Interview with S____, the President of M____ BLL.
Conducted on the 31st of July 2000 at the M____ BLL
Headquarters in M____, Osaka.
Translated by Ian Laidlaw.
I - Ian Laidlaw
S – S____
N – N____ [BLL member]
Interview Begins
I: The first question that I have is quite a basic one. Sixty percent of the people who work at the
M____ Meat Center are Burakumin aren’t they?
S: Yes, 60%. In the past there were not many people [who were not Burakumin], but since these kinds of field trips, Buraku study at schools and study of meat have been instigated, the numbers of people [who are not Burakumin] who have come here to work have steadily increased.
I: Do primary and intermediate school students often come to here to
see the Buraku and the meat processing center.
S: Intermediate students all come. In H____ city there are 6 intermediate schools and they all come here. There aren’t many primary schools. The local primary schools all come, but the children from the H____ city primary schools, instead of coming to see the meat processing center, mostly come to see the hamburger making factory.
I: Are there children coming to study the Buraku itself?
S: They mostly come to study the Buraku as their purpose.
I: About how many groups come each month?
S: How many groups? In one year we get a minimum of 50 groups. In one year.
I: Wow.
S: In December it is prohibited to come for study, so the number is quite large isn’t it. The reason that December is like that is because it is when the tochikujyo is at its busiest with the preparations for New Years. In Japan there is the end of year celebrations, and it is a period when they busy in preparation for selling the gifts that are associated with that, so field trips would get in the way and because of this they are prohibited. So there really are a lot [of groups who come to study]. So this time round, with you as well, we only did one group but other groups often come together as a set because if we didn’t do that then we wouldn’t be able to get enough free days to get them in.
I: Is there something that you want to tell to foreign countries?
S: Something that I would want to tell to other countries would be about the way that we consume meat. For example, in Europe they do not eat stomach. Japanese and Koreans say that certain types of stomach is delicious when cooked as yaki-niku. They mostly do not eat stomach, but we would like to tell them that it can be eaten. However, their cows are different to Japanese ones and in reality their stomachs may be bad. Speaking of differences of culture in meat, of course if it was publicised more that with relation to meat culture in Japan that these kinds of beef products can be eaten... Another thing is that in Japan the discrimination against Buraku is accompanied by discrimination against meat processing centres and we want that told as well. In foreign countries there isn’t any discrimination related to meat, is there. We would like it to be known from a standpoint of human rights that there is this kind of discrimination in Japan. In Europe they work with pride and in Japan we have individual pride in working in jobs related to the meat industry, but we are judged by the surrounding people, in Japan. We want foreign countries to know that, and we want to be able to learn from each-other from a perspective of human rights.
I: Is there anything you want knows about discrimination itself?
S: In Japan there is of course the discrimination related to the meat industry and Buraku discrimination as well. If one’s previous job was in the meat industry then when you are looking for a new job, there is a current problem in that you won’t be employed.
I: You have worked for the BLL for 33 or 35 years or so haven’t
you. What has been the most difficult
thing that you have experienced in that time?
S: The most difficult thing I have experienced in trying to get rid of discrimination has been trying to get the areas surrounding M____ Buraku to understand about us. The people living in the areas surrounding M____ know what M____ was like in the past, and they also know what M____ is like now so it is still difficult to get them to understand about Buraku and M____. Even not it is still very difficult. So there are not any marriages between M____ people and people from the areas surrounding us.
I: Nobody?
S: Discrimination is strong.
I: So do people from M____ Buraku mostly marry other Burakumin?
S: Buraku people or they marry friends they make at university, there are also people who find employment, make friends there and marry them, however, as for people from surrounding areas, it does not really happen. If we could stop this from happening, if it could become that neighbouring people could come and go freely, then I think that the discrimination would also disappear a little. This problem is not just in M____, but I think it also exists in S____, where you went to. Most people from the surrounding areas do not enter the Buraku. There are normal relationships between people, but not marriage.
I: I did not hear about that from the people at S____.
S: It happens at S____, it happens everywhere.
I: Is marriage the most difficult thing to remedy then?
S: Marriage is a difficult problem to solve. From my perspective, job hunting is also very difficult. Even if you just say you worked at a butchers then it is difficult [to find a job].
I: So what are the members of this Buraku doing about that?
S: In order to get the surrounding people to understand about the meat industry, we get people from enterprises to come and see and get them to understand that way. That these jobs are in the same way very important jobs. That the meat industry, as well, is an indispensable job for humankind. In the same way as we did it today. These jobs are important so that we can all live. The first things that we do in order to get people to understand that we can join together and become one area are study meetings on enterprises, we get school children to participate in study meetings and in order to get them to not be afraid of Buraku, but realise that we are all the same human beings living in this place, we do school education and enterprise education and get everybody in society to teach that kind of learning to each other.
