Burakumin: Japan´s inconvinient truth of social outcasts
“When people ask us about what sort of work we do, we hesitate over how to answer” Tokyo slaughterman Yuki Miyazaki says. Dozens of hateful graffities decorate the place of what is known in western culture as a local meat market. But what Miyazaki might face for who he is in the present, is happening to almost 3 million people in the Asian country that have a common past.
Inside the monoethnic Japanese society, an invisible minority is hidden. Physically unrecognizable from the rest of Japanese people and with hardly traceable locations, Burakumin people face prejudice based entirely in what they ancestors did for living.
Miyazaki is associated to this group of untouchables. During the Edo feudal era, Burakumin were last in the Japanese food chain. They were the ones carrying out jobs that had to do with blood. This group was hereditary, composed of people who work with dead animals (leather and meat) and dead humans (autopsies and gravedigging). In a majoritarian Buddhist society, these jobs related to death were seen as unclean.
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A thousand years later, the descendants of these people are marginalized and seen different from the rest of Japanese people, although it is impossible to identify them just by looking at them since they are ethnically identical to the others. Nowadays, people that live in historical Burakumin neighborhoods, the so called ‘Burakus’, are from different origins and the majority of them do not carry out these jobs anymore.
Buraku locations
Buraku locations are hard to get. According to Burakumin stories portrayed in different sources like the BBC, the Japan Times, The Independent and The New York Times, locations of these neighborhoods might be in Tokyo, Kobe and Osaka, and might coincide with the old Buraku ubications.
According to Alex Martin, a journalist from The Japan Times, there used to be books published that chronicled buraku communities and their addresses, but they have been banned for the dangers of spreading discrimination. A small publisher called Jigensha and its editor, a man who goes by the name Tottori Loop, have republished this information online and have been asked to take it down, but mirror sites keep on popping up.
Yukihiro Matsushima, a Burakumin activist, has being monitoring hate messages against his community for the last 15 years in northeast Tokyo. “I have found more than 120 examples of hateful graffiti messages. Isn´t that scary?” ‘Eta’, meaning filthy people, was the pejorative name used to distinguish the untouchables from the rest of Japanese, and although it has been 120 years since the word was banned, discrimination remains until today. Matsushima is an example of targeted antiBurakumin bigotry. “When I was a child I was humiliated by my classmates, and even my close friends insulted me. I realized I was different and that I would be discriminated against my whole life.”
Researcher Alastair McLauchlan exposed that while 88% of Japanese claim they have no problem or even awareness of Burakumin, 33% in the same study are somehow opposed to marrying someone from a Burakumin neighborhood, the so called ‘Burakus’.
Google’s Wall of Shame and other Blacklists
Back in the 1970’s, it was discovered the existence of a list with Buraku names and locations that was being sold to employers to identify the feudal origins of the applicants.
But blacklists did not stop with the arrival of the internet era.
In 2009, Google immersed itself in a big scandal when it introduced a new feature in which people could appreciate old maps of Tokyo. The maps seemed harmless letting people compare old samurai and merchant houses with today’s neighborhoods. Immediately, people started to denunciate that the maps marked the exact locations of Burakus, the untouchable hamlets, making them publicly available for discrimination. The company removed the maps soon after.
Old map showing Buraku locations
More astonishing than Google’s explicit reveals, is the complex family registration system of Japan, the Koseki, which has been called the most complete in the world although very outdated and nationalist. The Koseki explicitly shows ancestors and whether someone is part of the royal family, or even an outsider. In the 70’s a law was passed to deny access to third parties to check others’ registrations, this in order to tackle down Burakumin problematics.
Although regulations were brought up to make these acts illegal, activists still denounce that blacklists are being sold through mail to companies and that are openly used by a lot of people. Moreover, families have being identifying the ancestors of prospective spouses without Google’s help by hiring private investigators before marriage.
All this derives in many Japanese thinking that the progress made against discrimination does no come from the decrease of prejudice, but rather from the inability to figure out who is Burakumin.
Even though the origins of Burakumin are hardly traceable and their occupations have varied enormously, the notion of them being somehow different and abnormal from the rest of the population remains in the collective imagination of Japanese people.
Despite this, Japan is also remarkable for the efforts it has made.
Banning words like ‘Eta’ from the public discourse and passing the law that regulates access to Koseki are part of the affirmative policies the government has carried out in the past few years. During the human rights revolution of the 1960’s, the Japanese government started addressing the Burakus by giving money for their modernization as well as to Burakumin people indistinctively from their income. They did it through what was then called dowa policies.
The first Burakumin rights’ group was founded in 1922 and has grown to what is now known as the Buraku Liberation League (BLL). Initiatives and denounces have primarily come from them and they constantly condemn the lack of a law that targets real discrimination. In December 9 of 2016, a new law was enacted to establish consultation systems in the central and local governments; however, it does not ban discrimination nor punishes it, which has led the BLL to call the regulation pointless.
Yakuza Connections
Although a part of Burakumin descendants say they do not face discrimination in their daily basis, they go through a tougher reality as most minorities in western countries: poverty and high crime rates.
Historical labor discrimination forced outcast people to seek for other alternatives to bring food home choosing a criminal network that gave them the recognition they craved. According to a 2006 speech by Mitsuhiro Suganuma, a former officer of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, around 60 percent of Yakuza members come from Burakumin and 30 percent from Koreans, the other major marginalized group in the country.
However, Yakuza relationships with Burakumin are far from superficial. Kunihiko Konishi case was one that demonstrated that Yakuza was benefitting from the dowa policies. Apparently, the Buraku Liberation League redirected contracts and money destinated to roads and buildings to the criminal organization. Reported cases of corruption like this one increased the hostility towards Burakumin in what looks like a vicious cycle that lingers to this day.
