Miyamoto Takashi

English

DSpace at Waseda University

特集7 RILAS研究部門「知の蓄積と活用にむけた方法論的研究」

宮本, 隆史

Miyamoto, Takashi

Waseda University Repository

553?? 7????????????The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the internet on the private practice of preserving historical docu-ments, by focusing on the personal practice of MAEKAWA Toshiyuki, who for the past two decades has been collecting historical materials related to people’s experiences in the Miike Coal Mine region and exhibiting them online. Examining the development of Maekawa’s personal archive and the network of people who contributed to it, this paper discusses the conditions and effects of encounters between the community of Miike? and cyberspace at the turn of twenty-first century. In particular, this paper is concerned with the question of how an archive can become practically useful.?First, we will make an overview of archiving practices, both institutional and private, related to the history of Miike. Second, we will briefly consider the family history of Maekawa and his parents. Third, I will observe how Maekawa launched his online archive. Fourth, we will examine the historical narratives in his privately published journal series. In conclusion, I will discuss the conditions and effects of the private online archive.???????????????????????????????There have been multiple archiving practices related to the history of the Miike Coal Mine. First, there are institu-tionalised efforts. The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine company preserved its own records that are now contained in the Mitsui Bunko in Tokyo. The company’s collection of materials in order to compile its 50-year history in 1944 was an important event in the formation of this archive. In the end, these volumes remained unpublished manuscripts, which along with other related materials became internal records of the company and comprise the core of the col-lection in Mitsui Bunko [Mitsui K?zan Goj?-nen Shi K? 1944]. Interestingly, hand-copied version of the manuscripts is now kept in Omuta City Library. According to Ohara, it is likely that the version in the library was a copy of the original kept in Mitsui Bunko [Ohara, 2016: 97].The Omuta City Library holds a large collection of local historical materials: published books and pamphlets, newspaper articles, records produced and kept by labour unions,? and personal documents donated by various indi-viduals. Among the personal documents, one can find documents contributed by MATUSO Keiko, HARADA Masazumi, ARAKI Shinobu, MORI Kota, NODA Haruji, WAKAMATSU Sawakiyo, URAKAWA Mamoru, KOSAKI Fumito, TAKEMATSU Teruo and others. OHARA Toshihide, former librarian of the Omuta City Library, played a key role in the donation process of the records [Ohara 2015].?Kyushu University also holds materials related to coal mining in Miike, including a large part of the First WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL NO. 6 ?? 7?RILAS???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????MIYAMOTO Takashi????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????As the Miike Coal Mine extended across Omuta and Arao cities, the whole region is casually called “Miike.” In this paper, I employ this casual name of “Miike” when I refer to the region.??I have Hayden White’s discussion on “practical past” in my mind here [White 2014].??The Miike Labour Union (the First Union) records were donated to the Omuta City Library, Kyushu University and the Omuta Coal Industry and Science Museum in April 2005 when the union dissolved itself. Ohara records the testimony of Yoshikawa Masaru, the last union president. According to him, the union donated manuscripts to the university, artefacts to the museum, and books to the library. On the other hand, the Second Union only donated printed records to the library, i.e., no manuscripts were preserved [Ohara 2015: 89].??See also Schieder [2018 (in this volume)] on Matsuo collection, and Miyamoto [2017] on Urakawa and Kosaki collections.554WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL NO. 6Union? records that were donated to the university, as well as some personal papers. An example is a large part of the Urakawa Mamoru papers not related to his activities in the Omuta Society for Prisoners’ Cemetery Preservation.Two museums in Omuta City keep historical materials as well. Omuta Coal Industry and Science Museum holds artefacts related to Miike coal mines, including materials from the First Union. Miike Playing Cards and His-tory Material Museum holds various artefats from ancient to modern times.Apart from these record keeping institutions, there has been a local tradition of preserving records privately. Labor unions and other groups who filed suits against the government or/and the Mitsui company had good reason to keep records. There were other individuals as well, who collected records privately. In the 1960s, the Omuta Soci-ety for Prisoners’ Cemetery Preservation (?muta Sh?jin Bochi Hozon Kai) started collecting historical materials related to convict labourers who worked in the mine [Miyamoto 2017]. A recent example is the HARADA Seiichi collection of comic books related to Miike.?Notably, there has been a network of individuals who study the social and cultural history of Miike, composed of intellectuals from within and outside of institutionalised academia, including school teachers, public servants, company workers, book sellers, students, and others. The Omuta and Arao Coal Mine Town Fan Club is a node of the intellectual network.? Another outcome of such collective efforts was an exhibition titled Tanko no Kioku to Kansai: Miike Tanko Heizan 20nen Ten (Memories of a Coal Mine and Kansai: An Exhibition Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Miike Coal Mine / ??????????????? 20??) held in the Osaka Labor Archive and the Kansai University Museum in May and June 2017 [Osaka Labor Archive and Kansai Tanko to Kioku no Kai eds. 2017]. Maekawa Toshiyuki was one of the organising committee members of the exhibition and his collection was displayed there. Maekawa’s collection is one example of such private efforts, and is unique in terms of the physical distance between Maekawa and Miike. To understand this point, we need to briefly examine his life history.???????????????????Maekawa was born as KUSUMOTO Toshiyuki in a company housing complex in Midorikawa, Arao, in 1952.? His father KUSUMOTO Tatsuo and mother Sadae met each other in Taiwan, where they worked as farmers, and moved to Miike after the end of World War II.? Tatsuo found work as a coal miner while Sadae became an active member of Miike Shufu Kai (Miike Housewives’ Association). Tatsuo was included in the 1,278 workers who were dismissed in December 1959, which Toshiyuki was told was partly because of Sadae’s activism. Toshiyuki recalls the hardship during the strike, “When my father was to go to the demonstration, he protected his stomach with a magazine.?  All we could have for our meal during the strike was somen.”?Although the family endured the hard days of the strike, the union eventually lost the battle against the com-pany in 1960. The family left Miike for Gifu Prefecture in March 1961 when Toshiyuki was eight years old. Sadae told Toshiyuki, “Don’t tell anybody that your dad worked in the Miike Coal Mine. Most of all, never talk about the Miike Labour Union” [Gushiken 2017]. They later moved to Kyoto in 1963, where the family received the news of the explosion in the Mikawa Pit. Upon hearing the news about the explosion, Sadae remarked to Tatsuo, “You were ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????The Miike Labour Union split into the original First Union and the Second Union in 1960. See Schieder and Miyamoto [2018 (in this volume)].??Harada Seiichi. 2018. Omuta Mangaka Meikan: Omuta ga Unda 22nin no Manga-ka Tachi. In Tanto to Bunka Kenkyukai (ed.) [2018: 112-121].??http://www.omuta-arao.net/ [last visited July 31, 2018]. Also see Nagayoshi [2008].??The family history written in this section is based on an interview with Maekawa Toshiyuki. Interview with Maekawa, 23 July 2017, Hikone. See also essays written by Maekawa and Aoki in Osaka Labor Archive and Kansai Tanko to Kioku no Kai (eds.) [2017].??Maekawa. 2007. Ihyumon kara no Tsushin, vol. 1, p. 8.??KUBO Kiyoshi, a worker belonged to the First Union, was  stabbed to death with a knife by a gang group member, while he and other union members were picketing the main gate of the Yotsuyama Pit on March 29, 1860. This might be the context of Tatsuo pro-tecting his stomach with a magazine.??Interview with Maekawa, Ibid. Somen are thin noodles made of wheat flour. Here, Maekawa mentions it as a meager meal.555?? 7lucky to have been dismissed. If you were still working there, you would have been dead as well.”? Ten years later, Tatsuo died of lung cancer in 1973. Toshiyuki became a police officer in Aichi Prefecture after graduating from senior high school. He then got married, assumed his wife’s surname, Maekawa, and moved to Shiga Prefecture. Sadae moved to Fukui Prefecture, and died in a car accident in 1981.After leaving Miike, the family did not maintain a close connection with the community there.  Sadae visited Miike to meet her friends sometime between 1961 and 1963. It was her last visit to the region. Toshiyuki kept in touch with his elder brother’s teacher for sometime. He visited Miike alone in March 1968 when he graduated from junior high school. He met the teacher once again when he visited Miike with his wife on their honeymoon. The teacher showed them the company housing complex in Midorikawa where he had grown up. However, this was his last visit to Miike before 1996.  He had scant interest in the Miike Coal Mine and the society around it, until the clo-sure of the mine in 1997, which reminded him of his “hometown.”