By slowly getting people into this area to see for themselves, despite the surrounding people being afraid of M____ Buraku, if they actually come in and see then they find that they were wrong about the things that they were afraid of. So in order to get everybody coming in and seeing for themselves, we accept people in this kind of way, we accept people coming in to look and learn more and more.
I: Are most of the people who are coming in to do that kind of thing
young people?
S: Young people, and older people as well.
I: How do the older people come in, do they come as groups or something
like that?
S: They come as groups, or they come as part of a regional human rights study, the people of various reasons who are part of a movement - we get them to come in and see us as a human rights region. There are elderly meetings when older people come in as a group in order to learn. Therefore, we try hard just to get people to come here. Up till now we haven’t had people coming here because they were afraid of the area, the surrounding people. Because we have been steadily getting people to come here, firstly to get people who are afraid of the area to come and experience it for themselves, we are getting more and more people coming. If they come then they understand whether or not the place one to be afraid of. The people who haven’t come here think that Buraku are places to be afraid of, or think that they are dirty places because they hear it from the surrounding people. That is what they are told. So in order to understand whether or not they should be afraid of the place they have to actually come and see for themselves.
I: Before I came to Japan this time I was asked by a Japanese lecturer
in New Zealand whether or not I was afraid of coming to Japan to study the
Burakumin, and so I began to wonder whether or not I should be.
S: Therefore, publicity like that when people associate Buraku with fear is wrong. If they come and see for themselves whether or not they should be afraid of it. How did you find it? Were you afraid?
I: Not at all.
S: You aren’t afraid are you. Having come here, it is not scary.
I: Aren’t the Intermediate school children afraid when they come to see
the meat centre though?
S: They are surprised when they come to see the meat centre, because it is the first time they have seen one. Because they haven’t seen a carcass being taken apart before. However, in order to produce meat, if we didn’t have places like that, we wouldn’t be able to eat meat, and we thoroughly explain those kinds of things so that different emotions instead of fear develop. I think that people who see it for the first time are surprised.
I: I was too.
S: Indeed. But it is because of places like that that we can eat meat. If we didn’t have those sorts of places then we couldn’t eat meat. So I think that it is important to make people understand that in order to make things, there are all kinds of jobs like this in places that people don’t know about. So it is important to get children from a young age to see that.
I: Is it hard to find jobs because of discrimination?
S: Yes it is. If young children do not see that their parents are living with pride because of their job then it is possible that the young people will not want to inherit meat related jobs, so we must teach them from a young age about work related to meat production and about the importance of their parents jobs, what their parents are having to endure and about their service to society.
I: Despite the outlying districts?
S: Yes. The children from the region all see it, all the children from the region use meat knives in intermediate school cooking classes and actually use them to cut off meat off the bones. Afterwards there is still meat left on the bone, so they experience the work of taking that meat off, they experience it themselves. From today the Intermediate 3rd year students will be visiting various meat-related workplaces together. So they will experience what the various jobs are in the meat industry. By doing this, up until now people who have had a hard time finding jobs have taken jobs in bars because they had no other options, and there is a history of people getting work in the meat industry because they couldn’t get anything else, but we want the attitude of doing meat industry work as a last resort to stop. If people don’t work in the meat industry with a feeling that they want to be there then they will not have pride in their work. Therefore, it is important that people who work in the meat industry to feel good about having found a job there.
However, when I was a child I used to cry that I didn’t want to work in the meat industry, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t stand it, it was the job that I least wanted. My home from when I was a child was a meat retailer and we were subjected to much discrimination. When I painted a picture with red in it, I would be told that it was because I had such a fixation with blood that I used red paint, because I killed cows. So I became afraid of painting with red. That kind of thing happens to children from M____ quite a lot. Girls are told that if people marry a girl from M____ then their children will grow horns. So if we don’t thoroughly educate people in school about the meat industry then our children will have problems with marriage and job hunting and things like that, there will be many discriminatory events.
I: Are there other kinds of discriminatory incidents, asides from
marriage and job hunting?
S: There is graffiti, things like “cow killers”.
N: Where does the graffiti occur?
S: The graffiti? In subway trains, like “Buraku die!”.
I: Really?
S: Yes.
I: Does that happen a lot?
S: Yes, a lot. If we went to see some graffiti now, where would be good to go to? K____?
I: Is it there now?
N: I think that it has just been removed. There is anti-Buraku graffiti that people put on their own houses and even though they are told to stop and it is taken off, they still put it back up again.
