Ethnic Diversity and the Origins of the Japanese
L. Keith Brown

Popular discourse within Japan and stereotypes of the Japanese by outsiders portray
Japan as an ethnically homogenous society. Such a characterization contributes to theimage of Japan and Japanese culture as unique. Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s aplethora of books and articles was published which extolled the alleged uniqueness ofJapanese culture. These writings became known as the nihonjinron (“theories ofJapaneseness”) literature, and the popularity of these writings led to a “nihonjinronboom.”In the 1980s, Prime Minister Nakasone made a comment that echoed the sentiments ofnihonjinron. He attributed the Japanese postwar miracle to the harmony that derives
from a homogenous society. In so doing, he was contrasting Japanese homogeneityand harmony to America’s alleged heterogeneity and divisiveness, and he wassuggesting that America’s economic problems during the 80s, as well as Japan’s
economic successes during that time, stemmed precisely from the two countries’
opposing cultural traits.
Sparks flew. Many Americans criticized Nakasone, asserting that he misunderstood thefact that America’s diversity was precisely its strength. Many Japanese also criticized
him, especially representatives from various ethnic groups. The upshot was that thisevent and others in recent years have made it increasingly clear that Japan is not as
homogenous, or as unique, as the nihonjinron literature and popular discourse would
lead us to think.
In fact, there is considerable ethnic diversity in Japan today. Minorities include over
600,000 people of Korean descent who are either Japanese citizens or permanent
residents, as many as 400,000 Chinese, and an assortment of other Asians andWesterners. There is also an aboriginal group living mainly in Hokkaido -- the Ainu.
There is also the burakumin -- a group considered racially Japanese but still
discriminated against because of their descent from outcasts who were shunned
because of their involvement in ritually polluting activities.
Because the Ainu, the burakumin, and many people of Korean descent living in Japan
are Japanese citizens, i.e., are Japanese in the full social and political sense, it isimportant to avoid terms in referring to these various ethnic and other groups ofJapanese citizens that suggest that they are anything less than Japanese. Thus I will
use the terms Yamato Japanese, Ainu, burakumin, and Korean-Japanese rather than

majority, mainstream, or minority in referring to the different ethnic groups of Japan. The
Yamato Japanese are the descendants of people assumed to have followed the firstemperor when he led them to the Yamato Plain in the Nara–Kyoto region and created
the Japanese “nation” in BCE 660, as described in the Kojiki, the ancient mythology.
Further, there are many permanent residents and other foreigners living in Japan who
also must be considered in any discussion of ethnic diversity in Japan.
The Yamato Japanese constitute well over ninety percent of the inhabitants of Japan.
Therefore, in a statistical sense it is appropriate to refer to them as the majority, and theother ethnic groups as minorities. However, to the extent that “minority” also implies asecond-class citizen, it is a term that I choose not to regularly use in this essay.
However, I recognize that in the power structure of the society, these non-Yamato ethnic
groups are generally at a significant disadvantage, as is typical for minorities
everywhere.

Ainu
The Ainu are generally considered to be the aborigines of the Japanese archipelago,i.e., the inhabitants of the islands before the arrival of the Yamato, the Japanese people
who dominate the society today. This is similar to the status of the American Indians,
the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere prior to the arrival of Europeans andAfricans. The Ainu are considered to be racially distinct from the so-called mainland
Japanese, though of course they are Japanese citizens. In some accounts the Ainu areconsidered to be Caucasian, in contrast to the Mongoloid Yamato Japanese, thoughsuch biological distinctions are difficult to defend scientifically.
One popular scenario accounting for the origins of the Japanese suggests that thehunting and gathering Ainu occupied much of Japan before the arrival of the Yamato
people from the mainland and were gradually pushed north by the more powerfulagriculturalists who brought rice irrigation technology with them. According to thistheory, the Ainu were either assimilated into the Yamato Japanese culture and genepool, or else retreated to the northern island of Hokkaidō where the most visible
vestiges of traditional Ainu culture remain today.
There are fewer than twenty thousand people today who identify themselves as Ainu.
As was the case when the aboriginal peoples came into contact with the Westerners in
the New World, the exposure of the Ainu to the Yamato Japanese, Russians to thenorth, and other peoples in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries left
the Ainu population decimated by disease. Today, most who survived have been
linguistically, culturally, and genetically assimilated into Yamato Japanese society.

