The Press: Glass House, Dirty Windows

Like many other newspapers abroad, the Japanese press played the news from Arkansas with ill-concealed relish. But Japan’s most influential daily, Asahi Shimbun, pointedly reminded its readers that perhaps Japan is in no position to throw rocks at Little Rock.

Asahi devoted 10,000 words to the plight of Japan’s 3,000,000 eta (literally: “very dirty”) untouchables. The eta class, also known as hinin (not human), includes most of the Japanese nation’s leatherworkers, shoemakers, butchers and slaughterhouse workers. Though the etas were formally abolished as a caste in 1871 under the Meiji Restoration and the word itself was removed from dictionaries, the prejudices that surrounded them survived almost unabated from the days when they were forbidden to pray at village shrines, go outdoors between sundown and sunrise, or marry outside their class.

Japan’s untouchables live in 6,000 more or less rigidly segregated communities. Commercial firms generally refuse to hire them, and when an eta seeks to “pass over” by hiding his origins, discovery can mean divorce, suicide, and occasionally even murder. In Saitama prefecture one day recently, an eta suicide left a note saying: “Even in death I cannot forget I am an eta. I hope I will be reborn in a better place.” In Tokyo last year, an appeal for nondiscrimination brought offers from a number of small business firms to hire etas. But of 40 who were hired, all save two quit in less than a year because they were unable to stand the sidelong glances and open contempt of their fellow workers.

One who makes no bones about his own eta origin is blunt, 70-year-old Juichiro Matsumoto, a respected Socialist in the House of Councilors, the upper chamber of the Japanese Diet. He says angrily: “There are many eta people who have risen to top ranks in their professions, including screen stars and flower-arranging masters, but they dare not be frank about their origin because their popularity would immediately drop. But before we blame them, we must blame Japan’s society, which permits such discrimination.”