Burakumin and the Problems Therein, Osaka, 6/16

We saw this young woman at the train station near the Liberty Museum.  Steve has composed a haiku that sums up his feelings on things:

In the Buraku,

Trains will not even slow down

for short-skirted girls
Alex pretends to drum, along with this statue commemorating one of the cultural bright spots in a dreary community.
This photo may not look like much, and that's the point.  We thought this apartment building looked like something you'd find in Soviet-era Eastern Europe, not modern Japan.

No photographs are allowed in many of the facilities that we toured over the last few days, apologies for that.

On June 16 we travelled to Osaka to visit the Liberty Museum, which serves as a sort of clearinghouse for all of the minority groups in Japan that are discriminated against.  We stepped off the train and were somewhat mystified by the industrialized and marginal area that we found: why would they build an important museum in this wasteland?  We were further confused as to why there were three shops selling large wooden drums right next to the train station.  We found the museum after walking past run-down apartment complexes and factory warehouses, at one point passing a grocery-store that looked worse than the worst 99 cent store you've ever seen.  The museum is somewhat informative.  On the plus side, it highlighted groups such as the buraku (a class of individuals who were cast as untouchables due to the fact that they dealt with death, specifically slaughter and removal of hides from animals,) the homeless, AIDS and HIV positive individuals, and the Ainu (indigenous peoples of Hokkaido) who do not receive much coverage in the press.  We felt that it suffered from the same flaws that the Atomic Bomb museum in Nagasaki did: namely, it didn't seem to acknowledge the complicity of individuals in the problems in Japan.  There were myriad photographs of people protesting to the government (often successfully obtaining concessions,) but we felt that there wasn't anything examining the real roots of the prejudices these people face.  As such, the message that these individuals are deserving of human dignity was compromised.  To use an analogy: if I were to simply show a few photographs of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's in my class, I would be wasting my students time.  It is absolutely necessary to examine, discuss, and explore Jim Crow segregation in the South, discrimination in the North, the successes and failures of Reconstruction, and the roots and effects of slavery to even scratch the surface of how pervasive a problem racism was and is in America.  

In any case, the burakumin were our primary focus and reason for going to the museum.  Afterward, we were going to try to find a buraku neighborhood, having an extraordinarily vague idea where there was one in Osaka.  We knew that the areas of a city that were associated with buraku were always economically depressed, and that non-buraku didn't want to move to those neighborhoods, for fear that they and their family names might be tainted with the label (buraku are ethnically exactly like other Japanese).  While in the museum, we learned that drum-making (wooden drums with animal skins stretched over them) and drum playing were well-celebrated elements of buraku culture.  As we left the museum, planning to seek out a buraku neighborhood, we looked around and realized that by coming to the museum in the middle of this industrialized wasteland, we HAD come to one.