The transition from a hunting and gathering economic base to agriculture, industrialism
and urbanism, together with a national policy of assimilation, made the traditional Ainu
religious and cultural systems difficult to sustain. As a result, there are no communities
in Japan today where Ainu is the common everyday spoken language. There are place
names in Tōhoku and Hokkaidō that are used today that derive from the Ainu language(e.g., Sapporo, Oshamanbe) and there are a handful of people who remember Ainu
songs and folk epics. Mostly, however, the language and culture persist as the result ofa conscious effort to preserve Ainu ethnic heritage, promote respect for the Ainu people
and eliminate discrimination against them, and give them and their concerns anappropriate place in national and international political processes.
As is common with many hunting and gathering societies in the northern latitudes, abear cult played a prominent role in the Ainu ritual cycle. Sacrificing a young bear to thegods for continued well-being and success in the hunt was a foundational component of
Ainu religious life. But today, that ritual and the lifestyle that undergirded it has all but
disappeared. The bear ritual is conducted only rarely, and then only as a tourist
attraction.
However, a thriving folk art industry—of carved wooden bears; colorful clothing; dolls of
Ainu in their ritual garb with tattooed lips for the women and extensive facial, head andbody hair for the men; model hunting and fishing implements; and other artifacts
associated with Ainu culture—is being supported by an active tourist trade. It is perhaps
ironic that carved wooden bears have become a popular tourist item, symbolizing thebear cult associated with traditional Ainu culture, for in past times among the Ainu
themselves it was considered bad form to carve the image of a bear, for fear that suchan image would offend the bear spirit.
The tourism industry focusing on unique aspects of traditional Ainu culture enables the
Ainu people to capitalize on their ethnic heritage by producing folk crafts to sell totourists, as well as to find employment. Most of the tourists visiting the Shiraoi Ainu
village and other sites in Hokkaidō are (Yamato) Japanese. Thus the presentation of avery different Ainu culture existing alongside the Yamato Japanese culture intensifies for
the Yamato their own sense of ethnic identity, contrasted with the Ainu as the "other."
The scientific evidence for the origins of the Ainu people, language, and culture, andtheir relationship to the Japanese people, language, and culture, is mixed. The Ainu
language is not closely related to Japanese or to any other language of East Asia,
inasmuch as tools of historical linguistics available to us today can specify. There are
only a few sound correspondences (one of the best indicators of genetic relationships
between languages) that may be argued to suggest a relationship of Ainu to Korean andto Japanese, its closest neighbors in East Asia. The difficulty in such reconstructions isbeing able to sort out lexical similarities that derive from cultural borrowing with contact
over time, which obviously occurred, from those linguistic similarities that derive from acommon parent or proto-language in the distant past. James Patrie in The Genetic
Relationship of the Ainu Language, suggests both a common origin, i.e., a genetic
relationship of Ainu, Korean and Japanese, and extensive borrowing, but that theoriginal roots of the three languages are fairly distant. The split between the three, ifthey shared the same linguistic root, must have occurred on the continent of Northeast
Asia before the peopling of the Japanese archipelago, several tens of thousand yearsago.
As with the Ainu language, the Japanese language, while clearly not related to Chineseor any of the Sino-Tibetan languages except in the written script (which Japan began toadopt wholeheartedly in beginning in the sixth century, so this similarity in itself is not abasis for their genetic affinity), shows only a few lexical and grammatical similarities tolanguages of the Altaic language family. In grammar, but not in the sound system or
native lexicon, Japanese and Korean are almost mirror image of each other, prompting
many scholars to investigate their yet-to-be-proven genetic affiliation. The connection
between the Japanese and Korean languages has not been conclusively proven; in fact,
it is unlikely that we'd ever know their genetic relationship. Japanese is also said to havesome similarities with the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages of the Pacific tothe south of Japan. Speculations abound. Further research is necessary, but current
historical linguistic methods lose their effectiveness in this case, in which the split
between languages, if indeed there was a split from a common ancestral language,
occurred many thousands of years ago, as may have been the case with Ainu,
Japanese, and Korean.

