Hokkaido Highway Blues

families have been in Japan for generations. They speak Japanese. They work and live and die in Japan, and most have never even been to Korea. Yet they will never— never —be treated as “real” Japanese citizens. They are forced to carry demeaning identity cards and—until just a few years ago—they were required to be fingerprinted as well. The Japanese, meanwhile, consider themselves a very open-minded, nonracist society. Asked if there is widespread racism in Japan, the average Japanese will be aghast at the question. They equate racism with overt acts of violence, which are rare in Japan. But it is a racist nation. It is racist in the deepest, purest meaning of the word. In Japan, race is taken as being a tangible definition of someone’s talents, worth, and membership. And that is racism at its most refined; an unshakable belief in the primacy of blood.
    None of Japan’s three main subcastes—burakumin, Chinese, or Korean— are what we would call visible minorities, but they are easy enough to detect. A six-hundred-page blacklist of burakumin communities was circulated among companies well into the 1980s. The list was eventually suppressed (or at least, better hidden), but the practice still persists. Japan has an extensive Orwellian system of public records. Every marriage, divorce, and relative is recorded by the local town hall. One cannot separate from one’s past, or from one’s family, or its past. You are trapped. It is like inheriting your grandfather’s reputation or your uncle’s nickname. Corporations routinely acquire these family records to screen out burakumin, and parents expect to check over their children’s suitors’ backgrounds. A boy who falls in love with a burakumin girl, or a girl who wants to marry a Korean boy, is doomed.
    The Japanese never talk about burakumin; they are the ghosts of the society. If you ask a colleague about this lower caste, he will either brush it off, or frown thoughtfully and try to change the subject. Those in even deeper stages of denial will insist that there is no such thing as burakumin.
    Akihira was very uncomfortable when I asked him about them on Shōdo. (Burakumin towns traditionally did not exist; they were not marked on maps nor were they signposted, a habit that lingers in present municipal attitudes.)
    “Some burakumin are very good,” Akihira conceded. “But some are very bad. Most, however, are just average people like you and me.”
    What a wonderfully evasive statement: some are good, some are bad, most are average. This could apply to any group of people on earth. It was a nonanswer, but it did mark Akihira as being at least sympathetic to their plight.
    East Indians in England. Aborigines in Australia. Natives in Canada and the United States. We have our own castes as well. It is a human urge, this need to create outcasts; you will see it on Indian reservations and South African homelands. And in the burakumin villages of Japan.
     

19
     
    AFTER A FULL day of exploring the island, my ride with Akihira was coming to an end. This was not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t want to sound ungrateful: Akihira was a gracious man, patient, generous, intelligent. But he was also— and I say this with the utmost respect—the worst driver in the history of the universe. He ground gears the way some people pull chainsaw cords. His truck never moved ahead in a linear fashion. It rolled backward, it lurched, it balked, it took running starts and made false stops and had second thoughts. It bounced and bucked across winding mountain roads and along sheer-drop coastlines. Perhaps it was a form of spiritual guidance; by the time it was over, I had taken to whispering the mantra Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo as we went around corners. When I climbed out, my vertebra were out of line, like a stack of broken dishes, and for days afterward, my back was racked with muscle spasms. I am not exaggerating. The Blind Swordsman had been the most dangerous driver of my trip; Akihira had been the most physically punishing.
    At a fork in the road, halfway up Mount Hoshigajō, we left my bicycle and then drove deeper into a gorge to where cable cars ran up the mountainside. (I left my bicycle so that I could get it on the way down.)
    The Kankakei gorge was magnificent. It’s odd, but my memory of Kankakei is in black and white, like the muted layers in a Chinese ink brush painting, with pine trees leaning out over straight-down crags of rock. Below the cable