A singular quest: hakkas and burakumin

A singular quest: hakkas and burakumin

day one.
We read in bafflement the proposal from our consultor.
Realitzar una ressenya comparativa de dos articles referits a dos grups ètnics de la Xina i el Japó: els hakka i els burakumin. Malgrat tractar-se de dos articles amb un enfocament molt diferent que apunten a qüestions diferents, heu d’intentar analitzar les similituds i diferències entre tots dos grups (podeu consultar pàgines web per completar el vostre treball). Extensió: Entre 5 i 10 fulls amb interliniat d’1,5 i lletra 12 p.

There are two minorities groups in our report. A first glimpse into the matter show they both belong to discriminated peoples in a way or other in China or Japan. They have not any common point in ethnic lineage but we will try to delve into the similarities and differences.
Luckily the text provided on the webpage about the hakka was quite large, so we started to develop a rough idea.
Some questions began to pop in my thoughts: can we find a definition for these groups? Is the Hakka group based on language, as it seems, or family origin (from the male line, obviously)? As I keep rereading some parts, mixing with local population was possible. To me, Han is a mixture of numerous tribes or ethnic groups that resided in East Asia. Intermingling along 2000 years is impossible to halt.

day two. A fresh start.
Learning about the burakumin took longer because I copied “burakimin” in the google search and no results were given. Later, with the key word “untouchables” things turn out much better.
There is no reference to the Japanese Burakumin but our first introduction into the Hakka population had to be through reading in the encyclopaedias. We found some comments in the Encarta, and Britannica (see below).
Much work had to be done and time was running short.
Days 3-5. Painstaking work. Cut and paste skills.
I dedicated my work at following my inspiration at various websites. Much of the hakka references come through language input! Our google search day 5 goes through Taiwan. Webpages are more likely in English and not government controlled. We are lucky as results start to crop in.
Books quoted:
The History and Geography of Human Genes by L.L Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi and A. Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1994)
"The Languages of China" by S. Robert Ramsey (Princeton University Press, 1987)
Guest People: Hakka Identity in China & Abroad by Constable, Nicole (Washington University Press Seattle 1995)
hakka sources
www.unescocat.org/cultmon/en/dossiers/hakka5.html
www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/.html
www.chinalanguage.com/Language/Hakka/Survival/Grammar/intro.html
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Pagoda/3847/sapienti/hakorig.htm
http://www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/mhonarc/msg00255.html
http://home.i1.net/~alchu/hakka/toihak2.htm
buraku sources:
http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic22/sawako/9_2002.html
http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/burak.html
http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/printout/0,9788,104138,00.html
This vast pool of information needed to be digested in the days to come.

day seven. Butting into the subject matter.
A. Shadows and distortions.
Buraku may look like other Japanese, speak the same language, eat the same foods and wear the same clothes, but prejudice is always close. Why is it like that still at current days? In a formally modern society, albeit a conservative one as the Japanese, democracy should have meant changing social paradigms.
The hierarchy in the Tokugawa period (1603-1867) established the class system where the eta were bound by many legal restrictions, which were enforced with increasing frequency from the middle to the end of the period. They were forbidden the privilege of sitting, eating, and smoking with commoners and of crossing the threshold of a commoner home. Tomihiko Harada (1981) emphasizes that this discrimination "was neither racial nor ethnic" and it did not "originate from religious or occupational discrimination either".

My surprise spurred when I read the following “Many Hakka know - although few non-Hakka do - that numerous prominent Chinese are Hakka, including China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, Taiwan's president Li Teng-hui, and former Singapore prime minister Li Kuan-yew.”
At the end of the 1980’s a Hakka ethnic feeling began to show which arose in Taiwan and is now spreading to mainland China. Hakka dialect (language) is the thread that holds people together.

Unlike the many ethnic groups classified by the Chinese government as 'minority nationalities', the Hakka are officially included as part of the Han Chinese majority. The Han label obscures Hakka identity in some ways. The characteristics of Hakka people is they all claim to be Chinese and there is no provincial difference to divide them. In their diaspora, they have set up roots in their new country of choice, some into their third or fourth generations. Those pioneers are called “Lao Fa Kiao” (Old Chinese Abroad). And their decendents see themselves as Chinese, because they have strong ties to their roots and bound by a common language.

