ainu, an indigenous group, claim cultural and ethnic difference, Burakumin, descendants of former outcaste groups who have faced various disadvantages and discrimination, protested based on their ethnoracial sameness. However, Tsutsui’s observation about Burakumin’s ambivalence is interesting, given that their strategies for equality mostly draw on ethnoracial sameness but also ask for solutions based on their unique disadvantages in history. Despite these internal tensions, the Buraku Liberation Movement achieved success by the 1970s, but they engaged in global rhetoric to create new legislation preventing discrimination in the private sphere. The ways in which global human rights have had an impact on Burakumin are interesting. Their initial adoption of global human rights in the domestic arena turned into an integral part of global activism, and the unexpected consequence is the establishment of descent-based discrimination as a new category of human rights violations at the United Nations, with a ripple effect empowering other similar minority groups. According to Tsutsui, the Burakumin case shows that global human rights have reoriented minority activism and consolidated norms by promoting minority rights globally and have expanded a new human rights agenda on descent-based discrimination.
Overall, Tsutsui’s efforts at examining two-way interactions between local and global movements are fascinating, making readers reflect on their generalizability to other country-specific cases. He first analyzed the role of global human rights in local and national movements by identifying three types: movement initiation (how groups that are politically dormant launch social movements); movement facilitation (how active but unsuccessful movements achieve greater success by changing their approach); and movement reorientation (how already successful movements head in a different direction). As he notes, the benefit of this analysis is to champion and also overcome the weakness of methodological nationalism, by going beyond an analytical focus on the nation to working at local and global levels. However, his argument is more complex and multiplex, showing that the relationship between global human rights discourses and local movements are not unidirectional, but bidirectional. That is, local activism not only gains support and practical knowledge from global society for the expansion and development of local movements, but it can also help consolidate and strengthen global human rights. Tsutsui’s final conceptual contribution moves toward providing two pathways to show how local activism speaks to the global movement: norm consolidation, which means the reproduction of institutions by individual actors, and norm expansion, which indicates the reinforcement of dominant global human right norms and an addition of new agenda items to global discourses. Another important aspect of Tstsui’s analysis is a thorough observation of actions, allies, and corporations among micro-level actors. Tsutsui vividly reveals the processes of communication and corporation between local and international actors.
In conclusion, Tsutsui’s comparative study on three minorities transcends a simple depiction of three groups, bringing readers to the forefront of rigorous conceptual and theoretical analysis. The findings of this study speak to the idea of global isomorphism and local diversity: although the three groups are based in the same country, the ways in which global human rights have affected the movements vary, and this highlights the idea that examining unique conditions such as form, content, and timing of movements is crucial. While Tsutsui’s work boasts its breadth and width in examining the global and local interface, it also creates subsequent questions igniting further sociological imagination. There may be some unanswered questions for future research. How do local activists collaborate across national borders, and how do these transnational networks utilize global human rights discourses to strengthen their cross-national allies? How do various social media outlets facilitate the diffusion of social movements, employing narratives of global human rights discourses? How do local activists’ gender, class, and majority organizational cultures influence the ways in which they mobilize political opportunities, resources, and framing? It is notable that global human rights principles advance their potential for catalyzing social change not only in Japan but also in many other parts of the world. Therefore, answering such questions in Asian and other social contexts is an important intellectual breakthrough for sociologists, resulting in conceptually fruitful insights and debates on the diverging pathways of globalization.