Introduction

Twelve years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Three northern prefectures—Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima—as well as other surrounding areas, were hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequently by a massive tsunami, 9 meters high at its peak. Three months after the earthquake, the number of deaths reached approximately 15,000, with 7,500 missing persons and 125,000 evacuees (Cabinet Office Japan, 2011). However, the disaster did not stop there; it also triggered a meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). This was the largest nuclear accident since Chornobyl and was rated Level 7—the highest level on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. According to the statistics compiled by the Fukushima Prefecture, the number of people forced to evacuate reached 165,000 by May 2012 (Fukushima Minpō, 2023). Such a triple disaster (or so-called 3/11) required diverse efforts for the affected people and communities. The complex interplay of man-made and natural factors has also triggered people to fundamentally rethink the social mechanisms that led to this catastrophe. The outbreak of the nuclear power plant phase-out movement was only one example. Numerous sociologists got involved in helping evacuees, recovering communities, social movements covering various aspects, and so forth, both for practical and research purposes, and published their findings. To facilitate the exchange of research findings among sociologists involved in the disaster, the Japan Sociological Association established a research committee named the “Liaison Group on Earthquake Disaster Issues (Shinsai Jōhō Renrakukai),”1 whose activities have been taken over by the Research Network on Earthquake Disaster Issues (Shinsai Mondai Kenkyū Network).2 Part of it was compiled into the English-language report Sociology in the Post-Disaster Society and distributed at the Conference of the International Sociological Association held in Yokohama 2014 (Iwai, 2015). Simultaneously, various books have been published, including a book edited by Tanaka et al. (2013); a book series titled Social Science Learned from Great East Japan Earthquake (Daishinsai ni Manabu Shakai Kagaku), produced by the Great East Japan Earthquake Academic Research Committee (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai Gakujutsu Chōsa Iinkai)3 of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, whose series include eight books in Japanese (Aoki, 2015; Ikeda, 2015; Kohara & Inatsugu, 2015; Saito, 2015; Shiroyama, 2015; Tsujinaka, 2016; Tsunekawa, 2015; Ueta, 2016) and a book in English (Tsujinaka & Inatsugu, 2018; Tsunekawa, 2016); and an English-language journal by the Study Group on Infrastructure and Society (Principal investigator: Takashi Machimura).4 The Journal of Japanese Sociology (formerly International Journal of Japanese Sociology) also published a special issue titled “Disaster and sociology: The Great East Japan Earthquake and its implications” in 2012. Meanwhile, individual studies have continued. However, as 10 years have passed since the earthquake, the momentum to link horizontally disaster-related research has been waning. The number of publications in English is even more limited (however, see the special issue of the Social Science Japan Journal edited by Koppenborg, 2021, featuring the energy transition as an exception). Against this backdrop, this special issue invites researchers who have conducted empirical research on disasters and Japanese society to contribute. Our goal is to look back at the 10 years since 3/11 and provide readers with an overview of how the catastrophe has affected Japanese society in various fields, and as a result, how Japanese society has been transformed in the medium and long term. By doing so, we would like to reexamine the sociological implications of the experience of the triple disaster on Japanese society. Summarizing the Japanese experience of 3/11 over the last 10 years will contribute to the universal proposition of how to cope with frequent disasters globally. Since 3/11, there have been frequent earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, and other disasters, not only in Japan but also in other countries (for example, Hurricane Sandy in the United States in 2012, the massive flooding in Europe in 2016, and the Turkey-Syria earthquake in 2023). The major issue at the global scale is how to build a society based on the assumption that disasters are normal, which cascades into multiple dimensions of society in unexpected ways (Graham, 2012). Owing to such multiplicity of challenges, the sociological examination of its impact needs to be approached from multiple perspectives. Therefore, for this special issue, we invited researchers from various fields, including disaster prevention (Shigeyoshi Tanaka), evacuation and reconstruction (Rina Kojima and Reiko Seki), and civil society and politics (Chigaya Kinoshita), to contribute. Shigeyoshi Tanaka has long been conducting research on disaster prevention and reconstruction in local communities from the perspective of regional sociology. He asks the most central question about the Great East Japan Earthquake: Why did so many people have to die? This is a critical question, especially in the context of the Great East Japan Earthquake, because the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region, which was severely damaged by the tsunami, was one of the most advanced areas in the world with disaster-prevention measures in place. This suggests the importance of not only hard measures such as seawalls but also intangible, soft measures such as training, information transmission, and organization development for the smooth implementation of evacuation activities. In addition, Tanaka problematizes the reconstruction process. The amount of national budget allocated for the earthquake reconstruction was a record-breaking high in postwar history. Under the developmentalist inertia Japan still holds, this big budget ignited a construction boom, which resulted in creating housing squares without residents along the coast, intruding upon the landscape like white elephants. Accordingly, it can be questioned whether this was in line with what disaster victims need for rebuilding their lives. In other words, disaster victims were marginalized from the reconstruction process, and it is necessary to reexamine the meaning of reconstruction. Rina Kojima approaches the concept of reconstruction in the context of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. A year after the accident, the Japanese government's reconstruction policy was to normalize the land through decontamination work. Furthermore, under the premise of encouraging self-help (jiritsu) of residents of the contaminated area, the government stopped the relief measures such as compensation and temporary housing. While the risk of low radiation doses remained, residents were urged to return to their original land which had been “cleaned” and “normalized” according to the national government. In this way, radioprotection has been attributed to individual responsibility. Based on interviews with disaster victims living inside or outside the evacuation zones, Kojima questions the meaning of the government's reconstruction for individual victims. Reiko Seki discusses the issue of deprivation of hometown (furusato) among the evacuees of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. The nuclear accident forced the residents of the surrounding areas of the power plants to evacuate, either by the order of the Japanese government or by their own decision. Some areas have been “decontaminated,” and some people have returned. However, has this return restored their hometowns? Drawing on the voices of evacuees, Seki argues that a hometown is not only a physical area but also includes the relationships and continuity of the community. Such a totality of the hometowns is what the nuclear accident took away. In her paper, Seki summarizes the deprivation of the hometown by referring to the results from her interviews with evacuees and lawsuits filed by evacuees. Chigaya Kinoshita discusses the historical significance and meaning of the various social movements that emerged after 3/11 in the context of the structural crisis of postwar Japanese society. While several scholars have already studied a sudden upsurge of social movements in the post-3/11 Japanese society, its long-term causes and impact have not been examined thoroughly. Kinoshita points out that the movements of the 2010s developed in the middle of a structural crisis of the existing postwar democratic and social systems. Simultaneously, the post-3/11 movements were the symbolic driving force of the transformation of these systems. In this sense, the social movements of the 2010s are prefigurative of the structural crisis and transformation of political society in the 2020s. Kinoshita discusses these issues by combining historical political science studies and his fieldwork as a major participant in the demonstrations in the 2010s. As these abstracts already indicate, taking the perspective of a period greater than 10 years from 3/11, we can understand the changes that this catastrophe and its reconstruction process have brought about in Japanese society. These processes can be seen as a mega-project of the reconstruction from the disaster on the one hand. On the other hand, we cannot downplay the aspects of how these projects inevitably impact individual lives and transform society, which cannot be labeled as recovery. The four papers reveal the essential sociological problematique of the interrelationship between the individual and society through the real issues of disaster and society. In this sense, we believe that this special issue will arouse interest from a wide range of sociologists/disaster researchers in and beyond Japan. None

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• Introduction

  Open Access•Florentine Koppenborg•Social Science Japan Journal•2021

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