Outcastes and Innards

For my joint seminar class we went to a community centre and museum for the Burakumin in Kyoto. For those who don’t know, the Burakumin were a class of people rather like the untouchables in India. They dealt with things such as slaughtering cows and pigs and handling corpses, which were considered extremely unclean. Because of this, they were segregated from the rest of society until the Meiji restoration, where the caste was abolished. Unfortunately, writing down on paper that Burakumin were just like any other citizen did not destroy the belief that they the lowest class available, and so up until the post-war period Burakumin neighbourhoods remained the most impoverished and poorly-funded areas in cities all over Japan. Also, the Burakumin had, while they were a separate class, monopolies on certain trades including shoe-making, which disappeared when the class was abolished and the market flooded with foreign imports. To aid the local population in Kyoto, a member of the class who had become rich set about improving schools, building modernized shoe-factories, and even starting a bank for his fellow Burakumin. The bank is now the site of the community centre and museum that we visited. I wish that I could recommend something with such history to American visitors, but there isn’t a single word of English in the entire place, which makes it virtually incomprehensible to the non-Japanese visitor. After that, we went out with the professors for Korean barbeque, which was tasty, though only because I didn’t ask what I was eating. The specialty of the place was pork, so we had that instead of the more traditional beef. We were given the pork raw along with a gas burner to cook it on, and served kimchee (spicy pickled cabbage, daikon radish, and something resembling zucchini), salad to wrap the meat in, a rice porridge of some sort, and a soup with thin slices of mochi (pounded glutinous rice). All the way back to campus I talked with one of the Doshisha students from the class about The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, which was very entertaining. On the train, another American said ‘hello’ and introduced herself as an exchange student studying near Tokyo who was from Washington State. I always want to introduce myself to other foreigners, but I’m always too shy to actually do so.
-When you have Korean barbeque and you don’t think that you have been given actual meat, it’s better not to ask what exactly it is that you are eating.
-Just like in Chinatowns in various large cities, Korean restaurants also seem to like to place things like pigs’ heads in their front windows to advertise the appetizing nature of their foods.
-Be five minutes late to a meeting place for a class field trip and you could wind up going the whole way by yourself.
-The ATMs here accept Bank of America debit cards.