Documentary : In Japan’s Worst Slum, Angry Underclass Feels a Nation’s Prejudice : The ghetto in Osaka may not be horrible by some standards. But it is a public blind spot for another kind of poverty.

For a microcosm of everything Japan isn’t supposed to be, come to Kamagasaki, home to the bloke on the bottom of the economic heap. Meet deranged street people, ruined construction workers and parasitic gangsters.

Crime and un-Japanese poverty aren’t the only curiosities in this notorious section of Osaka’s Nishinari Ward. The neighborhood also reveals how Japanese remain caught in a grip of strict social control, even where one might expect a little chaos. Kamagasaki embraces an otherwise almost invisible Japanese underclass that possesses its own bizarre order.

The tour begins at the city-run Labor Welfare Center, a concrete, barn-like structure where thousands of men from across western Japan gather at dawn each working day to muster in temporary labor crews.

Take no snapshots, please. A lot of these people are on the run from nagging families or persistent creditors, and they’re shy of publicity. Confidentiality ranks high among the unwritten rules of Kamagasaki, the nation’s biggest yoseba or labor market--literally a “gathering place”--and by virtue of that distinction, its biggest slum.

Follow the guide down the sidewalk, past the vans tended by rough characters with kinky permed hair and tattoos--the yakuza, or gangsters, who parcel out ditch-digging jobs to the indigent. Step over the man sleeping on the curb with his burgundy bruised face in a small puddle of vomit, and walk beyond the clusters of inebriates in traditional laborer’s garb--jodhpurs and split-toed boots--who loiter meekly outside the rows of bars and flophouses.

Stop before the Nishinari police station. This fortress of authority has been the top attraction in Kamagasaki ever since it was the target of rioting day laborers and youths earlier this month. A half-dozen idle laborers gaze at it vacantly from across the street, as if they expect the building to move. Two uniformed policemen peer nervously from behind thick plexiglass windows on the front doors, seemingly under siege.

Yet it’s a crisp, peaceful autumn day, and to anyone familiar with America’s worst ghettos, Kamagasaki is closer to Disneyland.

“Nobody’s got guns around here,” said Yoshiharu Abe, 59, a loquacious 30-year veteran of the yoseba lifestyle, who volunteered his services as a street guide on a recent afternoon. “We don’t do heavy drugs and murder each other just for fun like you do in New York.”

Sure, the place may be seedy, and smell of rancid urine and cheap wine. And there are video cameras mounted on telephone poles at key intersections to help police keep a watchful eye on things.

But not much seems truly sinister in Kamagasaki, not even the deadpan yakuza who hustle dice games on impromptu plywood tables around Triangle Park, snapping up thousand-yen bills from disheveled gamblers with predictably short attention spans. Crowds of street people, drunks and unemployed day laborers are lazily basking in the sun on the cement benches and on the sandy, grass-less surface of the park, untouched by the maniacal diligence that drives the worker bees of “Japan Inc.”

“There’s no oppression here,” said Abe, the guide. “As long as we stay in the neighborhood, we’re freer than we can be anywhere in Japan.”

The Kamagasaki day tour isn’t something a visitor to Osaka can book through the concierge of a deluxe hotel, or any tour agency for that matter. Most ordinary Japanese would abhor the thought of visiting the yoseba and warn vaguely that bodily harm awaits curious foreigners who might try. Stick with Osaka Castle, they’ll advise, or Kyoto’s Zen gardens.

While this month’s Kamagasaki rioting was the first major violence in 17 years, and although no one was killed in the ruckus, it did serve as a disturbing reminder to many Japanese that they still have an angry underclass. “The tranquil facade of today’s affluent Japan was rudely shattered,” an editorial in the Japan Times intoned.

Most major Japanese cities have semi-blighted yoseba districts similar to Kamagasaki, though on a smaller scale. But decades of postwar stability and prosperity have helped erase them from the national consciousness. Osaka authorities went so far as to take the name Kamagasaki off the map and replace it with the bureaucratic neologism Airin, which means “neighborly love” and which is used only by outsiders.

The public’s blind spot for Kamagasaki’s dirty workmen in jodhpurs extends to an array of misfits and outcastes--disadvantaged minority groups whose very existence belies the modern myth that Japanese society is homogenous, and because it is homogenous, harmonious and somehow superior.

In truth, significant minority populations contribute to Japanese society, even if they don’t always reflect the image of the middle-class cult hero, the “salaryman” white-collar worker.

More than a million descendants of the burakumin outcaste community still battle discrimination in education, employment and marriage. Though racially identical to ordinary Japanese, their ancestors were ostracized as long as 1,000 years ago for engaging in “impure” vocations such as tanning, butchering and mortuary work. Until their legal emancipation in 1871, these outcasts were forced to live in special ghettos in a pattern of segregation that continues to this day.

Prejudice also plagues nearly a million resident aliens and naturalized citizens of Korean and Chinese ancestry. Natives of Okinawa who have ventured north and the small numbers of surviving Ainu aborigines who have come south from the island of Hokkaido also face unequal treatment at Japan’s center.

Many have been assimilated at the price of denying their heritage or ethnic identity, while others have been driven to the fringes--into the meritocratic yakuza organized crime world and into yoseba such as Kamagasaki, where all able-bodied laborers are deemed equal.

The stigma of being different is so intense amid the mass psychology of conformist Japan that victims of discrimination often prefer anonymity. Stubborn taboos thwart serious discussion and stymie scholarly investigation, supporting the official line that Japan has no minorities.

Former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone captured the spirit of this cultural self-deception when he told a training session of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in 1986 the reason why he thought Japanese were better educated than Americans: racial homogeneity.

