While in Fukuoka prefecture, I visited the city of Kitakyushu, which has an interesting environmental history. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was immensely polluted. This part of Kyushu has been a transport crossroads for centuries, with iron and coal from China contributing to massive heavy industry development - steel, potteries, cement. This turned the bay and the surrounding environment into a toxic sink of chemicals. Driven mainly by local women's groups - largely made up of the wives of the men who were working in the local steel factories - a powerful environmental movement pushed through a comprehensive clean up and turned the city by the 1990s into an attractive, ecologically friendly centre of environmental and alternative energy research. "We want the blue sky for our children" was the slogan.
An impressive local museum, on a former industrial site, tells the story. It's fascinating to see the 1960s home movies taken by Kitakyushu women, recording the soot and dust continually blowing into the small terraced houses, blackening the "shoji" screens and freshly washed sheets hung out to dry. And Kitakyushu also has Japan's only independent (but originally Government-subsidised) research centre on Asian womens' issues, established in the late 1980s.
Posted at 14:12 22 May 2009 by David Warren | Comments[0]
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