Curtain Parts on Japan’s Unmentionable Community : Discrimination: The low-caste group tries to suppress a controverial book pointing out its isolation.

TOKYO —  Japan’s hereditary outcaste community has lodged a vigorous complaint of discrimination against Dutch author Karel van Wolferen, pressuring a Tokyo publisher into temporarily halting sales of his controversial book about the Japanese power structure shortly after it appeared in translation here.

The dispute appears to underscore one of the major arguments made in Van Wolferen’s book, “The Enigma of Japanese Power,” that free academic and political debate is often stifled by social taboos in Japan.

Representatives of the burakumin community, a little-known outcaste group whose very existence is unmentionable for many Japanese, contacted the Tokyo publisher Hayakawa Shobo on Oct. 1 and demanded that the book be withdrawn from sale.

Hayakawa officials apologized and immediately advised major bookstores to remove the book from their shelves, the publisher’s lawyer said.

“There was a very strong tone of intimidation in the initial complaint by the Buraku Liberation League (BLL),” said Futaba Igarashi, the lawyer.

Sales did not resume until Van Wolferen intervened Oct. 5 and persuaded the publisher to rescind its warning to booksellers. But a major advertising campaign is still on hold while Hayakawa negotiates with the league over its demands for a number of revisions in the second printing.

“This group is essentially parasitic,” Van Wolferen said. “The last thing they want is emancipation for the burakumin . They themselves are the ones who keep the issues from being discussed.”

Kenji Kobayashi, an official with the league, said he objected to the use of “discriminatory language” in the translated text, particularly the term “special buraku “ to describe the state of economic and residential quarantine traditionally forced on outcaste communities.

Buraku literally means “hamlet,” and the term burakumin (“people of the hamlet’) is a euphemistic reference to the minority’s segregated status. Descendants of the outcastes number between one and three million and still face widespread discrimination in marriage and employment.

“The phrase ‘special buraku ‘ is loaded with a long history of discrimination, and its usage perpetuates bad attitudes and misunderstanding,” Kobayashi said. He did not explain why his organization draws its own name from the term.

“The book makes many valid points and we think it will have a lot of influence in Japan,” Kobayashi said. “That’s why it’s important that the section on the burakumin be based on the truth.”

Kiyoshi Imaoka, an editor at Hayakawa, said the publisher has proposed revising the buraku phrase to “special community” in the second printing but leaving other disputed sections intact to “serve as a starting point for academic debate on the subject.”

Hayakawa printed 50,000 two-volume sets in its first edition of the book, originally published in English in April of last year. Yoshi Tadokoro, the local representative for Van Wolferen’s American publisher, Macmillan, estimated that about 20,000 sets have been sold since it was released in Japan on Sept. 26 but said that it is too early to make an accurate count. Some news reports have placed it on bestseller lists for business books, he said.

Van Wolferen became a controversial figure in Japan after he was branded by the media as a so-called “revisionist,” one of an influential group of scholars and journalists who criticize Japan’s trade policies and political institutions.

In his book, he cites the Buraku Liberation League as an example of how “intimidation is a preferred alternative to legal sanctions” in Japan.

“The denunciation tactics of this group have made it very powerful when it confronts publishers, authors, journalists, editors and teachers,” he writes. “Any of these who says anything about the burakumin minority that contradicts BLL ideology runs the risk of being forced to undergo denunciation sessions.”

The league’s Kobayashi said this allegation is “clearly in error.”

“We’re only raising our voice on behalf of a minority that’s being discriminated against by misinformation,” he said. “That’s not intimidation.”

BACKGROUND The burakumin are indistinguishable by race or religion from other Japanese. Like the lower castes of India, they are defined by birth, by poverty and the kind of work they do. Their ostracism dates from the 6th Century when Buddhism was introduced to Japan from the Asian mainland and certain occupations--such as butcher, tanner and executioner--were declared “unclean.” Those who continued to perform those jobs eventually were ostracized and forced to live in special buraku, or villages. For those whose heritage can be traced to to a buraku, life in Japan even today is often a nightmare of discrimination and humiliation. Burakumin especially encounter enormous prejudice if they seek to wed a non- burakumin , and suicides are not unknown.