Last year Osaka was the scene of one of the biggest news events in Japan in the past three decades. At first sight, it was nothing dramatic: merely the arrest of an elderly gentleman named Kunihiko Konishi on fraud charges. But the fallout from the arrest has led to a gradual breakdown of one of Japanese journalism’s last great taboos: Japan’s hereditary outcasts, the buraku.

Before his arrest, Konishi was considered by his supporters to be a paragon of the Osaka and Kansai community, a man who had spent his life working for the human rights of others. No scruffy leftwing activist shouting on the fringes of society he, but a wealthy political insider who dined regularly with Diet members, local politicians, senior police officials, and major enka singers.

But Konishi led a double life. By day, he was the head of an Osaka social-welfare foundation known for its active pursuit of human-rights issues and for providing employment for its buraku members through deep connections to Osaka City Hall. He was also the head of a local chapter of the Buraku Liberation League (BLL), which was set up to promote buraku rights.

But by night, Konishi was a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, a fact known to police and local journalists but never reported. And not just any senior member, but one of its most influential, a man who played an indirect role in not one but two of the gang’s most notorious incidents.

On the night of Jan. 26, 1985, four hit men from the Ichiwa-kai arrived at a luxury apartment complex in Osaka. Their target was a man known to the landlord and other tenants as “Kunihiko Konishi,” but who was in fact Masahisa Takenaka, then fourth don of the Yamaguchi-gumi.

Takenaka, alias Konishi, had come to visit to his mistress, who was living in an apartment rented out to the same “Konishi.” As Takenaka emerged from the elevator, shots rang out, killing him and his henchmen. A four-year war between the Yamaguchi-gumi and Ichiwa-kai then erupted, leaving 20 dead and the Yamaguchi-gumi without a leader until Yoshinori Watanabe became fifth don in 1989.

Then, in August 1997, the Yamaguchi-gumi’s No. 2 man, Masoru Takumi, was shot and killed in a coffee shop at the Shin Kobe Oriental Hotel beside Shin Kobe station. Police later alleged that Konishi had an indirect role in the assassination, as he was close to one of the gunmen. But nothing was ever proven, and he was never arrested, or even questioned, by the police.
Despite, or perhaps because of, Konishi’s connection to Japan’s largest criminal gang, it was he who dealt directly with Osaka politicians and bureaucrats to ensure that public money reached both his organization and his friends. Under the theme of “improving human rights” and over a quarter-century, until this year, Osaka poured money into human-rights centers designed to make life better for the buraku people. A number of these and other projects were overseen by or connected to Konishi.

Many of the projects were human-rights museums and information centers, things that actually did and continue to advance broader human-rights issues, raise awareness of the plight of the buraku people and educate the Japanese public on Japan’s brutality toward its Asian neighbors during World War II.

At the same time, and again using “human rights” or “ending discrimination” as justification, Osaka and Kyoto, where there are large numbers of buraku people, launched a number of jobs-for-the-boys schemes, again with the idea of improving the lot of the buraku people. Officially, such jobs were open to all buraku groups. In reality, most of the money went to those connected to the politically powerful BLL.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most Japanese recognized that social discrimination against the buraku people was indeed a reality and a problem. At the same time, especially in Kansai, it was common knowledge among local journalists and politicians that the BLL harbored senior figures connected to the Yamaguchi-gumi, while for many ordinary Osakans, the buraku were synonymous with the yakuza. In 1992, the Boryokudan (violent organization) Countermeasures Law went into effect, making it more difficult for the yakuza to act as they once did. Some joined the BLL as a way to avoid further policy scrutiny, but neither the mainstream media nor the politicians dared to openly point out this fact.

By the late 1980s, Konishi and his buraku and yakuza buddies had become involved in a number of businesses at least partially financed by Osaka city, including parking lots, human-rights centers and hospitals, all of which provided employment for not only local buraku friends of Konishi but also city bureaucrats, who were assigned to oversee such centers but usually did very little work.

