Minorities in Japan

The following is taken from “Japan’s Minorities: Burakumin, Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans”. It was put out in 1983 by Minority Rights Group LTD, and is written by Prof. George A. DeVos and William O. Wietherall. “Minority Groups in Japan” is the introduction to the report, and “Burakumin: Pre emancipation segregation” is the first half of the Burakumin section.

Minority Groups in Japan

Among Japan’s 116,000,000 nationals are about 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 former outcasts called Burakumin, nearly 1,000,000 Okinawans, and some 500.000 members of other minorities who hold Japanese citizenship but are discriminated against for various reasons by Japanese majorities. The latter group includes Ainu in Hokkaido, survivors of the atom bomb hibakusha; recently naturalized foreigners kikajin, mainly of Korean ancestry; offspring of interracial parentage konketsuji; and the bearers of several non-outcast occupations of traditionally marginal status. In addition to her nationals, Japan hosts a population of about 800,000 resident foreigners, consisting mostly of Koreans but including significant numbers of Chinese and Americans, and nominal numbers representing other nations.

In short, a full 4% of Japan’s 117,000,000 residents, or about 5,000,000 persons suffer considerable discrimination, most as degraded minorities. This figure may be as high as 5% or 6% if we accept the more liberal estimates of minority populations advanced by the leaders of minority group movements, and would rise above 10% if we were to broaden our implicit concept of minority groups.

Over 40% of all Burakumin, Japan’s largest but physically least visible minority group, are found in the Kinki region of Japan, particularly in the prefectures of Hyogo (Kobe City), Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, and Wakayama. The Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu regions have each between 10% and 15% of the total Burakumin population, involving mainly Okayama, Tokushima, Ehime, Kochi, and Fukuoka prefectures. These four regions and ten prefectures center on the Inland Sea [Seto Naikai] in Western Japan the theatre of ancient Japanese culture.

Of the Korean minority in Japan, including over 65,000 registered Korean nationals and tens of thousands of recently nationalized Korean Japanese, 48% are concentrated in the Kinki region, 20% in the Kanto region, and 14% in Chubu, mainly the prefectures of Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo, and in Aichi (Nagoya City), Tokyo, Kanagawa (Yokohama City), and Fukuoka. These seven prefectures account for nearly 40% of Japan’s total population and about 40% of all Burakumin, but the same prefectures include nearly 60% of Japan’s high-density population and 70% of the Korean minority. This suggests that Koreans, as recently immigrating foreigners, have tended to converge in major industrial and commercial centres, while Burakumin, of indigenous historical origin, are more evenly distributed in both urban and rural areas.

The overlap of these two principal minority groups in the Kinki region gives Hyogo Prefecture a total minority population of 6%, with Kyoto and Osaka prefectures at over 4%. Wakayama and Nara prefectures have Burakumin populations approaching 5%, while Kochi’s Burakumin population exceeds 4%. Demographically speaking, Western Japan is the most active minority region with Eastern Japan accounting for relatively few minorities except for sizable communities of Burakumin in Nagano and Gunma prefectures and fairly large Korean populations in Tokyo and Kanagawa. There is a significant overlap between Koreans and Burakumin, and the atom bomb survivors for the reason that Hiroshima City has traditionally had sizable Burakumin and Korean communities. Burakumin and Koreans who are also hibakusha carry a double burden that tends to make them minorities within their own groups.

Okinawans are nominally the citizens of Okinawa Prefecture, in particular those who have lived on the Ryukyu Islands between 1945 and 1972, during which time the islands were under the administration of an American military magistrate. Okinawans were relatively independent of Japanese rule until the Tokugawa period, and were the only marginally controlled by a Kyushu province that was itself the most independent of all domains under the Tokugawa hegemony. The Ryukyu Islands were formally annexed by Japan in 1872, since which time Okinawans have all but psychologically been assimilated into the mainstream of majority society.

