ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Korean women's distinctive place in Japanese mining and what it means for people concerned with gender and ethnicity in the workplace today. It is concerned with the Chikuho coal field, Japan's most important during most of the modern period. Korean women coal miners in Japan were a small group – truly a minority within a minority – that has received little scholarly attention. Most Korean miners were men, but Korean women worked in and on Japanese coal mines from 1920 through 1945. Even at their peak in around 1928, they numbered only some 500 but had a distinct occupational distribution. Most Korean women in pre-war Japan were there primarily to perform reproductive labour, so they faced a heavy burden of housework. Korean women's experience in and at the Japanese mines shows that it is not enough to analyze work and life in mining communities from the standpoint of either gender or ethnicity alone.
