From Coal-Miner’s Housewife to Historical Actor: Understanding a Personal Archive as a Political Act

This paper focuses on the activism and personal archive of Matsuo Keiko, the wife of a coal miner who suffered carbon monoxide poisoning in a 1963 explosion in the Mitsui Miike coal mine. In the wake of that industrial accident Matsuo launched a protracted legal battle against her husband’s employer, the corporate giant Mitsui. Matsuo’s case offers a way into understanding how ideologies of gender roles at the time interacted with organized labor, activist lawyers, scientists, and students in social movements that mobilized “ordinary” people and forged activism networks that wove together issues of labor (Miike), industrial pollution (Minamata), and land dispossession (Sanrizuka) into a political imaginary that challenged the postwar status quo, empowering the people who were often considered “behind the times” in a period of rapid economic growth (1955-1975): coal miners, fishing families, farmers.

In using the many artifacts and texts Matsuo saved, however, I need to contend with Matsuo’s impulse to save itself: what were the circumstances under which she came to see herself as a historical actor, and her affects as historical materials? Existing networks among the leftist labor movement as well as postwar ideas about the inherently “grassroots” activism of the “housewife,” predicated on ideas about women’s assumed intimacy with daily-life concerns through their domestic labor, opened up a space for Matsuo to understand herself as a political actor, and also amplified her voice within activist circles. At the same time, Matsuo’s self-consciously archived “counter-narrative” to the official archives of the Mitsui Corporation and the established labor unions sits uneasily alongside existing histories of the social and economic roles of the middle-class housewife in the postwar period. How can Matsuo’s archive speak to larger histories of labor, women, and environmental justice, but how can we also understand it as complicating and resisting those categories?