Coal-Mining Women in Japan

Heavy Burdens

W. Donald Burton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317800415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and markets intensively, making substantial profits without the burdens of extensive mechanization.

This unique book explores the lives of the thousands of women who labored underground in Japan's coal mines in the years 1868 to 1930. It examines their working lives, their family lives, their aspirations, achievements and disappointments. Drawing heavily on interview material with the miners themselves, W. Donald Burton combines translations of their stories with features of Japanese society at the time and coal mining technology. In doing so, he presents a complex account of the women's lives, as well as providing a keen insight intoon gender relations and the industrial and labor history of Japan.

Coal Mining Women in Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars of Japanese history, gender studies and industrial history.

1 Background

DOI: 10.4324/9781315813066-2

Akai entotsu o meate de yukeba

Kome no manma ga abarekui.

If you seek out the red chimney,

You can feed on rice to your heart’s content.¹

Although many of the women came to the “red chimney” of the collieries from other parts of western Japan, we will deal here mainly with their working lives in the major coal-mining districts of the Chikuho region. This region comprises the traditional provinces of Chikuzen and Buzen in what is now Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu, in southwestern Japan. In the valleys and on the slopes of mountains drained by the tributaries and the main branch of the Onga River, production at the Chikuho coal mines increased through the Meiji period (1868–1912). Eventually these mines put out more coal than the other coal regions combined and employed up to half of all the coal miners in Japan.²

During the first two decades of Meiji, however, the Hizen region (particularly Takashima and other islands off Nagasaki Harbor and the northern part of what is now Saga Prefecture around Karatsu) produced more coal than Chikuho.³ The location of the early Karatsu region coal mines on the slopes of the low mountains surrounding the coastal plains made mining relatively easy there, the evacuation of underground water being a simple matter of collecting and removing it at a level below the mining face.⁴ Much of the water removal work was done by women. Easy access to the coal inhibited the application of modern methods of mining in the region, according to documents cited by Sumiya Mikio. In other regions, similar methods of hewing and hauling in “badger burrows” that exploited the poorer seams of the Karatsu and Chikuho region persisted into the post-Meiji era.

Even the best seams around Karatsu, reserved for the steamships of the new Imperial Navy, were poor in quality and size compared to those of the Chikuho region. In the era of the greatest expansion of the industry as a whole, the Karatsu seams were not able to sustain the large-scale production desired by the government and by entrepreneurs. Because of limitations on its size and coal reserves, the Ube field in Yamaguchi Prefecture (on the western end of Honshu—the mainland) would never yield much more than five per cent of Japan’s output of coal, and this proportion would drop below four per cent in the latter half of Meiji (1890–1912).⁵ Underground hauling methods developed in the Karatsu region and used by the female hauliers in the coal mines of Chikuho would continue to be used around Ube and at other small coalfields throughout the period of this study.

Sumiya argues that the development of more modern methods for dealing with underground water in the Chikuho region, as well as at the large Takashima and Miike coal mines, made possible the much faster expansion of coal mining after the late 1880s.⁶ As they were more commonly at or below the water table than mines in the Karatsu region, the rich mines in the Chikuho valleys presented greater water removal problems.⁷ In the feudal period before 1868, women had been involved in the manual winding of long wooden screws and bucket chains that brought water to the surface from drift shafts in copper, gold and silver mines.⁸ In the few open-pit coal mines sunk in the early Meiji period, a balance-pole device called a tsurube, or, alternatively, a simple windlass such as that used in water wells in England and other countries, lifted buckets of water as well as coal from the mines. These too were often operated by women, though physical strength was essential for such work. It was not until the widespread application of steam power to windlasses and water pumps in the 1890s, however, that the more efficient removal of water and coal from vertical shafts at the Kyushu coal mines enabled a substantial increase in production at the bigger mines. Steam power also resulted in the loss of specialized jobs for women as well as outcaste people in the “water gangs.”⁹ In the smaller coal mines of Chikuho, the collection and removal of water continued to consume the manual labor of both men and women, at least until unmanageable accumulations closed them. Such closures were a frequent occurrence.¹⁰

At the same time that the Chikuho region became prominent in the production of coal—that is, the last half of the Meiji period—another region along the Pacific Coast in northeastern Japan was developing as a coal-producing center. This was the Joban region around the town of Hitachi, which much later generated the modern industrial giant of the same name. In a more constricted geographical area than the Chikuho mines, the Joban mines never produced the quantities of coal that their Kyushu counterparts put out, nor, consequently, employed such large numbers of women.¹¹ Although mining in the Joban coalfield had fewer problems with underground water than did the Chikuho fields, extraction methods in the smaller mines of the two regions were remarkably similar.

A third region of large-scale coal production, the northern island of Hokkaido, began development in the post-Restoration era after 1868. But labor had to be imported from the other main islands, and the number of women involved in underground work there was limited. The management of Mitsubishi and Hokutan (the Hokkaido Colliery and Steamship Company) acquired the captive labor of male convicts as a major “source of energy” for their initial ventures in southern and central Hokkaido. As limitations on the stamina and dedication of virtual slave labor became apparent, however, management recruited ever-larger numbers of migrant (dekasegi) workers from the impoverished northeastern region of the main island, Honshu, and gradually from even more distant locations. Although the administration of Hokkaido induced poor farm families to come to the island to open up less intensive cultivation than that on the mainland, the private coal companies did not recruit women for their coal-mining ventures on the same scale as they did elsewhere.¹² Hence, males did much of the underground hauling work. The dormitory housing of bachelors, inherited from the system for housing convicts, was cheaper than the housing and provisioning required for families. However, a small pool of female labor was created from immigrants to the island, and teams of sorting-women were organized for the surface labor of sorting and cleaning the coal. Although the work and contribution of sorters certainly deserve recognition, our story is mainly about the work and lives of female underground miners; therefore, female surface labor will not be dealt with here.¹³

Number of women in mining

Women in Japanese mining numbered fewer than those in textiles in the period of our study—from the 1880s to the 1930s. Textile mills used many more female workers than males.¹⁴ In 1902, there were some 180,000 women working in cotton and silk mills throughout the country. By 1924, nearly 600,000 women worked in the textile factories. The number of women in mining, meanwhile, was relatively small—some 65,000 worked in the coal mines in 1924,¹⁵ roughly one-tenth as many as in textile mills. But this represented a decline from earlier in that decade. Even after the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations and tables
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Background
• 2 Work and wages
• 3 Working conditions
• 4 Their life trajectory
• 5 The daily routine
• 6 Solidarity, divisions, bondage, and resistance
• 7 Common seams, common attitudes
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index