Sakubei Yamamoto

Sakubei Yamamoto (, 17 May 1892 – 19 December 1984) was a Japanese coal miner and artist. His sumi-e and watercolour work, which was heavily annotated, depicted the life he had experienced as a miner, and a collection of his paintings and diaries formed the first Japanese entry in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, inscribed in 2011.

Early life and mining Yamamoto was born in a village in the Kama district of Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, on 17 May 1892 (Meiji 25). The village is now part of the city of Iizuka while Kama is part of Kaho District. His father, Tarō Yamamoto, was a riverboat worker on the before becoming a miner in the Chikuhō coalfield. His mother was Shina Yamamoto.

From the age of 7 or 8, Yamamota helped his brother as a trammer moving mine carts and, aged 15, after a truncated apprenticeship, he began a career as a coal miner and metalsmith. Over the next 50 years he worked for 18 different mines and his last position was at the Ito Mine in Iikane-mura, Tagawa (also in Fukuoka Prefecture) where he worked from 1940 (Shōwa 15) until it shut down in 1955 (Shōwa 30).

Art "Underground Survey in the Mid-Meiji Era (1868-1912)", February 1965. This illustrates an annual survey called a kentori. A larger gallery is available at Y-Sakubei.com

Yamamoto had been interested in art since he was a young child and recalled repeatedly drawing a figure of Katō Kiyomasa (a famous 16th century daimyō) that his younger brother, then 8, received as a present. After about the age of 20, he left drawing and painting behind as life as a miner took over, and he did not pick it up again until 1957, two years after the closure, when he was 64 and working as a nightwatchman at the mining company's main office in Tagawa. He took first to drawing and painting sumi-e (ink wash drawing) in journals and on scraps of paper.

Style Yamamoto's work has been described as naïve art, consisting primarily of watercolour paintings of mining scenes, accompanied by a great deal of text. His motivation for producing the work was to record his memories of mining life for posterity and his grandchildren as industrial development meant that the way of life he had known in mining was fading away. The blend of images and explanatory, reflective text puts his work somewhere between purely artistic painting and something more intentionally documentary, intended to record and explain the times he lived through.

Recognition and exhibitions A programme about Yamamoto's life and art called A Life, A Mountain of Rubble was broadcast in 1967. This led to two publications anthologising his work: Life in the Coal Mines: An Anthology from Kodansha later in 1967, and Sakubei Yamamoto Anthology: The Chikuho Coal Mine Collection in 1973.

The collection consists of 589 paintings, 65 diaries, 15 notebooks, and other documents.

Exhibitions of his work outside Fukuoka include one in 2013 at Tokyo Tower. An exhibition at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Memory of the World inclusion is planned for 2022 (delayed from 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic).

As part of the "Japan–UK Season of Culture" in 2019 and 2020, selections of Yamamoto's work were exhibited in the UK, at the Japanese embassy in London, and the Brunei Gallery of SOAS University of London. It was supposed to continue to the National Mining Museum Scotland but, owing to the pandemic, that could not take place at the time. The Season of Culture was extended to the end of 2021.