Employment beneath the Rising Sun:

Women Miners in Japan's Coal Industry

by Katie Anderson

Roundtable Discussion on Energy Supply and the Making of Modern East Asian History

from the 56th Annual Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs

Since the Meiji era, Japan has depended heavily on foreign resources and the technology from the

Western world. In the wake of rising Western powers, and for the need to present herself on par with

the West, Japan's national policy “to enrich the country and to strengthen the military” led to the open-

door policy for Western technology and institutions, which helped accelerate the transformation of

Japan from the labor intensive agrarian society to the machine-intensive and energy intensive industrial

society. The development of the coal industry played a pivotal role in Japan’s success of industrial

takeoff but it also caused adverse social affects.

This paper endeavors to provide an account of the discovery and supply of Japanese coal,

technological advances of the coal mining industry, and above all how those advances impacted female

labor in the coal mining industry. In the process of achieving the goals of economic and energy

independence in early 20th- century Japan, a large portion of Japanese women indeed made up the coal

mining labor force.

The steel and machine industries, essential to Japan's defense industry, relied heavily on the coal

mining industry. The types of coal which were most useful towards the development of the steel

industry, came from the mines in Kyushu, where coal mining may be traced at least to the 16th century

in the vicinity of Chikuho1. "By the end of the Tokugawa period2 the large-scale mining of Takashima

and Miike coal in the Chikuho and Karatsu regions, both on the big Kyushu island, were in operation."3

After the US Navy under Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open to Western intercourse, the

Tokugawa shogunate also sent skilled miners to begin excavation in the northern island of Hokkaido,

post-1854 as a means of providing fuel for foreign ships entering the port at Hakodate4. In addition to

1
Allen, Matthew, Undermining the Japanese Miracle: Work and Conflict in a Coal mining
Community, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994), 54.
2
Culter, Suzanne, Managing Decline: Japan's Coal Industry Restructuring and Community
Response, (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 1999), 35: The Tokugawa period lasted from 1603 to
1867.
3
Ibid, 35.
4
Ibid, 35.
the small amount of coal to meet the need for fuel, heat, and light, however, there was little production

of coal until after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The upsurge of industrial and technological growth,

beginning in the late 1860s, provided the impetus for finding more coal as the most efficient energy

source of the day.5 The Meiji government expanded the development of the coal industry by

employing Japanese engineers well trained in coal mining, in addition to introducing foreign experts

and technology in an effort both to establish large-scale government-owned mines and to support the

modernization of privately owned mines6. As early as 1869, coal mining was among the top agenda of

the Meiji government. The rapid development was reflected in the growth of Miike and Takashima

mines in Kyushu between 1874 and 1886, which accounted for nearly half of Japan's total coal

production7.

The need for fuel was further augmented as Japan became involved in the Sino-Japanese War8,

whereby China ceded the coal-rich island of Formosa to Japan, and then in the Russo-Japanese War9,

which led to the expansion of Japanese control of the coal and iron mines in Mandarin. Coal was the

primary fuel source powering munitions factories and the steel and shipbuilding industries10. Critically

important to its war efforts, coal production increased by 200%11 between 1931 and 1945.

An understanding of coal mines and female labor supply demands a brief account of coal

repositories and development in Japan, in addition to an analysis of the coal mines in Kyushu and

Hokkaido. In the northern island of Hokkaido, the Hokkaido Coal Mine Steamship Company Limited,

known as Hokutan, bought the Horonai mine as well as other coal mine sites. Until the mid 1900s,

Hokutan produced ninety percent of Hokkaido's coal output. As demand for coal increased, additional

small and medium sized privately owned coal mines were developed by local families, former mining

5
Allen, 55.
6
Ibid, 35.
7
Ibid, 36.
8
Sino-Japanese War, 1894-5.
9
Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5.
10
Allen, 56.
11
Ibid, 57.
engineers, foremen, and businessmen. By the early1900s, Hokkaido had attracted the zaibatsu

companies, which would run 90% of all coal mining in Hokkaido in the 1930s12.

The expansion of coal production meant changes for the living and working conditions of the

miners. In 1883, prison labor formed the core of Honorai's workforce13. Under Meiji government

management, the miners' work "consisted of extracting the coal and carrying it manually in a coal box

to a coal funnel in the main corridor or lowering a coal box in a cage to the corridor. A pair of porters

would then push a four-wheeled cart of the coal to the exterior of the pit, where it screened into lumps

and powder, with workers manually picking out the stones. Full scale mechanization of the mines,

which facilitated the use of electric power, did not come about until World War I."14

In Kyushu island, the governmental operation of the Miike coal mines in 1873 initially also

employed workers from the convict labor pool. After the sale to Mitsui interests in 1888, the practice

of using prison laborers was continued until 1933. 15 "The low labor costs resulting from the use of

convicts gave the government-operated mines an advantage over those privately run mines that did not

have ready access to convict labor."16 The government hired two groups of workers. The first group

had specialized skills and worked as foremen. Clerks and engineers were also hired in this way. The

second group was hired by the foreman to work in the mines. Workers from Korea were brought into

the Hokutan mines beginning in 191617.

