Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. xxi, 197 pp. (Illustrations.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4985-4251-7.
The earthquake and tsunami that struck East Japan on March 11, 2011 was a catastrophe with far-reaching political, social, and personal implications. As a volunteer working in the town of Ōtsuchi in Iwate prefecture, the author collected the personal accounts of survivors, while observing and engaging in help and reconstruction efforts. The result is a book that retells in detail and with empathy the experiences of surviving the immediate catastrophe, living in and running evacuation shelters, and finally planning the reconstruction of local communities. The author connects these stories with his personal thoughts and interpretations.
The book develops two main narratives: one tells the events as a human-made catastrophe and highlights institutional and personal failures; the other focuses on spontaneous and practical solidarity and highlights individual initiatives in rescuing others and rebuilding communities. It is to the book’s credit that it emphasizes both of these aspects equally.
The book is structured as three main chapters that evolve on a timeline from the events of March 11, 2011 until mid-2012, titled “escaping the wave,” “evading danger, running the evacuation centres,” and “the reconstruction process along the Sanriku coast,” and are followed by a conclusion. These main chapters are divided into 18 sub-chapters with 62 sections in total. This reflects that data was collected in several locations and covers a huge variety of social aspects. Given the fine-grained structure of the book a more detailed table of contents (only the three main chapters are featured) would have been advisable.
Each chapter presents one or more stories of success and failure. As an example of successful disaster management, the author presents the heavily destroyed fishing village Kirikiri, where self-help and solidarity sprung up quickly, and encouraged a high level of autonomy. Kirikiri was the first community to have its roads cleared and install a helipad for disaster relief, by relying on self-organization within the community. A successful evacuation shelter was run in Usuzawa, a settlement that lay further inland and was thus not directly affected by the tsunami. Here a local dance association was largely responsible for communicating and organizing relief operations. As an example for successful reconstruction planning, the author names the village of Kerobe, where the administration and the residents agreed not to build a seawall.
On the other hand, the book does not hold back on its criticism of public administration. In several instances, it stresses that the huge loss in human life was partially attributable to tsunami warnings that indicated a wave height that was far too low, resulting in many residents feeling no need to escape. The author prominently highlights the administrative decisions that led to a high number of casualties among the public employees of Ōtsuchi. After the earthquake, the town hall staff were ordered to keep working while a crisis meeting was scheduled to be held in the parking lot, out of concern for the building’s structural integrity. When all the chairs and tables were placed outside, the tsunami struck and killed many of the personnel in the parking lot or still in the building. Another major target of the author’s criticism is the public reconstruction planning. Especially the prefecture of Iwate is criticized for inflexibly connecting reconstruction funds to a specific seawall height and placement. The author then quite convincingly presents his own alternative plans for reconstruction and disaster prevention, which were cheaper and had the support of the local communities.
The book’s weakness, however, is its pretence to be a collection of survivors’ testimonies. It therefore lacks an interpretative framework; also, it does not place its observations into context using the current literature on disaster anthropology. Moreover, the author does not refrain from offering convenient interpretations of his observations, leading him to venture into scientific fields beyond his own expertise, which results in naïve generalizations about national cultures, such as when he reflects on a conflict between Japanese residents and Chinese migrant workers in an evacuation shelter. The local residents wanted the migrant workers to leave the shelter, because they felt disturbed by their singing and smoking. Similarly, the author makes assumptions about the causes and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in disaster victims, solely by relying on one report by police staff and what local people told him. The author also displays a positivist attitude when it comes to social norms and gender roles. For example, a section that deals with preparing meals for the survivors in the evacuation shelters is titled “the role of the women,” without discussing this division of labour or contrasting it with “the role of men.”
As most of the book deals with personal narratives and commentary by the author, references to research literature are mostly featured in footnotes. Often, rather than relativizing or contextualizing specific arguments, the author makes value-laden and generalizing judgements about other authors’ intentions. A prominent example of this method is a section positively referring to Naomi Klein’s concepts of “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” that without further introduction begins on page 168. There, the author uses Klein’s models to bolster his criticism of how the public administration handled reconstruction. The shock resulting from the destruction of their homes and shops, the author argues, led to a paralysis of the local community, which was then used by the local administration and external investors to push through the construction of a strip mall in the former centre of the tsunami-struck fishing town. Overall, references to previous research are placed in the text in a rather haphazard manner, and without conceptual engagement with the argument being cited. It seems the referenced literature thus merely serves the purpose of decorating and legitimizing the author’s interpretations.
The detailed and personal records that the author has compiled in this book are precious and insightful, and his critique of institutional and individual failure is likewise poignant and important. To appreciate these qualities, however, the reader is forced to overlook many half-baked conclusions and the author’s convenient and at times judgemental use of scientific literature.
Daniel Kremers
German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo, Japan