Paper short abstract:

This paper explores continuity and rupture after Japan's 2011 tsunami, asking how disaster has reshaped local identities by prompting the re-evaluation and resurrection of traditional materials and practices and the incorporation of objects and landscapes produced by the tsunami into local heritage.

Paper long abstract:

Disasters are often seen as historical ruptures: moments when "everything changed." Nowhere is this truer than in Northeast Japan, or Tōhoku, where on March 11, 2011 (3.11), a tsunami washed away everything from boats to houses to family photographs, leaving survivors bereft of both past and future. Many Japanese scholars have explored what the disaster means for Tōhoku's cultural heritage, already threatened by the demographics of an aging population. For some, the Tōhoku narrative is one of loss, with festivals and shrines abandoned and the historical character of villages eroded by uniform reconstruction policies. Others emphasize a greater degree of continuity, highlighting the role of shrines, monuments to past disasters, festivals, folklore, and traditional ecological knowledge in both mitigating and recovering from 3.11. This paper explores the interplay of continuity and rupture after the tsunami, asking how disaster and reconstruction have reshaped local identities not only through loss, but also by prompting the resurrection of traditional materials and practices and the incorporation of objects and landscapes produced by the tsunami into local heritage and "disaster culture" (saigai bunka). In the midst of Japan's ongoing heritage boom, catastrophes like 3.11 offer, I argue, a unique vantage point from which to view in real time the social and political processes through which some things become "heritage" and others merely the debris of history.