Does Japan have Emancipation Days?
Not observed here
Japan has no national holiday marking the abolition of status discrimination or any act of emancipation. Article 2 of the Act on National Holidays (Act No. 178 of 1948) lists sixteen holidays, from New Year's Day to Labour Thanksgiving Day, and none of them touches this subject; the list is closed, extendable only by amending the statute, and neither prefectures nor municipalities may add to it. The institutional answer took another form. In 2016 the Act on the Promotion of the Elimination of Buraku Discrimination (Act No. 109 of 2016) was passed — six articles in total, opening with the statement that buraku discrimination still exists today, then setting out the duties of the national and local governments, the strengthening of consultation services, education and awareness-raising, and a national survey of the actual state of that discrimination. The Ministry of Justice runs the awareness work under its human rights remit and publishes the statute alongside the supplementary resolutions of both houses' judicial affairs committees. Japan, in other words, has the law but not the date.
What is this topic?
The two largest slaveholding societies in the Americas both waited until the 2020s to put abolition on the national holiday calendar — the United States in 2021, Brazil in 2023 — more than a century and a half after slavery ended in law. Both arrived the same way, from below: Texas made 19 June a state holiday in 1980, and Brazil's 20 November passed through the school calendar and then a commemorative-date statute before it became a holiday. India has no abolition holiday; the closest date, Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, is not even on the central government's annual holiday list and is granted each year by a separate order. Taiwan names 21 March in statute and expressly gives no day off, Japan has the law but no date, and neither Indonesia's nor China's national holiday list contains anything of the kind.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.