Japan Copes with Calamity: Ethnographies of the Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disasters of March 2011

Abstract

In the fraught aftermath of Japan’s 2011 triple disaster, should ethnographers embrace the ‘slow science’ of standard long-term anthropological fieldwork or engage in ‘urgent ethnography’, entering a parlous disaster zone quickly and publishing interim findings in a changing milieu? For that matter, where does characteristic anthropological wariness of exploiting ravaged communities or of making the easy ‘grandstand play’ shift from legitimate ethical concern to an excuse for scholarly inaction (pp. 31–32)? Such questions help drive this important and well-crafted collection, which scholars of disaster and of contemporary Japanese society should read carefully. The contributors furnish subtle, thought-provoking, and original work that conveys the immense challenges of this notorious series of disasters and how different communities have coped with the thorny aftermath. The glimpses offered here of Japanese struggling to create order amid the chaos of the disaster zone—or even to move twisted wreckage to be able to reach debris-strewn roads or coastline—are poignant and striking. When an Iwate man is tragically reunited with his wife’s corpse, it takes three people two whole days to clean the oily sludge off the body for the funeral (p. 89), giving a palpable sense of the scale of the problem for the many thousands of other fatalities there. Locals in a liminal Fukushima community that suffered high radiation exposure outside the official exclusion zone spent months moving outdoors without special clothes or even sometimes masks; all the while, paid barricade monitors and visiting employees from prefectural and central government agencies arrived for short periods of testing and other work wearing full-body radiation suits, like space-suited aliens, even as the status of the hamlets there see-sawed in rather Kafkaesque fashion between designations of risk and safety (p. 226; Gill, personal communication).

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