Japan’s ‘Untouchables’ Suffer Invisible Stain : Class: Facing discrimination solely because of their ancestors’ birthplace, burakumin hope that society will finally forget the past.

Kazuki Aoki, the son of a middle-class businessman, was a young man of more-than-average intelligence when he entered the prestigious law department of Osaka Municipal University, but he shared the prejudices of many Japanese.

One was the bias against those whose ancestors were burakumin (literally, “village people”)--the “non-human” outcasts at the bottom of a rigid feudal-era hierarchy with hereditary classes of warriors, farmers, artisans and merchants.

They were the people consigned to the “unclean” jobs of society--butchering and tanning, for example--and forced to live in clearly demarcated ghettos. “ Eta “ (“filth”) was one synonym for them.

It didn’t matter to Aoki that no one in modern Japan can identify a descendant of an outcast by skin color, speech, religion, nationality, ethnic origin or any of the other landmarks of discrimination. Only by learning the address of a person’s ancestors and determining that it was located in one of the feudal-era ghettos can a burakumin be identified today.

Aoki, however, realized that his knowledge of the buraku problem was fragmentary, and out of curiosity he enrolled in a class on the subject at the university.

There, he learned that burakumin who try to “pass” in society never visit the places where they were born. Somewhat puzzled, Aoki thought of his own parents, who had never gone to their birthplaces during the ancestor-worship o-bon season or the New Year’s holidays while he was growing up.

Aoki also learned that many burakumin who wish to hide their identities never speak of ancestors’ occupations. And he recalled that he had never been told anything about his forebears.

There were other such examples. Aoki found a parallel for each one.

And so, at age 19, he made his first journey to his father’s birthplace. There, he learned the awful secret that his parents had tried to spare him: The family’s ancestry led back to the “non-humans” of feudal days.

Shaken to his bones, Aoki realized that, unknowingly, he had been prejudiced against himself.

Akinobu Tanimoto, general affairs director of the Buraku Liberation League, tells the story as an example of the suffering and tragedy still found in Japan 121 years after the government officially abolished the old class system. Tanimoto asked that Aoki’s real name not be revealed; the two were college friends.

The centuries-old bias against the burakumin is only one form of discrimination in Japan, but for a nation that is increasingly stressing a commitment to human rights, it is by far the most insidious and embarrassing.

The untouchables of India--who, like the burakumin, are indistinguishable physically from the rest of the population--can at least trace the bias against them back to specific religious beliefs. But in Japan, where anti- burakumin discrimination is forbidden by the constitution and attacked in education, only a vague “cultural memory” provides a prop.

“It’s partly ideology, partly religion (Buddhist and Shinto) and partly a philosophy of bloodline,” Tanimoto said.

About 3 million people, or 2.5% of the population, are estimated to be burakumin, he said. ( Buraku means simply “village”; burakumin can mean either “villager” or “villagers.”)

For the 1 million of them who still live in residential clusters easily identified as buraku neighborhoods--either by history or by the residents’ acceptance of special governmental subsidies--discrimination is an almost daily experience.

Those who live there are often denied normal association with people in neighboring areas. Their children come home from school telling about such things as the candy-store owner who warns youngsters not to play with buraku children, said Mieko Suzuki, secretary of the International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism.

Suzuki, now in her 20s, remembers the candy-store incident from her fifth-grade days. It was not until later that she realized that the warning had been directed against her. She did not discover her burakumin origin until she was 18, when she overheard her mother in a telephone conversation, she said.

About 2 million buraku people trying to “pass” in society lead ordinary lives in ordinary neighborhoods--on the surface. But they live with the fear that a lightning bolt of prejudice could at any time strip away their secret identities and burn down all they have worked to build.

A potential employer discovers a burakumin background and won’t hire a job-seeker. A detective agency digs up the ancestry of a young person about to be married. An antagonist brings up the “ultimate stamp of dishonor” to win an argument.

A sign made by holding up four fingers--symbolizing four feet, as if referring to an animal--can destroy in an instant the standing and respect of a lifetime. Goro Shikimoto acutely remembers his experience with the sign. It transformed his life.

Born in Nagasaki, Shikimoto, whose ancestors were not burakumin, came to Tokyo after the end of World War II, fell in love and decided to marry. An uncle, however, inexplicably objected to Shikimoto’s fiancee, who happened to be a daughter of one of the uncle’s in-laws.

“He never explained his reasons,” said Shikimoto, 68, who now runs a nursing home on the outskirts of Yokohama.

The two were married in 1947, and Shikimoto moved in with the family of his wife, an only child. Several years later, in a conversation with an acquaintance who knew where Shikimoto lived, the other man held up four fingers and asked, “Are you one of them?”

“When I saw that gesture, I cannot describe my shock,” Shikimoto recalled. “A chill came over me. I could not continue working. The realization that the woman I loved and married was a burakumin and the place I lived was a buraku community destroyed my hope for the future.

“I understood, in rational terms, that people should not discriminate against other people. I tried to suppress my feelings, but for weeks, in my heart, I could not find a solution. . . . Nobody taught me to discriminate against burakumin , but in the years in which I grew up in Nagasaki, it just became part of me, naturally.”

Only when he realized that his feelings had originated in a social milieu of discrimination against Chinese, Koreans, the handicapped, mixed-blood children and Caucasians--”that my nature had been created by others”--did Shikimoto overcome the shock.

