THE ASHIO RIOT OF 1907 and Office Ladies and Salaried Men are two works that appear to have little in common. Kazuo Nimura's historical study considers the world of tough Japanese copper miners, all of them men, who rioted nearly a century ago while Yuko Ogasawara's sociological exploration of contemporary Japanese clerical workers focuses on the corporate "office flowers," women usually described as defenceless and perennially exploited. But these differences in time, place, and subject should not divert us from appreciating the common themes and preoccupations evident in these engaging case studies. Indeed, together these works suggest much about where Japanese labour studies have been during the postwar period and where they are headed today. Of the.two works, Nimura's is the most self-consciously revisionist. His study of the three-day Ashio riots explicitly challenges the ideas of three influential shapers of Japanese labour history. Nimura claims that the first, Maruyama Masao, presented a distorted image of Japanese workers as so thoroughly atomized that they were "not human beings acting on their own volition... but mere bodies, acted upon from without." (43) Nimura assails his second target, the labour historian Okochi Kazuo, for espousing a similarly static "migrant labour theory." According to Nimura, Oko-