The COVID outbreaks in American meat-packing warehouses have recently cast attention to the frankly horrifying working conditions in these plants. Like coal-mining and cesspool-cleaning, the practice of animal slaughter and butchery has a long history being considered an undesirable profession — it is one that most of society benefits from, even as the general population disdain doing those jobs themselves.
In Medieval Japan, people involved in the slaughter and preparation of animals were considered unclean. Lumped with other jobs dealing with death, blood, and flesh, they became known as the Eta (“much filth”) Burakumin (“hamlet people”). Burakumin were originally likely to have come from the poor who couldn’t find good work, but as Shintoism and Buddhim developed in Medieval Japan, the Eta were considered polluting, their work taboo. During the Tokugowa period (starting in 1603), these people became legally tied to a sort of caste system that forbade them from any intermixing with other people in Japan.
In fact, although the Burakumin class was outlawed in the late ninteenth-century, many descendents continue to face racial and economic prejudice today.
Source(s): Image of servant following samurai from “Burakumin, los ‘intocables del Japon,” 17 April, 2008, “Cabovolo.” Information from “Burakumin” online Encyclopedia Britannica, “Quora,” ‘What are Burakumin?’ By You hi Hajime, Dec 2019, “Though Co.” ‘ The Buraku ‘Untouchables’ of Japan,’ By Kallie Szczepanski, Jan 22, 2018;.
