The Creation of "Strangers" and Punishment in Japan Journal article by Lill Scherdin; Social Justice, Vol. 21, 1994

The Burakumin

The study of the burakumin in the past and present tells us something about the cultural creation of strangers in Japan. Japan is not singularly unique in this respect; the processes of stranger creation must always be understood as it is perceived and experienced by the actors in space and time, that is, in its cultural concreteness.

The estrangement and general treatment of the burakumin (outcasts) in Japan, both in the formative stages as an undercaste and throughout the Tokugawa era (1600 to 1867), illustrate the insidiousness of the "we-they" mentality. The burakumin (who number between 1.8 to three million in contemporary Japan) were formed from a conglomerate of groups on society' s edge through processes of stranger creation predicated on a variety of economic, structural, social, and religious bases. This group was gradually selected as a suitable enemy in a social war fueled by images of "unclean occupations" (that actually only applied to some of its members) and by the combined identities often forced upon them as guards, executioners, and criminals. Criminals were degraded to burakumin status either for a specific period (e.g., 10 years) or forever. During this time, they were forced to live in Buraku neighborhoods (De Vos and Wagetsuma, 1967). These neighborhoods, which the burakumin could not leave, were considered too unclean even to be drawn on the map and the length of the road through such areas was omitted when measuring the distance between places.

At the height of discrimination, the burakumin were relegated to extreme otherness through self-enforcing, interpretive processes where each fact related to the group was re-created to fit the main interpretation of the other facts until the burakumin embodied all evils: "lowly, despicable people who deserved to be oppressed, dirty, vulgar, smelly, untrustworthy, dangerous, treacherous, subhuman creatures". Because of their impurity, they were prohibited from entering temple areas and were untouchable. The height of official discrimination came in a court judgment concerning the residents of an area that had beaten a young burakumin to death in 1859 because he had attempted to enter a Shinto shrine in Edo (Tokyo). The magistrate's judgment is said to have been: "The life of an Eta (their name at the time, meaning literally 'full of dirt') is worth about one-seventh of a townsman. Unless seven Eta have been killed, we cannot punish a single townsman". The burakumin's past was suspended and rewritten to cast them as the opposite of ordinary Japanese people of that period. No social relational ties were assumed to exist and thus there was no brake on the accelerating process of reinterpretation and pain delivery.

Although the burakumin are probably genetically and culturally indistinguishable from other Japanese, they were consigned to the extreme position of social exclusion as untouchables during the Tokugawa era; to a large degree, they remain strangers today and live separately from others. They have experienced seriously substandard living conditions, although in recent years Japanese authorities have actively sought improvements, including the building of health clinics and schools for the Buraku. The discrimination faced by the burakumin when they attempt to enter mainstream society remains a serious problem. In the absence of visible differences between the burakumin and other Japanese, discrimination was maintained through official registers, using the address of the person in a Buraku as a sign of his or her status. After this practice was made illegal, private detective agencies and major companies (some very well known in the West) compiled their own secret lists. Detective agencies throughout Japan specialize in privately investigating the status of prospective marriage partners and job applicants.

The historic situation of the burakumin is instructive in terms of how difficult it is to overcome such an extreme position of otherness in social, economic, cultural, and symbolic terms. The interplay between the burakumin and ordinary Japanese perhaps offers insight into the identity-formation processes of difference today, and thus into possible characteristic tendencies of stranger creation in relation to other groups in Japan. Stranger creation and cultural reinterpretations among the dominant Japanese may be most strongly influenced by a sense of collectivity and a physical revulsion against the "unclean."

Though I do not mean to isolate this aspect or reduce the potency of other factors, or even to minimize the importance of the unclean in the West, it is a sign worth watching for in other groups, like guest workers, foreigners generally, drug users, or others who may be in the process of acquiring the status of supreme otherness. The coupling of foreigners with the spread of AIDS is a seed that could develop into isolation and pain delivery. A parallel process would be the coupling of foreigners with uncleanness, immorality, and the dangers of rape.

My research into the burakumin highlights the latent potency of this facet of the specter of otherness. An anonymous printer/distributor of a publicly available illegal database of thousands of burakumin names claimed that it was a gift to help Japanese parents keep their children from marrying burakumin without knowing it. (Personal interviews [1993] revealed the underlying fear that entire families - the living and their ancestors - would be polluted.) Confirming the potency of this image of otherness is the fact that even burakumin who have achieved considerable success in Japan do not identify themselves as such, especially to protect other members of their families and their children against possible shame and discrimination in the future. To the shock of many, the discriminatory feelings evoked by marriages and getting work are still colored by such discomfort, even disgust. According to burakumin informants, as recently as 10 years ago banks argued against hiring burakumin, claiming that people might worry that their money was "dirty" in a literal or ritual sense after having been touched by burakumin hands

The collective nature of the cultural stain on the burakumin is obvious: whether the individual burakumin is actually in contact with impurities is of no concern. Modern burakumin youth, who had not encountered much discrimination until being rejected as marriage partners, suddenly experience disgust and strangeness toward their own bodies and toward their families. Suicide is still far too common as a "solution" for them (Buraku Liberation News, 1981-1993).

Although much has improved since the Tokugawa era, the long road back for the burakumin is an indicator of the difficulties faced by other groups gravitating toward similar social positions. To determine which cultural images of acts and actors are in the process of being created and attributed to groups, it is necessary to analyze the economic conditions of different groups, the cultural battle (the discourse) within and between powerful factions, and the media's handling of incidents connected to these groups. Close attention to the images put forth by the extreme nationalists and rightists and those prevailing in business and government circles is needed. In a comparison of intellectuals, school teachers, and businessmen, Yoshino (1992) found that the ideas of Japanese "uniqueness" - referred to in the literature as Nihonjinron, loosely, the "theory of Japaneseness" - have been embraced primarily by those in business. It is important to identify when a difference between the Japanese and others is simply stated and mused over, rather than touted for its superiority, in contrast to when a difference is deemed significant enough to warrant differential treatment, indirectly ranked, or openly ranked and used administratively, politically, or by the criminal justice system. The "ideal Japanese" are construed in the latter case as so unique that grounds exist for instigating discriminatory public or criminal laws and regulations against old or new collectives of strangers.



Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page