Burakumin - The Untouchables of Feudal Japan

In feudal Japan men and women who worked in jobs connected with death, such as undertakers, executioners, and tanners had been heavily discriminated against as they have been regarded tainted and impure. Shinto beliefs held that persons could be seriously contaminated by repeated killing of animals or engaging in hideous misdeeds like incest or bestiality. Those people today have been forced to reside outdoors of standard society in outcast communities.

It is unknown when precisely those out caste communities came into existence. By the Edo period (1603-1867) the existence of outcast communities became typical. At the time those individuals had been referred to as eta, or filthy mass. The government supported the segregation and discrimination of eta communities. Eta had been not permitted to check out religious internet sites outdoors of their communities and had their own temples.

The caste program of feudal Japan was abolished by Emperor Meiji in 1871 and outcasts had been granted equal legal status. Even so, this did not finish the discrimination and a lot of terms had been utilised to indicate former outcasts. The word burakumin ("hamlet individuals") started becoming applied in the early 1900's to describe men and women of former eta communities. In some components of the nation burakumin settlements nonetheless exist in the identical regions of former eta villages.

Social discrimination against burakumin is nevertheless an challenge in western Japanese cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Hiroshima. Quite a few men and women, specifically these belonging to the older generation, associate the buraku class with criminality and decrease socio-financial status. According to some estimates burakumin account for 70 % of the members of the Yamaguchi-gumi, one of the biggest criminal organizations in the planet and the biggest Yakuza syndicate in Japan.

Alton Trevino lives in Japan and enjoys writing about Japanese history and culture. Please take a look at the following pages to study extra about feudal Japan and ancient Japanese history.