JAPAN'S SECRET UNTOUCHABLES
Alan Booth on the
underclass that the Japanese prefer to ignore
THE Japanese Establishment's habit of hushing up the potentially embarrassing has been dented, albeit slightly, in recent months by circumstances beyond the control of hushers. The crisis in the Gulf has resulted in heated public arguments about the legal status of Japan's armed forces, and this in turn has encour- aged murmurings on the possibility of revising the American-drafted constitu- tion, a project which, though dear to the heart of the former Prime Minister Mr Nakasone, has usually been deemed too sensitive for even muted public airing. And last month an open debate on one of Japan's most determinedly hushed-up issues was prompted by the publication in Japanese of Dutch author Karel van Wol- feren's book, The Enigma of Japanese Power.
In a book whose English edition (Mac- millan, 1989) runs to 496 pages and which is about the subtle and not so subtle machinations of power holders at various levels of Japanese society, van Wolferen spends slightly less than two pages discus- sing the activities of an organisation called the Burakumin Liberation League (BLL). The burakumin are Japan's largest minor- ity group, and they have been the objects of vicious social discrimination for centur- ies. Feudal authorities relegated two groups of people to a status outside normal society. These were the eta ('pollution abounding') who performed such 'unclean' tasks as butchery, tanning, and burying the dead, and the hinin (lion human') who included beggars, vagrants and itinerant actors. In 1871 the post-feudal government formally emancipated these outcast groups, forbade the words eta and hinin to be used, and coined instead the euphem- ism burakumin ('hamlet people') after the 'special hamlets', the equivalent of ghettos, 'You're living in cloud cuckoo land.' to which they had been restricted. Since then, despite 'emancipation', the buraku- min community has grown in size. The present number of 'special hamlets' is estimated to be around 5,000 and the burakumin themselves to number between two and three million.
Today, burakumin, if they are men- tioned in print at all, are usually described as 'former outcasts' or as having been 'formerly' discriminated against. But de- spite their being physically indistinguish- able from other Japanese, and despite the increasing mobility of Japanese society, the burakumin have continued to experience serious prejudice, especially when it comes to employment and marriage, when in 1976 a law was passed preventing public access to an individual's household register (a document kept in local government offices which contains details of family, residence and other revealing personal information), an entertaining private detective agency compiled and published a volume called the Buraku Locations Register, which identified burakumin communities and which was sold to major corporations who wished to avoid recruiting burakumin by mistake. Although the registers are re- ported to have sold for the equivalent of £1,000 a volume, there were at least 150 purchasers before the matter became a public scandal.
But public scandals are rare where the burakumin are concerned; indeed, public mention of their very existence is normally avoided, and in his book van Wolferen offers one explanation of why this should be. The BLL, he says, has continually applied pressure to 'publishers, authors, journalists, editors and teachers. . . . Any of these who says anything about the burakumin that contradicts BLL ideology runs the risk of being forced to undergo denunciation sessions . . . . The result is that most references to burakumin in books and magazines are cut by editors.' Three days after the Japanese transla- tion of van Wolferen's book appeared in Japanese bookshops, its publishers, Hayakawa Shobo, received the first of a series of telephone calls from the BLL. The calls complained of the book's `de- rogatory language' and 'errors of fact'. The BLL insists that no threats were uttered against the publisher, but a swift result of the complaints was the recall of the books from major bookshops and the cancella- tion of the planned promotional campaign. In the end, van Wolferen persuaded Hayakawa Shobo to return the books to the shops and it was agreed that the BLL should be offered a public forum in which to air its complaints and in which van Wolferen would respond. To some peo- ple's surprise, the BLL accepted this offer, and a formal debate subsequently took place at the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan.
