The plan was casual: choose between a museum and a shopping complex near central Yokkaichi, then kill some time.
The museum happened to be running a special exhibition called “Nyan-Nyan Museum,” which opened on September 19, 2026. It costs ¥1,000 for adults and is built around cat-themed parodies of famous art and historical motifs.[1]
My reaction was not particularly generous.
For a few pieces, “Oh, it’s a cat now” works. After enough of them, the joke begins to feel like: make it a cat and the concept is done. And the cats themselves were not cute enough, at least to me, to carry the entire show.
Then I went downstairs.
That is where the museum became far more interesting.
1. The free third and second floors became the real attraction
The third-floor permanent exhibition, “Time-Space Highway,” is free. It reconstructs a Yayoi pit dwelling, a medieval market held on days containing the number four, and the Edo-period post town of Yokkaichi at life scale. The second-floor Yokkaichi Pollution and Environmental Future Museum then continues the story from the modern era into the present and future.[2][3]
The museum explicitly designed the two floors to form one historical sequence.[2]
That sequence is unusually effective:
ancient legends → prehistoric life → markets → post town → modern homes → wartime bombing → postwar recovery → petrochemical complex → pollution → environmental controls today.
This was not a place I should have entered shortly before closing.
2. Yamatotakeru, then losing a fishing contest to prehistoric people
One surprise is how far back the local story reaches.
Yokkaichi’s cultural-heritage materials record a local Yamatotakeru legend: on his return from the east, he is said to have climbed a steep slope near Uneme using a staff, giving rise to the legend of Tsue-tsuki-zaka. The Kojiki tradition that his legs were bent with exhaustion is also connected to a traditional explanation for the name Mie.[4]
This is a legend, not a claim of verified historical fact.
A little later, the displays on early subsistence show fishing and food production.
That creates an embarrassing modern comparison:
prehistoric people could catch fish, while a person with modern fishing gear can still come home empty-handed every time.
Civilization advanced. The catch did not.
The difference is that an empty catch then was not a hobby failure. It meant less food. No smartphone, supermarket, refrigerator, weather app, or delivery service was coming to rescue you.
After a few minutes, “I’m glad I wasn’t born then” stops sounding like a joke.
3. Even the word “doujin magazine” changes meaning across time
The third floor also contains a memorial room for Yokkaichi-born novelist Fumio Niwa.
One item is the literary coterie magazine Bungakusha. To someone whose first association with “doujinshi” is modern fan culture, the word briefly lands wrong. Here, “doujin” means a circle of writers publishing literature together. Niwa supported the magazine with his own money and helped younger writers develop through it.[5]
Same word. Completely different mental image.
The museum quietly shows that not only houses and machines change over time; vocabulary does too.
4. Early Showa looks exhausting. Around 1961 suddenly looks livable
Old domestic reconstructions make one thing obvious: modern life has outsourced an enormous amount of physical labor to machines and infrastructure.
Water, fire, food storage, laundry, lighting—ordinary life used to be work.
Then the exhibition reaches a reconstruction of life around 1961, and the emotional response changes immediately.
“I could live from here onward.”
A sink, a dining table, electrical appliances: compared with the earlier house, the difficulty setting has dropped dramatically in only a few decades.
Today, washing, refrigeration, hot water, air conditioning, communications, shopping, and delivery are all partially delegated to systems outside our bodies.
If losing a smartphone makes a modern person feel helpless, that does not only mean we became weaker. It also means civilization became an external brain and external muscle.
At this point, the museum had me thinking: modern life is great.
Then Yokkaichi’s history gets much darker.
5. Before the comfort boom, the city was bombed nine times
From June 18 to August 8, 1945, Yokkaichi suffered nine air raids. A 2026 city record lists more than 800 deaths and 49,198 people affected.[6]
Why so many attacks?
By the Showa period, Yokkaichi had shifted from light industry toward heavy and chemical industry. Military facilities including the Second Naval Fuel Arsenal were built, turning the city into an important production base and therefore a bombing target late in the war.[7]
In other words:
industrial development became a strategic vulnerability in wartime.
On July 24 and August 8, 1945, “Pumpkin” practice bombs associated with atomic-bomb training were also dropped on Yokkaichi.[7]
The story suddenly stops being “old life was inconvenient” and becomes “the structure of a city can determine who gets targeted.”
6. Postwar recovery brought prosperity—and pollution into people’s bedrooms
Japan then moved into reconstruction and rapid economic growth. Yokkaichi built up its petrochemical complex, creating industry and jobs.
It also created severe pollution.
