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.

Of skins and workers : producing the Buraku -- "Ushimatsu left for Texas" : passing the Buraku -- Locating the Buraku : a political ecology of pollution -- A sleeping public : Buraku politics and the cultivation of human rights -- Demanding a standard : Buraku politics on a global stage -- Wounded futures : prospects of transnational solidarity -- The disciplines of multiculturalism -- Texas to Japan and back.