After the Flood: The Politics of Reconstruction in Post-3.11 Tōhoku

Abstract

This dissertation explores the confluence of knowledge, power and the production of resilient space through a case study of how the town of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture is being rebuilt after the tsunami of March 11, 2011 (known in Japan as 3.11). In response to the damage, the local and national governments are enacting an unprecedented, top-down restructuring of coastal space that entails relocating communities to higher ground, building giant seawalls, and imposing new land-use restrictions. My study examines the effects these policies are having on residents, asking why and how they are resisting proposals that in theory (and the government argues) should make them safer. As well as ethnographic research in Minamisanriku and its environs, I draw on formal interviews with a cross section of residents, and analyze documents produced by various levels of government and citizen’s groups. I show how, for many inhabitants of the affected regions, reconstruction is like a second disaster, erasing both pre-disaster social space and the memory of the disasters themselves in the name of a future they have not chosen and cannot see.