Coal-Mining Women in Japan: Heavy Burdens by W. Donald Burton is a compilation of interviews and detailed accounts of women miners’ lives that have been documented in the published works of several Japanese authors, namely Hi o Unda Hahatachi (Mothers Who Spawned the Fires) by Yasuko Idegawa, and Makkura: Jokōfu kara no Kikigaki (Pitch Black: Interviews with Women Miners) by Kazue Morisaki.
The book details the difficult conditions experienced by women working in several coal mines located in Fukuoka prefecture in southern Japan between the beginning of the Meiji era in 1868 and the early years of industrialization in the 1930s. Burton sets the tone from the outset in saying that the book is “a story about the exploitation of human labor,” and that it “aims to pay tribute both to the women who worked underground” and also to the two Japanese authors Idegawa and Morisaki...
