"Do you consider me unclean because you find my profession or my nature abhorrent? Regardless, I’m prepared to find your answer ironic."
The Nosferatu bloodline that has come to be known as the Burakumin originated in feudal Japan within the social stratum of the same name. Beneath the samurai and the soldiers and the priests and even peasant farmers were those mortals whose professions were considered “spiritually unclean” by the tenets of the Shinto and Buddhist religions. Such professions included tanning, leather-working, butchery and the handling of dead bodies. People who made their living from these professions were declared unclean and legally worth less than other people, and grouped in small hamlets far from their spiritually poor neighbors. (Roughly translated, in fact, the word burakumin means “hamlet people.”) Considered equally impure and valueless by the Kindred Princes of the Eastern domains, Japanese Nosferatu were restricted from feeding on or Embracing from anyone outside that same class of mortal. In time, all of Japan’s Nosferatu were referred to as Burakumin, and the name and stratification spread throughout much of Eastern Asia as Burakumin Nosferatu expanded their influence under the cover of various Japanese imperialistic advances.
