Sue Sumii
Sue Sumii, the champion of Japan’s untouchables, died on June 16th, aged 95
WHEN Sue Sumii was six, the Emperor Meiji visited the village where she lived, near Nara. After he left, the villagers scrabbled for souvenirs: cigarette butts adorned with the imperial seal, anything that the god-king might have touched. One farmer went into the lavatory the emperor had used and reverentially scraped out a sample of sacred stool. For the child the incident was a revelation. “If the emperor shits,” Mrs Sumii wrote later, “it must mean he eats, too. In that case, he's no different at all from me.” She spent most of her adult life exposing the idiocy of Japan's class system, and inspiring sympathy for its most despised victims: the untouchable caste known as burakumin.
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