Painting the People’s Court: Art and Democracy in Postwar Japan

This paper introduces the work of a group of miner-artists at a coal mine in northern Japan, as an exampleof how art and other forms of cultural expression became vehicles for building new forms of democratic
subjectivity after the end of WWII. The miner-artists’ vision was but one of a multiplicity of visions that
jostled and jockeyed in the dispersed cultural environment of the early postwar, but their efforts to represent
and memorialize an important moment in their recent history can be seen as part of a broad movement
among ordinary people to participate in the formation of their own culture and lay claim to the franchise of
authorship.

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