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This panel focuses on collections of historical documents kept by mining communities in postwar and contemporary Japan. In mining towns, localcommunities -- including labourers, activists, teachers -- often built their own collections of documents as challenges to the formal documents archived bycorporate mining interests. Local and private preservation efforts have facilitated regional histories in Japan. Such collections shaped the historicalimagination of local communities and non-elite actors played significant roles in their creation. In the case of the mining communities we examine,grassroots archiving addressed both a lack of formal archives and also the fact that corporate interests could withhold key documents. While creatingtheir own collections, communities also learned how to appropriate the archives of formal record-keeping institutions.Our four case studies center on questions about the creation of grassroots mining archives in Japan, how those archives enabled people to form theirown political strategies, and how those archives related to public record-keeping institutions.