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Burakumin (, "people of the hamlet/village") are an outcaste group in Japan, residing at the bottom of the traditional Japanese social hierarchy. The burakumin's ancestors were outcastes of the pre-modern era, primarily from the Edo period, who were associated with occupations considered impure or tainted by death, such as Executioner, undertakers, slaughterhouse workers, Butcher, or tanners. They traditionally lived in their own hamlets and neighbourhoods. Although legally liberated in 1871 with the abolition of the feudal caste system, burakumin have since faced persistent discrimination and prejudice. While living conditions in buraku communities have improved, particularly as a result of government projects in the late 20th century, burakumin may still face social ostracism, especially in marriage and employment. The total population of burakumin is estimated to be between 1.5 and 3 million people.
The history of the burakumin is often presented as a "master narrative" that assumes a direct, continuous line from pre-modern outcastes to the modern-day community. However, scholars such as Timothy D. Amos have challenged this view, arguing that the modern burakumin identity is a more recent, discursively constructed category that homogenizes diverse groups with unique and often fluid histories. As they are physically and ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese people, the discrimination they face is often rooted in their ancestry, place of residence, or other indirect markers. This "invisibility" has led to a social environment where buraku issues are often shrouded in silence, creating a paradox where individuals may be of burakumin descent without being aware of it.
The social stigma attached to the group led to the " buraku problem" (部落問題, buraku mondai) in modern Japan. Various social and political movements have emerged since the late 19th century to combat this discrimination, most notably the National Levellers Association (Suiheisha) in the 1920s and the post-war Buraku Liberation League (BLL). These movements have adopted different strategies, from vocal confrontation to strategic silence, to challenge prejudice and advocate for human rights.
The term burakumin, which carried strong discriminatory connotations, became a "discourse of difference" that categorized diverse populations into a single common group. The term eta in the early modern period was primarily a temporal signifier, referring to the state or condition of an individual's humanity for the duration of their life. In contrast, the modern term burakumin is a spatial signifier, used to signify the abnormality of a particular place that needs to be marked off by a "sanitary cordon" ( cordon sanitaire). In time, liberation movements came to prefer terms like hisabetsu buraku (被差別部落, discriminated buraku), hiappaku buraku (被圧迫部落, oppressed buraku), or mikaihō buraku (未解放部落, unliberated buraku).
In the post-war period, the term dōwa (同和, "assimilation") was used by the government, particularly in the context of projects aimed at resolving discrimination, while liberation groups continued to use hisabetsu buraku. The term dōwa was intended as a neutral euphemism, but as it became synonymous with buraku, it too acquired a stigma and was eventually removed from the official names of government laws and policies. Today, within liberation movements and scholarly work, the terms hisabetsu buraku and simply buraku (as an abbreviation) are widely used without inherent discriminatory connotations.
During the Heian period (794–1185), discrimination based on ideas of ritual pollution ( kegare), derived from both Shinto and Buddhist beliefs, became more pronounced. The Engishiki code (927) stipulated periods of impurity following contact with death (human or animal), birth, and blood, which strengthened occupational discrimination against those who handled such things. Buddhist texts introduced the concept of sendara (a transliteration of the Sanskrit Chandala, referring to the lowest castes in India) to describe those with "bad integrity," such as butchers, hunters, and fishermen. These religious and legal ideas gradually spread, leading to increased prejudice against butchers and leather workers, who were often excluded from mainstream society, particularly in and around the capital, Kyoto. Popular theories about the origins of the outcastes often suggest a foreign ancestry, including Korean, but these are generally after-the-fact rationalizations; as a whole, the outcastes are not descendants of Koreans, but are ethnically Japanese. For instance, some Kokugaku scholars in the late Tokugawa period proposed that eta were descendants of Korean prisoners of war, a theory intended to either assert Japanese supremacy or as a veiled attack on Confucianism, which they associated with Korea.
During the Sengoku period (1467–1603), regional warlords ( Daimyo) began to organize leather workers, then called kawata, to ensure a stable supply of leather for military goods like armour. These artisans were controlled through their group leaders and granted a monopoly over their craft in exchange for taxes and services. In areas like northern Kyushu, outcaste communities existed from at least the 16th century, primarily engaged in leatherwork but also farming and producing craft goods such as drums.
The establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) solidified a Edo society. The population was broadly divided into samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, with the discriminated groups placed at the very bottom, in part as a political tool to maintain social control and discourage peasant uprisings. The kawata (or chōri in eastern Japan) and hinin statuses were formalized and made hereditary. People with these statuses were registered separately in religious census records and lived in segregated villages or parts of towns. Their duties included leatherwork, drum making, acting as jailers and executioners, and policing functions. While their status was seen as polluting, many outcastes supported themselves through the same means as commoners, not only their mandated jobs. In a series of edicts between 1715 and 1730 known as the Kyōhō Reforms, the government strengthened the status system by codifying discriminatory regulations regarding clothing, hairstyle, and movement, making it virtually impossible for even non-hereditary hinin to be absorbed into the mainstream.
