| Abstract |
"An insightful study in disaster anthropology, The Aftermath of the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami takes as its focus the fishing town of Otsuchi in Japan's Iwate Prefecture, one of the worst damaged areas in the mammoth 2011 tsunami. Here,1,281 of the pre-tsunami population of 15,000 were killed and 60 percent of houses destroyed. To make matters worse, the town's administrative organs were completely obliterated and fire ravaged the downtown area for three days, blocking external rescue attempts. Complete with vivid and detailed witness testimony collected by the author, this book covers the eighteen months since the first day of the disaster through the subsequent months of community life in the evacuation centers and the struggles between the citizens and local governments in formulating reconstruction plans. It particularly addresses community interactions within the post-disaster context, assessing locals' varying degrees of success in organizing emergency committees to deal with such tasks as clearing rubble, hunting down food, obtaining fuel, and inquiring into the sociological reasons for these differences. It also casts new light on administrative failings that significantly augmented the loss of human lives in the diaster, and are threatening to bring further damage through insistence on reconstruction centered on enormous sea walls, agains local citizens' wishes"--Back cover. |