“In the United States, there are blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans,” Nakasone said, “so the average is still very low.”

Such bigotry from the mouth of a prime minister was enough to spark a storm of protest from American minorities, who drew parallels to Japanese corporate behavior in the United States. Some Japanese subsidiaries have had spotty records in minority hiring, on top of denying management opportunities in general to local American employees.

Still, there was a similar incident just a month ago when Justice Minister Seiroku Kajiyama--the official in charge of immigration policy--decried the deterioration of a Tokyo red-light district by drawing a parallel between Japanese prostitutes and American blacks.

“It’s like in America when neighborhoods become mixed because blacks move in, and whites are forced out,” Kajiyama told a news conference.

Kajiyama, like Nakasone before him, personally apologized to the American people for making the statement, but he has so far rejected demands by black leaders--and by at least one major Japanese newspaper--that he resign his post.

To the leaders and intellectuals of Japan’s underclass, Kajiyama’s remarks are significant because they reflect how the vast majority of Japanese have been conditioned to think about ethnic minorities, people of color, people who simply don’t fit in.

“It goes back to the (late 19th-Century) Meiji Era, to an ideology of homogeneity that’s used to control this society,” said Kim Dong Hoon, the Korean-born chairman of the law department at Kyoto’s Ryukoku University.

“Behind Kajiyama’s slur (against American blacks) is a policy of racism,” Kim said. “If we believe Japan is a homogenous society, then the government doesn’t have to recognize the minority rights of Korean residents or Ainu.”

No law exists that specifically forbids discrimination or provides penalties for employers or landlords who deny fair treatment. Nor can a victim of bias easily sue for justice in the courts. This forces disfranchised groups to resort to high-pressure tactics, sometimes intimidation and occasionally acts of civil disobedience to air their grievances. A curious protest movement has flourished among Korean residents who refuse to be fingerprinted for their alien registration documents.

Not surprisingly, blatant discrimination persists. Major corporations are still widely suspected of screening prospective employees by having private snoops check family registration papers for signs of an outcaste, burakumin background.

Referring to the outcaste ghettos that still exist in the vicinity of the Kamagasaki district, Seiji Nakamura, an official with the Buraku Liberation Research Institute, commented: “The buraku environment has improved, but nothing fundamentally has changed in job discrimination. We’re still mostly shut out of stable, mainstream employment.”

The burakumin do retain an economic base in the shoe and leather industries, once monopoly outcaste trades that are protected from foreign competition by steep tariffs. But no reliable data exist substantiating how much they benefit from the protected status, or accurately defining demographics and unemployment in the invisible community.

Kamagasaki beckons, meanwhile, as an employer of last resort.

This is where a subcontractor in the construction industry turns to recruit a crew of laborers in a pinch, or a small manufacturer finds extra hands during peak demand. Osaka city nominally organizes the hiring at the Labor Welfare Center, but in fact the forces of the marketplace have drawn in organized crime to maintain order.

Yakuza dominate the labor brokering, particularly on the curb outside the center, and run just about every imaginable scam out on the streets as well. The latest object of complaint is a rash of fraudulent horse race wagering, in which fake bookies simply pocket the bets.

With a recent construction boom came more work and higher pay for Kamagasaki--the yen equivalent of nearly $100 a day is not unusual, although such wages do not go nearly as far here as they would in the United States.

“The better the economy gets here, the more the yakuza take root,” noted Kazuo Fukuda, an official with the Kamagasaki Day Laborers Union. “They skim money off the men’s wages at the work site, and back at the yoseba they steal more money with their dice. Behind every shiny new public works project, the yakuza are putting on the squeeze.”

Unlike American ghettoes, which are in many respects outside the law, the yoseba are kept in order through a set of social contracts, most important of which is a police accommodation with organized crime--always preferable to the disorganized kind. The yakuza are a kind of surrogate for formal authority, performing services such as running the labor market smoothly in exchange for gambling and prostitution concessions.

More than 20 crime families now maintain offices in the district, according to police, who reject allegations of routine corruption on the force. “We’re in an adversarial relationship with the gangs,” said Rentary Atake, head of the Nishinari police station’s general affairs division. “We arrested three gangsters this morning for gambling, and we’re going to keep at it from now.”

However, Christian missionaries in Kamagasaki bemoan the arrogance and aloofness of the police and say the bribery investigation that triggered the recent rioting only scratched the surface of a numb routine of corruption. Tsutomu Haga, 38, a detective in the Nishinari police station, was arrested and accused of taking more than $70,000 in bribes from two yakuza groups.

Meanwhile, the conspicuous role played by teen-agers during the climax of the Kamagasaki rioting offered some clues as to where Japan’s underclass may go from here. These firebomb- and rock-throwing youths were not radical university students as in yoseba riots of yore, but junior high and high school dropouts. Many were presumed to be members of bosozoku motorcycle gangs, long a recruiting ground for the yakuza gangsters.

“Those young people came here with a purpose,” said Nobuaki Koyanagi, a Protestant clergyman active in Kamagasaki.

“Before, nobody came to this neighborhood unless they were down and out and looking for work,” Koyanagi said. “But there was something this time that bound everyone together. They were all reacting with frustration to the same social control.”

Profile of the Underclass

Japan’s “underclass” is usually defined as including three groups:

* The burakumin, racially identical to other Japanese but descended from feudal-era outcasts from the so-called unclean professions; variously estimated at 1 million to 3 million. * The Ainu, an ethnic and racial minority indigenous to Japan and comparable to American Indians; officially put at 27,000, mainly on northern island of Hokkaido.

* Koreans, many of them descendants of laborers forcibly brought to Japan during the country’s colonization of the Korean peninsula in 1910-1945; 682,000.