Who are the Burakumin as noted in the novel, My Brother, My Sister, and I?

Burakumin, Watkins explains, are social outcasts, labeled by some as four-legged animals or dirty people. By order of the Shogun in twelfth-century Japan, they were forced out of the village communities and into small shacks, relegated to jobs such as digging graves and butchering animals, and excluded from attending prestigious schools or marrying outside their social stratum.