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At the centre of Japan’s postwar “economic miracle,” nearly 7,000 housewives in Tobata, Kitakyūshū, spent two decades investigating and confronting the air pollution produced by the Yahata Steelworks. This lecture recovers their activism as more than a local pollution movement, asking what happens when those historically positioned outside the worlds of science and politics begin to produce knowledge about environmental harm. Drawing on oral histories and local archives, this presentation shows how the housewives transformed domestic observation and embodied experience into a collective evidentiary practice, working with scientists and physicians while simultaneously challenging the authority of established institutions. This presentation argues that their movement constituted a form of vernacular environmental science: a mode of environmental knowledge rooted in everyday experience, collective inquiry, and collaboration across the boundaries between lay and professional expertise. The Tobata case thus reveals an overlooked dimension of postwar democratisation, in which women claimed a legitimate role in defining environmental problems and shaping the terms on which they were addressed. It therefore shifts attention from protest as resistance toward knowledge production as a form of citizenship, suggesting that environmental politics in postwar Japan emerged not only through confrontation in the streets, but also through the quieter process by which ordinary women made pollution visible, knowable, and politically actionable. Anna Schrade is a historian of modern Japan whose research explores the intersections of environmental history, gender, science, and civic participation in postwar Japanese society. She holds an MSc in Modern Japanese Studies (with distinction) and a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She taught at Kobe University from 2013 to 2018 and was Associate Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University from 2018 to 2023. Her research examines how ordinary citizens—particularly women—participated in the production and mobilisation of environmental knowledge beyond established scientific and political institutions. Her monograph, Give Us Our Blue Skies Back: Housewives, Science, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Postwar Japan, 1950–1969 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026), recovers the history of a mass anti-pollution movement in Kitakyūshū and explores its wider implications for the history of environmentalism, scientific authority, and postwar democracy in Japan.

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