A Dirty Secret

THE RECENT, ALMOST preternaturally orderly, evacuation of all 379 people on board a Japan Airlines flight that collided with a smaller plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport appeared to once again buttress the claim that the Japanese are somehow unique. That they are better than the unruly panicking rest of the world.

When I lived in Tokyo, between 2016 and 2020, I realised that many Japanese, while loath to articulate it as such, did in fact have a belief in their exceptionalism. Something that they tended to attribute to their ostensible social and racial homogeneity.

The belief in Japan’s racial purity has relatively recent roots. It can be traced back to the 1868 Meiji Restoration. The new constitution promulgated in the aftermath of the revolution established a state based on a creation myth wherein the emperor was purportedly a direct descendant of the ‘original’ Yamato clan. All Japanese, it was claimed, were organically related to him. The idea of a single racial and cultural identity became central to Japan’s constructed sense of itself.

Yet, there is now scholarly consensus that the Japanese are in fact a mixture of Korean-like ‘Yayoi’ people who immigrated to the archipelago around 400 BCE, and an indigenous population who walked over land bridges during the low sea levels of ice ages some 12,000 years ago. The average Japanese person, however, remains unaware of academic research into demographic origins. Many seem to accept the legend that Japan sprang into existence fully formed in 660 BCE, when the first emperor, Jimmu, the descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, led the “Japanese people” to the Yamato plain in the Kyoto region, as truth-like enough to warrant little critical interrogation. Even today, Jimmu’s accession is marked as National Foundation Day on February 11. The post-Meiji development of Japanese nationalism along racial lines was partly enabled by the archipelago’s natural geographical isolation and amplified by the policies of the Tokugawa Shogunate that ruled Japan for almost 300 years from 1600CE. During this time, foreigners were expelled from the country and contact with outsiders was forbidden. Japan’s seclusion only ended in 1853 when the American forces of Matthew C Perry forced the country to open up to Western trade through a series of what were called the “unequal treaties”. The humiliation of these helps explain why notions of ethnic and cultural uniqueness came to underpin Japan’s assertion of itself as an equal, in a world dominated by Western powers.

But Japan has never been homogenous racially or socially. The Ainu, a people who today number about 12- 15,000 on the northern island of Hokkaido, for example, certainly predated the Yayoi, possibly by thousands of years. Japan also has substantial minorities of ethnic Koreans and Chinese. Moreover, all of these minorities have faced discrimination, putting paid to the tautology that the Japanese cannot be racist because they are one race.

The minority group that was a revelation to me personally wasn’t one based on race or ethnicity but on caste: the Burakumin. The Dalits of Japan. Between one and three million Japanese are thought to have Burakumin ancestry. Their precise numbers are unknown since it is illegal for census takers or government offices to identify anyone thus.

I was taken aback at how analogous they seemed to India’s so-called untouchables. Burakumin have been defined by a historical discourse asserting that people engaged in ‘unclean’ activities involving animal carcasses and death (butchering, leatherwork, mortuary practices, garbage disposal) are indelibly polluted and dirty. Like Dalits, Burakumin, too, were traditionally confined to isolated, demarcated areas of residence. Intermarriage between them and other Japanese was shunned. They were forbidden from entering most religious sites.

The new Meiji government banned formal discrimination against the Burakumin. In 1889 references to Buraku status were stricken from the registers. But Burakumin communities were predominantly poor and faced significant hurdles in educational opportunities, employment and especially, marriage

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The origins of the Burakumin are debated, although it probably has something to do with Buddhist opprobrium against eating meat, which was then extrapolated to the idea that handling meat was itself impure. But the formation of the Burakumin into a permanent caste dates to the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). This was when specific discriminatory policies towards them became established following the drawing up of registries that surveyed and categorised them as separate from the other four ‘castes’ of samurai warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant. They then became subject to a series of laws that restricted where they could live, the type of work they could engage in, and even their hairstyles and the colour of their clothes.

The new Meiji government banned all formal discrimination against the Burakumin and in 1889 references to buraku status were stricken from the family registers, or koseki. But Burakumin communities remained predominantly poor and faced significant hurdles when it came to educational opportunities, employment and, especially, marriage.

In a 2014 survey by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 26.6 per cent of respondents said they would oppose their children marrying someone of Burakumin lineage, while a similar 2012 survey in nearby Aichi prefecture found that a huge 48.5 per cent would protest such a marriage.

And yet, there is little public discourse on this marginalised group. Consequently, not only is their plight rarely acknowledged but their very existence is brushed under the carpet of supposed Japanese social harmony. Over the years, I was often asked, hesitantly, because the Japanese are loath to offend, about the caste system in India, as though it were such an exotic beast that the person asking had no ability to comprehend it. I took to replying that it was similar to how the situation of the Burakumin had developed in Japan. The responses ranged from people blushing crimson and turning away mid-splutter, to people who looked blank with a “buraku who?” kind of look. There was embarrassment and there was ignorance, the sure signs of a dirty secret.

Once I attended a talk at the Tokyo Foreign Correspondent’s Club by Iehiro Tokugawa, a descendent of the Tokugawa clan, about why he believed the Tokugawa Shogunate’s achievements were underappreciated. He waxed eloquent about his ancestors’ reforms in education, sanitation, and agriculture. During the Q&A I raised my hand and asked what he thought about the era’s less savoury aspects, like the hardening of discrimination against the Burakumin. A hostile murmur immediately rippled across the room. It was obviously felt that I had transgressed. Tokugawa coughed and deflected, something along the lines that my question was not pertinent to his talk.

The bigotry faced by the Burakumin might be considerably less heinous than the discrimination that Dalits in India have to endure. But the stigma of Burakumin ancestry isn’t as easy to shed as many Japanese seemed to believe. Caste is always insidious.

POSTSCRIPT It is true that as a society the Japanese are well placed to face natural disasters and other crises, like the plane collision. Yet, the reasons for this lie not in their supposed social homogeneity but in a culture that stresses obedience to rules and putting the needs of others above those of oneself. The result is a normalisation of civic behaviour. And since this is learned behaviour rather than an innate or immutable trait, there is hope for the rest of the world too!

About The Author

Pallavi Aiyar

Pallavi Aiyar is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has spent the last two decades reporting from China, Europe, Indonesia and Japan. Her most recent book is Orienting: An Indian in Japan. She is a contributor to Open

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