Sayama Campaign

I have been involved in Japan's Buraku liberation movement for the past decade or so. The Buraku people, despite being the largest minority group in Japan, are a little-known outcaste group who are discriminated against due to their ancestry. They suffer from a similar status to the "untouchables" (Dalit) in India. There has been a campaign running for the last 36 years to hold a retrial for a Buraku man who was falsely convicted of murder in the Sayama Case. He was arrested due to his outcaste status, forced to confess, and imprisoned. He was subsequently released, but the authorities have refused to grant a retrial since it would mean both admitting the existence of Buraku discrimination (which officially does not exist) and that it was a factor in the case. Please sign the online petition, which is part of a drive to gather one million signatures to request a retrial of the case:

http://www.petitiononline.com/sayama/petition.html

You can read more about the Buraku issue at the website of the Buraku Liberation and Human Rights Research Institute, and also at a homepage I built for my MA thesis research.

Ian