8th International Conference on the History of Occupational and Environmental Health (ICOH History 2026), Recognizing the rich history of occupational and environmental health

The history of mining labor in twentieth-century Japan has largely been framed through three dominant narratives: the miner as a heroic agent of national economic growth; the miner as a victim of industrial accidents, exploitation, or colonial domination; and the miner as a beneficiary of rising living standards and social modernization. While these approaches have significantly enriched our understanding of miners’ social worlds, they have largely overlooked silicosis and pneumoco-niosis—occupational diseases that caused more deaths than any other hazard in Japan’s industrial history. This striking absence is evident not only in historical scholarship, but also in museums, artistic representations, and literary or oral accounts of mining communities. This lecture investigates the social, cultural, and historiographical mechanisms that contributed to the long-term invisibility of silicosis in Japan’s mining history. It first argues that the disease’s specific charac-teristics—its long latency period, slow and insidious progression, frequent association with tuberculosis, and strong social stigma—made it difficult to recognize as a collective industrial problem. Unlike accidents or mine closures, silicosis often affected workers after they had