2024 Volume 91 Issue 3 Pages 343-355
This study aims to clarify the process and historical significance of the reorganization of kogai kyoiku (educational on industrial pollution) by the Minatama Ashikita Kogai Study Circle, focusing on the practices of the teachers in the group from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
Kogai kyoiku (KK) grew prominent between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s. It was a unique educational movement in Japan that began with resistance on the part of teachers and educational researchers to the environmental destruction occurring in their communities (Ando, 2019). In recent years, criticism of the depoliticization of environmental education in Japan (Takata et al., 2012) and the rise of environmental justice theory (Okura, 2020), following the Great East Japan Earthquake and accompanying Fukushima No. 1 Reactor nuclear disaster (Ando, 2013) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Furusato, 2021), have brought the contemporary significance of KK back into the spotlight.
While most KK research has analyzed the movement in its early years (the early 1960s through the mid-1970s), the period after the mid-1970s, when KK was replaced by environmental education, has been less studied. Therefore, this study focuses on the Minatama Ashikita Kogai Study Circle, which continued to explore KK after the mid-1970s. One notable characteristic of the Circle's teachers was that they reorganized existing KK through a common narrative focused on “ways to live.”
Kogai to kyoiku (Industrial Pollution and Education), published in 1972, was located in the segment of the contemporary KK movement that denounced the false KK led by the government and the corporations responsible for industrial pollution. The educational practices described in the book emphasized the effective use of media, such as photographs and scientific materials, to hold the guilty companies accountable. The Circle's teachers also began to implement similar practices.
An incident of discrimination against patients in 1975 prompted the Circle's teachers to reflect critically on their earlier practices. They began to question the purpose of KK and education through the “ways to live” narrative. They also questioned how they themselves lived their lives, aiming to explore industrial pollution on an equal footing between teachers and students through this narrative. Instead of simply accusing the perpetrators of wrongdoing, they began to think in the context of their own relationships with these bad actors. Finally, Minamata disease patients came to be seen not so much as victims, but as survivors who were considering “how to live,” as the Circle's teachers portrayed them.
In short, the process of reorganizing KK through the “ways to life” approach adopted by the Circle's teachers suggested the need to change the relationship between the teachers and industrial pollution, between the teachers and the companies that perpetrated the pollution, between teachers and students, and between teachers and Minamata disease patients during the transition from KK to environmental education.
