Burakumin
A movement for burakumin rights began in the 1920s, and the Buraku Liberation League was founded in 1946; it has achieved some of its legal goals, including securing restrictions on third-party access to family registries.
[citation needed] During the 19th century, the term burakumin was invented to name the eta and hinin because both classes were forced to live in separate village neighborhoods.
The Shinto and Buddhist cultures, which aimed for a certain purity of body and mind, considered working with dead animals, blood, or any sort of decaying object as polluting, and hence occupations like butchery and leather tanning were besmirched.
[8] Prior to the Edo period, these burakumin (peripatetic or settled) would live outside common population centers and maintained some socio-ethical significance, albeit negligible.
Within the hinin and eta communities there would usually be a centralized chieftain[11] who was given the exclusive license of tanning, candle wicks and other similar occupations, employing their peers and concentrating great wealth and local power.
By exerting control over strategically important daimyo and their fiefs, he centralized power and revitalized the position of Shogun as the de facto leader of Japan.
[13] However, various studies have revealed since about 1995 that the classes of peasants, craftsmen, and merchants under the samurai are equal, and the old hierarchy chart has been removed from Japanese history textbooks.
[14][15][16] The burakumin held occupations associated with religious impurity, and were subsequently relegated as outcastes and subject to ostracization in the mainstream Japanese society.
As Japanese society stabilized, the demand for leather declined, as it was used largely for warring purposes, and along with the Tokugawa caste policy, the eta were relegated to the peripheries of villages or formed their own communities.
As the Edo period witnessed local prosperity, the shogunate augmented the differences between the four classes (even between the burakumin and the hinin), and often used the two outcaste groups as scapegoats.
[9] Various humiliating injunctions mandating certain dress codes or hairstyles for burakumin were passed, and by the 18th century, they were prohibited from entering temples, homes of common citizens and schools without permission.
At this point, the burakumin were generally economically subsistent on the government's purchase of the war equipment they produced, and they adopted occupations in the military as jailers, torturers and executioners.
In 1871, the newly formed Meiji government issued the Senmin Haishirei (賤民廃止令 [ja], 'Low Caste Abolishment Edict') decree, giving outcasts equal legal status.
Continued ostracism, the decrease of living standards and the development of modern construction and city sprawl resulted in former eta communities becoming slum areas.
Official documents referred to them as kyu-eta (旧穢多, 'former eta'), while the newly liberated outcasts called themselves shin-heimin (新平民, 'new citizens'), among other terms.
Although liberated legally during 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system, this did not end social discrimination against burakumin nor improve their living standards; until recently,[when?]
[25] It is estimated that around 1,000 buraku communities chose not to register as dōwa chiku, wanting to avoid the negative attention that could come from explicitly declaring themselves burakumin.
[29] In many parts of the country, buraku settlements built on the site of former eta villages ceased to exist by the 1960s because of either urban development or integration into mainstream society.
[citation needed] In 1969, the government passed the Special Measures Law for Assimilation Projects (同和対策事業特別措置法, dōwa taisaku jigyō tokubetsu sochihō)[30] to provide funding to these communities.
These checks are now illegal, and marriage discrimination is diminishing; Nadamoto Masahisa of the Buraku History Institute estimates that between 60 and 80% of burakumin marry a non-burakumin, whereas for people born during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the rate was 10%.
[34] Cases of continuing social discrimination are known to occur mainly in western Japan, particularly in the Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo, and Hiroshima regions, where many people, especially the older generation, stereotype buraku residents (whatever their ancestry) and associate them with squalor, unemployment and criminality.
[35] No burakumin communities were identified in the following prefectures: Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata, Fukushima, Tokyo, Toyama, Ishikawa, and Okinawa.
Despite internal divisions among anarchist, Bolshevik, and social democratic factions, and despite the Japanese government's establishment of an alternate organization, the Yūma, designed to reduce the influence of the Suiheisha, the Levelers Association remained active until the late 1930s.
[citation needed] One concession was the passing of the Special Measures Law for Assimilation Projects, which provided financial aid for the discriminated communities.
[citation needed] This traditional system of registry, kept for all Japanese by the Ministry of Justice since the 19th century, would reveal an individual's buraku ancestry if consulted.
The BLL is known for its fierce "denunciation and explanation sessions", where alleged perpetrators of discriminatory actions or speech are summoned for a public hearing before a panel of activists.
The conflict between the two organizations increased during 1974 when a clash between teachers belonging to a JCP-affiliated union and BLL activists at a high school in Yoka, rural Hyōgo Prefecture, put 29 in hospital.
Today, most burakumin share common religious practices with the majority of Japanese citizens, following a unique mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, known as Shinbutsu-shūgō (神仏習合).
In 1922, when the National Levelers' Association (Zenkoku-suiheisha) was initiated in Kyoto, Mankichi Saiko, a founder of the society and Jodo Shinshu priest, said, critiquing aggressive postures on the denouncement of acts of discrimination: We shouldn't disgrace our ancestors and violate humanity by our harsh words and terrible actions.
For example, in 1979 the Director-General of the Sōtō Sect of Buddhism made a speech at the "3rd World Conference on Religion and Peace" claiming that there was no discrimination against burakumin in Japan.
