American Burakumin

Exporting Japan: politics of emigration to Latin America

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Institutionalized export of Japan's lower classes

Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=TK8p_5h_yfoC&dq=burakumin+nikkei&sou...

Exporting Japan examines the domestic origins of the Japanese government's policies to promote the emigration of approximately three hundred thousand native Japanese citizens to Latin America between the 1890s and the 1960s. This imperialist policy, spanning two world wars and encompassing both the pre-World War II authoritarian government and the postwar conservative regime, reveals strategic efforts by the Japanese state to control its populace while building an expansive nation beyond its territorial borders.

Toake Endoh compellingly argues that Japan's emigration policy embodied the state's anxieties over domestic political stability and its intention to remove marginalized and radicalized social groups by relocating them abroad. Documenting the disproportionate focus of the southwest region of Japan as a source of emigrants, Endoh considers the state's motivations in formulating emigration policies that selected certain elements of the Japanese population for "export."

Japan's outsiders waiting to break in - The New York Times

KYOTO — For Japan, the crowning of Hiromu Nonaka as its top leader could have been as significant as America's election of its first black president.

Despite being the descendant of a feudal class of outcasts who are known as buraku and still face social discrimination, Nonaka had dexterously occupied top posts in the governing party and acted as the government's No. 2. The next logical step, by 2001, was to become prime minister. Allies urged him on.

But not everyone inside the party was ready for a leader of buraku origin. At least one, Taro Aso, the current prime minister, made his views clear to his closest associates in a closed-door meeting. "Are we really going to let those people take over the leadership of Japan?" Aso said, according to Hisaoki Kamei, a politician who attended the meeting.

Kamei said he remembered thinking at the time that "it was inappropriate to say such a thing." But he and the others in the room let the matter drop, he said, adding, "We never imagined that the remark would leak outside."

But it did, spreading rapidly among the nation's political and buraku circles. And more recently, as Aso became prime minister just weeks before Barack Obama's victory, the comment has become a touchstone for many buraku.

How far have they come since Japan began carrying out affirmative action policies for the buraku four decades ago in a mirror of the American civil rights movement? If the United States, the yardstick for Japan, could elect a black president, could there be a buraku prime minister here?

But the questions were not raised in the society at large. The topic of the buraku remains Japan's biggest taboo, rarely raised in private conversations and virtually ignored by the media.

The buraku, who are ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese, are descendants of Japanese who, according to Buddhist beliefs, performed tasks considered unclean. As slaughterers, undertakers, executioners and town guards, they were called "eta," meaning "defiled mass," or "hinin," meaning "nonhuman." Required to wear telltale clothing, they were segregated into their own neighborhoods.

The oldest buraku neighborhoods are believed to be in Kyoto, the ancient capital, and date back a millennium. That those neighborhoods survive to this day and that the outcasts' descendants are still subject to prejudice speak both to Japan's obsession with its past and its inability to overcome it.

In Japan, every person has a family register that is kept in local town halls and that, with some extrapolation, reveals ancestral birthplaces. Families and companies widely checked birthplaces to ferret out buraku among potential hires or marriage partners until a generation ago, though the practice has declined greatly, especially among the young.

The buraku were officially liberated in 1871, just a few years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. But as the buraku's living standards and education levels stayed below national averages, the Japanese government, under pressure from buraku liberation groups, passed a special-measures law to improve the buraku's condition in 1969. By the time the law expired in 2002, Japan had reportedly spent about $175 billion on affirmative action programs.

Fumie Tanaka, now 39, was born just as the special-measures law for the buraku went into effect. She grew up in the Osaka ward of Nishinari, one of the 48 neighborhoods that were officially designated as buraku areas.

At her neighborhood school, the children began learning about discrimination against the buraku early on. The thinking in Osaka was to confront discrimination head on: The problem lay not with the buraku but with those who harbored prejudice.

Instead of hiding their roots, children were encouraged to "come out," sometimes by wearing "buraku" sashes, a practice that Osaka discontinued early this decade but that survives in the countryside.

Sheltered in this environment, Tanaka encountered discrimination only when she began going to high school in another ward. One time, while she was visiting a friend's house, the grandparents invited Tanaka to stay for lunch.

"The atmosphere was pleasant in the beginning, but then they asked me where I lived," Tanaka said. "When I told them, the grandfather put down his chopsticks right away and went upstairs."

A generation ago, most buraku married other buraku. But by the early 1990s, when Tanaka met her future husband, who is not a buraku, marriages to outsiders were becoming more common.

"The situation has improved over all," said Takeshi Kitano, chief of the human rights division at the Osaka prefectural government. "But there are problems left."

via nytimes.com

Documenting the American Burakumin

angel island This Thanksgiving, I broached a topic with my Japanese American cousins about a heritage issue they weren't familiar with. Few Americans know that the Japanese historically has an underclass of untouchables similar to other Asian cultures like India. The "burakumin" are descendants of a feudal outcaste that worked in occupations handling dead bodies - butchers, leather workers - and considered unclean. They are indistinguishable in physical appearance from other Japanese, and live mostly in the western half of Japan. Even in Japan, it's a hidden culture that makes for embarrassing public conversation, let alone media coverage. My wife who grew up in Tokyo knew very little about their existence. The Burakumin have always lived a segregated existence because the government has always kept family records based on residence that made escaping their heritage difficult. Their plight became publicized with the 1975 disclosure of a hand written book that disclosed the locations of burakumin ghettoes for use by Japanese corporate recruiters. Even this year, Google Earth caused an uproar in Japan by overlaying old maps that highlighted burakumin neighborhoods, which Google eventually doctored. The systemic societal ostracism accounts for estimates that 70% of Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, are burakumin. Normally reticent Japanese now discuss the burakumin issue in the chat forums. Information suppressed for generations is disclosed (in Japanese) albeit under cloak of anonymity. There are inferences that many burakumin emigrated from Japan to the US in the early 1900's as a natural cleanser to their tainted background. The old Hollywood meme of the Japanese gardener and florists in LA may have been started by burakumin who would tend garden at the castles (although it's also said that non-burakumin Japanese also followed into the profession). Burakumin were nameless during the feudal era that ended in the mid-1800s. Many were then given geographical or directional names. Burakumin ghettoes were located near rivers and higher up in less arable land. Yamaguchi means mountain mouth, and Olympic skater Kristi Yamaguchi is said to be burakumin. The American Burakumin What makes this interesting to Japanese Americans is the experience of the American Burakumin has almost no documentation. My 87 year old aunt says their status in San Francisco was known and my grandmother discouraged a relationship between a cousin and a known family. But that's all. I think the socially liberal Japanese Americans didn't give it a second thought. Then I met a 70-year-old Japanese American woman last year who described in great detail two segregated cultures of Japanese Americans while growing up in Los Angeles. Brings up searing questions... why isn't this documented? How did they co-exist when Japanese were shipped out to those WW2 internment camps? Was this downtrodden culture already too docile to put up a fight against relocation? If you're Japanese American, do you know if you're a descendant of the burakumin? It's possible that story never got told. Is there family lore that you're descended from samurai? If so, might it be a whitewash tale? It's an intriguing heritage issue. I've created a posterous blog to try to document this at http://burakumin.posterous.com. Please tell your story. My wife tells me it could make Japanese uncomfortable.