Nippon Mining Company (Japan Mining Co.)

Nippon Mining Company (日本鉱業, Nihon Kōgyō) was one of Japan's leading mining conglomerates. Its origin was the Hitachi copper mine in Ibaraki, bought by Kuhara Fusanosuke in 1905; Kuhara Mining was founded in 1912 and built smelters at Hitachi and Saganoseki. After running into difficulties following the First World War, the business was taken over in 1928 by Ayukawa Yoshisuke and reorganised as the holding company Nippon Sangyō (Nissan); the mining division became Nippon Mining in 1929, a core firm of the Nissan zaibatsu. In the 1930s it also moved into oil production and refining in Akita.

The Jinguashi (Kinkaseki) mine in north-eastern Taiwan had been worked since 1896 by Tanaka Chōbei's Tanaka-gumi, later reorganised as Kinkaseki Mining Co. This site's earlier text states that Nippon Mining acquired the concession in 1925; Chinese-language sources record the purchase in 1933, when operations were reorganised as Taiwan Kōgyō K.K. (Taiwan Mining Company). Under its management the flotation and smelting works at Shuinandong were enlarged and a dedicated railway built; gold output peaked in 1938 and Jinguashi became Asia's most productive gold mine and the Japanese Empire's largest copper mine.

During WWII, the company cooperated with the military in utilising forced POW labour at the adjacent Kinkaseki camp, opened in November 1942. The first 523 prisoners, British and Commonwealth soldiers captured at Singapore, arrived via Keelung on November 14; with later transfers more than a thousand men passed through. They mined copper in the deep levels of the Honzan No. 6 tunnel amid heat and frequent rockfalls, with inadequate food and medical care and beatings by supervisors, and Kinkaseki had the highest death toll of the POW camps on Taiwan. Mining stopped in March 1945 and the survivors were moved to a camp in the hills near Xindian until the surrender.

Following Japan's defeat, nine Nippon Mining employees were tried for cruelty and mistreatment of prisoners of war, and the British War Crime Court Number Five in Hong Kong convicted eight of the nine on 28 May 1947, holding the company and not only the army responsible for abuse in the mine. The mine was taken over by the Republic of China government and run as the Taiwan Metal Mining Company until 1987. A memorial was erected on the camp site in 1997 and a memorial park opened in 2005. Nippon Mining merged with Kyōdō Oil in 1992; its oil and metals businesses now belong to the ENEOS and JX Metals groups.