Behind Japan's famous facade of social harmony and homogeneity lie complicated realities. Often hidden from view are troubling elements of the country's social life involving stigmatized communities such as the burakumin and minority ethnic groups like the Ainu or the many Koreans, Filipinos, and other foreigners living in Japan today. Also hidden, and often denied, are troubling accounts of Japan's past role as an imperial power. Discrimination, exploitation, predatory colonialism, war crimes: these subjects are taboo, especially in print. AKIO ISHII thinks it should be otherwise. As head of Akashi Shoten, a publishing house, he is exposing the underside of Japan?s smooth social surface and bringing difficult subjects to light.
In premodern times, the buraku were social outcastes and reviled as dirty. Despite official emancipation over a century ago, this stigma lingered. Ishii himself experienced it as a boy. He was five years old when the end of World War II ushered in Japan's postimperial era. As a politicized youth in the 1960s, he agitated against injustices in Japanese society and also opposed the renewal of Japan's security ties with the United States. In the 1970s, he joined a study group dedicated to eliminating discrimination against the buraku and became editor of its magazine. This led to Akashi Shoten in 1978, a publishing company of his own. ISHII determined to build his company as "a bastion for the movement to eliminate discrimination in thought and culture."
At first, ISHII concentrated on the buraku issue itself and on other beleaguered Japanese minorities. But he soon expanded to other human rights issues. Koreans had been colonized by Japan and compelled into forced labor during World War II. Ishii published accounts of this brutal episode and also of the plight of Koreans living in Japan, where they were discriminated against in housing, employment, and marriage. Similar forms of discrimination faced a new wave of foreign workers who flocked to Japan in the 1990s. Ishii exposed their dilemma to readers in a stream of new books. He published a Human Rights Handbook for Foreigners in Japan in Urdu, Vietnamese, Persian, and fifteen other languages, to guide migrants through Japan's vexing laws and procedures and to steer them to services and support groups. In a similar spirit, Ishii published a book in Japanese on the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, which Japan declined to ratify.
Over time, ISHII's books drew attention to the "comfort women" of World War II; to Filipino women trapped in Japan's exploitative entertainment industry; to the physically and mentally disabled, abused children, and victims of domestic violence-to everyone, in fact, who was invisible behind Japan's curtain of respectable normality. Ishii also published books that countered right-wing efforts to exaggerate the beneficial influence of Japanese colonialism, to cover up Japan's war crimes, and to depict its former military leaders as heroes.
In recent years, many of Akashi Shoten's books have introduced Japanese readers to human rights issues outside Japan, including the caste system in India and the struggles of other oppressed groups around the world. In the twenty-first century, says ISHII, "We must create an era where the human rights of individuals are truly respected."
Ishii is not a public figure but his influence is large. Some 2,800 Akashi Shoten books are in print. They sell well among intellectuals, scholars, university students, and civil society activists. Ishii is content. What is important for a publisher, he says, is "how often he can publish books of universal and permanent impact. These books," he says, "are my real assets."
In electing AKIO ISHII to receive the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts, the board of trustees recognizes his principled career as a publisher, placing discrimination, human rights, and other difficult subjects squarely in Japan?s public discourse.
