Go Speed Racer Go

It is now time for the Japanese to feel the insufferably oppressive weight of my moral indignation. I can sense their fear.

As I was exploring the Web this morning in my never ending quest for knowledge (and Scarlet Johansson photos), I came across an article about the vestigial impacts of the Samurai era caste-system on modern Japan. It seems that back during the Shogunates there was a class of citizens known as the Burakumin who were the social equivalent of the Hindu caste Untouchables. These were the folks who butchered animals, dug graves and prepared the dead for whatever it is the Japanese do with corpses. These Burakumin were the lowest of the low and were relegated to their own ghettos. Now oddly, they were not genetically unique in any way; they were just plain old Japanese who got stuck in a family tradition of dead-end jobs (again, pause for groans). They looked the same and spoke the same as everybody else, but they were not allowed to have spiffy pigtails or hang out with anybody cool.

Now I am not going to waste time beating up our BBF’s the Japanese over some stuff that happened before my great-grandmother was born; after all, among so many other moral failures, America once had a Constitution that said a slave was three-fifths of a person, and we stuck our Japanese-American citizens, Burakumin or not, in internment camps in 1942; so let’s not get all righteous over ancient history. The problem is that there is apparently still latent prejudice against the descendants of the Burakumin in Japan and, due to that nation’s extensive and detailed records of family history, many romantic and business arrangements are affected by a negative report on an ancestor’s profession.

This has to be the most egregious form of institutionalized idiocy that I have recently encountered. The Japanese eat some pretty weird stuff and they censor their pornography in the most useless ways (so I am told), but I always respected them for being industrious and inventive and having a code of honor as close to the Klingons as exists on our planet, but I am not giving them a pass on this one. This report implies that people will often do research on the caste background of their potential employees and marriage or business partners. So these guys are saying that if they find an adorable little Japanese girl who is the public picture of decorum and virginity, makes a good income, likes baseball, tolerates their drunken friends, doesn’t complain about getting stuck with most of the housework, is not flatulent, who at least smiles, if not outright laughs, at their lame jokes, and who acts like that girl from the Exorcist in the bedroom; they are not going to marry her because her great-grandfather was an executioner?!

God bless America. We are so screwed up in so many ways, but the overwhelming majority of Americans, no matter how bigoted they may think they are, will never pass up a chance to make money (or marry for money) or get it on with somebody hot because of something so irrelevant as family history. How else would Chelsea Clinton ever get a date? In our American heart of hearts we know that every individual is just as useless as everybody else, including ourselves. We play a lot of stupid social games and we are clearly burdened by both a history of ignorance and an ignorance of history, but ultimately in America nobody is too good to marry, or do business with, anybody else. We rock because here in the Land of the Free, the Burakumin are in charge, and that is reason enough for hope.