Burakumin, Japan's largest minority group, have been discriminated against throughout Japanese history for engaging in jobs that were considered to be defiling, e.g., slaughterers, tanners, and undertakers. Specifically, burakumin played the social and occupational roles despised by the majority Japanese, but those without which the Japanese society as a whole could not maintain its viable function, i.e., actual and symbolic processes of recycling whereby those which are dead and polluted were transformed into living and holy. In recent years, however, some burakumin scholars have begun to recast their identities; instead of examining the problem of being burakumin (the deficit model), they now look to burakugaku as the key to understanding the cultural development of larger Japanese society. This paper examines ways in which this new understanding suggests a paradigm shift from a dualistic-materialistic to a cosmic-ontological view of minority education in Japan and elsewhere. (Contains 2 footnotes.)