Ebook: Working skin: making leather, making a multicultural Japan

Since the 1980s, arguments for a multicultural Japan have gained considerable currency against an entrenched myth of national homogeneity. 'Working Skin' enters this conversation with an ethnography of Japan's Buraku' people. Touted as Japan's largest minority, the Buraku are stigmatized because of associations with labour considered unclean, such as leather and meat production. That labour, however, is vanishing from Japan. Liberalized markets have sent these jobs overseas, and changes in family and residential record-keeping have made it harder to track connections to these industries.