S: It’s not near here though, it’s quite some distance away. It is hung outside the person’s house. The person is from east Osaka. His wife divorced him and she lives in H____, when the weather is good he comes here on a motorbike and writes on Buraku houses with faeces that Burakumin live in them, he also writes on the road.
N: On the road?
S: And so they don’t fly away he puts stones on them. So the east Osaka together with H____ go to his house to talk with him, as there aren’t any other ways to deal with the problem. We can’t lodge a complaint because there are no laws to deal with that. No laws prohibiting it. It came to an end though when he died from alcohol poisoning, but it carried on right up till then. So it’s difficult because there are no regulation laws.
I: It sounds difficult.
S: The people from the Buraku, including myself, did not know how to read, which caused many regrettable problems, and so we could not read the graffiti. Myself included. Therefore it is important to learn how to read and write at school, and we want people to stop using writing in order to torment people. So the importance of characters in not in that people are intelligent if they learn them all, but it is important not to use them to hurt other people.
I: Are there still people who cannot read Kanji?
S: Yes.
I: Are there many such people, and are they mostly elderly people, or
are there young people who cannot read Kanji as well?
S: Young people.
I: Why can’t young people read Kanji?
Is it because they are not going to school?
S: They go to school but they are not being properly guided, and in the literacy classes, I____-san who came here today left school at 5th year Primary level.
I: Really?
S: So they don’t go to Intermediate, even though schooling in Japan is compulsory up until 3rd year Intermediate level. But they just didn’t go. So when it comes time to look for a job, they cannot write their academic record into their CV. Therefore they don’t tend to settle into stable jobs. So she has been studying at the literacy class right through, because she has had the motivation to do so. She not has gained the ability to read Kanji, but she does not have a graduation certificate from the Ministry of Education so she cannot write anything into her resume apart from the fact that she left school at primary level. So she took the Ministry of Education “acknowledgment exam”. She had been at literacy class for more than 10 years by her own willpower, but she was told that the fastest way to get anywhere was by the Ministry of Education exam. So she took the exam and got the highest pass on it. She cried and I cried too because I was so happy for her, but they were tears of remorse. Remorse that she didn’t have that thing from the Ministry and so she couldn’t find a career.
N: Was it a graduation certificate for Primary school?
S: The Ministry of Education “Achievement Exam”. She attends the literacy class every Friday.
I: How many people go there?
S: There are about 5 people attending it now. There are more people who come along, but they are busy with their work or they are embarrassed about not being able to read.
I: When did the literacy class begin?
S: Long ago, it has been running for more than 30 years not.
I: 30 years ago, were there many people who couldn’t read Kanji?
S: Many people. The number of people who can read Kanji has increased, but from now more people will be using computers to write.
I: That’s right.
S: A style called “functionalism” is coming in now so that people without knowledge are increasing.
I: I read that there are about 19,000 people who attend literacy classes
in Japan right now.
S: The number of literacy classes are increasing. There are a lot, in S____ as well. The number of foreigners attending has increased recently as well. So in Japan, looking at just the Japanese population, the Burakumin have the highest illiteracy rate. However, even though they don’t know characters, it is very difficult for them to come to the classes.
I: Why I was asking that is that there was a survey of the literacy
rate of Burakumin and it said that there are about 300,000 Burakumin who were
classed as being illiterate, so the number of people who attend the literacy
classes isn’t that great really, is it.
S: The survey of the actual conditions of Buraku revealed that as well. The numbers are small.
I: Is it because people are embarrassed about going?
S: Yes. Everybody takes it for granted that people know characters so it looks bad to be going to one of those classes. There are also people who want to study but whose families won’t let them go. Because it looks bad to be going. There are people who think that because they are already living their lives in the area and can get about fine, they don’t need to take the trouble to study. They have lived fine up until now without knowing, and there are people who just don’t want to have to go back to studying again.
I: Do their children grow up not wanting to learn?
S: Not so much not wanting to learn, but when they come across characters that they don’t know and they ask their parents about them, the parents cannot tell them, so their children start having difficulty. So it’s not that they don’t want study, I think they do want to study, but when they ask their parents “What is this character?”, their parents can’t tell them. I think that most of them want to study. Because their parents can’t study. The children say how much they want their parents to teach them, but the parents talk about how hard it is because they can’t. So at schools, and in the Liberation Movement, the Liberation Movement has started trying to get the number of teachers per class increased and the number of students decreased so that the children can ask the teachers whether or not they could just teach them about the phrase that their parents couldn’t teach them about.
I: When did that start?
S: It started about 30 years ago. The movement is so there isn’t just the teacher in charge present, but also other teachers in the classroom as well as local teachers who see the problems that students are having. There is that Children’s Hall in S____. If there isn’t anybody to substitute for the parents when they cannot teach their own children then the same discrimination will return and repeat itself again, so there is a movement to teach children starting now. Therefore all the textbooks in Japan are…you have to pay for them overseas don’t you?