??????????????????????????????????????????? ????? ???? ???Although the company did not announce that it was making preparations for the closure until the last year of opera-tions, it was apparent in the preceding years that it was moving towards a closure. In September 1996,  the elevator shaft of Yotsuyama Pit was demolished, and the demolition scene was widely broadcast. Maekawa recalls that when he saw the image on TV, “I felt as if my hometown was disappearing.”?He had a few black and white photographs from the days in Miike that his parents had left him. “I regretted that I did not ask my parents about Miike while they were alive. I made up my mind to make records of my hometown before it disappears.” He started visiting Omuta and Arao to take photographs every year.  “Perhaps I started this because I wanted to understand my own parents’ lives. They might actually have wanted to shift to the Second Union, who knows…?”?The Mitsui Miike Coal Mine was completely closed in 1997. This was around the time when the World Wide Web was becoming popular among ordinary people. Maekawa bought his first personal computer, a Windows 95 machine, in order to learn a new technology that seemed useful for his work. An owner of a sento (public bath) sug-gested that he learn to make a website and taught him hyper text markup language (HTML), the lingua franca of the web. In August of the same year, Maekawa launched a website titled Ihyumon Kara no Tsushin (Communication from a Strange Man).?Maekawa began posting pictures that he took during his visits to Miike on his website. He recalls, “Initially, I made my website out of nostalgia about my hometown. Later, someone suggested to me that I could look at some-thing beyond that.”? He started sharing voices of people who read Maekawa’s website. Many of them had some connections with Miike and now lived in other parts of Japan.? Others entrusted him with documents and artefacts that they had kept. Now his collection includes pictures, letters, rare books, scripts for plays, poems, oral histories, post cards, as well as artefacts such as helmets, flags, clothes, etc. [figures 1-3].His growing online collection attracted more people’s attention, and many others contacted him and enriched the archive with various types of records and artefacts. Maekawa says, “I have met many people through my website who showed sympathy with me.”? Some, including some former members of the Miike Union, were highly appre-ciative of his work. However, there were those who suspected that he was a “spy” of the police forces or some hostile groups. Others labeled Maekawa as a “leftist.” Maekawa adopted somewhat of a detached attitude to such accusations. He continued to call himself an ihyumon. This was when more and more people were leaving the region, and the entire community of Miike was grappling with their hometown’s disappearance.?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Maekawa. 2007. Ibid., p. 9.?????Interview with Maekawa, Ibid.?????Interview with Maekawa, Ibid.??Ihyumon (???) is a person who is stubborn, strange or eccentric in Kumamoto / Saga dialect.??Interview with Maekawa, Ibid.??http://www.miike-coalmine.org/message1.html [last visited July 31, 2018]??Interview with Maekawa, Ibid.??The population of Omuta city was above 200,000 between the mid-1950s and early 1960s, but dwindled to below 140,000 in the 2000s.556WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL NO. 6???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????557?? 7????????????????????????????????????????????In 2007, Maekawa started a home-made periodical journal series in addition to the website.? He reproduced the contents of the website with his commentaries on an A5 size brochure titled again Ihyumon Kara no Tsushin [figure 4]. Maekawa says, “I wanted elder people who do not use the internet to read my writings in my own words. I want to make it into a book if I win a lottery.”?Unlike HTML format, paper media compelled him to write in a more rigid and inflexible style. Maekawa adopted a linear narrative style on paper whereas he took advantage of the non-linear structure of hypertext on his online archive. Now, his authorship or will to tell a story became more evi-dent on paper.Irrespective of the type of media, however, he maintains his position as ihyumon. He repeatedly presents himself as someone who no longer belongs to the Miike community. He continues to seek the meaning of the experiences he and his family had when they lived in Miike. For him, the texts that others shared might offer some clues to understand his own past. It is not assured that he would be able to find answers to ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????http://www.miike-coalmine.org/NO1.html [last visited July 31, 2018]??Interview with Maekawa, Ibid.??