The `derogatory language' to which the League objected was, it turned out, the single term tokushu buraku especial ham- lets'). Until quite recently, this had been a sanctioned euphemism, but the League had since decided that it preferred hisabetsu buraku ('discriminated against hamlets') although at a push it would accept tokushu na community (using the English word), and all publishers, editors, authors etc, were expected to alter their texts in the light of this unilateral and seemingly arbitrary decision.
An 'error' that had riled the League was, of course, van Wolferen's description of how it went about intimidating publishers; it seemed not to have noticed that its quarrel with Hayakawa Shobu appeared to exemplify van Wolferen's point.
The debate between van Wolferen and the League's secretary general, Komori Tetsukuni touched on several important 'taboo' issues, in particular that of 'self- censorship' to which the Japanese pub- lishing industry seems especially prone. Often, it has not been necessary for the BLL to raise so much as an eyebrow in order to ensure that discussions of the burakumin problem do not see the light of print.
It remained not entirely clear what the BLL stood to gain by creating a climate of trepidation among publishers and editors. As a political organisation, it obviously has an interest in securing and expanding its power base. In fact it is only one of three groups representing the burakumin (though, with a membership of about 200,000, it is easily the largest) and, by outdoing the others both in stridency and in its insistence on ideological conformity, it may hope to garner greater support. It is also true that, in seeking to maintain the status quo rather than to widen debate on the intolerable treatment of the class it purports to represent, the BLL, is in effect preserving such of that class's vested in- terests as exist. This is liable to become clearer, and result in greater political trade-offs for the BLL, when US pressure on Japan to liberalise the leather and footwear markets increases, since these industries are traditionally a burakumin preserve.
One area in which the debate refrained from violating taboos was the question of the burakumin's association with the yaku- za, or organised crime syndicates. In their book Yakuza (Addison-Wesley, 1986), Alec Dubro and David Kaplan quote an unofficial police estimate that 70 per cent of the membership of the Yamaguch-gumi, the largest of Japan's criminal gangs, is burakumin. (This book, incidentally, pro- vides another interesting example of Japanese publishing's 'self-censorship' tendency; no local equivalent of the book exists and much of the information it contains is unavailable to the general read- er in Japan, despite which every one of the more than 20 Japanese publishers who were offered translation rights found a reason to reject it, and it has still not appeared in a Japanese edition.) Most observers believe that the 70 per cent estimate is too high, but it is no secret that organised crime recruits many of its mem- bers from among the underprivileged clas- ses and it is certain that, in the areas of employment, income, education, health and living standards, the burakumin re- main severely disadvantaged. The question of the yakuza connection could help to explain precisely what it is that editors and publishers are afraid of. Denunciation sessions may be 'unpleasant' (as van Wol- feren describes them), but there are cer- tainly unpleasanter forms of intimidation, and the yakuza are past masters of them.
One irony in all this is that, whenever the burakumin have been mentioned in print by non-Japanese authors, including Reischauer and van Wolferen, the men- tions have almost invariably been sym- pathetic to their cause. Japanese society's treatment of its own minorities throws an interesting light on its frequent claims to be 'homogeneous', 'classless' and 'interna- tionalised' and not a few commentators have pointed this out. Nor can it be to the advantage of the burakumin as a whole if public discussion of their plight is stifled because one ideologically and politically motivated organisation decides to alter its preferred euphemism and can goad a publisher into withdrawing from the shops an important book that is only peripherally concerned with the burakumin issue, but which many Establishment groups in Japan, from the government down, have ample cause to dislike, It cannot be to their advantage, either, for the media to go in constant fear of their largest representative organisation since, by association, the burakumin themselves then begin to seem fearful, even dangerous, in the minds not only of publishers and editors but of potential supporters and employers. To a large extent, one can sympathise with a group as ill-treated as the burakumin utilis- ing whatever means lie to hand — includ- ing perhaps extra-legal means — to im- prove their situation. But it is hard to see how their situation can improve without greater public awareness, or how aware- ness can be achieved without the unhin- dered publication of facts, comments and opinions.
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