These regulations resulted in outcaste communities becoming larger and more isolated. While small and scattered in the 17th century, by the mid-19th century they were large, visible communities regarded with contempt and fear. The kawata population, in particular, may have increased by as much as 300 percent between 1720 and 1850, partly as a result of members of the mainstream population falling into outcaste areas, and partly because outcastes were more resilient to famine due to their access to meat. The Bakufu and various Han system enacted increasingly detailed discriminatory policies, such as prescribing their clothing, forbidding them from entering towns at night, and restricting their interaction with commoners, further amplifying social prejudice. However, the status of these groups was ambivalent; many leaders within outcaste communities, such as Danzaemon in Edo, had considerable wealth and social standing. Moreover, membership of eta and hinin groups was not always stable or straightforward, with evidence of movement and absconding from these communities.
However, the edict did not end social discrimination. While the former outcastes largely responded with elation, demanding equal rights and in some cases engaging in self-policing to become more acceptable to the majority, many commoners reacted with hostility, seeing the reform not as an elevation of the burakumin but as a demotion for themselves that violated the traditional "moral economy". Violent riots occurred in opposition to the edict, often linked to broader discontent with Meiji modernization policies like conscription and land tax reform. These included "eta hunts" ( eta-gari) and the destruction of buraku homes and property. In June 1873, a major rebellion in Fukuoka Prefecture known as the Takeyari Ikki involved up to 300,000 people and resulted in the destruction of over 2,000 houses belonging to "new commoners", including the near-total destruction of the Horiguchi community in Hakata. The abolition of their traditional occupations, which had been guaranteed monopolies, was a double-edged sword: while it removed hereditary bonds to certain jobs, it also thrust many into economic difficulty as they were forced to compete with other entrepreneurs without state support. Discrimination was enabled through the koseki (family registry) system, which marked former outcastes as "new commoners", allowing their ancestry to be easily traced and perpetuating barriers to social integration.
The intellectual climate of the late 19th century exacerbated this social prejudice. The universalist ideals of the "civilization and enlightenment" period of the 1870s gave way in the 1880s to a new discourse shaped by Social Darwinism, eugenics, and concerns about public hygiene. In 1884, for example, the influential educator Takahashi Yoshio warned against intermarriage with burakumin to prevent the "pollution" of the Japanese gene pool with hereditary diseases like leprosy. The popular press, especially during cholera outbreaks, began to portray buraku communities as unsanitary Ghetto and their residents as inherently diseased, immoral, and deviant. Journalist Yokoyama Gennosuke's 1899 report on a Tokyo buraku characterized residents as having an "indescribable stench" and being prone to a debauched and criminal lifestyle, framing these traits as endemic to the people themselves. The most enduring new boundary was a quasi-racial one: the idea that burakumin were of a "different race or ethnic group" from mainstream Japanese, a concept that became a powerful barrier to intermarriage. This theory was taken up by early anthropologists, who posited Korean or other "foreign" origins for the burakumin. Though later "scientific" studies by figures like Torii Ryūzō sought to prove they were "normal Japanese," the popular press often twisted these findings to reinforce the idea of racial difference. This notion of a different "lineage" or "impure bloodline" became central to modern buraku discrimination.
The government's municipal amalgamation program of 1888–1889 systematically excluded buraku communities from newly formed villages and towns, forcing them to remain as isolated administrative units, which further entrenched their segregation and poverty. It was only after the Russo-Japanese War that the government, concerned about national unity and social stability, began to address the buraku issue through "improvement policies" (改善事業, kaizen jigyō). Starting in Mie Prefecture in 1905, these policies were primarily "moral" movements aimed at reforming the customs and habits of the burakumin, with little budget or attention to economic problems. In response, affluent burakumin began to organize their own movements. The Dai Nippon Dōhō Yūwa Kai (Greater Japan Fraternal Conciliation Society), formed in 1903, and its successor the Yamato Dōshikai, advocated for "conciliation" ( yūwa). This approach, often called the Yūwa Undō (Harmony Movement), was assimilationist, encouraging burakumin to prove their worth to mainstream society through hard work and patriotism. The government feared a link between buraku communities and the Socialism movement, which spurred the state to develop a national Yūwa policy.
The 1918 Rice Riots were a major turning point. Burakumin participated heavily in the nationwide protests and were disproportionately targeted for arrest and punishment by the authorities, making up 10.8% of those prosecuted while being less than 2% of the population. This repression fueled a desire for a self-directed liberation movement. On 3 March 1922, the Suiheisha (全国水平社, Zenkoku Suiheisha) was founded in Kyoto. Its declaration famously proclaimed: "The time has come when we can be proud of being eta." The Suiheisha became the first nationwide, self-directed buraku liberation movement, championing pride, self-respect, and a strategy of "thorough denunciation" (徹底的糾弾, tetteiteki kyūdan) of discrimination wherever it occurred.