B. A true believers accounting job.
A daunting task to have a clear-cut question in any census. The burakumin is estimated to number about 3% of the Japanese population or roughly 2-3 million people.
The hakka souces say about 35 million: 25 in mainland, 4 in Taiwan and 6 in the diaspora.
Other sources offer higher quantities: About 7% of the 1.2 billion Chinese clearly state their Hakka origin or heritage and roughly 50 million to 75 million Hakkas all over the world.
However, the actual number may be more as many Hakka Han who settled along the path of migration assimilate with the local people. The Hakka identity is gradually lost.

C. Current geographic distribution.
While the Japanese group was confined to The main Island, Hakkas distributed all over the world.
The burakumin are concentrated in a few areas of Japan, namely in parts of Kyushu, the coasts of the Inland Sea, Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto.
The hakka gradually migrated and mixed. In China, Hakkas can be found in the provinces Kwangtung, Fukien, Kiangsi, Kwangsi, Hunan, Szechwan, Sikiang, Kweichow, and Hong Kong. Outside, Hakkas can be found in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, Indonesia, Indo-China, Taiwan, Brazil, Trinidad, Surinam, Canada, USA, Holland, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and East-Africa.

day eight. The negative effects on real individuals. Zero Tolerance policies.
A. The contemporary context
Prejudice towards Burakumin is always close. And the absence of any information -- and fear of discussion -- about this invisible group serves to perpetuate the prejudice, leaving people to spout untruths and rumors: that burakumin are physically deformed, for example. Non-burakumin Japanese see the burakumin as inherently morally defective.
About the burakumin, Japanese society tries not to trace their marks. A rare specimen can be found in Sumii Sue (1902-1997), a Japanese woman writer, who devoted her entire life to terminating discrimination against burakumin. The most prominent of her protest against discrimination against burakumin is her seven volume novel, The River with No Bridge (Hashi no Nai Kawa, 1961-1992).
Discrimination against Buraku was not something that came about as a result of emotions, tradition or the consciousness of people. Its origins cannot be traced to any of these. The Buraku problem was nothing more nor less than a political problem in the modern feudal era.
The burakumin were further oppressed by a mythology that developed out of their political oppression. Much of this mythology centering around the supposed uncleanness and inhumanness of buraku people. Some Burakumin have tried to move out of their ghettos or isolated areas and "blend" into society in general, but education, employment and marriage inquiries into a person's background always present the threat that their Burakumin status will be revealed.
Such a situation, of course, is inherently self-fulfilling as the burakumin are unable to get good education and good jobs and thus are effectively kept in their lower-class status.

By the mid-nineteenth century Hakka had emerged as a distinct linguistic and social group, and often clashed violently with Cantonese-speakers over land and other resources. They had a different evolution in the next 50 years.
To compare, read this “The Hakka were called “guest people”when they began migrating into Yue-speaking territory, and the exotic name seems to have stuck quite simply because, until fairly recently, many Cantonese and Min mistakenly thought that the Hakka were not Chinese at all, but rather some kind of strange non-Han "barbarians" like the Tai or the Miao.” (quoting Robert Ramsey).
Not all the groups called Hakka accept changes in their way of life. Comunism offered real chances of access to education and in the 80’s some research tried to prove old certainties. Isolation and backwardness comes from rural backgrounds. Urban settlements have proven a good way of levelling opportunities to Hakka in all there dwellings.

B. A taste of history 111 years ago. Two personal stories.
A Hakka Chinese immigrate. Zheng Ping-Yuan and Ping-Sheng were born in a little Hakka village in the district of Dong Guan, Guangdong Province, China; the year was 1858AD. Their parents were poor peasants who had no land of their own - instead they rented about an acre of land from the landlord in the village. By planting rice and some cash crops in the field they managed to escape starvation. The produce from the rented acre of land had to support a family of four, including the rent to the landlord. Life was a constant struggle for them, but somehow they magaed to scrape through year after year.

