The "Village People" (部落民/burakumin): the limits of harmony

One Sunday afternoon, when Y and I were visiting the prefectural art gallery, I noticed a large crowd of people gathered around banners and placards, on the other side of the Ni-no-maru park. I had been in Kumamoto for about a year without seeing any large political demonstration, so I was intrigued by this mass of several thousand, clearly politically-motivated people. Y looked carefully and said she thought it looked like a gathering of “burakumin”. I insisted on going and having a look. As we got closer, I could see that the people gathered there very much a typical cross-section of the Kumamoto community. There were children in school
uniforms, men dressed in the ubiquitous grey suits of office workers, and women, indistinguishable from the women down the hill, thronging the big department stores.

As we approached, a small group of teen-age girls, in school uniform, came up to us and, with the shy confidence that came from numbers, began to talk to us. After an exchange of greetings, one of them asked me, “差別をしますか？/—Sabetsu wo shimasu ka?" ("Do you do …" and I didn’t know the meaning of the word “sabetsu”. Y filled in the gap: “Do you discriminate?” “No,” I hurriedly assured them, “I don’t discriminate.” Perish the thought. They went off satisfied.

In later years, I was to recall that conversation and realize that it was not by chance that their question had not defined the object of my potential discrimination, as in, "Do you discriminate against ...whoever?" For decades in Japan, the concept of discrimination has been linked to that section of the Japanese population called the “burakumin”, or “village people”. "Burakumin" is just one of a chain of euphemisms which have been used since the Meiji period to refer to that section of the population which had been an underclass during the Edo period, when they were called "Eta" and "Hinin". They had never been either genetically or culturally distinguishable from the rest of the population. The Eta and Hinin consisted of different groups of people who, for varying reasons, were shunned by their fellows: some because the nature of their work, dealing with human or animal cadavers; some because they, or their ancestors, had been involved in political revolts against the regime, and some because of other more mundane misdemeanours like theft or gambling.

With the Meiji reforms, the Eta and Hinin were restored to the same legal status as the rest of the population, and discrimination against them was made illegal. However, one hundred and fifty years later, they still remain a readily identifiable group throughout Japan, and are still the object of discrimination. There are areas in many Japanese cities and towns which are officially designated as areas which are to receive special help, on the basis that most of the people living in these zones are "burakumin". This positive discrimination is designed to counter the still-pervasive problems of poverty and low educational levels which afflict many of these people.
Like many outsiders who come to live in Japan, I was fascinated by this flaw in the apparently seamless face of Japanese cultural and ethnic unity. My Japanese family could tell me little. Y knew simply that some areas of Kumamoto were known to be places were burakumin lived.

I made a point of asking my students to write brief essays in English about the issue. Out of the hundreds of essays I read, not one of them was written by someone from a burakumin family, or at least by someone who was prepared to say that they were from such a background. A number of students wrote that they had grown up close to “designated areas” where burakumin lived. I began to wonder whether this kind of reference was not a coded way of saying that they were from “burakumin” families.

Needless to say, all students condemned the discrimination. Most said they only knew about the issue because they learned at high school that discrimination against burakumin was bad. Several told stories of young couples whose plans to marry had been blocked because one of them was from a burakumin family. Others told me that firms and families routinely hired private investigators to check whether there was a taint on prospective employees and partners. All condemned such discrimination, writing that it was a problem of the older generations and would eventually disappear.

It was years before I was to have closer contact with burakumin. When the foreign teachers at my university began to resist discrimination of our own, our first support came from the smallest of the three main union federations in Japan, the Zenrokyou, or National Workers’ Council. The first contact we had with their General Workers’ Union was through Mr. Tanaka Nobuyuki, a local man, and through him we met the area union official, Mr. Okabe Tadashi, who was living more than two hours drive away in Kita Kyushu. Both of these men had married women from burakumin families, and both were living with their families in “designated” areas. They knew about discrimination, and they knew that it was not a phenomenon which was limited to a single group of people.

Before long, we had a chance to repay the support we had received. Mr. Tanaka and his family had been passed over for city housing, although he knew they were the next on the list. He sued the City Council for discrimination and won in the District Court. The Council appealed. He called on friends to help leaflet a national congress on “Dowa” (harmony) discrimination. “Social harmony education” is the current official euphemism for the issue of discrimination against burakumin. Three of the foreign teachers at the university joined with ten other supporters of Mr. Tanaka and passed out leaflets to the thousands of delegates pouring into the conference centre. It was ironic, but not unexpected, that the prefectural officials responsible for the discrimination against their own foreign teachers were among those attending. Mr. Tanaka eventually won in the appeal court as well, and the City finally gave in, proving that one of my academic colleagues was unduly pessimistic when he said that you “can’t beat City Hall”.
As outsiders who had “married in” to Burakumin families, Mr. Okabe and Mr. Tanaka talked to me about the situation of their families in a way that their wives have never done. Both were from the radical generation of students from the sixties and seventies, and were relatively immune to the kind of family pressure which would have deterred most young Japanese men.
Mr. Okabe told me of a dark history which went far beyond discrimination. In the area of Northern Kyushu where his wife had grown up in a farming family, there had been massacres of burakumin around the turn of the century when surrounding communities made them scapegoats for their own suffering.

I learnt from my friends that the burakumin communities remain relatively insulated socially, and that “integration” is still a long way off. However, the children that I have met don’t seem cowed by prevailing attitudes. Mr. Tanaka’s oldest son has acted in a number of local theatrical productions and in several films. Mr. Okabe’s son is now a second year university student at the largest private university in Kumamoto, and is a quietly confident young man who has been fighting discrimination and nationalism since he was a schoolboy.
It was from these people that our little group of foreign teachers received unstinting and generous support in our own attempts to get fair treatment at the hand of ingrown bureaucracies who could not imagine treating foreign teachers as anything other than foreign “guests”. Nov. 2002.