IT CAN NO longer be said that Burakumondai is ignored by overseas scholars working on Japan. In the last few years historians Amos, McCormack and Groemer, sociologist Bondy, social anthropologist Hankins, political scientist Tsutsui and scholar of cultural studies Cangia have each published English language monographs on different aspects of the issue. In addition, there are studies of the novels of Nakagami Kenji by Anne Helene Thelle, Anne McNight and Eve Zimmerman. Moreover in most cases these volumes are re-workings of their doctoral dissertations so we can expect more from them over the coming years. Apart from anything else this means that there is no reason any longer to omit the study of Buraku issues from university level courses about Japan due to a lack of high-quality scholarship written in English.

However, there is nothing in English that provides an overview of the history of the Buraku communities and their antecedents which is based on the most recent work published in Japan, nothing that can provide a place to start for the serious student of Japan interested in the Buraku issue. For this reason, I was delighted to be invited by Professors Teraki and Kurokawa to become a member of the small group that planned the publication of this current volume. The aim was to produce a general history of Buraku history that would make use of the most recent scholarly publications guided by the principle of making this work available to the general reader. It was always intended that the initial publication would be in Japanese because of the need for a new introductory volume based on the historical research that has developed rapidly in the first decades of the twenty-first century. But at the same time, it was also the intention that it would be translated into English to make it available to an international readership. This text is the result of that translation process. Precisely at a time when more is being produced about the issue in both languages it is important to ensure that those writing in both English and Japanese know what is being published in the other language. This volume is a first step in that direction.