The Buraku of Japan Descendants of people who worked as tanners and butchers—jobs that were traditionally believed to be unclean and worthy only of lowly people—the Buraku are no longer legally categorized as outcasts, but continue to be discriminated against. Here, Buraku workers perform hazardous tasks in the cleanup of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after it was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Like outcast groups elsewhere, Buraku in Japan perform more poorly in school and have lower average IQ scores than other citizens. However, when they emigrate to America, where most people do not know their caste status, the IQ difference between them and other Japanese Americans vanishes.

Yoshikazu Tsuno/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom