3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Ten Years Later

Photo by Matthias Lambrecht, licensed under CC BY NC.

In July 2011, three months after the Tohoku tsunami and subsequent nuclear reactor destabilization, we published the first Hot Spot series on the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s website, “3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan: Fear and Anger, Possibility and Hope.” Ten years later, we asked the original contributors to reflect on the past decade, in terms of fear and anger, possibility and hope post-3.11.

Posts in This Series

3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan, Ten Years Later: Introduction

3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan, Ten Years Later: Introduction

On March 11, 2011, the largest recorded earthquake in Japan’s history rocked the country. Within minutes, a tsunami that reached thirty meters in places was hea... More

Reterritorialization of the Nuclear Village

Reterritorialization of the Nuclear Village

The dispersal of radiation did not produce the sort of death or illness that many feared, although the long-term effects of radiation are still largely unknown.... More

Fukushima: Despite Resiliency, Emancipation Denied

Fukushima: Despite Resiliency, Emancipation Denied

Pity the arbiters of the Fukushima Grand Narrative. As the crisis phase of the nuclear disaster receded to the point where survivors of the 2011 disasters could... More

Too Many Crises to Remember

Too Many Crises to Remember

Since 2011, the media coverage of the 3.11 disaster has ebbed and become an annual media ritual. Most people seem to be busy in their own business of everyday l... More

Empire of Bones

Empire of Bones

I stayed up late one night a couple months ago, in March 2021, watching the live broadcasts commemorating the tenth anniversary of the catastrophe in Tohoku. Wh... More

Meaningful Play

Meaningful Play

Science fiction, rather than science, seems to be dictating reality in the decade after 3.11. The post-apocalyptic eighties manga AKIRA predicted the Olympics w... More

Affective Technology in Times of Crisis

Affective Technology in Times of Crisis

Ten years ago, when an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northern Japan, one technological object in pa... More

History’s Repetition

History’s Repetition

When the unwelcome collaboration of nature and history furiously swept over and uprooted everything in its way in Fukushima on 3.11, the then mayor of Tokyo exp... More

Mapping Diffuse Anxiety

Mapping Diffuse Anxiety

Mapping continues to reconfirm the criticality of space in the cruel happenstances of human life evidenced by the Triple Disaster that struck Tohoku Japan in 20... More

From Bravado to Radical Interdependence

From Bravado to Radical Interdependence

Despite ten years having passed since the Fukushima nuclear accident, we still can’t enter the nuclear plants and their surrounding area due to excessively high... More

Time and Life in Fukushima

Time and Life in Fukushima

Summer 2015, four years after the disaster, I headed to Fukushima with a friend to see what we could of the region. Having contracted with someone offering to g... More

Can You Hear the People Sing?

Can You Hear the People Sing?

Nine years ago, I joined the choir praising a series of mass gatherings claiming to speak in the name of the people. A weekly antinuclear rally outside the Japa... More

Disaster Continues

Disaster Continues

A decade has passed since the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident. While the disaster continues with radio-contamination permeating beyond the border of Japa... More