“Give Us Our Blue Skies Back”: Women in Postwar Japan, 1950-1969

Tue 3 March

Murray Edwards College

This lecture revisits one of the most remarkable yet understudied episodes in Japan’s post-war history: the Give Us Our Blue Skies Back movement, led by nearly 7,000 housewives in Tobata (Kitaky?sh?) between 1950 and 1969. Situated at the heart of Japan’s high-growth industrial expansion, these women confronted the devastating effects of air pollution emitted by the Yahata Steelworks—then one of Japan’s largest industrial complexes and a national symbol of economic recovery and technological progress. Without formal education or political experience, they organised one of Japan’s earliest and longest-running anti-pollution movements, combining grassroots mobilisation, scientific inquiry, and moral persuasion to demand accountability from both industry and government.

Speaker: Dr Anna Schrade received her MSc in Modern Japanese Studies and her DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. She served as Associate Professor at Kobe University (2013–2018) and at Kwansei Gakuin University (2018–2023). Her research explores post-war Japanese society, with a particular focus on civil movements, gender, and environmental history. Her forthcoming 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), examines women’s grassroots activism in Kitaky?sh?’s “Give Us Our Blue Skies Back” movement and its wider implications for the history of democracy, science, and environmental consciousness in post-war Japan.

Cost: Free