A significant amount of research on the Buraku issue has been conducted by overseas researchers in the past. Their academic interest is diverse including, for instance, Japanese history and culture, cultural anthropology, sociology and education. They have analyzed from their respective perspectives this unique form of discrimination originating in the status system developed in the feudal days of Japan.

However, the studies conducted by overseas researchers in the 1950’s and the 60’s had a general tendency to focus on the peculiarity of the Buraku issue by defining it as an exotic issue in Japan. Survey sample was not truly representative of the Buraku population, and the research did not properly reflect the concerns of the Buraku liberation movement that was emerging in those days.  Among studies that discussed psychological aspects of Buraku people, we find discriminatory analyses which portrayed Buraku people as ‘hypersensitive.’

However, as the Buraku Liberation Research Institute (currently ‘BLHRRI’) began to publish its English newsletter regularly in the early 1980’s, an international network of researchers on the Buraku issue began to develop. The newsletter introduced relevant research data and findings to overseas researchers regularly, and the BLHRRI actively responded to inquiries from abroad and assisted overseas researchers when they conducted field research in Japan.

The BLHRRI has built academic data base and accumulated research findings on the Buraku issue in such a way as to represent the perspectives and concerns of Buraku people and their movement. The fact that such an international research network has been formed around the BLHRRI provides necessary conditions to look at the Buraku issue ‘now’ and ‘in the future’ internationally from a new perspective. Recently, interdisciplinary and comparative studies by Japanese researchers have been growing. Such new approaches include, for example, redefining Buraku discrimination as an instance of ‘discrimination based on occupation and descent,’ reexamining the achievements and remaining issues of Dowa education from the perspective of human rights education in the world, and reanalyzing the role of middle class in minority groups.

In the workshop and symposium, we discussed the Buraku issue not only as the Buraku issue, but from the perspective of the roles to be played by minority middle-class, process of identity transformation among minority people, and the mechanism by which minorities are created. These analyses were made by comparing the case of Buraku and other minority populations. Together with invited researchers from the United States, India, the Republic of Korea and the Philippines who have studied Buraku and other minority issues, we hope that we have been successful in ‘sowing seeds’ for expanding the new international collaborative research network further.

The BLHRRI celebrated its 40th anniversary in August this year, and the preparatory work began as early as the end of last year. I hope that the workshop has been the venue for sharing important findings on ‘Present Day Buraku Issues’ among researchers, especially young researchers, by learning from the achievements of recent studies both domestically and internationally, and that the workshop has helped consolidate the foundations for accelerating the construction of international network of research on the Buraku issue.