After the first complex began operation, residents complained about noise, soot and smoke, vibration, and odors. Sulfur-rich crude oil contributed to large sulfur-dioxide emissions, and respiratory illnesses including asthma became widespread—what became known as Yokkaichi asthma.[8][9]
The most disturbing part of the visit was not the disease name but the everyday-life data.
A panel seen on site showed a survey in which roughly half of respondents could not sleep well. I am treating that figure here as an on-site observation, not as a statistic independently reverified online.
Odor, noise, coughing, closed windows, bad sleep.
That is not “the industrial area smelled a bit.”
The living environment itself was breaking down.
Pollution entered sleep, work, school, laundry, food, and home life.
No wonder the history feels long. Pollution does not end when the smoke appears. Society has to measure causes, compensate patients, litigate responsibility, write regulation, change equipment, and monitor the result.
In 1967, nine officially recognized pollution patients from Isozu sued six companies in the first complex. The judgment came in 1972.[10]
7. So is the petrochemical complex safe in 2026?
After seeing all this, the obvious question is:
“What about the giant complex that is still there?”
Compared with the Yokkaichi-asthma era, ambient air quality has improved dramatically. In fiscal 2024 monitoring, sulfur dioxide met environmental standards at every station; Isozu and several other locations recorded an annual average of 0.001 ppm. Nitrogen dioxide, suspended particulate matter, and PM2.5 also met standards at all monitored stations, while photochemical oxidants remained a nationwide problem.[11]
The city’s own history notes that sulfur dioxide had improved to a good level across the city by fiscal 1976 through regulation and pollution-control projects.[12]
So the change is not that dangerous substances disappeared.
It is that regulation, treatment equipment, measurement, monitoring, and emergency planning became much stronger.
8. It is still an oil-and-gas industrial zone because modern life still needs it
The Yokkaichi coastal district remains a legally designated special disaster-prevention area because it handles large quantities of oil and high-pressure gas. As of January 1, 2026, the designated area covered 11.01 square kilometers, handled 6.805 million kiloliters of oil and 57.86 million Nm³ of high-pressure gas, and contained 34 specified establishments.[13]
Mie Prefecture’s 2026 disaster plan assigns responsibilities to companies, fire services, government, and other agencies, with public safety as the priority. Its latest risk assessment also incorporates updated Nankai Trough earthquake scenarios.[14]
So yes: the basic industrial skeleton is still oil, gas, and petrochemicals.
But “remove it all because it is dangerous” is not a complete answer either.
Fuel, plastics, synthetic rubber, industrial gases, and many chemical materials sit underneath modern manufacturing and daily life. Yokkaichi is now also running an ongoing carbon-neutrality committee for the complex.[15]
We still need the industry. The real question is how safely and with how little environmental damage it can operate.
That is the deeper lesson of the pollution exhibits.
9. I came for cats and left thinking about civilization
The emotional sequence of the visit ended up like this:
Prehistoric people caught fish. Respect.
Early Showa life looks exhausting.
Around 1961: finally livable.
Nine air raids: devastating.
Pollution that steals sleep: brutal.
Modern controls: impressive.
But the industry is still necessary.
That range is what makes the museum work.
The third-floor Time-Space Highway and the second-floor Pollution and Environmental Future Museum are both free.[3] Together they turn “how life became easier” and “what that convenience cost” into one continuous story.
As of September 2026, regular opening hours are 9:30–17:00, with exhibition entry until 16:30. The cat special exhibition runs through November 23 and costs ¥1,000 for adults.[3][1]
Even if the cats do not win you over, the floors below have several thousand years of Yokkaichi waiting.
Sources
[2]–[15]: see the common reference list at the end of this file.
Sources
- 四日市市立博物館「令和8年度年間案内／猫猫はくぶつかん」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市立博物館「常設展 時空街道」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市立博物館「開館時間・観覧料・アクセス」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市「文化財保存活用地域計画資料・古代史の舞台」 www5.city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市立博物館「丹羽文雄記念室」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市「四日市空襲犠牲者慰霊献花式（2026）」 city.yokkaichi.lg.jp
- 四日市市「四日市空襲と戦時下のくらし（2026）」 city.yokkaichi.lg.jp
- 四日市公害と環境未来館「四日市公害について」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 同「大気汚染」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 同「裁判・訴訟」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 四日市市「令和6年度大気環境測定結果」 city.yokkaichi.lg.jp
- 同「公害防止事業」 city.yokkaichi.mie.jp
- 三重県「三重県の石油コンビナート」 pref.mie.lg.jp
- 三重県「石油コンビナート等防災計画について」 pref.mie.lg.jp
- 四日市市「四日市コンビナートカーボンニュートラル化推進委員会」 city.yokkaichi.lg.jp
