Racism and inequality are as American as apple pie and mass shootings. We like to think that some of those foreign countries we constantly make fun of might be more civilized places. What could possibly be wrong with a nation that gives its citizens universal healthcare and paid parental leave? Well, if you happen to belong to one of the minority groups those countries have arbitrarily chosen to hate, you're about to find out.

6 In Japan, Some Common Occupations Are Viewed As Subhuman

Garbage collectors are criminally underappreciated everywhere, but Japan takes it to the next level. Sure, you might have a few strong words if your bin gets skipped, but Japanese sanitation workers are ostracized simply for existing. They -- along with other "unclean" workers, like butchers and undertakers -- are categorized as burakumin. Shintoism and Buddhism consider them spiritually tainted, which left them at the bottom of the social totem pole for centuries. They're sometimes called hinin (literally "nonhuman"), and the term for the lowest burakumin, eta, translates to "abundance of filth." A 19th-century legal document declares that any eta who committed a crime could be killed freely by samurai, because "an eta is worth one-seventh of an ordinary person." You ever had someone whip out a calculator and determine your worth mathematically? It's hurtful. (We had some harsh math teachers.)

Utagawa Kuniyoshi

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Despite many attempted remedies, prejudice against burakumin and their descendants persists. Burakumin are shunned by society and typically forced to live in their own communities, which are inundated with hate mail. Lists of burakumin communities and names began circulating in the '70s and were soon outlawed, but some of those lists have survived to this day, and people use them to screen everything from potential employees to future in-laws. Keep in mind, they're not just checking to see if (gasp) their daughter is marrying a garbage man. Anyone who has ever been related to one is off-limits. That's about 50 percent of the Japanese population. It's like an entire nation of Emily Gilmores.

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Things are getting a bit better. One high-profile buraku activist says people are contacting his organization about discrimination more, and hate speech laws are starting to be enforced. But to this day, if a buraku is asked what they do for a living, it's common to lie -- not out of shame, but to protect their own children.

Nesnad/Wikimedia Commons

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Hug your local sanitation worker.