“Soul Food of Japan” – Buraku cuisine conceals a history of discrimination | Hacker News Reader

“Soul Food of Japan” – Buraku cuisine conceals a history of discrimination

ignition.co

62 pointsalma8820 comments

I am not really exactly buying into the full premise of this article. While to a large degree the lack of exposure of this branch of japanese cuisine is based on bias... It also is clearly based on the fact that these are the least desirable cuts of flesh and offal from the least desirable livestock animals.

Much like sure you CAN really masterfully make something chittlins taste as good as intestines can taste... its still going to be viewed as lower class leftover scraps because thats really fundamentally what it is at its core.

"The thirty-eight-year-old Yasui radiates a quiet pride. With his round face and COMMANDING MUSTACHE, he conveys a stoicism..."

I just can't stop laughing at that description of that picture.

It kind of detracts from the credibility of the rest of the article, doesn't it?

And I thought fried chicken cutlet with vegetable curry and rice was Japan's soul food. It is one of my soul foods at least.

Well, they have lots of comfort food. Katsu curry is only one of these.

Cool food article.

Also, I get to add Buraku to the list that starts Ainu, Women and Foreigners.

You have a list of things it sucks to be in Japan?

OP was about discrimination. Buraku is way down that list.

Title begins with (0x0008). Source page title does not appear to have it.

"Discrimination"? Seriously?

Yes, Burakumin are still discriminated against.. Less so now than before, but coming from a Dowa area is still seen as a negative, land prices in Dowa areas are significantly cheaper, those neighborhoods are much poorer and there are still quite a few parents who will strongly object to their daughter marrying someone that comes from such an area.

It's not as bad as discrimination against Zainichi Koreans but it exists and does affect the job prospect of Burakus.

I used to live south of Kyoto station which is a Dowa district and had friends from this minority (as well as Zainich Korean friends). So I'm saying this based on experience.

Back to the topic at hand, Saiboshi is delicious :)

I was thinking about the food, not the people.

For example, I discriminate against liver and cauliflower.

The ignition.co spammer is back! I'm impressed that this account and the others regularly hit the front page, if only for a short time.

Isn't there a better place for you to promote these articles? They don't really fit HN.

You should probably email hn rather than posting in the thread.

Why do you think this article doesn't fit on HN? What about it makes it a poor fit? What articles should be on HN?

I think whoever runs ignition.co or does marketing for it liked the traffic boost they got from someone posting this article randomly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10802816

Then created these accounts to drip feed more of their articles here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=marmn

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alma88

I mean, just look at the titles. They don't fit with the general theme of the content which is usually posted on HN. This general focus of content on HN has indeed become more muddied and low quality as time has gone on and it approaches Reddit status, but I'm not ready to give it up yet.

EDIT: Ahh, I'm wrong. There's another account which predates the "moss" submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ngym

So it's just spammers who have about 33% of their articles killed by the system, and I suppose the rest are being flagged off the front page.

He may be a spammer, but I take issue with:

> They don't fit with the general theme of the content which is usually posted on HN.

I'm glad HN isn't /r/programming, where there are strict controls on topics. There has always been an 80/20 mix of stories about tech or startups / interesting stories about the world, and I find that works pretty well to hold my interest.

There's a universal nostalgic bias that everything used to be better, so I'm skeptical by default of any claim that something has declined in quality over time. It might be true, just needs some kind of data to be persuasive, rather than personal testimonies.

These people submit more than just ignition.co articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=arm

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amy8341

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Kechol

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jpatokal

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nkurz

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=MarlonPro

A couple of those people are long standing HN users, with over 1k karma.

These people only submit ignition.co articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tekitoeditor

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alma88

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nana7

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=marmn (they have a single link to a medium post alongside their ignition.co articles)

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tdys

There are plenty of people who only submit from a single domain, and there are some people who post very much more from those single domains than the handful of links these accounts post.

But, again, if you think it's a problem you achieve more by emailing HN ratHer than posting to this thread.

> I mean, just look at the titles. They don't fit with the general theme of the content which is usually posted on HN. This general focus of content on HN has indeed become more muddied and low quality as time has gone on and it approaches Reddit status, but I'm not ready to give it up yet.

I asked some really specific questions and it's frustrating that you just give this non-specific hand-wavey answer. I think you're wrong about the muddied focus, I think you can find articles like this from the site's early days.

Thanks for being concerned about the quality of HN. Here's what I'm pretty sure was going on:

It's common for boutique publications like this to randomly get posted to HN (often by excellent HN users with long track records). Someone at their office notices the traffic, and they create accounts to start promoting their site here. Obviously that's not a good fit for HN. I sometimes email them letting them know that they should stop because our users will consider it spamming—or alternatively, that they should join the community in earnest and post from a diverse set of sources, including their own.

But that doesn't make the site itself spam. This class of publications often produces articles of general intellectual interest, which is why a user like nkurz would have submitted it in the first place. Such articles are welcome here—they're neither off-topic nor a recent development, and it's good for HN to be well-stocked with outlier stories.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11090064 for another explanation re keeping HN weird.

How do you not like food? That's outrageous.

>Isn't there a better place for you to promote these articles? They don't really fit HN.

That's for HN users to decide, and they have upvoted the article just fine. If you don't like it, don't upvote it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com

“Soul Food of Japan” – Buraku cuisine conceals a history of discrimination

“Soul Food of Japan” – Buraku cuisine conceals a history of discrimination