Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes narratives of people who have relocated to Northeast Japan after the 2011 The Great East Earthquake and Tsunami. This area represents an attraction for people that seek to "reinvent" their life in a more personally satisfying way by embracing a more precarious lifestyle.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the narratives of people who have relocated to Northeast Japan over the last five years. In 2011 The Great East Earthquake and Tsunami hit three Japanese Prefectures (Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate), leaving 400 km of coastline completely destroyed.

While many residents left their hometowns in the aftermath of the disaster, looking for more stable realities in different places, new migrants are gradually moving to the disaster areas. Given the complex nature of this phenomenon, it is still difficult to analyze it through the figures. In fact, people who relocate don't usually do it from one day to another, neither they intend to move permanently from the beginning. Therefore, most of them are still registered in the place where they were living before.

The relation between tourism and migration (Cohen, Duncan and Thulemark 2013) is complicated in this case by the volunteering experience. Usually people that relocate to these areas, did not initially visit as tourists, but they started by knowing these areas while working on some kind of volunteer activity. It is often through this activity that they develop a closer relation with locals and eventually decide to extend these trips. Through the act of helping someone, people involved in this phenomenon seek to give a new meaning to their life experience while participating in the recovery process of towns that need, in most cases, to be rebuilt almost completely.

In this study, the decision to move to a rural area to achieve a more fulfilling lifestyle is related to the need of taking part in a more socially involving practice of recovery and community rebuilding. Before the disaster, the region of Tohoku was facing depopulation and lacking opportunities, especially for younger generations. Hence, these areas are not perceived just as towns to rebuild as they were, but as opportunities to reverse the trend of rural decline. This effort to buck the trend represents an attraction for people from other areas of Japan that in some cases left full-time jobs to embrace a more precarious lifestyle, seeking to "reinvent" their life in a more personally satisfying way.