The Supreme Court has finalized a lower court ruling ordering a publisher to delete its lists of areas where people discriminated against as descendants of the country's feudal outcasts live or had lived.
In the lawsuit filed by people from such areas and the antidiscrimination group Buraku Liberation League, the Tokyo High Court in June 2023 ordered the publisher in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, to delete from a related website the areas where most of the individual plaintiffs are from. The plaintiffs said in the suit that the publication of the lists violated their personal rights.
The high court ruling was finalized by the Supreme Court's Third Petty Bench on Wednesday, with all five justices supporting it.
According to the rulings of the high court and Tokyo District Court, the company announced in 2016 that it would publish a reprinted version of a pre-World War II survey listing areas where descendants of feudal outcasts lived. It published the lists of the areas on the website.
In its September 2021 ruling, the district court determined that publishing the lists did not serve the public's interest and violated people's privacy. It prohibited the publication and ordered the lists of areas in 25 of 47 prefectures be deleted.
After the ruling was appealed, the Tokyo High Court in the 2023 verdict said that the publisher violated the plaintiffs' personal rights and expanded the scope of the prohibition of publication and the deletion to areas in 31 prefectures.
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