And while Konishi had far less influence in neighboring Kyoto, that city, too, was building a special relationship with the buraku people. Stories of corrupt practices between Kyoto bus drivers and the city had been traded privately among local journalists for years. But only recently has the public begun to question why the city pays bus drivers over the age of 50 an annual salary of more than 12 million yen.

A few local media reports have suggested that the high salaries are due to the city’s “human-rights” policy, a euphemism for its buraku policy. The bus drivers’ union has traditionally been controlled by the local chapter of the BLL, which is deeply connected to Kyoto City Hall and especially the LDP. In Kyoto, there has been much less public discussion of the BLL’s political influence than in Osaka. This is partly because of the closed nature of Kyoto, partly because there are fewer journalists interested in the story and partly because of the lack of a dramatic event related to buraku policy, such as the arrest of a senior Konishi-like figure.

Privately, however, Kansai-based journalists say that with Hiromu Nonaka, the former Liberal Democratic Party kingmaker from Kyoto who has admitted his buraku roots, now out of power, the taboo against reporting the dark side of Kyoto’s buraku policy is starting to crack, and more stories about Kyoto’s buraku/city/yakuza connections are likely to emerge. At the moment, the say, only the tip of the iceberg has been revealed, and speculation, as opposed to increased hard evidence, remains the norm.

In Osaka, those trying to tell the story have it a bit easier. They claim that with Konishi’s arrest and all of the subsequent revelations about his mob connections, secret payoffs and corrupt dealings with the city, the taboo against reporting on the buraku, and especially the BLL, is on the wane. In Tokyo, the BLL is far less powerful at the local political level, and there is a prevailing belief among the enemies of the BLL in Osaka that it’s only a matter of time before the group simply disappears or becomes completely irrelevant.

For its part, the Osaka chapter of the BLL has condemned Konishi and kicked him out, warning the public against those who claim to be representing the buraku people but who are actually representing themselves. But the BLL will not address detailed reports by freelance journalists that there are at least a dozen members of the Yamaguchi-gumi within its ranks.

Many in the rank-and-file membership of the BLL who work on behalf of the rights of foreigners in Japan have told me they are shocked and appalled by Konishi’s arrest, although the older members insist that, given the strong discrimination against the buraku people that still exists and the way Japan, or, more precisely, Osaka, works, Konishi’s good works on behalf of them could never have been accomplished unless he did have such connections.

Osaka City Hall has also issued a string of apologies and is now rethinking its entire policy of how to deal with the BLL. Such apologies have placated much of the public’s anger but have not eliminated the larger question of whether any special treatment of the buraku people is necessary.

And here those on the right and the left of the political spectrum have found common cause. The left now argues that continuing special social policies and dispensing money to the buraku people in order to improve their human rights actually undermines their rights further by singling them out from the rest of society. Better to spend policies on the human rights of all and not specifically target one group, they say.

Those on the right argue that whatever the justification for the original buraku policies back in the early 1970s, discrimination has lessened to the point where public financial assistance is no longer needed. They argue it’s wrong to spend money for “human-rights” projects in traditional buraku areas of Osaka, because (1) these areas are now so intermixed with non-buraku that they can no longer claim to be truly separate and distinct; and (2) given all of the money that has flowed into these areas over the years in the form of public housing, improved roads, sanitation and sewage, and buildings such as modern social-welfare centers and libraries, the standard of living is actually higher in traditional buraku areas than in other areas where there have traditionally been few, if any, buraku people.

Even the BLL’s fiercest critics admit social discrimination against the buraku people remains a problem. The real question, they insist, and one that the Konishi arrest and the growing questions in Kyoto about its own buraku policy illustrate, is the extent of the problem, and whether local-government policies, both official and unofficial, that have been in place for decades are really the answer to addressing modern human-rights concerns. Not just for the buraku people, but for all who live in Japan, regardless of their ethnic or social origin.