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.

Tens of thousands of buraku-min have tried to flee oppression by "passing." But the risk of discovery is high --partly because of the diligence of private detectives hired either by corporation personnel managers or by parents who suspect that their offspring's fiance may be of buraku-min origin. Many outcasts, while passing at work in the city, still prefer to live in the reassuringly familiar surroundings of their special hamlets; they must resort to ruses like getting off the bus a stop or two early so that fellow passengers who are not outcasts will not see them entering a buraku. Their psychological suffering can be intense. Said one youth: "Once a group of high school friends began discussing outcasts without realizing I was one. One boy held up four fingers, meaning the four legs of an animal; it's a symbol of dislike, fear and contempt. Imagine how I felt!"

A better way of escaping, at least emotionally, is by taking an active part in the civil rights movement. The crusade began in 1922 when a poor shoemaker named Zennosuke Asada formed the Suiheisha (Levelers' Society), forerunner of the Liberation League. In 1968 the movement won passage of a law banning public inspection of the social registers that contain the family history of every Japanese citizen. A year later the league successfully backed a civil rights law that commits public funds--$400 million this year--for buraku housing, high school scholarships and vocational training.

Salvation. Japan's booming economy has provided jobs for many buraku-min, but the group has made few social gains. Young Japanese are, in fact, less prejudiced than their elders, and there are more mixed marriages than formerly. But few religious or intellectual leaders are strongly behind integration--partly because they are ashamed to admit that segregation exists. Professor Murakoshi sees the salvation of the outcasts only in a wholly unrealistic goal--an end to the monarchy, which even in its postwar, watered-down form remains the country's most revered institution. As Murakoshi sees it, the Emperor symbolizes and enforces the status quo in the Japanese system, and is thus responsible for the plight of the buraku-min. "Just as Japan created a superhuman being," Murakoshi charges angrily, "so it created, by necessity, a class of subhumans--us."

* Remarkably similar to the average 15-point difference between U.S. blacks and whites, which most experts attribute to environmental influences.

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