Japan’s Outsider Caste

The braced steel frames are already in place and covered with gray panels. The new Kyoto University of the Arts is currently being raised at the heart of what once was one of the most disgraceful places to be born in Japan: The Sujin area, a few hundred meters east of the central station of Kyoto.

It was precisely 100 years ago, in 1922, that the National Horizon Association (Zenkoku Suiheisha) was founded in Kyoto with the declared purpose to eliminate discrimination directed toward the Japanese underprivileged class, which, with no exaggeration, can be compared to a social caste: the burakumin.

Despite the effort from the association to dispel the perception of those people as sub-citizens (how they were viewed in the past), the long shadow of centuries-old discrimination is still felt to this day.

“Sujin is the burakumin ghetto. I personally don’t think of them badly, but definitely, my parents do, as they expressly told me ‘to be careful’ if I found myself close to them,” said Yudai, a 43-year-old salaryman who comes to Kyoto on Sundays to fish in the Kamo river.

In fact, it is very near this river that the burakumin historically lived, and today many of their descendants still reside here.

“The river was used as a source of water to wash the leather they used to work with,” said Yamauchi, who is a local historian and resides nearby.

Yamauchi explained, “The discrimination started as a form of barrier that ‘regular’ citizens put up to distance themselves from employments deemed unclean: killing animals to make leather, but mostly the dirtiest of all jobs, executioners.

“The executioner himself was a samurai, but those who held the headless body that would be spilling blood all over, they were the burakumin.”

Taking a stroll along the riverside, I spotted a dozen people picking up trash along the banks and the dry bed. Minoru is a 60-year-old man who regularly comes here every month to accomplish this community duty. When asked about the burakumin, he told me, “There is no discrimination anymore, except maybe when it comes to marriage.”

I then ask him if he would be happy to see his daughter wed to a burakumin. “Well… that could be a problem,” he answered honestly.

The fact that some people I interviewed seemed to be in denial when it comes to the present discrimination (“it only happened in the past” is usually their first answer) may be an unconscious reflex to avoid embarrassment. Many Japanese seek to avoid giving a disparaging image of their own country, especially in front of a foreigner.

This impression was confirmed to me by a 38-year-old woman who works at the community center in the Sujin area.

“Even though I’m from Nara Prefecture I know there is still discrimination going around. I have friends from the Rakuchu area in the north part of Kyoto who told me that they would never even come near Sujin,” she said.

It has to be stressed that this aversion is not because Sujin is a high-crime area. It’s a legacy of doom rooted in the blood of its inhabitants.