In its early years, the movement combined an ideology of ethnic nationalism with fervent patriotism, criticizing the majority's prejudice as a betrayal of the emperor's will. In the mid-1920s, the movement was heavily influenced by socialism and communism, leading to a major ideological shift and internal conflict between those advocating for class struggle and those focusing on buraku-specific issues. The movement was re-energized by the 1933 Takamatsu Trial Incident, a court case involving blatant discrimination, which led to a new platform that defined burakumin as an "oppressed" group ( hiappaku buraku). As Japan moved towards militarism in the 1930s, the Suiheisha was co-opted into supporting the war effort, adopting state rhetoric like "national conciliation" ( kokumin yūwa). In June 1941, the wider Yūwa movement was restructured by the state to create the Dōwa Hōkōkai, a "powerful reconciliation movement of state officials and people" in which discrimination was defined as "unpatriotic activity". The Suiheisha was ultimately forced to dissolve by the government in 1942 as part of the consolidation of civil society organizations under the Imperial Rule Assistance Association.
Despite these legal changes, the living conditions in buraku communities remained dire. They were largely left behind by post-war land reforms and economic recovery, suffering from high unemployment, poor housing, and inadequate sanitation. Although the central government and the Occupation authorities were largely indifferent, some local governments, particularly in the Kansai region, revived Dōwa projects on a small scale from 1946 onwards. In 1951, the "All Romance Incident," involving a discriminatory story published in a Pulp magazine set in a Kyoto buraku, galvanized the BNLC to shift its focus. The campaign linked the discrimination in the story to the poor living conditions of the community and demanded that the government take administrative action to resolve the buraku issue. This marked the beginning of a new strategy focused on gyōsei tōsō (administration struggles). The movement's new militancy was demonstrated in incidents like the 1952 Nishikawa Affair, where a prefectural assemblyman in Wakayama was forced to resign after making discriminatory remarks. In 1955, the BNLC changed its name to the Buraku Liberation League (部落解放同盟, Buraku Kaihō Dōmei, or BLL).
Growing pressure from the BLL and its political allies in the Japan Socialist Party, including a "Grand March of Liberation" to Tokyo in 1961, led the government to establish the Dōwa Policy Advisory Council ( Dōwa Taisaku Shingikai). The government's concession was partly motivated by a desire to weaken the BLL's commitment to the widespread anti–US-Japan Security Treaty protest movement of the time. In 1965, the council submitted a landmark report (known as the Dōtaishin Tōshin) that acknowledged for the first time that the resolution of the buraku problem was a "responsibility of the state." The report defined buraku discrimination as an infringement of civil rights, rejected theories of racial difference or feudal remnants, and focused on improving the poor living environments of buraku communities as the key to solving the problem.
This led to the enactment of the Special Measures Law for Dōwa Projects in 1969. Over the next thirty-three years, this law and its successors funnelled significant government funds—a total of around ¥15 trillion—into "Dōwa projects" aimed at improving housing, infrastructure, and living standards in designated buraku districts. The projects dramatically transformed the physical environment of many communities and significantly improved educational outcomes, with high school matriculation rates for buraku youth rising by nearly 35 percent in some prefectures between 1969 and 2002. However, the law was a time-limited measure, not the permanent Human Rights Basic Law that the BLL had campaigned for. The projects also created a new "official boundary" by formally designating areas as , which some argued reinforced stigma. It is estimated that around 1,000 buraku communities chose not to register as , wanting to avoid the negative attention that could come from explicitly declaring themselves burakumin.
During this period, the BLL grew into a powerful national movement. The Sayama Incident, a murder case from 1963 in which a buraku man, Kazuo Ishikawa, was convicted, became a major focus of the BLL's activism from the late 1960s, with the league arguing it was a case of discriminatory investigation and a miscarriage of justice. In 1975, the discovery of the Buraku Chimei Sōkan, illegally compiled address lists of buraku communities being sold to companies for use in discriminatory hiring practices, brought the issue of employment discrimination to national attention. However, it was also marked by internal conflict, particularly with the Japan Communist Party (JCP) over ideology and tactics. The JCP criticized the Dōwa projects for separating burakumin from the wider working-class movement and alleged that the BLL's control over the allocation of Dōwa funds (the Madoguchi Ippon or "Single Window" strategy) was exclusionary and undemocratic. This conflict culminated in violent denunciation struggles, such as the Yata incident (1969) and the Yoka High School incident (1974), where BLL members physically assaulted teachers affiliated with the Communist Party. This led to a split in the movement. In 1976, the JCP-aligned faction formed a separate organization, the Zenkoku Buraku Kaiho Undo Rengokai (National Buraku Liberation Movement Alliance, or Zenkairen).
