Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. xviii, 270 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, map.) US$27.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-63843-0.
The world is currently facing different types of threats and disasters in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change. In Japan in particular, prior to the current crisis, many fundamental assumptions were challenged as a result of the 3/11 triple disaster of an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdown at Fukushima. Aldrich’s Black Wave tackles the 3/11 disasters with analytical insight and useful prescriptions for political leaders, NGOs, and everyday citizens. As the entire world recovers from the pandemic and rebuilds resilient societies in the post-COVID-19 era, Japan’s wealth of experience with earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and volcanic explosions provides fertile soil for extrapolating widely applicable insights on disaster and recovery. I can still vividly remember standing frozen in one of the disaster zones near Sendai immediately after the 2011 tsunami, the scene like the aftermath of a war, and seeing the fragments of people’s lives, with their seemingly perpetual joys and sorrows, swept up, strewn about, and cast aside by the waves like so many disposable items.
What can we learn from Japan’s experiences of tackling unprecedented triple disasters and recovery processes? This is the starting point of Aldrich’s work. As a scholar with a long-standing interest in social capital (he previously authored Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery [University of Chicago Press, 2012]), Aldrich focuses on social capital and governance based in both qualitative and quantitative data. The chapters are well organized, seamlessly moving from the individual (chapter 2), to the municipal (chapter 3), the prefectural (chapter 4), the national (chapter 5), and finally the international levels of analysis (chapter 6). All chapters, including the conclusion, are very coherent and clear, rarely resorting to an easy reliance on culture or national identity as explanatory variables.
One of the many merits of this book is its empirical foundations. Drawing on a mixture of the interview data and quantitative data, Aldrich combines detailed, vivid personal stories with more formal methods such as network analysis. The author states that he conducted face-to-face interviews with more than a hundred people at various levels of analysis for around seven years. More specifically, Aldrich focuses on the stories of three elderly survivors of 3/11 to demonstrate the critical role of horizontal ties of local social connections, such as family members, friends, and neighbours (chapter 2). Chapter 3, on the municipal level, is more rigorous and convincing, if less evocative and vivid, through its use of quantitative data set on early recovery and the case story of Coastal Town (a pseudonym for a case study town). Aldrich reveals the critical roles of local council members and powerful politicians who have served six or more consecutive terms in the National Diet in acting as vertical ties between the municipality and the national government. Local municipalities in Japan lack political autonomy and are dependent on the central government to receive various financial support for recovery. Based on a social network analysis, chapter 4 explains advantages that allowed Miyagi prefecture the earliest recovery among the three most devastated prefectures. More respondents in Miyagi saw the prefectural government as reliable than respondents in Iwate and Fukushima prefectures (126). Miyagi prefecture had much better connections not only to the central government but also to NGOS, NPOs, and foreign rescue teams than both prefectures. Although rating Japan’s response and recovery as superior to the post-earthquake experiences of India (2001), China (2008), and Haiti (2010) (chapter 6), the author is at the same time highly critical of the Japanese central government’s inability to engage in two-way communication and bottom-up planning (chapter 5). As a result, there were no significant changes at the national level on energy policies. This has meant a continued dependence on nuclear power, the continuation of the construction state model that relies heavily on public construction jobs and infrastructure spending, and bureaucratic inflexibility regarding existing laws. In chapter 7, as one of the major conclusions and recommendations, the author stresses ways of building social ties and enhancing governance. He asserts, “[l]ocally tailored, bottom-up policies can create more trust among neighbors, build more intense interactions between residents and their decision makers, and help overcome barriers to collective action” (189), but this has yet to be realized in Japan.
Even after the triple disasters, a top-down, centralized, and homogenous approach (154) still continues in Japan, as can be seen in the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and climate crisis. Japan missed its best opportunity to transform policy structures and decision-making processes right after the 3/11 disasters—a break from the “Iron Triangle” system of strong ties between the business community, central government bureaucrats, and ruling politicians.
This unrealized transformation bodes ill for the future of Japan’s economy and ordinary citizen’s lives, especially as disasters always wreak the most havoc on vulnerable areas and people, and thereby reveal the most fragile points of each society. As Aldrich puts it: “In many senses, [3/11 disasters] have served as a kind of accelerator or time machine, bringing into focus issues that Japan and other nations will have to struggle with in the future” (180). Accelerating depopulation, rapid aging, worsening peripheral economies, and concentrating nuclear reactors in peripheral areas are typical examples of major challenges devastated areas have been facing. How and where can we find the exit or the means to transform this situation? This is the toughest challenge Japan is still facing after the 3/11 disasters. National politics and major industries are deadlocked and reluctant to transform. Even this brilliant author has failed to find an exit route.
We always have to prepare for the next disaster. To survive the post-COVID-19 era and the threat of a climate emergency, we should keep in mind, as Aldrich does, the roles of strong social capital and effective governance.
Koichi Hasegawa
Tohoku University, Sendai