Hacker News Reader

Japan traditionally had a caste system where certain people were restricted to certain neighbourhoods. There was a lot of official effort to break that up after the war, but you can still tell which neighbourhoods are which.

google burakumin

The public schools I taught at in Japan kept (private) lists of which kids came from burakumin families.

It's my understanding that Japan's housing regulations are mostly driven by a long history of all their buildings falling over in an earthquake every couple of decades.