Culture, Nationalism, and Mythology in the Search for Origins
The archeological evidence for the origins of the Ainu and Japanese peoples is notconsistent with the linguistic evidence. Over the past several million years, the islands ofJapan have alternately joined and separated from the continent as sea levels receded
during the ice ages, then rose in periods between glaciations. The last time Japan wasconnected to the continent was about thirty thousand years ago, during the same periodthat the peopling of the New World occurred with migrations across the Bering Strait. It
can be expected that with further research, evidence of earlier human habitation in theJapanese islands will be discovered, given that earlier hominid sites have been foundon the continent, including the Early Paleolithic sites of the so-called Peking Man(250,000-400,000 years) and the older Lantian remains (750,000-800,000 years) in
China.

There was great excitement in Japan when an amateur archeologist in Sendai, Shin'ichi
Fujimura, claimed he had excavated, in the 1970s and 80s, cultural artifacts in Japandating back 150,000 years. His reports fanned the ethnic pride of many people who
were eager to accept the idea that Japan and the Japanese people had a long anddistinguished history. However, some people were suspicious of the Fujimura findings.
In 2000, a national newspaper set out to follow him in his excavations and took secretphotos of Fujimura planting artifacts in a Paleolithic stratum that he would later use as
proof of the ancient origins of human culture in Japan. The scandal attracted suspicion
to all evidence for the Paleolithic in Japan because most excavations of those earlysites had been directed by Fujimura. Nevertheless, because of other, more reliable
research we can now confidently say that there was human habitation in Japan datingback as much as thirty thousand years; but whether there were people in thearchipelago prior to that time is a question awaiting more conclusive research.
Culture has also affected scientific studies of the origins of the Japanese people. The
origin myths of Japan, recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, describe the creationof the islands and provide a genealogy of the gods. Central to these myths is the Sun
Goddess Amaterasu, supreme deity and ancestor of the imperial line. It is these myths
that provide the justification for the emperor's supreme position in Japan as the direct
descendant of the Sun Goddess. The emperor today, the 125th descendant of the firstemperor of Japan, remains a powerful symbol of the ethnic unity of the people and of
the Japanese nation state, except for the Ainu, the Koreans, and the other non-Yamato
citizens.
The first emperor, Emperor Jinmu, the great-great grandson of the Sun Goddess, isdescribed in the Nihon shoki as beginning his reign on earth in B.C.E. 660. Thus
logically, if one follows these creation myths literally, there could be no archaeologicalremains of human habitation in Japan before creation, before the Age of Gods, andbefore Jinmu. During the highly nationalistic and imperialistic period of Japanese history
leading to the Pacific War in the 1930s and 1940s, the emperor was used as theunifying and motivating force for the Japanese military and civilian war effort. The Kojiki
and the Nihon shoki provided the textual basis for attributing a divine ancestry to theemperor and indeed a unique descent for all the Japanese from the Age of the Gods,
giving them racial and cultural superiority over other peoples.
Consequently, prewar archaeological research focused only on the past ten thousand
years, i.e., it examined sites only from the Jōmon Period onward, with the assumptionthat lower strata from older periods would have nothing to offer. Following Japan's
surrender in 1945 and the emperor's public admission that he was not divine,archaeologists began to excavate the lower strata looking for pre-Jōmon artifacts, withsome success. Such excavations are still going on today.

How to reconcile the presence of the Ainu with these national and ethnic origin
accountings has been problematic and has changed over time. In one account, the Ainu
were already there when Emperor Jinmu arrived and were forced north and finally into
Hokkaidō as Jinmu and his tribe left Kyūshū and moved to more northern areas.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a common ancestry of the Ainu
and the Yamato Japanese was proposed. This ideology supported a colonization of
Hokkaidō where most of the Ainu lived and an integration/assimilation of the Ainu into
Yamato Japanese society.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, as nationalism and ethnocentrism
intensified, and as there was more contact between the Ainu and the Yamato Japanese,
the Ainu were increasingly seen as different, becoming an "other" to the presumed
homogeneous Japanese race. According to Mark Hudson, "a racist view of the Ainu
thus became intertwined with an image of them as the primitive aborigines of the islands
who had been driven north by Jinmu and the (racially superior) Japanese." Part of theJapanese discourse at that time was that the Ainu were at least partially descended
from the dog, inu in Japanese. There is an active movement by the Ainu to dispel thesenegative stereotypes and gain for the Ainu a more effective voice in the national politicalprocess.