Due to a lack of advances in coal removal techniques, the demands on workers were increased

by the mechanized conveyance system. As a result, burdens increased and working conditions

12
Culter, 37.
13
Ibid, 37.
14
Ibid, 38.
15
Hane, Mikiso, Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York:
Pantheon, 1982), 227.
16
Ibid, 228.
17
Cutler, 38.
Nishinarita, Yutaka, "Types of Female Labour and Changes in the Workforce, 1890 - 1945" in
Technology Change and Female Labor in Japan, ed. Masanori Nakamura (Tokyo: United Nations
University Press, 1994), 10 : The naya, or "stable system', emerged to supervise miner families.
The naya chief, whose duty it was to recruit miners provided bunk-houses for the miners and
supervised their daily lives.
deteriorated, and more rigorous labor management became necessary. The naya system was devised to

meet this need.

The naya foremen served as managers over miners in several ways. It was their responsibility

to recruit miners and to help settle them in bunk-houses, dormitories which had been in use since the

employment of prison laborers in the mines. The naya foreman or chief also allotted jobs, supervised

work and patrolled the mines. The availability of certain loans enabled the foremen to keep the

workers in 'virtual human bondage.'18 The new conveyance system greatly impacted the composition

of the workforce; mining as a seasonal occupation was no longer sufficient because the coal mining

industry had demanded a more consistent output. The Mitsui Tagawa mine began regular recruitment in

190619.

Mining processes during the industrial revolution relied on labor using simple tools. A common

working pattern involved a husband20 who dug the ore, and the wife assisted him by carrying away the

coal. Married women made up a large portion of the female workforce in the coal mining industry21.

As was the case in the Chikuho mine, the work contracts were between the foreman, the miner, and his

family22. At the mines in Chikuho, Kyushu in 1909, the percentage of miners with families who also

worked in the mines or supported the mines in some other way was 65.3% of all miners. Miners with

families were preferred because the morale of the workers was higher, and it was more efficient to have

men digging and women hauling. Thus, the industrial revolution promoted the employment of working

couples and families as the dominant pattern for recruitment, bringing women into the workforce."23

Social relations in the mining camps were essentially patriarchal and "women worked long and

18
Nishinarita, Yutaka “The Coal Mining Industry” in Technology Change and Female Labor in
Japan, ed. Masanori Nakamura (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1994), 62.
19
Ibid, 62.
20
Among coal mining couples, the husband comes from the Japanese 'sakiyama'. The term for
the husband's partner, or wife, was 'ayotama'. Both parties shared responsibilities in their small
mining teams.
21
Nishinarita, "Types of Female Labour and Changes in the Workforce, 1890 - 1945", 9-10.
22
Nishinarita, "The Coal Mining Industry", 62.
23
Ibid, 62.
exhausting hours." In addition to their mining jobs they also performed their household duties. The

heavy workload, in addition to working restrictions24, contributed to the decrease in working rates of

women miners25. Fewer women haulers increased the workload for the male diggers, which restricted

the management's dependence on the family recruitment system26.

Four mines in Kyushu27 employed women in the pits as haulers and sub-haulers. Mines also

employed women as coal dressers, whose range of work remained on the surface or exterior of the

mines. Working conditions at Miike were much better than the other mines because the coal seams

were deep and the work units consisted of a ratio of two diggers to two haulers, which did not conform

to the family recruitment pattern28. In contrast, the mines at Hokkaido employed very few women and

none worked underground29. The naya system was abolished in Hokkaido in the early part of the

industrial revolution and "recruitment or management of the mines was done directly by the mine

owners."30

Considering that the major mines in Kyushu produced eighty-six percent of the nation's coal in

1906, and that Hokkaido only produced ten percent, it is clear that women workers played a central role

in the Japanese coal mining industry31, for reasons that will become evident. Eighty percent of the

women working underground were married. This figure supports the claim that much of the mining

was carried out by working couples. Thirty-six percent of the coal dressing was performed by single

women under age twenty. Nearly sixty percent of the underground mine workers were employed as

miners for over five years. Thirty-seven percent of the coal dressers remained employed in the same

time span. Nishinarita reveals that coal dressing was a simple task that required no training, in

comparison to the demand for the mastery of the high level of skills necessary for the underground
24
Ibid, 62-3; working restrictions were placed on women. Women who were menstruating, for
example, were forbidden to enter the mine.
25
Ibid, 62-3.
26
Ibid, 65.
27
The four mines in Kyushu were Joban, Chikuho, Miike and Karatsu coal mines.
28
Nishinarita, “The Coal Mining Industry”, 65.
29
Ibid, 65-8.
30
Ibid, 68.
31
Ibid, 68-9.
workers to remain employed32.

