This note follows the one on early Shōwa and covers the period from the surrender in 1945 to the end of the Shōwa era in January 1989. Kanazawa University’s move from the castle to Kakuma began in 1989 and gets one sentence. The focus is Kanazawa, Toyama, and Komatsu, with Uchinada, Kurobe, Takaoka, Yatsuo, Toga, and Noto as well.

In late Shōwa Hokuriku, US occupation and military government came first, then reconstruction: the grounds of Kanazawa Castle became a university campus, and Toyama held an industrial exposition in its burned-out centre. From 1952 the dunes of Uchinada were chosen as a US firing range, setting off Japan’s first postwar campaign against a base. Komatsu Air Base, Toyama Airport, Kanazawa port, Toyama Shinkō port, Kurobe Dam, and the Hokuriku Expressway followed, and in 1971 the itai-itai disease suit in Toyama won the first victory in a Japanese pollution lawsuit. Hokuriku Broadcasting went on air in 1952, and Fujiko Fujio from Takaoka and Itsuki Hiroyuki, living in Kanazawa, made their names in these years.

1. Occupation and Military Government

As the early Shōwa note described, units of the US 33rd Division arrived in Kanazawa and Komatsu in October 1945. The numbers differ by source: the Kanazawa city chronology has a main body of more than 350 arriving on 27 October, while the History of Ishikawa Prefecture, Modern Volume 1 has 750 occupation troops reaching the former 7th Infantry Regiment barracks on 22 October, 90 of them going on to Komatsu and Nanao¹². Thirteen men of the advance party lodged in the former 7th Regiment officers’ club inside Kanazawa Castle, and the Hakuunrō Hotel was converted into a rest facility for occupation troops².

In the US local military government records catalogued by the National Diet Library, the 30th Military Government unit in Nagoya became the Tōkai–Hokuriku military government regional headquarters, and the 90th unit in Kanazawa became the Ishikawa military government team. From July 1949 “military government” was renamed “civil affairs”, and the prefectural civil affairs teams were abolished by the end of November 1949³. In Kanazawa the Ishikawa military government team was set up on 3 January 1946 in the former naval district personnel office in Honda-machi and was released on 26 July 1952². The US Counter Intelligence Corps office opened at the end of 1945 in the former foreigners’ residence beside the courthouse, the CIE, and the SCAP library all appear on Kanazawa street maps of 1951 and 1952².

The Toyama Denki Building was requisitioned by the occupation forces and housed a headquarters until 1952⁴. Komatsu airfield, taken over by the US as an auxiliary radar base in August 1945, was released in February 1958 (fully in August that year)⁵.

2. The Shōwa Emperor’s Tour of Hokuriku

From 23 October to 2 November 1947 the Shōwa emperor toured Fukui, Ishikawa, and Toyama on his own, attending the National Sports Festival for the first time, the second festival, held in Ishikawa; in Fukui and Toyama the tour doubled as an inspection of war-damage reconstruction⁶. In Ishikawa he entered Daishōji from Fukui on 26 October and stayed at Yamanaka hot spring; on the 28th he came into Kanazawa via Komatsu, visited the Heiwa housing in Heiwa-machi, then took the train from Kanazawa station to Wakura and stayed at the Ginsuikaku inn at Wakura hot spring; on the 29th he returned to Kanazawa via Nanao, Hakui, and Tsubata and visited the Daiichi Zenrinkan settlement house in Nomachi, the city office, and other places, staying at the Seisonkaku in Kenrokuen; on the 30th he attended the opening of the sports festival at the city stadium and left Kanazawa station for Toyama at noon⁷.

Later imperial visits included the 13th National Sports Festival in Toyama in October 1958⁶; the 20th National Tree-Planting Festival at Yonari in Tonami (now the Yonari Forest prefectural park) on 26 May 1969, where the emperor and empress planted Tateyama cedar and other saplings and sowed Tateyama cedar seed at the prefectural forestry station in Yoshimine, Tateyama⁸; and the 34th National Tree-Planting Festival at the Ishikawa Prefectural Forest Park in Tsubata on 22 May 1983, with about 7,700 participants⁹.

3. Repatriates and Taiwan

Heiwa-machi in southern Kanazawa grew up after the war when about 100 repatriates from the 9th Division moved in; the name dates from the 1963 address reform¹⁰. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru also inspected the repatriates’ hostel in Heiwa-machi on a visit to Kanazawa in November 1946¹¹.

The Daiichi Zenrinkan in Nomachi opened a day nursery in 1934, which was licensed as a nursery school in 1948 with a capacity of 165¹².

Hayashi Torahiko (born 1926) was born in Xizhou, Taiwan, where his father was chief engineer at the Taiwan Sugar Xizhou mill. He graduated from Kaohsiung First Middle School in 1944, came to Japan on a repatriation ship in 1946, drifted from Kyushu to Kanazawa, and in March 1950 founded the confectioner Torahiko in Kanazawa¹³. He moved the business to Tochigi in 1954 and in 1963 founded Rheon Automatic Machinery, which developed automatic filling machines for sweets¹³.

In 1966 YKK set up its Taiwan subsidiary¹⁴. At the 80th anniversary of the Kinjō school group in 1984, Kinjō Junior College became a sister school of the National Taiwan Academy of Arts¹⁵. The Kanazawa city chronology for April 1985 records that farmers in Taiwan were still holding memorial services for Hatta Yoichi, who appeared in the Meiji and Taishō notes; his nephew Hatta Kazunari was to attend one, and the mayor sent with him a letter of thanks and a Kaga doll for the Chianan Irrigation Association¹⁵.

4. A University in the Castle and an Art School

In 1949 Kanazawa Medical University, the Fourth Higher School, Ishikawa Normal School, Kanazawa Higher Normal School, Ishikawa Youth Normal School, Kanazawa Technical College, and others were merged into the new Kanazawa University, with six faculties: law and letters, education, science, medicine, pharmacy, and engineering. The law and letters, education, and science faculties had their campus inside Kanazawa Castle, known as “the university in the castle”¹⁶. When classes began in September 1949, general education was taught in a converted barracks of the former 7th Infantry Regiment¹¹. In 1955 the city council asked for the castle grounds to be opened to the public; the university refused, saying it “cannot let the campus become a promenade for tourists”¹¹. The move to the Kakuma campus began in 1989 (Heisei 1)¹⁶.

In 1946 the city’s Kanazawa College of Arts and Crafts opened in the former army arsenal in Dewa-machi, with ceramics, lacquer, metalwork, and fine art departments¹¹. It became the four-year Kanazawa College of Art in 1955¹¹. According to the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of History, the three red-brick arsenal buildings described in the Taishō note were used by the art college after the war and became the history museum in 1986¹⁷. Miyamoto Saburō, who appeared in the early Shōwa note, became a professor at the art college in 1948¹⁸.

5. The Uchinada Struggle

In 1952, against the background of the Korean War, US forces in Japan asked for a range to test artillery shells, and the government named Uchinada as a candidate¹⁹. That September the Uchinada village assembly resolved “to oppose with all our might” the requisition of the dunes, and Awagasaki in Kanazawa held its own protest meeting¹¹. On 2 December the cabinet decided to lend the Uchinada area to the US as a firing range for four months, January to April 1953, covering 625 chōbu of land and 400 of sea¹¹.

Test firing began in March 1953 and the government decided on permanent use; villagers petitioned and staged sit-ins again and again. Splits within the village and the forced continuation of firing weakened the movement, and in September 1953 Uchinada village accepted the range¹⁹. In December 1956 the US range commander told the governor that firing would end that month¹¹, and the town records the complete withdrawal of US forces in 1957²⁰. The town’s history museum describes the Uchinada struggle as Japan’s first postwar anti-base campaign, one that strongly influenced anti-base movements across the country and is regarded as “the starting point of grassroots democracy”¹⁹.

Hokuriku Broadcasting’s 1988 documentary on the struggle notes that the government secretly inspected Uchinada in September 1952, and that in the upper-house election after the 1953 “Bakayarō dissolution” a sitting cabinet minister lost in Ishikawa²¹.