The Scientific Evidence of Origins
The following sequence of archaeological periods is generally accepted, though there ismuch disagreement about dates and other matters.
Paleolithic: Pre-Jōmon, pre-ceramic, polished stone tools—B.C.E. 10,000
Jōmon: Jōmon cord-marked pottery, open kilns, hunting, B.C.E. 10,000—B.C.E. 300
gathering, shell fish gathering, sedentary villages
Yayoi: Closed kiln pottery, agriculture, metal working, B.C.E. 300—300 C.E. evidence ofsocial stratification
Kofun: Large tombs, some larger than the Egyptian 300 C.E.—710 C.E. pyramids,
horsemen/warriors, unified polity
Historical Period: 710 C.E.—
Jōmon Period culture is remarkable in that it has left behind the oldest known pottery in
the world, dating from about twelve thousand years ago. The cord-marked design thathas given its name to the period was impressed upon the wet clay that was then fired in
an open kiln. It is highly unusual for a hunting and gathering society, normallynecessarily nomadic, to have the technology to create ceramic pots or the willingness totransport them from one campsite to another. The abundant natural setting of Jōmon
Japan, an area blessed with a high biomass, meant that the Jōmon people could settle
down in semi-permanent villages of seven to fifteen pit-houses without having to movearound in search of game, fruits, vegetable plants, and shellfish or other marine
resources. Evidence suggests that Jōmon peoples did not cultivate millet or rice.
Indeed, agriculture was not well-developed in Japan until the Yayoi Period.
The pit-houses and other aspects of Jōmon culture also continue into the Yayoi Period,
though the introduction of well-developed wet-rice agriculture and metal working had aprofound effect on the lives of the people. These new developments may be the productof new ideas coming into Japan, as it is clear that during the Yayoi Period there wassignificant contact with the Chinese and Koreans across the Sea of Japan.
The artificiality of dividing history into periods obscures the fact that between all thesecultural periods from the Paleolithic to the contemporary historical periods there wasconsiderable cultural continuity. What is also clear is that Japan has not been isolated
throughout the period of its human habitation, and there has been a flow of ideas andpeople across the sea for a long time.
One popular account is that the hunting and gathering Ainu are descendants of the
Jōmon culture and that the Yamato Japanese arrived from the continent with the Yayoi
agricultural and metal-working culture. However, because of the continuities from one
period to the next, it is also possible that the Paleolithic, Jōmon and Yayoi are allancestral to the Ainu, and the militaristic horsemen culture of the Kofun Period
represented an invasion from the continent of the Yamato Japanese who unified thenation-state and became the political and military leaders, with the emperor at the top.
That the Kofun Period had a highly stratified society is indicated by the massive
keyhole-shaped mounded tombs, some measuring as much as 912 feet in length. The
ceramic figurines or haniwa that lined the outside of the tombs, exhibit tailored, quilted
clothing that suggests an origin from, or at least a relationship with, the nomadic
horse-based cultures of the northeastern part of the continent and Korea.
New technologies in DNA and other genetic markers are beginning to offer the promiseof answering more concretely questions of ethnicity and Japan's past cultures. Now thatDNA can be extracted from fossil materials, preliminary support is emerging for theargument that the hunting and gathering Ainu were the indigenous population of Japanin the Jōmon Period. Yayoi, with its agriculture and metal-working, seems to have been
introduced by an outside population coming from the continent. Mitochondrial DNA
analysis of a limited sample of Jōmon skeletons was found to cluster with late historicAinu, and not with contemporary Yamato Japanese, which were similar to Yayoi DNA.

