At the heart of modern Japan there remains an intractable and divisive social problem with its roots in pre-history, namely the ongoing social discrimination against the D?wa communities, otherwise known as Buraku. Their marginalization and isolation within society as a whole remains a veiled yet contested issue. Buraku studies, once largely ignored within Japan’s academia and by scholarly publishers, have developed considerably in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as the extensive bibliographies of both Japanese and English sources provided here clearly demonstrates. The authors of the present study published in Japanese in 2016 and translated here by the Oxford scholar Ian Neary, have been able to incorporate this most recent data. Because of its importance as the first Buraku history based on this new research, a wider readership was always the authors’ 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.

Soeda’s story provides insights into the last thousand years of Japanese history. It was the location of a strategically important castle, Ganjakujo, from the twelfth century until its destruction by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587. Ganjakujo controlled access to Mt Hiko which was the most important Shugend. monastic community in Kyushu until its dissolution in the 1870s. Coal mines in Soeda in the first half of the twentieth century owned by the Kurauchi family drove the modernization of the town and contributed to the industrialization of the country. During the Pacific war, these mines employed Korean labourers and Allied POWs. The town continued to contribute to national economic growth in the 1950s but, following the switch to oil as the main source of energy, its coal mines closed in the 1960s. For forty years between 1971–2010, Mayor Yamamoto Fumio sheltered the town from the worst impact of being ‘left behind’, yet the town continues to seek a new identity in the twenty-first century.