This is a book about a Japanese coalmining community. In particular it is a book about the people of the coalmines, and their struggle to achieve a dignified identity in a rapidly changing society that has no use for coalminers. Although coal is no longer mined in Chikuho, the region where the study was conducted, the legacy of the coal years is omnipresent. People still live in rundown coal villages (tanjū), where slag-heaps abound (many now covered with vegetation), and poverty and isolation are still characteristics of the existence of those who worked in the coalmines. In some of the older tanjū, where the naya seido (the barn-like ‘long houses’) still stand, the neighbourhood structure has remained intact, and although newcomers move into the villages as former residents die or move away, the social cohesion of the coal years endures to some extent within this system. This is reinforced by the impression, transmitted to locals and outsiders alike, that the coal villagers are different to the rest of society. In turn, this is reinforced by the geographical isolation of the villages.

At the present time the mining communities are populated by a cross-section of urban poor. Not only coalminers and their families, but also welfare recipients, relatives of miners, and some minorities inhabit the tanjū.