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The narrow street is lined with people squatting on small stools tending steaming pots of boiled innards; behind them hang hunks of raw meat. Children joyfully run loose, kicking up dust as they shuffle back and forth, hiding in between the crevasses of the wooden walls that demarcate one space from another. Weaving in and out of upturned bicycles, plastic furniture, and odd wares for sale, dodging adult cries to calm down, are the mischievous faces of youth, testing their limits. While I am a stranger in this community, we muster little attention because my host, Professor Hideo Aoki, is known in the area, a longstanding human rights advocate and scholar and, more importantly, a trusted friend. To him a nod is offered, a greeting, a smile, or a brief wave of the hand. This is a community unlike most others in contemporary Japan. Here there is interaction and open communication, a village within an urban space. While all the stereotypes of a buraku that are common in Japan are confirmed within a few blocks of our route, within this space they take on a different meaning. How can laughter and cries of contestation across a dusty city street be viewed as vulgar and non-Japanese? How can suppression of feelings, emotions, and thoughts be seen as more acceptable? Do the Burakumin, people of the buraku, in fact represent an echoing back to a traditional Japanese past when the distinction between tatemae (what is displayed) and honne (what is felt) was not so rigidly enforced?
Hiroshima's buraku neighborhood of around six thousand members has been transformed over the past twenty years from a slum of rundown shacks into respectable newer housing, thanks to the pressure exerted on the government by the Buraku Liberation League, the principal organization for advancing the cause of the Burakumin since the end of the Asia-Pacific war. The area has become far more diverse in the process, not only because it lies next to the local Korean community and public housing for victims of the A-bomb, but also due to the influx of newly arrived immigrants, in particular the Chinese. Resting alongside the river and newly developed park, the community buzzes as people move in and out of small shops and eating...