ABSTRACT
There is considerable evidence of such feelings among Japanese coal miners, but solidarity was weakened by the divisions among ethnic and social groups as well as between individual workers and work gangs thrust into competition with each other. Matthew Allen writes of an institutionalised political powerlessness of Chikuho miners and a "culture of violence" that dominated relationships between mine management and miners. He also summarizes the main obstacles to resistance among Japanese coal miners as isolation, powerlessness, and dependence. The mining companies used carrot-and-stick methods to prevent worker solidarity. Allen has found a pattern of brutality and violence in colliery management's treatment of miners in a period later than ours. Most of the recollections of the retired female miners dealing with the period before 1930 similarly refer to the brutality of the bosses in forcing people to work and in trying to deter absconding.
