ABSTRACT

In the daily routines of families living at the mine-head, the women took the leading roles. Their accommodations might vary in their home villages, but their routines and the roles of women were similar at their villages and in the mining camps. Mashio Etsuko describes the arrangement of the tenements at a mine-head village in the northeast, an arrangement typical of Kyushu coal camps. Yamamoto Sakubei says that by 1920, miners at bigger mines were housed in units of two rooms of four-and-a-half and three mats in area, with a closet divided between two units. No matter how generous the mining companies claimed to be in attempting to attract workers to the mines, inadequate housing continued to be a major factor in high labor turnover. A common morning task was to fetch water because in early days at most mines, it was not piped into the lodgings. The practice of sharing food, even rice, was common.