UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the role of the arts in Chikuhō, a former coal mining region in the northern central part of Kyūshū, which is Japan’s most southerly island. From the Late Nineteenth Century, coal mines proliferated in Chikuhō and greater Kyūshū, fueling Japan’s industrial modernization and imperial expansion. A petro-capitalist thirst for oil, the “energy revolution” as it is often called in textbooks, brought about the closure of coal mines in Chikuhō and elsewhere in Japan, starting in the late 1950s as part of a nationwide “coal rationalization plan.” While the evacuation of coal from Kyūshū provided its landscape with an opportunity to regenerate organic growth and decreased the amount of toxic industrial runoff that seeped into crops, for example, it also initiated trends of marked depopulation. The paucity of surviving industries and companies in Chikuhō contributed significantly to a languishing of the regional economy. I analyze the role of the arts in shaping historical consciousness in Chikuhō with regard to coal’s legacy and imagining a path forward for the community after coal. This study foregrounds the tensions inherent to articulations of ethnicity, gender, and class within the concentric frames of regional and national belonging during and after coal’s regional reign. I analyze Chikuhō’s role in formulating alternative mobile networks of artists, theater troupes, activists, and intellectuals invested in labor, gender, and minority experience from the 1930s as the Japanese imperialist agenda intensified and the arts-political Left questioned the nation’s trajectory. My study tracks regional arts activism in connection with national postwar grassroots democracy movements and into the Twenty-first Century as well, as art becomes a way of challenging historical consciousness and generating opportunities for representation and mutual aid after the evacuation of coal. I argue that region (as shared identity and pendant visuality) takes form through mobility: that of laborers and their families (domestically and from Japan’s wartime colonies); visual artists and theater troupes; and artistic styles and fashions. Coal miners and their families move in and out of Chikuhō in time with imperial military and industrial campaigns. Artists likewise move into or out of the region, carrying artistic styles and cultural practices with them. Activists interested in the emancipation of the proletarian laborer, the rights and experiences of women and minority communities, and the environmental and economic implications of coal’s rise and fall in Chikuhō visit or take up residence for a spell. Precisely because regional visuality exists in relationship to this mobility, Chikuhō—as a shifting field of images, actors, and articulated identity—intervenes in stubbornly static narratives of Japan’s industrial modernization and colonial expansion. The arts equip regional activists to question collective memory and negotiate a place for the region in and against (inter)national narratives of industrial modernization.