Buraku Women against Tripled Sufferings

Chapter 3 argues that when buraku communities and organizations refused to accept their collective erasure, they were not simply or even primarily fighting for inclusion in the rights-based system of common lands but were refusing a sensibility that figured them collectively as a threat to the nation. It introduces the concept of tripled sufferings, which Suiheisha women activists developed in order to draw attention to the specificities of their oppression as women, proletarian, and burakumin in order to bring seemingly disparate buraku struggles that were fought in Mie prefecture into relation. In so doing, it expands prevailing understandings of what participants at each of these sites may have dreamed about as they fought against their expulsion, exploitation, and criminalization and argues that they collectively constituted a revolutionary attack on Japanese sensibility that had made ippanmin consensus about burakumin expulsion from the commons unbreakable in Asama.