Indeed, there are cases where areas inhabited by senmin in the early modern period can be identified as current Buraku. F-chō in Hiroshima City, which is often mentioned, is one such example. However, such examples are rare. There are very few cases where it can be evidenced that a current Buraku is, without doubt, as described in, for example, some kind of early modern document. In short, such an argument based on the extension of the early modern period has so little data to disprove it that it is doubtful that it can even be established as an academic discipline. I believe that there is little evidence to suggest that those studies are from the early modern or medieval lowland system and not of the Buraku issue.

The feudal residuum interpretation of the Buraku issue, with the Comintern Thesis of 1932 (so-called Thesis of 32) as a distant cause, stipulates that “the coming revolution in Japan will be a bourgeois democratic revolution with a tendency towards a forced conversion to a socialist revolution” and reassigns the solution to the Buraku problem to a simple democratization. Such arguments confine the Buraku to the space of the past and make them oblivious to actual discrimination. It plays the same role as the feudal residuum, which was seen as something that would naturally dissolve with the development of capitalism.

In the Buraku issue, the discourse of “being a feudal residuum” has become an ideology. The apparatus of academism, by continually “addressing” on the Burakumin to believe that the Buraku issue is a feudal residuum forms the consensus of the Burakumin themselves, who are the parties concerned, and makes Burakumin subjectify this discourse. It is often the case that they believe that they are the descendants of the eta and hinin, as the author has shown on several occasions, such as the Burakumin in Kure City and Maizuru City who were established after the modern period. Therefore, it is the materialization of the feudal residuum theory as an ideology that is sometimes protested against when it is criticized. This means that the Buraku issue (research) has dragged on the perceptions of the Kōza school, which argued that the Meiji Restoration did not completely dissolve feudal land ownership and gave rise to loan shark capitalist parasitic landlords, and the Rō nōha school, which argued that the Meiji Restoration was already a bourgeois revolution. This is thought to have given rise to a theory of reality or historical reductionism that is detached from reality.

Discrimination may have existed in any society in any period. It may have existed in the Medieval period and in the early modern period. The reason for stating this in the hypothetical or inferred form is that the author has not experienced discrimination outside the modern period. There are crucial differences between modern people and those of the medieval and early modern periods. The difference is that in modern societies a modern individual is established among people. The discrimination we are concerned with is the discrimination felt by the modern self. Whether or not the senmin or the discriminated of each period are connected to today is actually not a very big issue. The discrimination that modern society is concerned with is the discrimination that the modern self feels painfully, in other words, it is about the problems for each “I am” or ego that is discriminated against in capitalist society.