Since the Tokugawa period, Japan supplied the coal mining industry with its criminal element

for the purpose of mining ore. During the Meiji era, the Japanese government continued that tradition

by transporting Koreans to the mining camps after Japan's annexation of Korea. Nishinarita provides a

statistical analysis that reveals how women were exploited as workhorses for the coal mining industry.

Coal miners had poor educational backgrounds. Seventy percent of women miners either had no

educational training or had not finished primary school. The figures support the low social status of

women miners in Japanese society, and cast a stigma upon them as denizens or criminal elements of

society. The proportion of miners who came from impoverished agrarian backgrounds was significant.

"Whole families had uprooted themselves and gone to work in the mines."33 Living conditions in the

bunkhouses were extremely poor. However, the wages were significantly high for women who worked

in the mines performing the job of pitman. Despite the hardship, it was the high pay that women

sought, and it is that which attracted them to work in the mines in the first place34. All households were

on a tight budget, but for the families of miner women, their households had the highest incomes. Thus,

underground workers endured debilitating hardships for a standard of living that was relatively higher

than their counterparts in the textile industry35.

Female labor in the coal mines attributed to the gross increase of Japanese coal. By the twenties,

Japan's mechanization efforts would speed up coal production exponentially. However, in lieu of the

demands for more machine technologies in the coal mining industry, machines would soon replace

female labor. Technological advancement in the mechanization of the coal mining industry were within

the conveyance system. Full scale mechanization of the mining process, however, did not begin until

the latter half of the 1920s36.

32
Ibid, 69.
33
Ibid, 72.
34
Ibid, 78.
35
Ibid, 78.
36
Ibid, 78.
 A chronic recession in the 1920s drove down the market price of coal. In 1920, type 1 Kyushu

coal37 cost 28.55 yen per ton and it later dropped to 20.20 yen per ton. After the establishment of the

Federation of Coal Industries in 1921, restrictions were placed on the amount of coal sent, and the price

per ton settled at over 16.00 yen. Tokyo prices for type 1 Kyushu coal, type 1 Iwaki coal, and Yuburi

coal continued to fall in 1922, which placed the entire industry in financial straits.

The Japanese Mining industry had grown to meet the domestic demand, and it sought to meet

export requirements as well. When coal was imported from Guandong Province, in Manchuria38, it had

been mined by cheap colonial labor and under the easier mining conditions of surface mining39. This

competition complicated the domestic industry worsening the recession and resulting in more intense

competition. This was the first major factor that helped accelerate the technological renovation of the

industry. A second factor was the enactment of protective legislation40. The prohibition of late-night

labor and underground work by women and minors "undermined the basic structure of the

workforce"41. The mine operators understood that the legislation would mean less frequent

opportunities for work. For the mine owners, however , “the removal of womena nd children from the

mines became an opportunity to implement technological changes to raise productivity and cut costs.”

Women and children, however, were allowed to work in pits with limited reserves at the supervisor's

approval.42 The prohibition of late night and underground work by the reform of the Rules for Relief

Miners and rationalization of the work process, which were "brought about by technology drastically

influenced the reduction of women workers."43 The proportion of women miners began to decrease in

1925. The drop was particularly prominent in underground workers between 1920 and 1931.

Japan also made significant advances in mining techniques. The primary technological advance

37
Type 1 Kyushu coal was also called moji.
38
The Fushun mine was located in the Guandong Province.
39
Nishinarita, “The Coal Mining Industry”, 78.
40
Ibid, 78-80.
41
The workforce was essentially the working couple and the family recruitment system.
42
Nishinarita, “The Coal Mining Industry”, 80.
43
Ibid, 85.
involved the mining method, essentially in the progression from the pillar to the long-wall method.

The pillar method required boring directly into coal seams, "leaving pillars in the resulting holes as

support." The long-wall method involved mining the coal along the entire seam or wall at a single

angle, while leaving pillars for support. Eventually the long-wall method was employed44. This method

was used earlier in mines with thin seams where geological pressures were controllable. Improvements

in filling also contributed to a long-term adoption of the long-wall method in thick and plied seams.

Consequently, it changed the work structure from small isolated teams to an enlarged workspace, group

work, and the use of machinery45. "The coal cutter and pick were made obsolete by the adoption of

mechanized tools."

