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Abstract
This article investigates the complex relations between heritage and memory through an analysis of the UNESCO World Heritage ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution’ and its component Miike coal mine. When discussing this World Heritage Site, scholars and the media have focused on the diplomatic controversy over the history of forced labour between Japan and South Korea, interpreting it as a new example of a dispute over history in East Asia. However, this understanding oversimplifies the relations between heritage and memory. Based on fieldwork research and documentary analysis, this article investigates the diversity and complexity of the collective memory of Miike coal mine from a local perspective. The results show that there is a sharp dissonance between the World Heritage story and some of the ex-miners’ memories, which focus on the negative past, fu no isan. Documentary analysis shows that fu no isan has two different but closely related meanings: negative legacy and negative heritage. Fieldwork research reveals that the various commemorations of fu no isan in the local community, mainly based on ex-miners’ social networks, constitute a form of vernacular memory, independent from the official memory of the World Heritage. Finally, I conclude that heritage can be public memory, rather than just official memory, as long as it is open to plural memories of the past.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
Notes
1 Industrial heritage is a relatively new category. The idea of conserving industrial sites and artefacts appeared and spread in Britain in the 1950s, along with the development of industrial archaeology. Associations dedicated to the research and promotion of industrial heritage have been founded since the 1970s in Western countries and Japan. Examples include the Society for Industrial Archaeology (founded in North America in 1971), Association for Industrial Archaeology (Britain, 1973), Japan Industrial Archaeology Society (Japan, 1977), Comité d’information et de liason pour l’archéologie, l’ étude et la mise en valeur du patrimoine industriel (CILAC) (France, 1978). An international association of industrial heritage was founded in 1978, under the name of The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (commonly known as ‘TICCIH’). Since 2000, TICCIH works as a specialist adviser for ICOMOS, which itself is a specialist adviser of UNESCO.
2 The original name for the Meiji Industrial Sites was ‘The Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyūshū and Yamaguchi: Pioneer of Modernization in the Non-Western World’. The name was changed in 2013 to ‘Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Kyūshū-Yamaguchi and related areas’. The name was once again changed to the current one in 2015, following ICOMOS’s advice.
3 I have engaged in fieldwork research in situ since 2010. There are twenty-three components in the Meiji Sites, located in eleven cities in eight prefectures, In situ research is necessary in each place in order to know whether the findings of my case analysis on Miike coal mine is applicable to other sites or not.
4 As a daughter of Kato Mutsuki, the LDP politician who headed several ministries, Kato Koko has close links to the LDP, including the current prime minister, Abe Shinzo. Her brother-in-law, Kato Katsunobu, is a current minister in Abe’s Cabinet and Kato Koko herself is a special adviser to the Cabinet.
5 Among the eleven cities related to the Meiji Sites, these characteristics especially apply to the likes of Ōmuta and Arao (where Mitsui Miike coal mine was located), Kitakyushu (in Fukuoka prefecture, which has the Yahata steel plant, now owned by Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation), Nagasaki (Shipbuilding by Mitsubishi), and Kamaishi (in Iwate prefecture, its steel plant now owned by Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation). The other cities, such as Hagi (Yamaguchi), Kagoshima (Kagoshima) and Saga (Saga), had important roles in transferring advanced industrial technology from the West around the time of Meiji Restoration, but never developed big heavy-industrial complexes after the Meiji era. Still, broadly speaking, they are also in a similar situation to the regional industrial cities, in that they also face population decline and aging due to fundamental economic problems.
6 The following citation is from the UNESCO website (n.d.).
7 This research is based on Asahi Shinbun database Kikuzō II visual and Yomiuri Shinbun database Yomidas Rekishikan.
8 Given the fact that Chikuhō was the largest coal mine in Japan from the Meiji era until it was overtaken by Ishikari coal mine in Hokkaidō in 1959, it seems strange that among the twenty-three Meiji Sites, not one is related to Chikuhō. In fact, several Chikuhō sites were included in the original plan for the Meiji Sites. The paintings of Yamamoto Sakubei were also presented as reference materials. Later, however, all the sites of Chikuhō were excluded from the nomination, because the experts judged the sites did not have enough heritage value. In contrast, Sakubei’s paintings were highly evaluated by the experts, one of whom was Michael Pearson, a founder of TICCIH in Australia and World Heritage consultant, who worked as a special adviser for the Meiji Sites. The experts advised the local people concerned to apply for the registration of Sakubei’s paintings as a UNESCO Memory of the World.
9 For a more detailed analysis of the semantic diversity of fu no isan, see Matsuura (Citation2018).
10 The two unions are called the ‘labour union’ (commonly known as Rōso) and ‘new labour union’ (commonly known as Shinrō). Their informal names are ‘the first union’ and ‘the second union’. In this paper, I use the latter names in order to clarify the difference between the two unions.
11 Coal dust fires can be easily prevented as long as the pit is watered. However, the management did not do so, concerned that water could decrease the quality of coal.
12 I visited Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin in France in 2015 and 2016 to prepare for a future comparative study. I asked the local people about the negative sides of the history of coal mining. The most frequent answers were accidents and pneumoconiosis. The latter exists both in France and Japan, but in Japan it is relatively marginalized in the collective memory of coal mining. The difference in the way it is remembered (or forgotten) might be an interesting clue for comparative research.
13 Dōmei was a national labour union in Japan, together with Sōhyō. There was a rivalry between the two organizations. The former adopted the principle of ‘union-management cooperation’ (Rō shi kyōchō) and supported the Democratic Socialist Party, whereas the latter emphasized the confrontation with management and supported the Socialist Party. It is clear that the rivalry between the first and the second union in Miike was a microcosm of the one between Sōhyō and Dōmei.
14 Some miners supported the Japanese Communist Party. After the Socialist Party’s breakup in the 1990s, local politicians related to the first union have belonged to other parties, such as the Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party and New Socialist Party.
15 The gap between heritage and memory of this sort is not seen in Miike alone. Dicks (Citation1996) shows that there is a similar gap in the case of the Rhondda Heritage Park, in Britain. The difference between the two cases might lie in the fact that the miners in Rhondda participated in the heritage production process, though in a quite marginalized way, while those in Miike were almost totally excluded from it.
16 The film was re-edited by Kumagai for commercial-release as a DVD, under the name of ‘Miike: owaranai yama no monogatari’ (the English title is ‘Echoes from the Miike Mine’).
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Yusuke Matsuura
Yusuke Matsuura is professor of Sociology at Kumamoto University, Japan, where he has been a faculty member since 2003. His interests include memory, heritage, urban regeneration, migration. His first book, Kioku no Fukakuteisei (Indeterminacy of Memory) (Tokyo: Toshindō, 2005) examines various forms of individual memory and identity in contemporary society through interpreting four representative novel writers, Goto Meisei, Furui Yoshikichi, Murakami Haruki and Tsushima Yuko. Based on fieldwork research at Miike coal mine since 2010, he has published several papers on cultural heritage, collective memory and revitalization of a regional city through cultural projects. He may be contacted at [email protected]