Mitsui Mining Company
三井鉱山株式会社
Major Japanese mining corporation and subsidiary of the Mitsui zaibatsu. Operated the Miike Coal Mine from 1889 to 1997, employing convict labor, conscripted Korean and Chinese workers, and Allied POWs during WWII.
History
Mitsui Mining Company (三井鉱山) was the mining arm of the Mitsui zaibatsu, one of Japan's most powerful industrial conglomerates. It began with the privatisation of the state-run Miike Coal Mine: Mitsui won the government tender in 1888 and took over in 1889, hiring the former government engineer Dan Takuma to run it. Mitsui Mining was set up as a partnership in 1892 and became a joint-stock company in 1911, one of the three pillars of the zaibatsu with Mitsui Bank and Mitsui & Co. Dan installed large drainage pumps and built Miike Port and a dedicated railway, making Miike Japan's largest coal mine; the company also ran the Tagawa and Yamano collieries in Fukuoka, Sunagawa in Hokkaido and the Kamioka metal mine in Gifu.
Coercion ran through Miike's labour history. Convicts had been used under state management and the company continued to use convict labor from 1889 until the early 1930s. After 1939, as miners were drafted, its mines relied on workers mobilised from Korea and, later in the war, Chinese labourers brought to Japan by force, as well as Allied prisoners of war. From 1943 Fukuoka POW Camp No. 17 at Ōmuta held American, Dutch, British and Australian prisoners who worked at Miike; with about 1,700 men at the end of the war it was one of the largest POW camps in Japan, and its staff were tried at the Yokohama Class B and C war crimes trials.
After the war Miike remained a symbol of Japan's energy industry. The Miike dispute of 1960, triggered by targeted dismissals, was the largest labour conflict of postwar Japan, and a coal-dust explosion in the Mikawa pit on November 9, 1963 killed 458 miners and left many survivors with carbon-monoxide poisoning. As Japan turned to oil and imported coal the company continued operations until the mine's final closure in March 1997; Mitsui Mining was renamed Nippon Coke & Engineering in 2009.
The Miyanohara and Manda pits, the former railway and Miike Port were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2015 as components of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution. At inscription Japan's representative stated that measures would be taken to explain that many Koreans and others had been forced to work under harsh conditions, and how this is presented has remained under international scrutiny. Memorials to convicts, Korean and Chinese labourers and POWs stand at sites in Ōmuta and Arao.