A short history of the Burakumin

The first records of the existence of outcaste communities start showing up in literature in the late Heian period (around the year 1000). It's important to note, though, that, at the time, these people constituted far less a true caste than simply a class of people who performed certain ritually unclean jobs and lived in segregated communities. For about six hundred years it remained possible to change one's status by changing jobs.

The incredible number of names referring to these people is testament both to the length of their communities' existence and to the fact that what we today think of as "the Burakumin" originated in fact with many disparate groups. Many terms refer to the locations of outcaste communities - for example kawaramono (riverbank dwellers) or sakanomono (dwellers of the slope) named after Kiyomizu Slope in Kyoto. Other names that eventually came to refer to all outcastes originated with a single profession, such as tosha (butcher) and kawata (plentiful leather - I don't know why "plentiful", maybe they were improbably efficient workers). And some referred to how they were seen in the community, like eta (plentiful filth) or senmin (despised people - also the modern Japanese word for "outcaste").

To give you an idea of how long the outcaste phenomenon took to fully develop, consider that the phenomenon of separate communities just for leather workers appears not to have begun until the start of the Warring States Period (1467 - 1603), nearly five hundred years after the first outcaste communities appeared. The Warring States Period was basically a hundred and fifty years of angry dudes (the samurai) poking each other with pointy things. To protect their armies from these pointy pokes, the daimyo (feudal lords) needed a steady supply of armor, which they secured by forcing all leather workers to move into communities directly abutting their castles.

An interesting note, all of the literature I read refers to the leather workers "processing" horses and cattle that had died - none of it refers to them actually butchering anything. Back in the year 700, as it turns out, a law was passed forbidding the eating of beef or horse flesh to protect the animals, which had to be imported from the continent at great expense and were essential to the plowing of rice paddies. I can't be totally certain, but from the wording that is always used I get the feeling that leather was produced using the carcasses of animals that had died natural deaths (or had been worked until they dropped).

It wasn't until the end of the Warring States period that a true caste system was developed and two categories of outcastes were created - the hinin (inhuman) and eta. Hinin were largely itinerant workers or entertainers, and eta were those who did ritually unclean work. The eta were truly in a caste - it was legally impossible for an eta or his descendants to escape the status. Hinin were in many places considered to be even lower than eta in status, but it was legally possible for those who fulfilled certain conditions to escape and become townsfolk or peasants.

This situation continued until 1871, when the new Meiji government passed a law dissolving the old caste system and granting the eta/hinin the status of shin-heimin (new commoners), de jure equal to regular commoners but conveniently given a special label for quick recognition. It wasn't until the 1970s that the government finally made it impossible to simply look up whether a given person was Burakumin based on his or her ancestry.

Today most discrimination takes place based on one's address - if you live in a buraku, regardless of your ancestry, it can be difficult to find work with some companies and some families may refuse to allow you to marry into them. This has bizarrely led to court cases where non-Burakumin have sued real-estate agents for selling them property in a buraku without warning them.

There is a lot more to the story - it stretches over a thousand years, after all - but now you have a pretty good idea what it is I'm writing about. When I have a bit more information, I'll tell you more about the specific focus of my thesis. Basically, I'm trying to answer the question of just how much an impact the 1871 law had on the way Burakumin were perceived, both by mainstream Japanese and by the Burakumin themselves.