strange places where he had worked, the odd customs he had observed in other parts of Japan and the efforts of workers to improve their conditions, we felt that we were being lifted out of the prisons of our narrow lives.
His lively eyes shone as he described life underground in the Aso mines where he had formerly worked. “To get to the first pit, you go down a hundred and fifty feet in the cage. Then down you go another hundred and fifty feet to the next pit. There are twelve pits altogether. In the bottom pit the temperature was nearly a hundred degrees just from the heat of the earth. There was a whole lot of us working down there. The air was pumped down from the pit-head. But after you’d been down there a while, it got so damned hard to breathe your lungs were fit to burst. I was in the war and I can tell you that to spend eight hours down there in that mine was worse than twenty-four hours under enemy fire.
“And don’t let them tell you mining isn’t dangerous! Down there you’re at the mercy of machines and they’re always going wrong. One of the fellows I knew was pulling a loaded trolley on to the elevator. At least he thought the elevator was there but something had gone wrong and instead he stepped backwards into the empty shaft and went shooting down hundreds of feet with the loaded trolley on top of him. You could hear him screaming right down to the bottom.
“You see, the strain down there makes you careless in the end. Lots of the fellows get blown to smithereens by the dynamite they’ve planted themselves. Sometimes they even knock down the props when they’re working and get buried alive.
“But I’ll tell you something funny. While you’re down there in the mine, you’re so busy with your work, you’re so damned glad you haven’t had an accident yourself and trying so hard to watch out in the future, that you don’t have time to worry about anything else. It’s when you come out on the surface after a day’s work that you start thinking. You see
