ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with working lives of Japanese female underground miners in the major coal-mining districts of the Chikuho region. This region comprises the traditional provinces of Chikuzen and Buzen in what is now Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu, in southwestern Japan. Nishinarita Yutaka has presented a table to outline the composition of the underground coal-mining workforce in the late Meiji period. The statistics show that in 1906 almost 20,000 women worked at the major coal mines throughout Japan, compared to 62,000 men. Nishinarita notes that, in 1910, in the three major coalfields of Joban, Chikuho and Karatsu, married couples made up of a male hewer and a female haulier comprised, respectively, 38.3, 39.9, and 33.9" of those involved directly in mining. Yasukawa Junosuke, following the memoirs of Matsumoto Kichinosuke, a coal miner and leader in the Suihei-sha movement of the 1920s aimed at liberating the outcaste burakumin, tells how discrimination persisted in coal-mining areas in the Meiji and Taisho periods.
