newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ROGER WITHERSPOON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

The Burakumin are the members of Japan’s lowest class.

If the job is dirty, or dangerous, or carries a social stigma, hire the Burakumin. They will take the job. They have few options and, like everyone else in Japanese society, need money to live – even in their ghettos. Besides, that’s what a permanent “untouchable” class is for. It was that way centuries ago when the Samurai class created the Burakumin to take care of society’s dirty work. And it is that way now, when the wreckage of four nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi needs to be cleaned up, and the utility does not want to waste trained employees on jobs that will contaminate them and make them ineligible for further work in the nuclear field.

“They are the Throwaway People,” said Yuki Tanaka, Research Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan’s Hiroshima City University. “They are the Untouchables.”

The subject of racial discrimination in Japan and how it is playing out in a radioactive environment emerged during a dinner conversation in a restaurant under the elevated subway tracks at 125th Street and Broadway in Harlem as the A-train periodically rumbled by. Tanaka and his colleagues – Kyoko Kitajima, a Tokyo-based union organizer now working at the power plant; and Fuminori Tanba, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Fukushima University and Senior Researcher at the University’s Institute for Disaster Recovery – were taking a break between a week-long series of seminars and discussions on the aftermath of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plants, owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO.

They have been meeting with first responders and residents from the New York – New Jersey area concerned about the reality of responding to and cleaning up after a nuclear catastrophe. They had been brought from Japan by four environmental groups – Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, Riverkeeper, Clearwater, and the Sierra Club – seeking to close the two Indian Point nuclear power plants just 25 miles north of Harlem.

There are actually three types of people discriminated against in Japan’s permanent underclass: the Ainu, the Burakumin, and Koreans. The Ainu were the indigenous people of the island of Hokkaido who were dominated for centuries by the Japanese, and officially declared no longer indigenous in 1899 and their land subsumed into greater Japan. Many have assimilated, but thousands remain in ghettos on the outskirts of Hokkaido’s cities.

Before and during World War II “more than one million Koreans were brought to Japan as laborers,” said Tanaka, author of Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. “They were forced to work in coal mines and arsenals and became kind of slaves after the war because they couldn’t go home again. It is the Koreans and Burakumin who have the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.