N: In Japan text books are free, in New Zealand you have to buy them don’t you?
I: Yes.
S: In Japan, both for Buraku and the rest of Japan, you used to have to buy your own textbooks but in Japan, Buraku parents had no jobs to go to so they didn’t have any money, no money with which to buy textbooks. Since they didn’t have any text books they skipped school. If they went to school, because they didn’t have any text books they couldn’t understand the study in the classes. So in that situation there began a movement to get text books and so textbooks are now free in Japan. That movement was because of the perseverance of the children. The movement for textbooks.
N: The reason that text books are free in Japan is because of the Buraku Liberation Movement.
I: Do you think that the most difficult problems of discrimination,
like marriage and employment, can be solved?
S: Yes, I think they can. I am part of the movement because I think that they can.
I: What is the most difficult problem to solve?
S: The last one to be solved will probably be marriage.
I: Is there anything that is especially being done right now to try and
resolve the problems surrounding marriage?
S: Problems like the ones in marriage and employment occur because of discrimination, they appear because there is discrimination. That is the first thing. Relating to marriage and employment. So the root or the source of the problem is discriminatory consciousness. In order to change this discriminatory thinking the Buraku Liberation Movement has been trying to improve the lives of the Buraku people who have been subjected to discrimination. They have started up many enterprises within the Buraku areas. That alone, however, will not get rid of discrimination so in order to stop the production of discrimination in surrounding areas education is very important, human rights enlightenment. That enlightenment and the struggle outside are very important.
Also, because there has to be a law passed to say that that kind of discrimination shouldn’t happen, there has been a movement appear for that as well. If we could move down that road somewhat faster, to establish a law like the Fundamental Law for Buraku Liberation, if we could create more laws to regulate discrimination, I think that we could teach the children that people are not allowed to discriminate. For example, when adults have children they can raise them and tell them that there are all sorts of fines if they try to steal something, or that it is a crime to steal. In the same way if there were laws that prohibited discrimination and parents told their children that the police would take them away if they committed an act of discrimination then the children wouldn’t discriminate, but there is no such law and so people can still tell their children not to play in this area. So from the side of building a society around that law, we could naturally change the thinking of the surrounding people. So I believe that we must create that law.
I: If the Government would give you any one thing that you wanted, what
would it be?
S: I want a law to be made. The law prohibiting discrimination that is within the Fundamental Law for Buraku Liberation. I want the law to help people who have been discriminated against, and laws to enlighten people. Those laws are all included in the Fundamental Law for Buraku Liberation, we are telling the Government that in order to eliminate Buraku discrimination that this Fundamental Law needs to be made. If the Government said that they would do this then it would be the responsibility of the Government to create it.
I: Are you still running denunciation sessions?
S: Yes we are, if there is a discriminatory event.
I: If that law was created then would denunciation sessions have to
end?
S: No they wouldn’t. whether or not there was a law, to us, the people being subjected to discrimination, we have vested interests in the denunciation sessions. The only problem is abut how the denunciation sessions are run. The purpose of a session is to change the way of thinking of the person involved, we think that that is an obvious necessity.
I: Do you run denunciation sessions in the Buraku?
S: Yes we do.
I: Who is usually indicted in a session? For example, is it mostly companies, or individuals?
S: Individuals, the person who actually committed the discriminatory incident.
I: Are they mostly individuals representing companies?
S: There are times when it is just an individual, and times when it is a company, and times when it is the responsibility of both of them. Even when there is just an individual it is not necessarily just the individual who is bad, there are often problems concerning their company as well. When it is the responsibility of the administration for having created that individual we look at what the administration can do so that they do not produce members who discriminate. There are also problems because the company employs those kinds of people so we research how companies can struggle to educate their employees so that they do not discriminate. I think that the denunciation sessions have quite a violent image though. The essential purpose of the denunciation sessions are to correct the mistakes of the person involved.
I: And if the law was created do you think that it would give more
power to the government so that the Buraku would lose control?
S: It would still be necessary to have the Buraku Liberation Movement so that they could check up on what aspects of the problem the law was protecting because we couldn’t have it so that there were aspects that were not being protected.
I: Okay.
S: There are all kinds of laws in Japan already, but it is still necessary to update them at times. Up until the time that discrimination disappears completely, I believe that it is necessary to have the Buraku Liberation Movement.
I: Is there anything else you would like to add?
S: Thanks for coming. It is important to publicise this to as many people as possible, about your visit here today to M____. It is important for you to report about this correctly. I think that it is your job to correctly publicise the Buraku issue to all kinds of places to people who do not know about it.
Interview Ends