ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to pay tribute both to the women who worked underground and to Morisaki Kazue and Idegawa Yasuko, recognized scholars on the exploitation of women in the Japanese workforce. It shows that what "modernization" did occur in the industry prior to the 1930s did not substantially affect the way the women worked and lived in the Japanese coalfields. Readers should be forewarned that many of my generalizations about the working lives of the female miners may not fully apply to the many outcaste women i.e., burakumin among them, nor to the much smaller number of Korean women living with their families at the collieries of North Kyushu. Discrimination against burakumin had been legally prohibited in 1871, but informal discrimination continued throughout the pre-1945 era and, despite government efforts at elimination, still persists today.