Indeed, he became the rarest of the rare. He ultimately joined the Buraku Liberation League, in which membership is assumed by society at large as proof of buraku ancestry. Fearing that the move would invite discrimination, his wife opposed his joining the league for two years, he said.

Today, Shikimoto is an obviously happy man, quick to smile, content in his work and at peace with himself. He never asked his wife why she hadn’t told him about her ancestry. Now she, too, has become active in the Liberation League--”more so than I,” he said at the nursing home. “I am too busy here.”

But Shikimoto recalls sadly the uncle who so resolutely opposed his marriage. A man without buraku origins, the uncle knew that Shikimoto’s wife was a burakumin. He died last year at 76.

“He never talked to me to his death,” Shikimoto said.

His wife’s father, he recalls, waited “three or four years” before registering his daughter’s marriage to Shikimoto in his own family register.

“He probably was afraid that I would divorce her if I found out she was a burakumin and didn’t want to deprive her of a chance to find another husband,” he said.

The Buraku Liberation League has for years insisted that the government abolish its system of family registers, which fill warehouses with data on family trees dating back centuries. Without the registers, there would be virtually no way to identify a burakumin , and only the presently known buraku neighborhoods--from which burakumin could move--would exist to sustain the discrimination.

The government, however, has refused to wipe out the records, which help maintain the family as a social institution in Japan.

Although the old class system was abolished in 1871, family registers continued to contain a “class origin” entry until the post-World War II U.S. occupation ordered an end to the listing. The “non-humans” of the feudal era became the “new ordinary people”--a phraseology that suffered no loss of clarity in identifying burakumin origins.

Indeed, it was not until two decades ago that the task of blacking out the “class origin” entry on old family registers was completed.

Despite the constitutional ban on discrimination, the government has refused to enact laws providing penalties for acts of discrimination, such as denying employment or denigrating a person, orally or in print, on the basis of family origin. Basically, the government believes that it is impossible to legislate prejudice out of existence.

“The solution lies in improvement of living conditions and eliminating the psychological problems,” said Yasuta Araga, chief of “regional improvements countermeasures” at the Administrative Management Agency.

“Defining what is discrimination would be very difficult,” Araga said. “Rather than combatting discrimination, the result could increase the abuses. A free exchange of opinions is needed to solve this problem. . . . A law could inhibit discussion.”

“Our thinking is different,” said Tanimoto of the Liberation League. “We are the same human beings. We live in the same way. Why is it that we cannot speak of where we came from? A society in which you can’t talk about your origins is strange.”

Although the government has implemented an anti-discrimination curriculum in schools, its major thrust is a system of subsidies designed to tackle the results of discrimination, such as poverty, squalid housing and low education.

After nearly $29 billion spent on scholarships and special projects since 1969, two-thirds of the residents of buraku neighborhoods--which the government officially calls dowa (assimilation) districts--are still receiving government aid, according to the Administrative Management Agency. Unemployment runs three times the national average. Dowa residents who are employed are more likely to work at tiny, obscure companies than at top-echelon firms.

Improvements, however, are visible. Gone are the ghettos without sewers or paved roads. More dowa district people own their own living units (68%) than the population as a whole (62%). Scholarships have wiped out economic deprivation as an obstacle to obtaining a high school education, Tanimoto said. The governmental agency reports that 6% fewer burakumin enter high school than children in the population as a whole, and 11% fewer go on to college, but the discrepancy used to be more than 35%.

There are societal signs of improvement as well. Among people under 30, more than 60% of dowa district youth now marry a non- dowa person. Among couples 60 and older, the percentage is only 20%.

Yet some critics charge that both the government programs and the activities of the Buraku Liberation League are perpetuating discrimination.

On one hand, government subsidies have created an image of favoritism and a belief that burakumin are “grabby.” Moreover, residents of dowa districts publicize their ancestry by accepting the subsidies.

In December, 1991, a government council declared that “special measures for a special group should not be continued permanently” and recommended that all dowa subsidies be ended within five years. The same recommendation had been made--and ignored--in 1987.

Meanwhile, staging kyudan, or accusation sessions--a weapon that the Buraku Liberation League has long used as a way of humbling those who discriminate--has helped create an image of burakumin as troublemakers.

Indeed, so widespread is the image that hundreds of “counterfeit dowa” organizations have sprung up, using accusations of prejudice as a way of extorting money from companies.

“You can ask for help from the police if threatened with violence, but it’s difficult for police to do anything about an accusation of prejudice,” said Akira Terada of the Justice Ministry’s human rights protection division.

Many members of the gangs, however, are themselves burakumin who join the underworld because of poverty, according to Sueo Murakoshi, an Osaka Municipal University professor who is an authority on buraku problems.

Last year, the ministry discovered that 20% of about 4,000 corporations that it surveyed had reported threats from groups identifying themselves as dowa. One in every three of the intimidated companies reported yielding to demands for sums of less than $800.

Projected nationwide, the survey indicated that perhaps 47,000 companies received threats.

“It is a great social problem,” Terada said.

Although no one is willing to predict how the vicious cycle might end, clearly a vast majority of the burakumin hope that society will forget its past. Many of them are trying to forget their own past.

Aoki, the college student who discovered his own buraku roots, apparently is one of them.

Tanimoto recalls that Aoki initially reacted to his shock by taking a strong interest in human rights issues. But, he said, when he searched his university’s alumni records and found an address for Aoki in a non- dowa area, Aoki later did not respond to a request for a meeting with his old friend.

Tanimoto has not seen him for years.

Megumi Shimizu, a research assistant in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this story.