Japanese citizens of mixed racial parentage form a fairly large and important minority group in Japan. While the group includes mainly the offspring of majority Japanese and Korean, Chinese, and Ainu minorities, it is usually more identified with the physically more conspicuous offspring of Japanese and non-Asian foreigners, most commonly White and Black Americans. Eurasian and Amerasian konketsuji are concentrated in the large cities, where they find employment readily in the entertainment and pleasure industries. More that any other minority group in Japan, the offspring of Japanese and non-Asian foreigners are maliciously stereotyped in mass media, including popular literature, films, and comic books. Unlike White-Japanese konketsuji, who often have physical features that Japanese majorities find exotically attractive, Black-Japanese tend to have the kind of features that Japanese most despise. Public opinion surveys have shown that Japanese tend to rate Blacks on the bottom of their list of racial favorites, immediately below Koreans. But South Koreans feel much the same way about Japanese, according to one report in which Japanese are disliked second only to Russians.

Other minorities, in small communities and settlements spread throughout Japan, include migrant marine fisher folk, woodworkers, hunters, ironworkers, riverine migrants, quasi-religious itinerants, and miscellaneous other groups in various secular occupations. If we somewhat enlarge our concept of the minority group, we would also include Japanese emigrants who have returned to Japan, Japanese who have been educated abroad in their formative years and Japanese who have attended school or been employed abroad long enough for their Japaneseness to be questioned by stay-at-homes. Further enlarging our concept of the minority group, we could include in addition the many Japanese women who have become waitresses, hostesses, and maids in restaurants, cabarets, and inns. There is considerable overlap here with the principal ethnic minorities in Japan for the reason that such service enterprises attract a disproportionately large number of Koreans, Burakumin, and konketsuji, as well as female divorcees and delinquents from the majority community. The crime syndicates with which many pleasure establishments are affiliated tend to attract minority males disproportionately to their numbers in the general population.

Burakumin

Pre-emancipation segregation

Introductory histories well describe the premodern four-tier Japanese class system. The samurai or bushi warrior administrators governed a large agricultural population that formed the productive backbone of the country. Artisans ranked third, beneath the samurai and farmers but above the merchants, who officially at least fell at the bottom. The formal paradigm of status, however, did not represent the actual distribution of power, particularly after the growth of a money economy during the Tokugawa period. Currency and banking developments, and the emergence of large commercial houses during the 17th and 18th centuries, found the townsmen wielding considerable influence by the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868 when Japan, facing great pressure from America and Europe, embarked on her modern century.

But discusses only briefly, if mentioned at all in general histories, are two senmin [despised citizen] sub-classes of traditional Japanese society. The highest in status of these lower groups were the hinin [non-people], a heterogeneous group comprised of beggars, prostitutes, itinerant entertainers, mediums, diviners, religious wanderers, and fugitives from justice who had fallen out of the four-tier class system, and others who had been reduced to hinin status as punishment for infractions of civil or penal codes. Beneath the hinin were hereditary outcasts called eta [a word of uncertain origin commonly represented with Chinese characters meaning ‘much filth’], who traditionally performed tasks that were considered to be ritually polluting, including animal slaughter and disposal of the dead.

Because people who practiced occupations centering on death were thought to be genetically sub-human, eta was inherited through birth or was acquired through marriage or close association, as Burakumin status continues to be handed down today. But eta kept their outcast status regardless of occupation changes, in contrast with hinin, who could revert to human status by settling down in normal communities. The origins of eta occupational groups are shrouded in history. The most acceptable theory postulates that the concepts of pollution already existing in indigenous Shinto beliefs were some ways modified while other ways reinforced by Buddhist concepts related to impurities attending the killing of animals and the eating of meat. Indigenous beliefs, extending back before written records, emphasized ritual pollution and avoidance practices concerning blood and death. Animal slaughter was associated with certain rituals practiced by hereditary specialists. Those in any way involved with these rituals; those who performed task related to child birth, disease, or death; and those who worked with the products of slain animal, were subjected to various forms of social segregation. Taboos against eating meat were established by the 8th century when the fusion of Shinto and Buddhist beliefs concerning death was nominally complete. Early 8th century codes forbade intermarriage between a freeman and slaves of specified occupations. Although later edicts banned slavery as such, attitudes regarding the contaminating nature of certain occupations reinforced these marital proscriptions and encouraged endogamy within groups that practiced these occupations.

