The song has long been sung by the people in the burakumin areas of Kyoto and Osaka in a slightly different form.
Burakumin ("hamlet people") were an outcast community at the bottom of the Japanese social order that had historically been the victims of severe discrimination and ostracism.
These communities were often made up of those with occupations considered impure or tainted by death (e.g., executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers, or tanners).
A burakumin neighborhood within metropolitan Tokyo was the last to be served by streetcar and is the site of butcher and leather shops to this day.
In 1969, the folk singing group Akai Tori [ja] (赤い鳥) made this song popular, and their single, recorded in 1971, became a bestseller.
The song has also an additional history in that NHK and other major Japanese broadcasting networks refrained from playing it because it is related to burakumin activities, but this ban was stopped during the 1990s.