Hokkaido Highway Blues

zannen ishi, lined up near the shore, or half forgotten in quiet forests.
    We continued up the northeast coast with the expanse of the Inland Sea below and beyond, and Akihira pointed out the smaller uninhabited islands, one of which was evocatively named Kaze no Ko, “Child of the Wind.”
    Shōdo Island is again being eaten. The quarries that supplied Osaka Castle were now supplying the raw rock for further construction at Osaka’s newest glory—an international airport built on an island. An artificial, man-made island. Osaka has always considered Shōdo to be a colony, in the baldest sense of the word: a place to be exploited, not developed. As we drove north toward the Shōdo quarries, trucks rumbled by loaded down with crushed granite. The convoys roll day and night, and Shōdo has once again been inflicted with economic leprosy: a chunk here, a chunk there, to please new Osaka lords.
    Great dry, bloodless bites have been taken from Shōdo and the dust drifts up in a fireless smoke. Amid the chalklike powder, moving like harnessed elephants, are massive trucks, their din and roar as loud as any minesweeper. Blasting caps and sudden monochrome firework explosions puncture the air. I loved it. Quarries are such primal places: man and rock and machine. I was fascinated by it, as I always am when I see large equipment digging up chunks of earth. I am one of those weird construction-site groupies you see peering through fences in rapt attention.
    We stopped for a light lunch at the Fukuda ferry port, with Akihira somehow managing, in a vast, near-empty parking lot, to box in one of the only other cars there. From the restaurant’s window, the view was once again sea-saturated. Even the farmers tilled their land within sight and scent of the sea. It was such a small, manageable landscape.
    From the restaurant we drove—south? north? I wasn’t paying attention anymore. I had slipped so comfortably into the role of pampered guest that I no longer took note.
    Along the coast, we came upon a small community that was gripping the hillside. Above it was a rocky promontory named kabuto iwa , after the helmets worn by samurai warriors. The road twisted and turned to get through the village, dropping low and skimming the water to get around a large, drab cement-block apartment building that had, apparently, dropped from the sky.
    “I’m sorry,” said Akihira. “It isn’t very clean.”
    “Pardon?”
    He grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
    And I knew then what we had just passed through. I knew it very well, because I had taught in schools in towns just like this one. It was a burakumin town. Those were burakumin shops and burakumin apartments, and those were burakumin children playing in the streets.
    Japan has a caste system. Japan has a caste system and burakumin are at the bottom. Their ancestors were butchers and leatherworkers, shunned by a Buddhist society that had learned to eat meat but not to accept those who processed it. This stigma, incredibly, has been handed down for generations and is firmly entrenched. Circles include and exclude, create outsiders and insiders, and outcasts.
    But it goes beyond the burakumin. Not long ago, I read a newspaper report about a Chinese businessman who was named to the head of a local PTA in Japan. The media trumpeted this as a breakthrough in “internationalization.” An official in the Japanese Ministry of Education gushed over the appointment as well, saying, “This demonstrates that any qualified person can serve as president of a PTA union, no matter what nationality he or she may be.” On it went, rounds of self-congratulation over the first “non-Japanese” person ever to head a PTA. The man was quoted as saying, “I hope to include many people in our program, including foreigners such as myself.” A wonderful and warm story. Except for one small detail. This particular non-Japanese person was born in Japan, educated in Japan, had lived in the prefecture for thirty years, and had a son—also born in Japan—who was now attending the school. But his grandparents were from China and thus, he would always be a foreigner, a “Chinese resident of Japan,” and would never be a citizen. Nor will his son.
    There is an even larger subclass of Koreans in the country, many of whom are the descendants of slaves (sorry, “forced laborers”) taken to Japan from their Korean colony, a practice which started centuries ago and which lasted right up until 1945. These Korean