History of Discriminated Buraku Communities in Japan

"At the heart of modern Japan there remains an intractable and divisive social problem with its roots in pre-history, namely the ongoing social and state discrimination against the D℗ ́wa communities, otherwise known as Buraku. Principally identified with ʻ́ úncleanʻ́ ́work linked to the leather industry and Japanʻ́ ś abbatoirs and meat processing factories, their resulting marginalization and isolation within society as a whole remains a veiled yet contested issue. Buraku studies, once largely ignored within Japanʻ́ ś academia and by scholarly publishers, have developed considerably in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as the extensive bibliography provided here clearly demonstrates, thereby ensuring that the authors of the present study (2016), translated by the Oxford scholar Ian Neary, have been able to access the most recent data. Because of its importance as the first broadly-based Buraku history, a wider readership was always the authorsʻ́ ́principal focus. Yet, it also provides a valuable source book for further study by those wishing to develop their knowledge about the subject from an informed base. This history of the Buraku communities and their antecedents is the first such study to be published in English"--