If this model of the peopling of Japan holds up with future evidence, we hope that wewill get a better understanding of how much Jōmon peoples contributed genetically tothe contemporary population of Japan. We can also assume that there was someintermixture between the indigenous Jōmon people and the invading farmers of Yayoi.
The search for a "pure" race is therefore inappropriate.
Questions of ethnicity and history are always hotly debated. The absence of a foreigninvasion of Japan for nearly two thousand years, with the exception of the seven-year
Occupation by the Allied Forces following the end of the Pacific War in 1945, hasallowed the emergence of a self-perception by the Japanese as a homogeneous race.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the genetic and cultural contributions to contemporary
Japan have come from many sources. Furthermore, the existence of the Ainu, with adistinct culture, has served as an "other" to solidify the Yamato Japanese ethnic identity.
The Ainu-Yamato Japanese relationship poses another important question for peoples
in multiethnic contexts. The centuries-old policy of integration/assimilation of the Ainu
into mainstream Japanese society has resulted in a situation where there are few
people living a "purely" Ainu lifestyle, with a "purely" Ainu identity. Along with the demiseof the Ainu language, the hunting and gathering culture is virtually gone from thehigh-tech civilization of Japan, except for the tourist sites that help to perpetuate an"other" image for the Ainu.
The Ainu experience raises the important question of whether an
integration/assimilation policy is best, or whether it would help the minority group more
to pursue a separation/independence policy that respects, and highlights, the traditional
culture of a racialized group of people, as the creation of reservations for American
Indians has done in the continental United States, and as the sovereignty movement iscurrently doing in Hawai'i. Assimilation is indeed a very complex issue for many ethnic
groups and governments around the world.

Koreans
Korea was annexed as a formal colony of Japan in 1910. As with the Ainu, the national
policy was one of assimilation/integration, with Japanese being the language of
instruction in schools in Korea. At the time of annexation, Koreans became subjects ofJapan, i.e., Japanese citizens, which was the case until the San Francisco Peace Treatyof 1952 when they were stripped of their Japanese citizenship. Following the Peace
Treaty, the Japanese policy towards the Koreans was no longer one of assimilation, andcharges of discrimination have been frequent ever since.

In 1991 those who had lost their citizenship with the Peace Treaty were given a special"permanent resident" status that distinguished them from other foreigners living inJapan.
Estimates state that there were only about 790 Koreans in Japan at the time ofannexation-mostly students, but also some mine and construction workers. Afterannexation, the movement of people between the two countries became extensive,
especially in the last five or six years of World War II when Japan needed laborers.
Koreans were hired or came as forced laborers to Japan to work in mines, munitions
factories, and other war-related industries. By the end of the war, there may have beenover two million Koreans in Japan. An unknown number of Koreans died in Hiroshimafrom the atomic bomb.
Following the liberation of Korea with the surrender of Japan in 1945, many Koreans
returned to Korea. However, a large number stayed in Japan where they had family andbusinesses. This was especially true of those who had immigrated to Japan before theforced labor build-up during the last years of the war. These Koreans had come to
Japan looking for better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. By
the time of Korean independence in 1945, they already were established in Japan, andtheir children were native Japanese speakers.
Today, there are approximately 700,000 North and South Koreans living in Japan, mostof whom were born and raised in Japan. By now there are third-, fourth-, and evenfifth-generation people of Korean descent living in Japan. Many of them are extremely
successful. Some even lead multinational corporations.
In addition there are a number of people of Korean descent who have taken Japanesenames and become naturalized Japanese citizens. Together, the Korean permanent
residents and the naturalized Japanese citizens and their descendants might constituteas high as one percent of the total population of Japan.
The characterization of Japan as a homogeneous society does not fit with theexperiences of Korean-descended people in Japan. However, their situation in Japan
has seen some improvement since the colonial days, characterized as it was by mutualsuspicion and hostility. Today, Koreans can openly celebrate their traditional rituals andfestivals, wearing typical Korean celebratory costumes; and there are schools where
their children are taught Korean language and history. Many have become economically
successful; and the transfer of money to both North and South Korea is sizeable, having
an especially significant impact on the economy of North Korea.
There are limitations on access to government jobs and other benefits of citizenship inJapan for permanent residents. However, numerous court cases are challenging theconstitutionality of local and national government policies that discriminate against thepermanent residents in employment with national universities, public schools, and many
local governments.
Whether to remain a permanent resident of Japan or become a naturalized citizen is notan easy choice. One very personal requirement to consider is that in order to become
citizens, applicants have to legally change their names, i.e., they must adopt aJapanese name.
Certainly passing the Japanese language exam required for naturalization is not a
problem for most of permanent residents born, raised and educated in Japan as native
Japanese speakers. Moreover, adopting Japanese mannerisms and dress enables
these people of Korean descent to easily pass as Japanese. The differences are notphysical. Americans may wonder, then, why not become naturalized and live the life of aJapanese citizen. However, in Japan, where the cultural perceptions of a homogeneous
society are strong, it is not easy to become a citizen while honoring a cultural heritagethat is not Japanese. It is difficult to have things both ways.