Ping-Sheng Ping-Yuan never had any formal education but they knew that life was tough, and as farmers, they could not rid themselves of the fate of poverty. But the time they were in their teens, the brothers had already begun helping their parents tilling the land; they disliked farming, but they were too young to anything else.
A memory from novelist Sumii sue. She learned from buraku district children what was the hardest thing as a person who was being discriminated against had to face. She saw a movie called "Tsuzurikata Kyodai" (Brothers and a Sister Who Are Good at Writing Compositions) with some students who were from both buraku and non-buraku districts in Wakayama Prefecture. The film was about a poor family who moved back to Japan from Taiwan. She noticed that the students from buraku districts cried before the non-buraku students when they saw the scene of the younger brother Fusao dying. Wondering about the difference in timing, Sumii asked the buraku students why they cried even when Fusao was still alive. A second-year junior high school student responded: “People die once, therefore I'm not afraid of dying nor am I sad about it. What is sad is to realize under what circumstances a person dies. The younger brother does not die because of an illness. He would have been saved if he could have seen doctor. He could have been cured if he had been hospitalized”. Therefore the boy was being killed by poverty, not illness.

day nine. The peculiar question of words.
A. In the name of the rose.
Nowadays “Burakumin” refers to “village people”, nothing very specific then. The Meiji era proclamed they were “common citizens”.
"Hakka" in Hansii characters means "Guest People" literally. The name 'Hakka' is a word of Cantonese origin literally means 'guest' or 'stranger'. The spelling "Hakka" is derived from the pronunciation in Hakka dialect ( pronounced as "haagga" in Hakka and "kejia" in Mandarin). The term 'Hakka' or 'Hak Ga' comprises of two words, meaning, Hak='guest' and Ga='family'.
The Hakka language is also referred to as Hak-fa, Hak-ka-wa, K'ak-wa, or Makkai-wa.
How and why the name Hakka was adopted ? He believes that the population pressure in original Hakka areas is the key. When Hakka tried to expand to other areas because population grew and conflict between Hakka and non-Hakka developed after they settled in non-Hakka areas. Hakka was used by other ethnic groups because they were essentially the “ guest “ people to the non-Hakka areas. In order to unify among themselves, the identity using the most common used name of " guest " (i.e. Hakka) developed. The name of Hakka started to appear in literature only after XVIIth century, at the same time of conflict between Hakka and non-Hakka began.

In absence of a proper name to refer to themselves, groups tend to get together in their langauage: “Deutsch” means “the people” (where our Catalan translation “alemanys” goes back to IV century “alemannes” “=all men”), “euskera” means “those who speak our language”. Similarly, all those who are fortunate to still master the Hakka tongue would find a lot of "Tziga Ngin" (our own people) anywhere in China and abroad.

B. Euphemisms for hatred utterances.
In the 1920’s Cantonese were calling Hakka "barbarian" tribes. Cantonese even used the Hon character with "khien" (ch'yuan in Mandarin, dog next to the "Hak" character or called Hakka "ch'i", a Hon character with the "dog" sign in a clear derogative way.

Other terms used in the past showed the specific non-friendly relationship with these outcasts. The most common name found was “eta”, written with two ideograms which mean “much impurity” or “full of filth”. Another names in the Edo era were “hinin” meaning “non-human” or “kawaramono”. And the synthesis idea was “untouchable class”. Besides, one term of contempt for the burakumin people is kokonotsu, (nine), not ten, which makes them imperfect, something less than human.
The mainstream media go to great lengths to avoid any discussion of the group, and code words are more the norm. An article about someone thought to be a burakumin, for example, might describe him as someone “who likes to attend the dog races”.

day ten. historical background on Japan. Society insights.
Stories from old times show that burakumin existed, informally, as a social class as far back as the 6th century, but they were shunted to the bottom of a five-tier caste system during the Tokugawa period (also known as the Edo period, 1603-1867) when the ruling shogunate established a strict hierarchical feudal society under which the discrimination against the eta people was decreed. Livia Monnet, in her Introduction to My Life: Living, Loving, and Fighting, writes: In the Tokugawa period (1603-1867) the eta outcasts were placed outside the four-class social system and lived in segregated slums and villages.
Severe prohibitions and harsh discriminatory regulations concerning the professions, dwellings, travel, and other aspects of the lives of outcasts were issued by the mid-eighteenth century. Official discrimination continued until the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868-1912). In August 1871 a national government edict brought it to an end. The edict proclaimed: "The titles of eta and hinin shall be abolished; and henceforth they shall be treated in the same manner, both in occupation and standing, as the commoners". Yet de facto discrimination continued.
The struggle against discrimination and oppression was carried on after the war by the Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaiho Domei). Special government and locally founded programs for the improvement of sanitation, housing, education, and professional training in designated buraku areas were implemented, and national campaigns were launched for identifying and eliminating discriminatory practices toward burakumin.

