Burakumin
Burakumin are an outcaste group in Japan, residing at the bottom of the traditional Japanese social hierarchy. The burakumin's ancestors were outcastes of the pre-modern era, primarily from the Edo period, who were associated with occupations considered impure or tainted by death, such as executioners, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers, butchers, or tanners. They traditionally lived in their own hamlets and neighbourhoods. Although legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system, burakumin have since faced persistent discrimination and prejudice. While living conditions in buraku communities have improved, particularly as a result of government projects in the late 20th century, burakumin may still face social ostracism, especially in marriage and employment. The total population of burakumin is estimated to be between 1.5 and 3 million people.
The history of the burakumin is often presented as a "master narrative" that assumes a direct, continuous line from pre-modern outcastes to the modern-day community. However, scholars such as Timothy D. Amos have challenged this view, arguing that the modern burakumin identity is a more recent, discursively constructed category that homogenizes diverse groups with unique and often fluid histories. As they are physically and ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese people, the discrimination they face is often rooted in their ancestry, place of residence, or other indirect markers. This "invisibility" has led to a social environment where buraku issues are often shrouded in silence, creating a paradox where individuals may be of burakumin descent without being aware of it.
The social stigma attached to the group led to the "buraku problem" in modern Japan. Various social and political movements have emerged since the late 19th century to combat this discrimination, most notably the National Levellers Association in the 1920s and the post-war Buraku Liberation League. These movements have adopted different strategies, from vocal confrontation to strategic silence, to challenge prejudice and advocate for human rights.
Etymology and terminology
The term burakumin is derived from buraku, which originally meant "hamlet" or "village", and retains that sense in areas where the burakumin issue is much less publicly prominent, such as Hokkaido and Okinawa. The term became associated with the former outcaste communities because of the way they were administratively separated and officially labelled during the Meiji era. After the 1871 Liberation Edict abolished the old status names of eta and hinin, new terms were devised by those who sought to maintain discrimination, such as "former eta" or "new commoners". Around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, these communities were "discovered" as a social problem and labelled "special buraku" to distinguish them from regular hamlets; by 1908, this term and the related tokushumin had replaced shin-heimin in popular press coverage of the minority.The term burakumin, which carried strong discriminatory connotations, became a "discourse of difference" that categorized diverse populations into a single common group. The term eta in the early modern period was primarily a temporal signifier, referring to the state or condition of an individual's humanity for the duration of their life. In contrast, the modern term burakumin is a spatial signifier, used to signify the abnormality of a particular place that needs to be marked off by a "sanitary cordon". In time, liberation movements came to prefer terms like hisabetsu buraku, hiappaku buraku, or mikaihō buraku.
In the post-war period, the term dōwa was used by the government, particularly in the context of projects aimed at resolving discrimination, while liberation groups continued to use hisabetsu buraku. The term dōwa was intended as a neutral euphemism, but as it became synonymous with buraku, it too acquired a stigma and was eventually removed from the official names of government laws and policies. Today, within liberation movements and scholarly work, the terms hisabetsu buraku and simply buraku are widely used without inherent discriminatory connotations.
History
Origins (pre-modern period)
The origins of buraku discrimination are connected to status distinctions that existed in Japan from the pre-modern era. During the Yamatai state, a class structure composed of royalty, nobles, commoners, and slaves existed, with clear status distinctions. However, the direct institutional precursor to the buraku outcaste system was the senmin system established under the Ritsuryō legal codes in the late 7th and early 8th centuries. Influenced by Chinese legal structures, the Ritsuryō system divided the population into ryōmin and senmin. The senmin class included various groups, such as imperial tomb guards and government- or privately-owned slaves. This system made slavery hereditary, forbade intermarriage with ryōmin, and connected the notion of "baseness" with the polluting nature of death, as tomb guards were re-assigned to senmin status.During the Heian period, discrimination based on ideas of ritual pollution, derived from both Shinto and Buddhist beliefs, became more pronounced. The Engishiki code stipulated periods of impurity following contact with death, birth, and blood, which strengthened occupational discrimination against those who handled such things. Buddhist texts introduced the concept of sendara to describe those with "bad integrity," such as butchers, hunters, and fishermen. These religious and legal ideas gradually spread, leading to increased prejudice against butchers and leather workers, who were often excluded from mainstream society, particularly in and around the capital, Kyoto. Popular theories about the origins of the outcastes often suggest a foreign ancestry, including Korean, but these are generally after-the-fact rationalizations; as a whole, the outcastes are not descendants of Koreans, but are ethnically Japanese. For instance, some Kokugaku scholars in the late Tokugawa period proposed that eta were descendants of Korean prisoners of war, a theory intended to either assert Japanese supremacy or as a veiled attack on Confucianism, which they associated with Korea.
Middle Ages and early modern period
During the Middle Ages, which some historians characterize as a "loose caste society", the status system became more fluid and less legally defined than under the Ritsuryō codes. Discriminated groups could be broadly classified into three types: eta, hinin, and sanjo. In some historical scholarship, medieval marginalized groups are referred to as "outcasts", a term that reflects their potential social mobility, in contrast to the more rigid status of "outcastes" in the early modern period.- Eta were primarily associated with occupations involving butchery and leatherwork. The term eta is thought to derive from etori. They lived in specific locations, often on riverbanks, which were necessary for the tanning process. Besides leatherwork, they also worked as landscape gardeners, well-diggers, and were tasked with carrying out punishments and handling the dead.
- Hinin were a more narrowly defined group, consisting mainly of beggars, the sick, orphans, and the destitute. Unlike the eta, whose status was permanent, the hinin status was not always hereditary, and individuals could sometimes move back into the commoner class. They formed communities often near temples or graveyards, such as at Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto and in Nara. Their leaders were known as chōri. They lived by begging and also performed duties such as guarding, cleaning for temples, and arresting criminals.
- Sanjo were groups such as garden sweepers and performers who were often attached to government agencies or temples and led a discriminated existence.
The establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate solidified a national status system. The population was broadly divided into samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, with the discriminated groups placed at the very bottom, in part as a political tool to maintain social control and discourage peasant uprisings. The kawata and hinin statuses were formalized and made hereditary. People with these statuses were registered separately in religious census records and lived in segregated villages or parts of towns. Their duties included leatherwork, drum making, acting as jailers and executioners, and policing functions. While their status was seen as polluting, many outcastes supported themselves through the same means as commoners, not only their mandated jobs. In a series of edicts between 1715 and 1730 known as the Kyōhō Reforms, the government strengthened the status system by codifying discriminatory regulations regarding clothing, hairstyle, and movement, making it virtually impossible for even non-hereditary hinin to be absorbed into the mainstream.
These regulations resulted in outcaste communities becoming larger and more isolated. While small and scattered in the 17th century, by the mid-19th century they were large, visible communities regarded with contempt and fear. The kawata population, in particular, may have increased by as much as 300 percent between 1720 and 1850, partly as a result of members of the mainstream population falling into outcaste areas, and partly because outcastes were more resilient to famine due to their access to meat. The Bakufu and various domains enacted increasingly detailed discriminatory policies, such as prescribing their clothing, forbidding them from entering towns at night, and restricting their interaction with commoners, further amplifying social prejudice. However, the status of these groups was ambivalent; many leaders within outcaste communities, such as Danzaemon in Edo, had considerable wealth and social standing. Moreover, membership of eta and hinin groups was not always stable or straightforward, with evidence of movement and absconding from these communities.