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????558WASEDA RILAS JOURNAL NO. 6his personal questions by looking at the lived experiences of others. Nonetheless, he carries on his personal project, the archive continues to grow, and he remains as an ihyumon.???????????Maekawa Toshiyuki launched his website out of feelings of nostalgia towards Miike. His abiding quest was to seek the meaning of historical experience of Miike for his parents and himself. As we observed, inspired by the responses from his website visitors, he developed an interest in the lives of others who had some connections with Miike. His private endeavour based on the web opened up a space where various memories, in the forms of texts and objects, intersected. Out of these encounters, an archive evolved.For Maekawa, creation of the archive was not the ultimate goal. His goal remained to understand the meaning of the lives of people in Miike. The question he asks might not be answerable at all. However, others who found his online activities meaningful entrusted him with their precious records and artefacts. In this sense, Maekawa’s online archive is seen as practically useful for those who want to maintain the collective memory of Miike. His commit-ment to maintain his discursive position as ihyumon, or a strange man / stranger, might have contributed to his image as a trustworthy unbiased guardian of the archive.Interestingly, he eventually chose paper as the media when he tells historical narratives in his own words. The non-linear nature of hypertext markup language was useful for him to construct the archive, but it was not the best language for narrating stories. What each media allows was critically important.The nature of Maekawa’s historical narrative, which is based on multiple voices pulled from the online archives, does not provide any definite conclusion to his personal quests. Rather, the polyphonic voices compel him to avoid telling any coherent story. He learns to improvise histories different from hegemonic narratives of the state, of the company, or of the labour unions. In this sense, his digital archive endows him narrative power.Maekawa made his first travel abroad in January 2018. He visited Taiwan where his parents lived before they moved to Miike. He went to the place they lived and got a copy of the family register. He is writing on his parents’ experience there, which will likely conclude his quest for the history of the Miike Coal Mine.?????????????????I would like to express my grateful thanks to Maekawa Toshiyuki for showing me his valuable collection and shar-ing his thoughts with me. I wish to thank Ohara Toshihide for guiding me on how to navigate the vast archives in Miike as always. I am grateful to Sam Holden and Peter Joy Hudson for reading my manuscript and giving me sug-gestions.???????????????????????????????????????????????????Ihyumon Kara no Tsushin (website). http://www.miike-coalmine.org/ [last visted July 31, 2018].Ihyumon Kara no Tsushin (paper edition). Vols. 1-75. Shiga: Omuta-Arao Ganbaro Kai.?????????????????Gushiken So. 2017. Furusato wa Tanto Miike 1:  Ase to Namida no Kioku Nokoshitai. qBiz Nishi Nihon Shimbun Keizai Denshi Ban. June 15, 2017. http://qbiz.jp/article/112105/1/ [In Japanese, last visited July 31, 2018]Mitsui K?zan Goj?-nen Shi K?. 1944. Mitsui Bunko.Miyamoto Takashi. 2017. Convict Labor and Its Commemoration: the Mitsui Miike Coal Mine Experience. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. 15 (1-3).Nagayoshi Mamoru. 2008. Shimin ni Yorisou Katsudoka ken Kenkyusha: Kindai Sangyo Isan Katsuyo no Jirei Yori. Kyushu Jinrui Gakkai Ho. 35: 30-45. [In Japanese]Ohara Toshihide. 2015. Shiry? Sh?kai: ?muta Shiritsu Toshokan ga Sh?z? suru Miike Tank? Kankei Shiry? to sono Mokuroku ni tsuite. Enerug?-shi Kenky?. 30: 99-100. [In Japanese]???. 2016. Shiry? Shokai: Miike Tank? no Sh?jin R?d?. Liberacion. 163: 81-101.  [In Japanese]????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????E-mail from Maekawa Toshiyuki to Miyamoto, July 28, 2018. [Permission granted by the sender]559?? 7Osaka Labor Archive and Kansai Tanko to Kioku no Kai eds. 2017. Tanko no Kioku to Kansai: Miike Tanko Heizan 20nen Ten. Osaka: Institute of Economic and Political Studies, Kansai University. [In Japanese]Schieder, Chelsea Szendi. 2018. From Coal Miner’s Wife to Historical Actor: The Personal Archive of Matsuo Keiko. Waseda RILAS Journal 6. [In this volume]Schieder, Chelsea Szendi. and Miyamoto Takashi. 2018. Mining Grass-Roots Archives: The Japanese Experience. Waseda RILAS Jour-nal 6. [In this volume]Tanto to Bunka Kenkyukai ed. 2018. Tanto to Bunka: Showa 30nen-dai no Miike, Omuta. Tanto to Bunka Kenkyukai. [In Japanese]White, Hayden. 2014. The Practical Past. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Special Feature 7 RILAS Research Area "Methodological Research for Archiving Scientific Data and Records" Excavating Memories Through HTML: The Internet and the Personal Archive of Maekawa Toshiyuki

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特集7 RILAS研究部門「知の蓄積と活用にむけた方法論的研究」

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