It is an honour and a pleasure to greet you here as the newly appointed JAWS Secretary General. Like many in this community, I’ve long benefited from JAWS as a space of intellectual exchange and generosity, shared curiosity, and long-standing friendships. Taking on this role feels both exciting and slightly surreal. I follow in the … Read more
ANTHROPOLOGY OF JAPAN, IN JAPAN 2024 CONFERENCE TOHOKU UNIVERSITY, SENDAI, NOVEMBER 30~DECEMBER 1 The deadline for submissions for the AJJ conference at Tohoku University has been extended until 12 noon on Sunday, November 3. Proposals on the conference theme of “Community, Collaboration and Co-production”, or any other theme relevant to the anthropology of Japan, are … Read more
This piece is the concluding part of the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku. Disasters today continue to be seen as events revolving around physical recovery – at least in public discourse. Some of the reasons for this may be that physical recovery and reconstruction are easier to comprehend, rather than the complex … Read more
This piece is part of the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku. Introduction: “Useless Things” In her work on Genkaijima’s earlier earthquake and 3.11’s effects on Onagawa in Tohoku’s Miyagi Prefecture, Nakano (2014, 2016) emphasized communities engaging in what government and economic interests considered “useless things”: storytelling, festivals, local customs. Tohoku communities experiencing the … Read more
This piece is the seventh in the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku When I started visiting the areas in Northeast Japan (Tōhoku) affected by the 3.11 disaster, I was living in Tokyo, doing my post-doc at Sophia University. By the end of 2015, almost five years had passed since the disaster, the … Read more
This piece is the first part of the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku It was the earthquake, not my alarm clock, that woke me up on March 11th 2011. At that point I was about six months into my study abroad year in Tokyo as an undergrad. I had spent the night … Read more
This piece is part of the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku. How have the residents of the Hamadōri coastal area of Fukushima normalized their daily lives after the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster? I consider this by examining an “intangible cultural asset,” an annual traditional ceremony called the Soma Nomaoi Cavalry Festival, … Read more
This piece is the fourth part in the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku “This is Namie. It’s now a ghost town”, said the tour guide as the bus stopped and we got off. An eerie silence filled the streets as we walked through Namie town, a town whose residents had had to … Read more
This piece is the fourth part in the JAWS online series of Reflections from Tōhoku “And what does your husband do while you’re doing the research?” “He’s a full-time house-husband (sengyōshufu, pronunciation the same as full-time housewife)” For my research into long-term community reconstruction after the 3.11 during my PhD, I conducted field … Read more
