Takaki Richardson Diss Final

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE LONG AFTER: DISASTER AND INFORMATION POLITICS IN POST-QUAKE KOBE, JAPAN A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ANTHROPOLOGY by Carla Takaki Richardson June 2014 The Dissertation of Carla Takaki Richardson is approved: _________________________________ Professor Melissa L. Caldwell, Chair _________________________________ Professor Noriko Aso _________________________________ Professor Donald L. Brenneis _________________________________ Professor Anna L. Tsing ____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Carla Takaki Richardson 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................... v ABSTRACT................................................................................................................. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................... viii PREFACE..................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: A Catastrophe of Knowledge ................................................................ 4 “Disasters are not theoretical” .............................................................................................13 Interrogating Crisis ..............................................................................................................16 Commensurating Crisis .......................................................................................................20 An Industry of Abstraction..................................................................................................23 Uncertainty and Affect ........................................................................................................27 A Tectonic Story..................................................................................................................31 Saiaku no Toshi (The Worst Year)......................................................................................34 Situating the Field................................................................................................................39 “Deep Kobe”........................................................................................................................42 Dissertation Overview .........................................................................................................54 CHAPTER 2: An Ethics of Relationality ................................................................... 58 Trajectories ..........................................................................................................................61 Crossroads ...........................................................................................................................67 In the Aftermath of Violent Change ....................................................................................73 An Archive for the Future to Remake the Past....................................................................82 CHAPTER 3: The Politics of No Politics................................................................... 94 Disaster and Community Participation................................................................................99 Activism from the Ashes ...................................................................................................116 Civic Histories ...................................................................................................................124 Information as a Site for Political Critique........................................................................132 CHAPTER 4: Failure and the Limits of Experience ................................................ 143 The Possibilities of Failure................................................................................................148 Recuperating the Past ........................................................................................................154 Reorienting Failures ..........................................................................................................161 Learning from Experience.................................................................................................165 The Impulse to Tell............................................................................................................173 Continuous Histories .........................................................................................................178 CHAPTER 5: Aestheticizing Safety......................................................................... 181 Ubiquity and Attention ......................................................................................................188 Distributed Anxiety ...........................................................................................................190 Saying Too Much ..............................................................................................................193 Airwave Aesthetics............................................................................................................196 Broadcasting Community, Broadcasting Care ..................................................................201 Disasters in common .........................................................................................................213 CHAPTER 6: Conclusions ....................................................................................... 219 iii EPILOGUE: Another Tectonic Story....................................................................... 233 A Triple Disaster ...............................................................................................................235 The View from Kobe.........................................................................................................243 A view from anthropology ................................................................................................245 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 247 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. A visitor at a Hanshin Earthquake memorial exhibit at the Nagata Labor Day fair, 2010......................................................................................... 45 Figure 2. Members of the Hamaishi Disaster Prevention Club during a disaster role-playing exercise....................................................................... 107 Figure 3. Safety evacuation sign at Okurayama Park, Kobe. .......................... 183 Figure 4. Advertisement for a disaster preparedness drill in Nagata Ward. 185 Figure 5. External view of the Disaster and Human Renovation Institution, Happy Active Town, Kobe. .......................................................................... 220 Figure 6. Disaster Prevention Center visitors experiencing an earthquake reenactment, Rinkû Town, Osaka, 2009. .................................................... 228 Figure 7. Mobile earthquake shake-table (jishin-sha) in front of the Disaster and Human Renovation Institution, 2010. ................................................. 228 v ABSTRACT Carla Takaki Richardson The Long After: Disaster and Information Politics in Post-Quake Kobe, Japan This dissertation investigates the practices and politics of disaster information in Kobe, Japan in the years following the 1995 Great Hanshin- Awaji Earthquake. Kobe was the site of Japan’s worst urban disaster since World War II; the earthquake catalyzed nationwide changes to Japanese disaster preparedness and also became symbolic of the social, economic, and technological failures that plagued the “lost decade” of 1990s Japan. This study draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in multiple fieldsites: formal and informal associations including a community radio station, a citizen-led emergency preparedness club, disaster research collaborations among scholars and citizens, and finally, the city of Kobe itself. Through ethnographic data from participant observation, media analyses, and interviews, I show how earthquake survivors, researchers, and activists characterized the disaster as a catastrophe of knowledge. Such a portrayal describes a lack of information (jôhô busoku) – from residents’ unawareness of Kobe as an active fault zone to victims’ frustrations about locating loved ones, shelter, and food – as a primary reason for why the earthquake was not just a natural disaster, but also a human-made catastrophe. Problematizing the disaster as a failure of knowledge has resulted in the continual production of disaster preparedness information (bôsai jôhô) in Kobe. The abundance of vi disaster information in Kobe illustrates the desire of disaster prevention researchers and activists to educate Kobe residents. At the same time, however, such information has become so ubiquitous that it risks becoming hidden in plain sight. This dissertation thus shows some of the strategies by which disaster prevention workers try to convince residents to become involved in securing their own safety. Further, these narratives of earthquake safety emphasize the importance of associational ties, as neighbors and community groups may prove to be lifesaving relationships during times of emergency. I argue that disaster prevention workers’ focus on practices of neighborly intimacy and

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