Burakumin
Between one and four million Japanese citizens are assumed to carry the stigma of
being burakumin, literally "hamlet people" or "ghetto people." The precise number
cannot be known because it is illegal for census takers and government offices to
identify someone as a burakumin. Physically, burakumin are indistinguishable fromother Japanese. There are no physical markers of skin color, blood type, or otherfeatures that physical anthropologists could use to identify them, though there were
invidious rumors in some parts of Japanese society, and sometimes also believed byburakumin themselves, that there was a slight coloration or mark under the arm thatwould reveal their status. This spot has never been empirically noted.
Burakumin is not a racial category, but rather is a segment of society hereditarily
defined through a historical discourse asserting that they contain a pollution. Their
supposed pollution derives from engaging in unclean activities by themselves or by theirancestors. Traditionally, "polluting" activities have been defined by the Buddhist
prohibition against taking any form of animal life; thus, polluting activities involve closeand frequent association with death and with dead things. For example, people
continuously engaged in butchering, leatherworking, mortuary practices and executions(in feudal days) over time became indelibly polluted.
In this incredibly hurtful ideology, once the pollution is sufficient, such as throughrepeated engagement in the polluting activity, it causes one to become a burakumin, astatus that is permanent for individuals, their spouses, and all their descendants.

Pollution is not synonymous with sin. These activities considered to be polluting
frequently were essential for the society as a whole. Leather-tanning in the feudal
period, for example, included the making of the armor and horse saddles for thehigh-class samurai. Today, it involves making shoes, belts, jackets, and drums, including
the drums used in sacred Shintō and Buddhist rituals. Nevertheless, because of their
purported polluted state, the burakumin came to be considered outcasts, and they weredistanced from the rest of the society.
Today, burakumin are not tied to their former occupations. Their stigma, however,continues. Discrimination persists in finding marriage partners, getting jobs, finding
places to live, and advancing to positions of leadership. The high concentration of
burakumin in leather-based industries is said to be one of the reasons that various
import restrictions have been imposed on leather goods from the United States,
Canada, and other countries where leather is much cheaper. Evidently this is an
unstated government policy to support the buraku community.
The government in 1871 banned all forms of formal discrimination against theburakumin. In 1889, any reference to burakumin status was stricken from the family
registers, or koseki. The koseki are continuous records of all vital events within a familysuch as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and adoptions. They also state the addressof origin and the new address when a family changes its official residence. The recordof such events in a family over the generations has been of great interest to marriage
detectives hired to find out about the family background of a prospective spouse, and to
employers before they hire someone for a lifetime, or at least long-term, job.
The koseki no longer carry notations about burakumin and other statuses, such as
samurai, farmer, artisan, or merchant as they did in the early years of the system at the
beginning of the Meiji Period (1868-1912). The records from before 1889 that did
sometimes contain such notations have been impounded or destroyed. However, theresidence history of a family in these official documents for the past one hundred andtwenty years provides strong indications of burakumin status, as the residential areas,or buraku, of the burakumin are well known throughout Japan.
Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly difficult for non-family members,
even scholars, to gain access to the koseki. With continuing pressure from the buraku
community itself, including from various activist groups such as the Buraku Kaihō Dōmei(Buraku Liberation League), the national government and many local governments haveworked to end the discrimination, protect the privacy of the burakumin, and provide
development support for the burakumin, their schools, and their communities. However,in spite of all these measures, discrimination in the important social arenas of marriage
and employment persists.

