From the 1950s through the 1970s, Japan underwent an “energy revolution” towards hydroelectric, petroleum, and nuclear power, and away from coal, deemed unable to sustain postwar growth. As mines shuttered under the injunction of “rationalization,” Kyushu’s storied Chikuhô coal region simultaneously spiraled into a pit of economic despair and emerged as a rich topos for literary and intellectual activity in the crucible of struggle between labor and capital. My talk probes this energy transition from two sides – first through an examination of the prose and poetry of journals self-published by local mining circles, then via a consideration of representations of the children of Chikuhô and the fate of coal country youth. In this period, dozens of “circle” magazines were published across southern Fukuoka Prefecture; most were flimsy, hand-scratched mimeographed pamphlets, but all were deeply engaged with the literary critical discourse of the moment. The first half of the talk analyzes these journals to explore how miners practiced and conceptualized literary activity and collective subject formation in acts of vernacular theorization, as life-writing reportage and self-publishing served as means for the cultivation of political consciousness and solidarity amidst the throes of a dying industry. The second half of the talk takes up images of youth, play, and departure to investigate the reimagination of the region as a place to be left behind on the scrap heap of history, including a discussion of the totemic image of the slag pile (botayama) as a site for both waste and play, and texts like Yasumoto Sueko’s diary Nianchan (My Second Brother), Domon Ken’s photobook Chikuhô no Kodomotachi (Children of Chikuhô), and Itsuki Hiroyuki’s novel Seishun no Mon (Gates of Youth). Through this bifocal perspective, I aim to animate literary attempts to capture the striations and limitations of everyday life as structured by coal extraction and its end.

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About the speaker:

Nate Shockey is Associate Professor of Japanese, Director of Asian Studies, and an affiliate of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is the author of The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan's Age of Modern Print Media (Columbia University Press, 2020).