Day eleven. Bouncing back to China. Migration causes a poverty curse.
A. Contrasting Western sources
Western reference work was an early start. Encarta says: “term applied to a migratory people of southern China." The more I read they had been around for many centuries. Many moved to less populated areas because of the pressure of population growth. Most of them living in farming community. And the CD-rom continued: “"They are thought to be descended from the Burmese or Thais or from the aboriginal inhabitants of northern China. The Hakka have always been persecuted by the natives of the regions in which they have settled."
The New Encyclopedia Britannica said that "group of North Chinese who migrated to South China, especially Kwangtung and Fukien provinces, during the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1279), when North China was occupied by Inner Asian tribesmen."
Some modern biological studies (see Cavallo Sforza’s book) indicated Hakka are primarily southern Mongoloid groups not northern groups as all the genetic trees and maps demonstrate that Southern Chinese is distant from Northern Chinese.

B. On the move
Tradition goes back at five migrations. But the record of the first two stages probably are merely "legendary". It is also possible the people that really migrated from northern and central China are really small in number.
Before the Five-Dynasty, there was almost no record in history about the activities in Hakka areas. After Sung dynasty, more literature regarding current Hakka area can be found. Professor Fong called "Era the Hakka Stepping into History". Hakka systematically migrated for the 3rd time to further south, west and other areas began in Ming dynasty (1368-1644).
The 4th migration (1700-1800) was not due to the war. This migration is more recent and is much better documented. For example, at the beginning of Ching dynasty, Hakka people started to move to Sichuan. This migration was secondary to the pressure of population increase. The areas where Hakka inhabited were primarily mountainous areas and very few farming land are available. Hakka started to move to areas with less population. Sichon (Sichuan) was less populated because of revolts at the end of Ming dynasty. Some moved to Hunan and Kongsi provinces. Some started also to migrate to Taiwan.
For the record, the only state that the Hakka people ever possessed was the Lan Fang Republic. Kwangtung Hakkas briefly established a Hakka state in Western Kalimantan in 1777 and lasted until 1884. The first of ten presidents was Low Lan Pak, a Meixian Hakka. In 1884 the Dutch attacked the republic and after 4 years of battle the Hakkas were defeated and fled to Sumatra. From there they moved to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore where they contributed significantly to the establishment of the state of Singapore.
The 5th migration of Hakka from eastern Kuangtung to other parts of Kuangtung and Kongsi provinces. Migration to Taiwan, other parts of Asia, Pacific islands, central America and Africa became more and more common. Many Hakka communities were established in those areas.
Researchers try to find answers to some questions raised: how history is used to create a sense of Hakka Chinese identity within the Hakka diaspora? how Hakka identity is linked with social class and economic factors; how strong Hakka presence has influenced culture in Malaysia.

day twelve. Folk-lore does not rhyme with wisdom.
Colourful images and stereotypes of the Hakka abound in folklore, popular literature, and tourist brochures, as well as in academic and missionary writings. To rescue Hakka culture from simple folksiness or from becoming a mere tourist attraction (as in the case of the tulous), what is needed is coordinated, ambitious action which, especially in mainland China, is still a long way away.
How Hakka gender roles and communal egalitarian values have shaped Hakka culture. Peculiar dwellings mainly due to group defence reasons; and women free from menial jobs inside the house, agriculture painful work model some special characteristics.

The eta formed a heterogeneous group Considered social outcasts that included butchers, grave diggers, leather workers, tanners, waste-handlers, beggars, prostitutes, and actors. They were easily recognizable, as they were not allowed to dress their hair in the same way as commoners, had to use a rope instead of a sash to bind their kimonos, and were sometimes obliged to wear a patch of leather on their clothes as a badge of their defiled status –like the jews in Europe! They were only permitted to marry other eta and could not live outside eta villages, not enter the service of commoners as servants.

