ABSTRACT

My intention, then, is to examine the conditions in which the coalminers lived and worked, and to emphasise not the direct involvement of the state, but rather its absence in matters that would, in other circumstances, have come under the general rubric of social control agencies. That the industry was so productive throughout the interwar period is indeed testimony to the success of the methods employed by the companies, without the strictures of state-led bureaucracies to confound them. In particular, the system of accommodation/incarceration is noteworthy, and I hope to draw out the at times rather nebulous links between labour controls in interwar Japanese coalmines, the panoptic experience described by Foucault, and postwar labour control mechanisms.