Nobuyuki Hishigaki need utter only a few words before his dialect betrays his Osakan roots. Like many of his peers, Hishigaki, a boyish-looking 39, joined his current employer straight after university. Marriage and children followed.
But there is an extraordinary side to his life. Since childhood, he has had to deal with name-calling, harassment and discrimination from people to whom he is ethnically identical.
Being treated as a second-class citizen is a fact of life for Hishigaki and tens of thousands of other buraku, members of a Japanese underclass labelled "untouchables" since the 17th century.
Considered vastly inferior to warriors, artisans, farmers and merchants, the buraku of feudal Japan were called eta (filth) or hinin (non-human). They were hired to slaughter animals, dig graves and work leather, thereby becoming tainted by their association with the impurities of death.
Many were forced to live in designated villages and abide by a special dress code. Their confinement meant they were easy targets for abuse. And the survival of many of those neighborhoods means the abuse has yet to end.
One of the better-known buraku communities is the Kuboyoshi district of southern Osaka, where Hishigaki works as a secretary at the local branch of the Buraku Liberation League.
The neighborhood was one of more than 4,000 buraku districts nationwide, with a total population of 892,000, according to the last government survey, conducted in 1993. League officials say that the number is closer to three million when buraku who have left their communities are included.
The Meiji rulers outlawed discrimination against the buraku in 1871, but mistrust and hostility continue. Private detectives sell lists of buraku to companies wishing to inquire into the backgrounds of job applicants. Hate mail is common, as are job applications summarily dismissed by employers.
The result is frustration, anger and countless blighted relationships. More than half of all marriages involving a buraku man or woman face opposition from the non-buraku partner's parents.
At university in Osaka, Hishigaki encountered graffiti warning other students of a buraku in their midst. A girlfriend who knew his ancestry suddenly split up with him. He was never given a reason, but knows that her parents were not pleased with her choice of boyfriend.
But the postwar period has also brought improvements to the lives of the buraku. Under a government plan launched in the late 1960s, slums were cleared and improvements made to education and welfare services. Buraku began to find work outside of their communities, and their children started to attend ordinary state schools. Marrying "outsiders" has gained wider acceptance.
Crucially, public figures, including the influential Liberal Democratic party politician Hiromu Nonaka, have acknowledged their buraku roots.
With anti-discrimination laws in place, Hishigaki believes the key to ridding Japan of lingering prejudice lies in a dialogue between buraku and their neighbors. "We have to work towards a day when a child can say he's buraku, and his friends will answer, 'So what?"' he says.
Faced with centuries of ignorance, that day may be some way off. In the meantime, Hishigaki says he will soon have some honest talking of his own to do with his two young children.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
RSS