I want to talk about a minority group. And I know what you're already thinking,
thank God finally an upper middle class white guy who's going to talk about minorities on the internet.
But I hope you'll find this video interesting, or perhaps even useful.
Because the group that we're talking about have suffered the same as virtually any oppressed people around the world,
and yet, they're genetically identical the majority.
Burakumin directly translates to village people. But, no, not those village people. No.
It's actually a euphemism to describe two groups. There's these historically oppressed groups known as the eta
or impure people and the hinin also known as nobody or
non-human. And those two words eta and hinin are hugely offensive here.
So I'm only going to use them sparingly and in their historical
context. And to understand why those terms are offensive or even why they exist at all we need to look at the state of Japanese
society in two periods. The Medieval Period and the Tokugawa Period.
And I know that sounds like a lot to take in, but we're going to keep it really simple.
So 500 years before Christ, this guy named Confucius is born into a crumbling Chinese kingdom.
He looks around and says, this sucks.
I should fix it. And so he decides that the state should be run like a
family with really strict rules on who fits into what category.
Specifically four categories that he invents: scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants, in that order.
Not everybody actually fits into these categories, but that doesn't really bother Confucius.
He's a bit of an idealist and after all, the Chinese are willing to give it a go.
So a few hundred years later and China's breaking down again. Only now this Confucius guy's pretty dead
and he's not really able to help decide what comes next. The people really loved Confucius' ideas,
but he didn't talk about God enough.
It was always man this and woman that. It was never God.
And so they started looking around and this thing called Buddhism had been coming over
from India and they thought, you know what, we can make this into a religion. And it seemed like it could be fun
so the Chinese decided to give that a go too.
Japan was sort of unifying into a proto-nation and they've been looking to the west, to China for a bit of help.
After all China had been a nation for around a thousand years at this point. So they had a lot of good ideas to steal.
Confucianism was one of the best
but it had split society into four distinct categories that you couldn't change from after birth, and
therefore if you weren't part of those four categories,
you almost weren't part of society.
It's as if you didn't exist. And what's more they went a little overboard and ended up taking a new religion along with it.
Buddhism. But the common people weren't really that into Buddhism. They already had their own religion, Shintoism,
and it was pretty cool.
You could pray to trees and rocks and stuff, and everybody agreed that that was kind of awesome.
But the elites of China and Korea, they really like this Buddhism thing, so the elites of Japan, they wanted in too.
So Buddhism changed a lot of things that I'm not really going to get into right now, but the one thing that it didn't change
was who was on the bottom. In fact it actually helped codify it into law.
Shintoism already had this idea of Kegare,
which you can almost consider sin, except it's not just things that you do that cause it. It's also things that happen to you.
For example your friend died, that's kegare, and you need to go purify yourself.
You change the barriers in a rice field, so it looks like you now have more than your neighbor,
that's also Kegare. You got to purify.
You touched placenta during childbirth. Oh, you know. That's Kegare.
The eta and the hinin were now
socially, religiously, and perhaps most importantly, legally on the bottom. So far on the bottom in fact, that they were below the system.
The eta had done jobs that were historically
necessary, but religiously
unacceptable. For example tanning the hides, cutting the meat, dealing with the dead. Pretty much non-stop
kegare. No way to get clean.
The hinin on the other hand did jobs that society just wish didn't happen.
Prostitution, begging,
criminals,
ugh, and actors.
Actors.
The hinin weren't really committing kegare, but it kind of felt like they were.
Between Buddhism and Shintoism, they were definitely doing something wrong. And so soon,
they were lumped together as Japan's untouchables, or as they would later be known as, the Burakumin.
They were so far down the social ladder that they weren't even counted on the census. One official referred to them as
1/7 of a human.
Barely even people. To distinguish them from the rest of the population, the government made them wear their own clothes,
moved them into their own neighborhoods and even sometimes tattooed them to show their criminal or anti-social behavior.
Ostracized, their language even began to change.
Not allowed to own farms, change their status or marry outside their social caste, the Burakumin become a people within a people.
Despite being genetically identical to the Japanese around them. They're actually referred to as racially inferior.
The average person is no longer willing to see themselves in the reflection.
With limited prospects for the future, the Burakumin began to criminalize.
As gambling entered society, they were predominantly the ones who ran the parlors. And now with this limited amount of wealth and power to protect,
They formed gangs.
Because the government, it wasn't going to protect them. In fact it was openly hostile to them.
So now, almost three out of every four yakuza members come from the Burakumin class.
They even started to tattoo themselves.
What society had viewed as a form of shame, they took as a form of honor.
When the Burakumin were given equal rights in the
1860's, that was supposed to be the end of it.
But of course discrimination didn't stop just because the government said it did.
It was ingrained as a part of society.
So despite the fact that they were completely the same, society had to find a way to continue to oppress them.
So these neighborhoods became the last to modernize.
Marriage books were invented so that families would avoid marrying into this caste.
And on top of that, books were handed around between companies that listed where people were from and last names. So that even though it was
completely illegal, these companies would save themselves the shame of hiring an untouchable.
In the Modern Era, these neighborhoods have simply become places of poverty.
Mixed in with the historically oppressed class are now mentally and physically unwell,
elderly without family and immigrants from what are considered undesirable nations.
They've created almost a new social class. A
nebulous class. No longer able to exactly pinpoint who fits into it in a time when we're supposedly above that sort of thing.
It's an evolving idea.
But there's no question when you walk these streets that it's happening. Obviously this isn't a problem unique to Japan.
I'm sure in your mind
you've already started making connections to your own society.
All it really takes to destroy a people is to take away their future. To take away the potential of their children.
It's so easy to pinpoint problems on the characteristics of the subgroup to say that it's race, religion, country of origin.
But the Burakumin are less likely to get a good education, more likely to be unemployed and in turn, more likely to become criminals.
But they're the same as everybody else.
This is Rare Earth.
of every four...