6. Komatsu Air Base and Toyama Airport

Komatsu airfield had irregular flights to Osaka from 1955. The Air Self-Defense Force’s Komatsu base opened in June 1961, and in December that year the airfield formally became a shared military and civil airport⁵. Scheduled services to Osaka and Nagoya began in April 1962 and to Tokyo in July 1963, and in September 1964 the runway was lengthened to 2,700 m for the F-104J⁵. The first international charter flew to Hong Kong in November 1973, and a scheduled Niigata–Komatsu–Seoul service began in December 1979⁵. Hokuriku Broadcasting’s 1988 documentary says that at the time of the 1960 security-treaty revision Ishikawa was in the middle of a campaign against a Self-Defense Force jet base²².

Toyama Airport opened on 20 August 1963 on the riverbed of the Jinzū with a 1,200 m runway; in March 1984 the runway was extended to 2,000 m and jets began to fly²³. Kuragaki airfield, described in the early Shōwa note, went back to farmland after the war and was not on the same site²⁴.

7. Ports and Roads

Kanazawa port was formed in July 1954 by merging the old Ōno and Kanaiwa harbours²⁵; at its opening ceremony on 1 November 1970 Governor Nakanishi declared the port open²⁶. Toyama Shinkō in Imizu is a dug-in harbour cut out of the Hōjōzu lagoon and opened in April 1968²⁷.

Kanazawa’s city trams were abolished on 10 February 1967, 48 years after they started in 1919²⁶. The Hokuriku Expressway first opened between Komatsu and Kanazawa-nishi interchanges on 18 October 1972²⁸; with the Asahi–Nadachi-Tanihama section on 20 July 1988 the expressway was joined up²⁹.

In the “Sanpachi heavy snowfall” of January 1963, snow in Kanazawa lay 181 cm deep²².

8. Kurobe Dam and Tateyama Kurobe

Kansai Electric Power’s Kurobe Dam and the Kurobe River No. 4 power station, about 10 km downstream, are together known as “Kuroyon”. Work began in July 1956 with the Ōmachi tunnel (now the Kanden tunnel), dug to bring in materials³⁰. In May 1957 the tunnel hit a fracture zone that released large amounts of groundwater and debris, and it took seven months to get through the roughly 80 m zone³⁰. During construction 171 people died. The reservoir began filling in October 1960, units 1 and 2 of the power station began generating in January 1961, and the project, with a dam 186 m high, was completed on 5 June 1963³⁰.

The film The Sands of Kurobe (Kurobe no taiyō), released in February 1968, is about this project; it was directed by Kumai Kei and starred Mifune Toshirō and Ishihara Yūjirō³¹. On 1 June 1971 the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route opened throughout, joining Toyama and Nagano prefectures in a single route³².

9. Industry and Pollution

From 11 April to 4 June 1954 Toyama Prefecture and Toyama City held the Toyama Industrial Exposition in Toyama Castle Park and on the Uozu seafront, to show the reconstruction of war-damaged Toyama and to promote the prefecture as a leading power and industrial region; 740,000 people came. A guide map of the grounds in the Takaoka City Museum carries a photograph of Toyama Castle³³. The castle was built that year to mark the war-damage reconstruction³⁴.

YKK’s predecessor, Yoshida Kōgyōsho, lost its Komatsugawa factory in Tokyo in the air raid of March 1945. In August that year it bought the Uozu Iron Works and became Yoshida Kōgyō, adopted the YKK trademark in January 1946, and opened its Kurobe factory in May 1955³⁵.

Komatsu Seisakusho, whose founding appeared in the Taishō note, completed its first D50 bulldozer in December 1947, moved its head office from Komatsu to Tokyo in August 1951, signed its first construction machinery export contract (motor graders for Argentina) in January 1955, and won the Deming Prize in 1964³⁶.