Heian period records report that certain members of the kakibe, one of the peasant and artisan guilds not directly under Imperial control, were engaged in such ‘degrading occupations’ as tomb-watch (contact with the dead) and birdcare (work with animals). It is thought by some that the term eta derived from etori [keepers of falcons used by hunting nobility], but the etymology is not verified and is probably of folk origin. Kiyome was a less common term used interchangeably with eta, according to a 13th century document, to refer to street sweepers, well diggers, and craftsmen enjoined to certain temples. Approaching the Tokugawa period, the term eta was loosely interchanged with hinin as the two principal categories of senmin. Castle towns emerging in the late Muromachi period were skirted with settlements of outcast citizens who worked as armourers and engaged in basketry and the making of musical instruments, in addition to the more traditional outcast occupations. The majority of outcast communities, however, were not affiliated with castle tows but were distributed through the major population areas of Japan, much as they are today, around the Inland Sea.

Polluting occupations of various kinds have been recognized throughout Japanese history. It was the greater rigidity of society under the Tokugawa military government, however, beginning in 1600, that firmly established the degraded status of Japanese practicing these occupations. Local edicts required that eta wear special clothing to mark their outcast status. Eta were generally not permitted to use cloth for sashes, and were required in some localities, reminiscent of practices in Nazi Germany, to wear a patch of leather on their sleeves.

Senmin generally, but eta in particular, were forbidden to intermarry with ryomin [acceptable citizens]. Ryomin had to avoid physical contact with outcasts or be viscerally compelled to cleanse themselves of contamination. Non-outcasts could handle armour, musical instruments, and other artifacts made partly of animal by-products, but they felt obliged to keep their distance from those who crafted such artifacts. In 1871, as part of its modernization programs, the new Meiji government passed an edict officially abolishing all senmin status discrimination. Effective the following year, former eta and hinin became shinheimin [new commoners], the precursors of Burakumin. The terms eta and hinin became more disparaging than they had been before, as in time did shinheimin and the abbreviated shinhei. None of these terms are used today except as pejoratives. All have been replaced by the relatively neutral burakumin, meaning ‘citizens’ min of ‘special communities’ tokushu buraku, but even this term tends to be avoided except in clearly political and sociological contexts. It is worth noting that before the Meiji Restoration, in 1859, there had been a trial in Tokyo (then Edo) in which a commoner was accused of murdering an eta. It was the ruling of the judge that the commoner could suffer the death penalty only if he was first allowed to kill six more outcasts, for the reason that one commoner life was valued to seven eta lives.

Among the arguments for abolishing outcast status was one that reflects with peculiar clarity the lengths to which ryonin went to avoid defilement. Japanese maps, it was pointed out, under-represented distances between ordinary communities because intervening outcast communities and the intervals they occupied were omitted. If the new nation state was to upgrade its maps, it would have to make possible the accurate representation of distances, which in turn would require the admission of the existence of outcast settlements. The Emancipation Edict of 1871 made possible the accurate drawing of maps, but it neither changed majority attitudes towards the former outcasts nor motivated meaningful legislation to protect the new commoners from continued discrimination. Old labels were simple replaced by new ones. Euphemisms like shiheimin and tokushu buraku were coined so that majorities might still have a was to designate what they continued to find distasteful. Military rollbooks are known to have used the Chinese character for toku [special] to mark the names of soldiers who came from outcast communities.

The members of these communities today, particularly of Burakumin urban areas, exhibit all the marks of oppression that characterize so many Black citizens of France, Britain, and the United States. The irony of the Japanese situation, however, is that racism directed against Burakumin is motivated by visceral feelings involving myths of racial origins having no basis in biological, much less historical, fact. In Western Japan, where 80% of all Burakumin are found, historical myths about the ‘unjapaneseness’ of the ‘biological inferiority’ of Burakumin are still very current although overt behavior towards Burakumin has gradually become more circumspect. The ‘scientific’ discriminator may argue that Burakumin are genetically ‘Korean’ or what else, but such racial suppositions have no empirical support. Nor have any studies attempting such physical or biochemical measurements as head and face indices or blood-type frequencies ever found appreciable differences between Burakumin and majority Japanese populations. Yet post-emancipation eta descendants continue to bear the burden of pre-emancipation thought and behavior.

There is a book available at NIFS called The Invisible Visible Minority: Japan’s Burakumin. For more information about Burakumin, contact the Buraku Kaiho Kenkyusho (Buraku Liberation Institute), No. 1247 Kuboyoshi-cho, Naniwa-ku, Osaka 556.