Japan Has Downtrodden Minorities, Too

When Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone got mired in a political controversy with his statement about blacks and Latinos pulling down U.S. literacy or intelligence levels, many observers seemed to think that he was praising Japan’s lack of social problems related to having a homogenous society.

But are the Japanese indeed so free of problems of minority status?

Culturally unified as it is, Japan also has ethnic diversity. There are more than 3 million minority citizens and non-citizens who are still faced with caste-like discrimination and relative non-acceptance.

Japan still is socially discriminatory toward Burakumin --members of an outcast group now numbering somewhere under 3 million. Originally drawn from the ordinary population and compelled to practice ritually defiling occupations, the Burakumin were declared “new citizens” and officially “human” in 1872.

Japan also has somewhere under a million Korean residents, most of them descendants of the unskilled laborers brought into the country during the colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Large numbers today still live in miserable slums. They are not eligible to receive ordinary welfare benefits.

In both groups economic discrimination and personal disparagement have continued. Although Burakumin are Japanese and Koreans overlap Japanese in physical appearance, both groups are subjected to a form of “racial” bigotry of a type resembling that practiced by those who classify Jews as a “special” race.

A marriage between a Korean and a Japanese is considered “interracial,” and their children are known as “mixed blood.” Marriage to a former outcast or a Korean is severely discouraged by social pressures in Japan, much as are black-white relationships in the American South.

Numerous Burakumin and many Koreans seek to become invisible to the casual eye. Some minority Koreans seek to “pass” by “assuming” Japanese names. Some Burakumin, by moving out of their ghettos or special villages, seek to move about freely among ordinary Japanese.

But, while the practice is officially discouraged, family background records are still invariably consulted when anyone seeks a job. Such investigation at the time of attempted marriage makes “passing” all but impossible in contemporary Japan. Caste and “racial discrimination” are social if not legal facts.

Most members of both groups are overt about their heritage and protest open signs of discrimination. But most of them are poor and fragmented politically, so their efforts are largely ignored.

How have these minority segments of the Japanese population been doing in the schools and in the job market? Poorly. In my research conducted with Japanese scholars, including the late Hiroshi Wagatsuma, we found the situation analogous to that reported for the American ethnic groups cited by Nakasone. In a systematic check of what was available in school records, including reports of Japanese IQ surveys in selected schools, we found that poor performance and a high dropout rate characterized both Japanese minorities. In our canvas of the family court records in a large city of more than 1 million population, we found that Korean youths had seven times the per-capita rate of arrests for delinquency while Burakumin youths had approximately five times the rate of ordinary Japanese.

Our interviews in minority communities confirmed the general impression that is held by members of these groups about themselves--that there is an unusually high rate of family breakdown as well as heavy drinking and unemployment among both the youths and the adults. The high unemployment among the males leads to the separation and desertion of their families. Further, since many minority mothers work at night in the entertainment industry, children tend to be neglected by the one parent who remains at home.

While Japanese minorities suffer a high rate of family breakdown and its attendant effects on children, majority families for the most part tend to remain intact. But strains are beginning to show. In five years of intensive field research with Japanese families in an economically poor area of Tokyo, we could demonstrate a clear-cut difference in family integration between families that had a delinquent child and those whose youngsters were doing well in school. Thus family integration is related to school performance or forms of deviant behavior--both in Japan and in the United States.

These problems are particularly apparent in minority situations. Social disparagement over several generations can cause a vulnerability in self-regard that starts very early in minority children. If the family becomes vulnerable, the child becomes vulnerable. The processes are the same in Japan as in the United States. They have nothing to do with racial differences, contrary to what many Japanese--and many Americans--believe.