Word: buraku
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...green turtleneck, matching jacket and slacks, Taoka, who is recuperating from a heart ailment, played the solicitous host to perfection. He offered his caller a delectable piece of green melon and then launched into a professorial discourse on social ills. Many of his followers, he said, were low-caste buraku-min (TIME. Jan. 8), social misfits who had suffered from discrimination. Since the government offered no help for them. Taoka had taken on the responsibility. 'What I need now,' he declared, 'is the services of some scholars in finding ways and means of securing mental and spiritual...
...state proclaimed the caste system illegal in 1871, but prejudice did not yield to government fiat. On the average, buraku-min are less well educated than their countrymen, and their children test 16 IQ points lower than other Japanese.* About 7% of buraku families are on relief, more than twice the national average, and juvenile delinquency is 3/2 times higher among them than among other Japanese youths. According to Sueo Murakoshi, an outcast who surmounted the system to become a professor of sociology at Osaka City University and secretary-general of the Buraku Problem Research Institute: "Some high school classes...
Tens of thousands of buraku-min have tried to flee oppression by "passing." But the risk of discovery is high -partly because of the diligence of private detectives hired either by corporation personnel managers or by parents who suspect that their offspring's fiance may be of buraku-min origin. Many outcasts, while passing at work in the city, still prefer to live in the reassuringly familiar surroundings of their special hamlets; they must resort to ruses like getting off the bus a stop or two early so that fellow passengers who are not outcasts will not see them...
...Liberation League. In 1968 the movement won passage of a law banning public inspection of the social registers that contain the family history of every Japanese citizen. A year later the league successfully backed a civil rights law that commits public funds-$400 million this year-for buraku housing, high school scholarships and vocational training...
Salvation. Japan's booming economy has provided jobs for many buraku-min, but the group has made few social gains. Young Japanese are, in fact, less prejudiced than their elders, and there are more mixed marriages than formerly. But few religious or intellectual leaders are strongly behind integration-partly because they are ashamed to admit that segregation exists. Professor Murakoshi sees the salvation of the outcasts only in a wholly unrealistic goal-an end to the monarchy, which even in its postwar, watered-down form remains the country's most revered institution. As Murakoshi sees it, the Emperor...