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Japan: Sanka, Legendary Gypsies Living in the Wild  This post is
part of our special coverage Indigenous Rights.  Sometimes
forgotten issues, people or stories come back from oblivion and
awake something in the collective imagination. Sometimes too,
the protagonists in those stories become part of a legend, whose
historical origins are difficult to track down.  This is more or
less what happened to a group of people who are said to have
lived in the remote mountains and plains of the Japanese
archipelago until the 1970s. They are the Japanese gypsies or
Sanka [ja], written as 山家 (people of the mountains) or 山窩
(mountains nomads).  What brought the existence of this group of
people – seemingly never registered by any government - back to
some people’s minds was a documentary by public broadcaster NHK
[ja] a few months ago.  Like some classical western literature
which lingers on the