The adoption of machinery was complicated with the pillar method and smaller workspaces, but

became more popular and efficient with the long-wall method. With the advent of blasting, another

technological improvement in the mining industry46, the demand for improvements in transport

mechanisms also increased drastically. The adoption of new equipment was widespread, and was more

efficient and cheaper than female labor47. Coal seams in Hokkaido were deep which led to a buildup of

methane gas, which caused deadly explosions, destroying both labor and facilities.48 The

implementation of new equipment was more cost effective than the risk of the loss and hiring of new

laborers. This was another reason for the adoption new machine equipment in the coal mines.

New machinery was implemented by 1926 in Hokkaido. Chikuho's new machinery was

concentrated in large-capital mines run by Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Meiji, and Kaijima Gomei. These

conclusions are supported by the statistics on production in the mines. From about the mid 1920s

through the 1930s, "the large mines established supremacy in productivity over the small ones." The

machines used for the coal mines in the 1920s were largely imported. By 1933, there was a sudden
44
Ibid, 80.
45
Ibid, 80-1.
46
Ibid, 81.
47
Ibid, 82: Other innovations included a switch from steam to electric power in slope mining and
the use of a coal washing machine to enhance the quality of coal production in the market.
48
Culter, 38-9.
increase in domestic machine production. In 1935, Japan was fifty percent self-sufficient49.

The decrease in women working on the surface was less noticeable than those working in the

deep mines. Since no technological advancements had been made in surface work, women were still in

high demand on the surface. Reforms were placed on the shift schedule from a four-shift to a three-

shift schedule, eliminating night shifts for women miners. Exceptions were also inculcated to

compensate the laborers in mines that had not adopted machine technologies at the rate of some of the

larger mines. These exceptions allowed women miners to continue working as haulers and sub-haulers.

There were larger populations of women miners in mines which were slower in the process of

modernization. For instance, Chikuho averaged sixty percent of female labor in the mines in 193150.

"Because of their inability to join the technological revolution the smaller mines were still dependent

on women and had not eliminated female labour at the rate the large mines had."51 Due to these

reforms and their exceptions that allowed female labor in the mines, four percent of Japan's pitmen

were still women52. The naya system was implemented originally to accommodate the recruitment of

women workers and whole families. As the female labor force declined, management of labor was

undertaken directly by the mine operators. By 1929 the naya system almost completely disappeared

from the major mines in Kyushu. 53

Nishinarita addresses that the women did not resist the loss of work in the mines. She suggests

that the women were encouraged to take subsidiary jobs. For instance, Mitsui's Miike Kogyosho

adopted a policy in 1928 to alleviate the pressures on miners by establishing a work-center where side

jobs such as manufacturing, weaving, sewing, and dynamite production were encouraged54. Secondly,

Japan's mining industries also promoted support for workers without jobs through welfare, educational,

49
Nishinarita, “The Coal Mining Industry”, 83-4.
50
Ibid, 87.
51
Ibid, 88.
52
Ibid, 86-7.
53
Ibid, 88-9.
54
Ibid, 91-2.
and cultural facilities and programs55.

The success that Japan enjoyed in its coal mining industry enabled Japan to direct its attention

to machine industries. The labor, for coal mining, however, was provided by the most overlooked of

Japanese citizens. Female labor fueled the coal mining industry. Japan's technological advancements

in coal mining machinery, as well as reforms for coal miners, eventually caused the removal of women

from the mines. But their work did not go without notice. Some mining corporations such as the Miike

coal mine set up programs and facilities to foster and support former miners, and helped them find

suitable supplementary forms of employment. The contrast between Kyushu and Hokkaido’s coal

mines reveal the important affects that modernization had on employment patterns in the coal mining

industry. They also show that Japan's restructuring of work allowances were granted to women who

worked in mines where technological advances were not so well grounded. Although machine

technology was replacing female labor, the use of both helped Japan to greatly increase its coal

production. Japan’s acquisition of knowledge and technology from the United States proved as

beneficial for the development of the machine industry as female labor had for the coal mining

industry. Their contributions, which were advantageous for the Japanese industrial revolution, identify

them as worthy subjects of further research concerning both women's studies and Japanese history.

55
Ibid, 92.
 Bibliography

Allen, Matthew. 1994, Undermining the Japanese Miracle: Work and Conflict in a Coal mining
Community. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Culter, Suzanne, 1999, Managing Decline: Japan's Coal Industry Restructuring and Community
Response, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.

Hane, Mikiso. 1982. Peasants, Rebels and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan. Pantheon, New
York.

Nishinarita, Yutaka, 1994,'Types of Female Labour and Changes in the Workforce, 1890 – 1945',
Technology Change and Female Labor in Japan, ed. Masanori Nakamura, 1-24. Tokyo: United
Nations University Press,

Nishinarita, Yutaka, 1994, "The Coal Mining Industry" in Technology Change and Female Labor in
Japan edited by Masanori Nakamura., United Nations University Press, Tokyo.