Sometimes forgotten issues, people or stories come up from oblivion and awake something in the collective imagination. Sometimes also 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).

Written by Scilla Alecci

This post is part of our special coverage Japan Earthquake 2011.

Written by Andy Yee

By Paulina Aguilera Muñoz · Translated by Stephen Cairns · View original post [es]