The Labor of Multiculturalism: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan provides an ethnographic account of stigmatized labor in contemporary, globalized Japan. The analytic inspiration for the book is a conundrum in the changing lives and politics of the Buraku people – Japanese people historically marginalized because of associations with stigmatized forms of labor such as leather production. Since the 1980s, Buraku political organizations have had unprecedented success in arguing the politics of labor in international venues, just as that stigmatizing labor is on the wane. As a result, these organizations find themselves compelled to mobilize a constituency that is either disinterested in political action or simply does not think of itself as Buraku. Utilizing insights from linguistic anthropology and practice theory to re-examine the relationship between labor and sociocultural process, The Labor of Multiculturalism examines the present-day Buraku conundrum borne of global transformations in economic structure and political representation.