Paper short abstract:

Locality construction, subalternity, and social change in post-disaster Japanese Northeast: an ethnographic study in placemaking, narration, and human mobility.

Paper long abstract:

After the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown, life in the Japanese Northeastern coast (Sanriku) was deeply shaken. People and places appeared to misalign, as if the waves eroded more than buildings, cars, boats and streets. On top of that, the disaster hit a region already facing another slower, criptic disaster: depopulation, old age, lack of manpower, and the primary sector decline typical of all modern countrysides.

Subalternity, and the vulnerability it produces, dumbed down recovery, as well as wide scale reconstruction. At the same time, authoritarian, nonlocal discourses inflitrated the Sanriku place-making practices, enforcing the naturalising notion of a region 'materially poor, spiritually rich'. In a seemingly conflict-less manner, however, a heterogeneous segment of young locals and new-locals (former volunteers turned counterurban returnees) are producing a brand new array of narratives, coupling fishery (traditional and subaltern activity par excellence) with entrepreneurship, innovation, and optimism.

Drawing on a 12 months doctoral ethnographic fieldwork in Ishinomaki (Miyagi Prefecture), and focusing on four specific case studies, this presentation aims at exposing and analysing processes of narrating, enacting, and mapping the spaces of post-disaster Sanriku from the different perspectives and aims of locals, newlocals, and nonlocal actors, and from the different hierarchies of place-making authority such positions imply.