Only after some hesitation did Tamaki, a 49-year-old man willing to reveal only his first name, play the DVD he'd found in a desk drawer last October at his parents' house, in the Chikugo district of Fukuoka Prefecture.

On its case was printed the title “The Path I Walked,” together with "Hikari," the name of his 82-year-old father.

Hikari has a stammer, and has avoided speaking in public as much as possible throughout his life. But the footage, shot 21 years ago, shows him stood behind a podium, speaking about his background in front of an audience. It was something Tamaki had never seen before.

“He looked like a different person,” Tamaki said, unable to look away until he'd watched the hourlong recording in full.

From the video, Tamaki learnt of the tears of frustration his father had shed in his younger days and the experiences that have remained with him throughout his life. Speaking from the podium, Hikari described going through hard times at work and being yelled at. “I wanted to get away but I couldn’t,” he said.

Tamaki's father’s words weighed heavily on him. Both of them had been brought up in a segregated community, and, having had little chance to go to school, the older man was unable to read or write.

Tamaki still remembers pretending not to see his father sitting at a low dining table late at night, tightly holding a pencil as he practiced writing characters on the back of flyers. He and his younger sister had a tacit understanding that they shouldn’t ask their father to help them with anything related to schoolwork.

Other than the fact that Hikari grew up in the chaos that followed World War II, what had prevented him from studying until he became an adult?

Tamaki’s father was born in 1939, before the start of the war, in a community in Fukuoka Prefecture that was ostracized as part of Japan’s outcast burakumin minority group. He entered elementary school in 1946, a year after the war ended.

Back then, it was said that for buraku children, school was where the most severe discrimination took place. On the first day of school, the teacher of the class said to the buraku children, “Since you don’t have to study, you all sit in the back.”

Teachers and pupils treated all the children from Hikari's community as if they were not part of the same class. They were openly bullied, with others throwing things at them and putting things inside their clothes from behind.

Hikari couldn’t speak well. When he tried to speak up, he stuttered and was laughed at. It was better for him to work with his mother, Haru, and earn money. Instead of going to school, he sifted gravel at a riverbank and picked up discarded taro roots.

Haru often told him to go to school rather than help her, saying he would at least learn something just by staying in the classroom. But even after reaching fourth grade, his class teacher would tell him and the other buraku children to go and weed the schoolyard, saying they didn’t have to be in the classroom.

When answer sheets were handed out for tests, he could only stare at them. Unable to read characters or figures, he didn’t know what to do. He began to skip school.

Hikari desperately wanted to leave the community. In the spring of 1955, when he graduated from junior high school, he left his hometown — climbing onto the back seat of a motorbike ridden by the owner of a sushi restaurant, who had come to pick him up after hiring him through an introduction by his teacher.

At that time, downtown Fukuoka was still recovering from the damage inflicted by air raids. Department store Iwataya was about the only prominent building to be seen.

The restaurant where Hikari lived and worked was located inside the Yanagibashi market. Every day before dawn, he helped the owner make purchases at the market. After returning to the restaurant, he was taught by senior workers how to make preparations for sushi, boiling dried gourd strips and cooking fried tofu. Then he washed sushi tubs and bowls.

Soon, people in Japan were beginning to enjoy the benefits of high economic growth, with electrical appliances such as black-and-white televisions, refrigerators and washing machines becoming must-haves. The restaurant was doing well, taking a flood of phone calls for delivery orders every day before lunchtime.

After working there for nearly a year, Hikari was asked to handle deliveries. But he couldn’t read the characters written on the delivery slips.

At first, he asked senior workers how to read each address and wrote down what he heard, using katakana letters, in a notebook. One day, having started to get used to the task, he left the restaurant to deliver sushi without checking the characters, thinking he was more or less sure where to go.

Usually a delivery only took about 20 minutes, but he had to walk to each house, comparing the nameplate with the slip, and still couldn’t find the house where he was supposed to make the delivery.

Eventually he found a tobacco store, showed the slip to a store clerk and was told where the house was. But the customer was furious. They yelled at him for making them wait for hours, said they didn’t want the sushi any more and told him to go away.

When he returned to the restaurant, the owner and senior workers shouted at him and scorned his inability to read. Hikari clenched his teeth, but tears welled up in his eyes. Even though the teachers wouldn't teach him, and everyone in the classroom had neglected him, he was filled with regret that he hadn't gone to school.

Aside from fleeting moments, Tamaki has little memory of ever spending time with his father at home, even when he was young. By that time, Hikari was busily engaged in the buraku liberation movement — campaigning for better education in their district, and the establishment of a 24-hour nursery.

After watching the video, Tamaki feels he now understands why his father was so serious about his campaign.

Realizing that facing those same ancestral roots was his destiny too, Tamaki asked his father what he himself should do from now on, and to teach him how he had campaigned. Hikari didn’t say much, only mentioning that Tamaki’s grandfather had also become involved in the liberation movement as he grew older.

Tamaki later learned that Hikari had said at the time the lecture in the video would be the only occasion on which he would ever speak publicly, and that his only motivation to share his life experiences was if it would be of help to others.

It was a century ago, in 1922, that the National Levelers’ Association (Zenkoku Suiheisha) was established in Kyoto to eradicate centuries-long discrimination against descendants of burakumin.

At the founding assembly of the association, on March 3, 1922, the members adopted the Suiheisha Declaration, which is regarded as Japan's first declaration of human rights.

The name Hikari means "light" in Japanese, and the same word is used in the last phrase of the Suiheisha Declaration:

“Let there be warmth in human society, let there be light in all human beings.”

This section features topics and issues from the Kyushu region covered by the Nishinippon Shimbun, the largest daily newspaper in Kyushu. The original article was published Dec. 30.