JAPAN: The Invisible Race

Burn, my son, with wrath.

Hate them all and despise them.

Until at last they come crawling

forward To apologize, tormented by

excruciating pains.

But never forgive them even then

—never.

Makoto Ikeue was 20 when he wrote that poem. Shortly afterward, he killed himself in the lovers' lane where he had often met the girl he made pregnant. Before Ikeue's suicide, the girl had an abortion because her family refused to let her marry him. Why? Because Ikeue was a buraku-min, one of some 3,000,000 "hamlet people," a caste-like group whose members have suffered economic and social discrimination for 15 generations in Japan.

The buraku-min are beginning to awaken from the apathy and impotence of their past. Seventeen years ago, they formed the National Liberation League, which now has a membership of more than 300,000—enough to draw the attention of politicians and behavioral scientists alike. The buraku-min are too few in number and too widely dispersed to be a decisive factor in any electoral district. Yet prior to last month's general election, candidates of all parties avidly courted their votes, promising more public funds for buraku housing, sanitation and roads.

Slums. Because the outcasts look exactly like their countrymen, an American anthropologist once called them Japan's invisible race. The only way to identify them is by their birthplace or current address, both of which are usually in one of the nation's 5,000 buraku —hamlets or ghetto slums inhabited almost entirely by the shunned group. Segregation was first enforced in the 16th century, when many of the pariahs' ancestors lived by slaughtering and skinning animals to produce leather, work that devout Buddhists and Shintoists consider defiling. Other buraku-min followed such despised occupations as burying the dead, executing criminals, telling fortunes and begging. Classified as eta (filthy ones), they were forced to step aside when other Japanese passed, to kneel during business dealings with non-eta, and to pick up the wages thrown in their direction by employers fearful of contamination.

The state proclaimed the caste system illegal in 1871, but prejudice did not yield to government fiat. On the average, buraku-min are less well educated than their countrymen, and their children test 16 IQ points lower than other Japanese.* About 7% of buraku families are on relief, more than twice the national average, and juvenile delinquency is 3/2 times higher among them than among other Japanese youths. According to Sueo Murakoshi, an outcast who surmounted the system to become a professor of sociology at Osaka City University and secretary-general of the Buraku Problem Research Institute: "Some high school classes attended by buraku boys have turned into blackboard jungles." On the island of Shikoku, angry outcasts have beaten up their teachers and broken 2,000 school windowpanes in a single year.