The implementation of the Dōwa projects was accompanied by persistent accusations of corruption and misuse of funds. Critics, particularly the JCP and Zenkairen, alleged that the BLL used its influence over local governments to secure kickbacks from construction contracts and channel funds to its members and affiliated businesses. While some level of corruption was endemic to Japan's "construction state", where close ties between politicians, bureaucrats, and local construction firms were common, several high-profile scandals specifically involved Dōwa projects. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, scandals in Kitakyushu and Kyoto led to investigations into the misuse of funds by local leaders of both the BLL and the conservative Zen Nihon Dōwakai. The most significant case was the Asuka-kai incident in Osaka, which came to light in 2006. The head of a BLL branch and a non-profit organization, Konishi Nobuhiko, was arrested for embezzling vast sums from public funds meant for Dōwa construction projects. The scandal also involved a major bank (the future MUFG Bank) that had provided unsecured loans to Konishi's organization under pressure, and had links to yakuza figures. A parallel issue was the rise of fraudulent ese-Dōwa ("fake Dōwa") groups, which were often fronts for organized crime. These groups would extort money from companies by threatening to publicly denounce them for alleged acts of discrimination, capitalizing on the mainstream population's fear of being associated with the buraku issue.
A 1993 government survey provided a detailed snapshot of the situation. It found a "Dōwa-related population" of 892,751 people living in 4,442 designated communities. Most were located in western Japan, while none were located in Hokkaido and Tōhoku. About three quarters of the districts were in rural areas. The size of each community ranged from less than five households to more than 1,000 households. While the proportion of burakumin in these districts had decreased, indicating outward migration, significant disparities remained. One-third of burakumin surveyed reported experiencing discrimination, most often related to marriage or employment. The survey showed an increase in intermarriage, but 5 percent of mainstream respondents still said they would "completely oppose" a marriage to a burakumin. Economically, 52 percent of buraku households received livelihood support, nearly double the rate for non- buraku households in the same areas. Educational attainment had improved, with high school entrance rates nearing the national average, but rates of long-term absenteeism were double the average, and university progression (around 20 percent) still lagged significantly behind the mainstream figure of nearly 40 percent.
Prejudice against most often manifests itself in the form of marriage discrimination and sometimes in employment. Traditionalist families have been known to check on the backgrounds of potential in-laws to identify people of ancestry. These checks are now illegal, and marriage discrimination is diminishing; Nadamoto Masahisa of the Buraku History Institute estimates that between 60 and 80% of marry a non-, whereas for people born during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the rate was 10%. Over the past decades, the number of marriages between and non- have increased, and opinion polls have shown a decrease in the number of Japanese willing to state they would discriminate against .
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 residents (whatever their ancestry) and associate them with squalor, unemployment and criminality.
A 2013 survey by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government highlighted the persistence of discriminatory attitudes regarding marriage. When asked what they would do if their child intended to marry someone from a Dōwa community, only 46.5% of respondents said they would respect their child's wishes without reservation, while 27% said they "don't know," and the remainder expressed reluctance. Conversely, only 56.5% of young people said they would go through with such a marriage if their parents strongly objected.
In recent years, the buraku problem has become less visible in public discourse. This is partly due to the transition in administrative focus from specific "Dōwa policy" to general "human rights policy," as well as other factors such as municipal consolidations and an aging population, which have diluted attention on the specific issue of buraku discrimination. There is a "virtual taboo" in the Japanese media against discussing the topic, leading to widespread public ignorance. This institutional silence compels many burakumin to manage their identity through a process of "bracketing"—selectively concealing or revealing their background depending on the social context. This strategy is not necessarily a passive acceptance of stigma but an active, pragmatic decision to avoid potential discrimination.
The rise of the internet has also created new challenges, with a large amount of discriminatory "graffiti" and hate speech appearing online. Because Buraku discrimination is based on location, the use of maps has contributed to the ongoing discrimination. In 2009, Google faced controversy after digitized Tokugawa-era maps were published on Google Earth, which could be used to identify historical outcaste areas.
Since the 1980s, the BLL has broadened its focus to build solidarity with other minority groups, both within Japan (such as Ainu people, resident Koreans, and Ryukyuans) and internationally, framing the buraku issue within a universal human rights context. In 1988, it was instrumental in founding the International Movement Against Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), which gained consultative status at the United Nations in 1993. This shift has been described as the development of a "human rights culture" ( jinken bunka), exemplified by institutions like the Liberty Osaka human rights museum, which was established by the BLL in 1985. This activism is a joint activity, also involving national and local governments which participate in "human rights enlightenment activities."
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