For itai-itai disease along the Jinzū in Toyama, a countermeasures council was formed at the Kumano community hall in Fuchū on 14 November 1966³⁷. On 9 March 1968, 14 plaintiffs sued in the Toyama District Court, and on 8 May the Ministry of Health declared the disease to be chronic cadmium poisoning caused by discharges from the Kamioka mine upstream, the first officially recognized pollution disease³⁷. The first-instance victory on 30 June 1971 was the first win in a Japanese pollution lawsuit, and the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court ruled fully in the plaintiffs’ favour on 9 August 1972. The next day residents negotiated for eleven hours at Mitsui Mining and Smelting’s head office and came away with three written commitments: compensation, restoration of contaminated soil, and a pollution prevention agreement³⁷. The residents’ Seiryū Kaikan hall was completed in May 1976³⁷.

10. Broadcasting, Department Stores, and Entertainers

Hokuriku Broadcasting (MRO) began radio broadcasts on 10 May 1952 as the first commercial broadcaster on the Sea of Japan coast, and on 1 December 1958 launched the coast’s first commercial television station³⁸. Before that, at the end of 1954, the Kanazawa chronology notes that the only places in the prefecture where Nagoya television could just about be received were the outskirts of Kanaiwa and Daishōji¹¹.

The Miyaichi department store of the Taishō note became Daiwa after the war. Daiwa’s main store in Katamachi closed on 16 September 1986 after 64 years, and on the 19th the Kōrinbō Atrio redevelopment was completed with Daiwa as its anchor²⁶.

Shibata Rie grew up in Yatsuo; as a student she joined a workers’ theatre-going society on her own to see the touring shingeki companies that came to Toyama every two or three months, and in 1984 she founded the Wahaha Honpo company with Hisamoto Masami and others³⁹⁴⁰.

Suzuki Tadashi’s company moved to Toga village in Nanto in 1976 and opened Toga Sanbō, a theatre in a converted farmhouse; in 1982 it launched the Toga Festival, Japan’s first international theatre festival⁴¹.

11. Manga and Literature

Fujiko F. Fujio (Fujimoto Hiroshi) was born in Takaoka in 1933 and in 1944 met a new pupil at his primary school, Abiko Motoo (Fujiko Fujio Ⓐ). The two debuted in 1951 in the Mainichi Shōgakusei Shinbun and moved to Tokyo and the Tokiwa-sō apartments in 1954⁴². The first Doraemon story, “All the way from the land of the future”, appeared in the January 1970 issue of Shōgaku Yonensei⁴³. Fujiko Fujio Ⓐ‘s Ninja Hattori-kun ran in Shōnen from November 1964 to February 1968⁴⁴.

Itsuki Hiroyuki wound up his work in Tokyo in 1965 and moved to Kanazawa, his wife’s home town, living in Kodatsuno⁴⁵. In January 1967 he won the Naoki Prize for Aozameta uma o miyo; the Kanazawa chronology calls him “a writer living in Kanazawa”²⁶⁴⁶.

Hotta Yoshie from Fushiki won the Akutagawa Prize in 1952 for Hiroba no kodoku and other works⁴⁷. Miyamoto Teru’s Akutagawa Prize story Hotarugawa is set on the Itachi River in Toyama, and in 1978 Kitanihon Broadcasting made a TV programme on it in which Miyamoto himself appeared⁴⁸.

12. Film and Television

The film Zero Focus (Zero no shōten), released in March 1961, was directed by Nomura Yoshitarō from Matsumoto Seichō’s novel, adapted by Hashimoto Shinobu and Yamada Yōji, and set in Kanazawa and Noto. Location shooting was plagued by bad weather, and the climax filmed on the cliffs of Noto Kongō influenced many later TV dramas⁴⁹.

Among regional programmes held by the Broadcast Library, the TV drama Kaze no Bon Koiuta, broadcast on 29 August 1986, was based on Takahashi Osamu’s novel and starred Sakuma Yoshiko and Takahashi Kōji: former lovers meet again by the Seine, and the man rents a house in Etchū-Yatsuo to wait for her to come and see the Kaze no Bon festival⁵⁰.

The Shōwa emperor died on 7 January 1989, and the era name changed to Heisei the next day²⁶.

13. Places to Visit Today

References