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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 labor considered unclean, such as leather and meat production. That labor, 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

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I trace the operations of a moral optimism and a skepticism that lie, uneasily, at the foundation of sociocultural anthropology. As other authors of year‐in‐review pieces have noted, anthropology is motivated by a moral optimism pointing toward the possibilities of an ethically and politically better life. Equally as fundamental, I argue, is a rigorous skepticism interrogating the shifting conditions that give life to anthropology's possibility. Here, I follow the productive tension between these two stances through the sociocultural anthropology of 2014, loosely grouping that work under the rubrics of "ends," "immediacy," "ecology," and "refusal." Throughout, I make a push for increased attention to our ethic of skepticism as means of tempering the discipline's moral optimism. [optimism, skepticism, immediacy, connection, year in review, sociocultural anthropology]

1. Introduction / Joseph D. Hankins and Carolyn S. Stevens -- 2. Publics that scream, publics that slumber : sound and the tactics of publicity in the Buraku liberation movement / Joseph D. Hankins -- 3. Facing the nation : sound, fury, and public oratory among Japanese right-wing groups / Nathaniel M. Smith -- 4. The political affects of military aircraft noise in Okinawa / Rupert Cox -- 5. Distraction, noise, and ambient sounds in Tokyo / Lorraine Plourde -- 6. Sounding imaginative empathy : Chindon-ya's affective economies on the streets of Osaka / Marie Abe -- 7. The swinging phonograph in a hot teahouse : sound technology and the emergence of the jazz community in prewar Japan / Shuhei Hosokawa.