day thirteen. A day off-work
day fourteeen. Hakka identitykit.
A. On the Hakka language.
For no matter what the ethnic origin of the Hakka, the group is linguistically Southern Chinese. The Hakka dialects are historically allied to the other Southern dialects around them. The have some unmistakably Northern features, but they are actually not much more like Mandarin than Cantonese is.
Hakka is one dialect of the Chinese language. It has approximately thirty-three million speakers world wide. However, there are sub-dialects of Hakka. This is due to the geographical distribution and local influences on its speakers. The Moi Yen (Meixian) dialect is considered to be the standard dialect. Meixian is a city in the north eastern region of Guandong Province in China. Other sub-dialects of Hakka differ tonally and phonetically.
Professor Chen argues that “the only real unique part about Hakka is the language. If the Hakka migrated to a new area and Hakka language transplanted to the new areas successfully then all population there became Hakka. If the Hakka language is not established in the new area, then immigrants disappeared and adopted the new identity of the ethnic group of other language.
But keep in mind that the origin of dialect or language groups are mostly emotional and political rather than logical and scientific. Urdu-Hindu and lately Serbo-Croatian are good examples. The two "languages" are almost mutually intelligible, but the speakers claim that they are different languages which can distinguish both groups. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are also very similar in phonology, vocabulary and grammar. On the other hand, the Hainan dialect, Chaozhou dialect, Taiwan dialect and Southern Fujian dialects are grouped together as a "Minnan" dialect, but when a Xiamener goes to Haikou in Hainan and speaks his mother tongue, he is in a much worse position than a Cantonese going to Meixian. Therefore, don't view the dialect difference as "scientific" as genetics, and it is far more than an issue of "pure" linguistics.

B. Hakka identity bonds. Half truths and other white lies.
The Hakka identify themselves as Northern Chinese and no doubt this gives extra bonus at group pride (old dynasties were all from north, Huang-ho river and surrounding, weren’t they? Hakka scholars claimed Hakka were originally from northern China whose ancestors migrated by stages to southern China because their "homeland" was occupied by "barbarian" tribes. They claimed the Hakka was the most authentic Han. But the interlocking migration pattern between Hakka and non-Hakka repeated again and again on both directions as professor Chen states.
History shows that they were open to their new society. Christianity has been incorporated into Hakka identity in Hong Kong; Hakka identity has experienced a reawakening in Taiwan during the 1980s and early 1990s; and was of relevance in the Chinese communist revolution and continues to be important in contemporary China.

Hakkas tend to be perceived by other Chinese as standoffish, clannish, frugal, determined, and almost dour people. One reason for the perceived Hakka standoffishness is they probably were standoffish –as one Hakka wrote on the net. Many Hakkas have a pride in their culture which arises from the fact that they migrated from the North i.e. the 'cradle of Chinese civilisation' and therefore perceive themselves to be culturally superior to the 'Southern yokels' they settled amongst. The North-South divide in China is no different from the North-South divide in Europe (also Italy!), India or the US.
To end with, we quote Nicole Constable words: “But despite the obvious importance and distinctiveness of the Hakka, until now no detailed, comparative analysis of the meaning of Hakka identity has been published.”

day fifteen. Prospectives (dark and bright).
Japan's government has passed laws to end discrimination against the group, and has set up special programs to improve burakumin neighbourhoods, and improve their children's education. The prejudice, though, persists. "Around me, day to day, it doesn't seem anyone discriminates against me," says Hiroshi Kanto, a burakumin in Kyoto. "But then one day my daughter came home from elementary school and said some other kids' parents told them not to play with her because she is burakumin."
The burakumin scare many people. The mainstream media go to great lengths to avoid any discussion of the group, and code words are more the norm. The burakumin scare many people. There is one place, however, where talk about the burakumin is freewheeling and unfettered. That place is the Internet. Here, of course, people don't worry about a backlash because they can be anonymous. The question now is whether the Internet revolution will help, or hurt the group. Channel 2 still holds an optimistic view. "One of the discussion threads was a survey about discrimination people experienced, or from the other side, that they imposed," he says. "You can't do that anywhere else but on an anonymous bulletin board. It's the only place for these two opposing voices to communicate."

The first Asiawind Hakka Forum started on September 2, 1996, and was later replaced by a new forum format on Jan 12, 2001. The forum has facilitated the Toronto Hakka Conference 2000, which was the first international Hakka conference held in N. America with participation of more than 300 friends. Asiawind's forum links Hakkas from all over the world to reminisce their hometown lives in China and away from China. I am glad that such a small corner of the Internet has brought so much joy and meaning to all participated.
Since the mid 80’s progress in Taiwan has been slow but steady, with the emergence of communications media and an incipient normalisation in the teaching of the Hakka language in state schools, political representation, the birth of cultural associations, etc. A reaction has also taken place on the mainland and Hakka studies have reached some universities in Kwangtung province.