Passing into the mainline society is one obvious option for burakumin, given that they
are considered to be racially Japanese and are physically indistinguishable from
Yamato Japanese. However, as with those of Korean descent and the Ainu, the costs ofpassing are high, and it is not easy. To pass, one must reject one's family andcommunity, because any association with a buraku family or a buraku community will"blow one's cover." Nonetheless, it is assumed that some, if not many, do just that.
Increasingly it is also possible to work mainstream society by day, and then return in theevening to family and friends in the buraku community, but it is not an open job market,
and objections to a marriage between a burakumin and a non-burakumin can destroy
family solidarity.
The lesson to be learned from this Japanese case is that racial prejudice can exist evenin the absence of differences in skin color or other physical characteristics. We humans
have the capability, through culture, of creating out of thin air physical differences, andstrong social prejudices, where none exists in the empirical world. Consequently,
combating racial prejudice is not easy. It is an elusive target.

Ethnic Japanese Foreigners
During the boom years of the 1980s, Japan experienced a labor shortage, especially in
low-paying, manual jobs. In 2005, for the first time, deaths exceeded births, and withouta significant surge in the fertility rate and/or mass immigration, the prospects for futurelabor shortages are high. Mass immigration has not been easy for the Japanese since
the end of the war. The strong ethnic identity and the ideology of a homogeneous
society led to an assumption that foreigners will not fit in with the rest of Japanesesociety.
Policy-makers hope that they can enact measures to reverse the declining birth rate,
which is now less than 1.29 children per woman. A variety of tax breaks, educational
scholarships, and increased investment in daycare centers are being promoted by thegovernment as ways to increase the fertility rate. So far these efforts have met with little
success. Immigration thus remains an important, and perhaps the only, option for Japanto find workers to keep the industrial and service sectors of the economy viable into thenext generation.
One accommodation to the Japanese aversion to allowing foreign (non-Japanese)migrant workers into the country has been to encourage the immigration of Japanese
ethnics, that is, "hyphenated" Japanese such as the Japanese-Brazilians now living in
Brazil. In the 1980s, foreigners of Japanese descent were given special visa and otherprivileges to live and work in Japan. Many came, especially from Brazil, where there is alarge Japanese-Brazilian population. From 1908 to 1945, over two hundred thousandJapanese sailed on emigration ships to Brazil, and their numbers and influence in Brazil
grew over the generations.
Emigration from Japan to South America continued for several decades after 1945, but
in much smaller numbers.
In the 1980s, the flow was reversed. Toyota and other multinational corporations saw
worldwide sales expand at a rapid rate. To expand production, Toyota hired many
Japanese-Brazilian workers for its plants in Aichi Prefecture, and by 2005 these
returnees from Brazil numbered 280,000, a significant minority in Japan.
The Japanese-Brazilians frequently experience conflicts in identity, language andculture in Japan, problems that can be expected when two very different cultures comeinto contact. By their own descriptions, Japanese-Brazilians characterize the open,
expressive, emotional and warm human interactions in Brazil, including considerable
tactile contact of hugging and kissing, as contrasting with the formality and social
distance governing interactions among many Japanese. Being racially Japanese does
not isolate a Japanese-Brazilian from these cultural differences.
Other foreigners also are contributing to the workforce in Japan, with Chinese being aprominent group. However, registered foreigners, including students, families and others
living in Japan, constitute only about 1.6 percent of the total population of 127 million
people, a small percentage compared to the 12 percent in the United States, and close
to 10 percent in France.
These low numbers of foreigners in Japan contribute to the characterization of thesociety as being homogeneous. However, that characterization both denies the ethnic
diversity that exists in Japan and relegates the non-Yamato Japanese to positions ofsecond class citizens, resulting in discrimination of various kinds. The Japan Committeeof the International Movement against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism in 2006
issued a united call from seventy-one different groups for passage of a strong
anti-discrimination law. Ainu, burakumin, and people of Korean descent are leading theway in this effort.
In an ethnically diverse society, pulling all the people together in harmony without
discrimination and allowing everyone to enjoy the benefits of citizenship andmembership in the nation, while at the same time giving everyone full respect for theirdifferent ethnic and cultural heritage, is an important task shared by all societies in thisglobalized world. Japan is not unique in this problem.

L. Keith Brown
L. Keith Brown is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh. His
lifelong research interests have centered on the town of Mizusawa in the Tohoku region,and the changes in lives of the inhabitants since the early 1960s.

Suggested Reading
Hudson, Mark J. Ruins of Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Japanese Islands. Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1999.