Japan abolished its outcaste status in 1871, but the stigma survived
Japan's burakumin look no different from other Japanese people and share the same ethnicity. The prejudice against them rests on ancestry and address: descent from pre-modern outcastes who did work tied to death, such as butchery and tanning. They were legally freed in 1871, yet some still face rejection in marriage and jobs.
Estimates put the modern population at between 1.5 and 3 million. Because there is no visible marker, discrimination relies on family records and neighbourhoods, and the subject is often met with silence; some people have buraku ancestry without knowing it. The historian Timothy D. Amos has questioned the tidy story of an unbroken line from medieval outcastes to today's community, arguing that the modern category lumps together groups with varied and shifting histories.
The roots go back to the Ritsuryō legal codes of the late 7th and early 8th centuries, which split society into good and base people, the latter including hereditary slaves and imperial tomb guards. In the Heian period Shinto and Buddhist ideas of ritual pollution deepened the stigma, and the Engishiki code of 927 set out periods of impurity after contact with death, birth or blood. Popular claims of Korean descent are later rationalisations; the outcastes were ethnically Japanese.
Medieval status was comparatively fluid. Leather workers, often living on riverbanks because tanning needed water, were distinct from the hinin, a looser category of beggars, the sick and orphans who could sometimes rejoin commoner society. The Tokugawa shogunate, from 1603, made these statuses hereditary and segregated, partly to keep peasants from rebelling. The Kyōhō Reforms of 1715 to 1730 regulated outcastes' clothes, hair and movement. Communities grew, with kawata numbers possibly climbing 300 percent from 1720 to 1850, helped by meat that made them more resilient to famine. Some leaders, like Danzaemon in Edo, were rich.
The Meiji government's Liberation Edict of 28 August 1871 turned outcastes into commoners on paper, but new labels such as new commoners and special hamlets kept the old boundary alive. The National Levellers Association of the 1920s and the post-war Buraku Liberation League fought back, and government projects in the late 20th century improved living conditions.
Source: Burakumin
