- Convenor:
-
Paola CAVALIERE
(University of Milan)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Kaoru Ueda
(Stanford University)
- Discussants:
-
Veronica De Pieri
(University of Bologna)
Paola CAVALIERE (University of Milan)
Irene Petraroli (University of Twente)
Julia Gerster (Tohoku University)
Kaoru Ueda (Stanford University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Anthropology and Sociology
Short Abstract
Japan’s recent disasters reveal gaps between disaster preparedness frameworks and lived experiences. This panel examines community narratives, gendered impacts, and forms of emotional care and memory—from kokoro no kea to kataribe and kamishibai—to show how local practices shape resilience.
Long Abstract
In the context of accelerating climate change, demographic decline, and increasingly frequent natural hazards, Japan offers a critical site for examining how individuals and communities navigate layered forms of vulnerability. While national disaster management policies have become more sophisticated over the past decades, recent events—including the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster, the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquakes, the 2020 Kyushu floods, the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake, and ongoing hydrogeological hazards—reveal persistent gaps between institutional frameworks and lived experience, particularly regarding long-term psychosocial impacts that often remain invisible. This panel brings together four interdisciplinary studies that foreground local narratives, gendered experiences, and community-led practices in shaping responses to both sudden-onset and recurrent disasters. The first paper situates Japan within a comparative investigation of hydrogeological hazards in Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan, showing how non-dominant narratives around mobility, belonging, and foreign residents challenge mainstream vulnerability discourses. The second paper examines gendered disaster experiences in Kumamoto and Noto Peninsula, exploring how kokoro no kea (emotional care) and religiously rooted support systems provide culturally-accepted and non-pathologizing alternatives to stigmatized mental health services. The third contribution analyzes kataribe storytelling in Tōhoku as an informal form of narrative exposure that enables survivors to reframe trauma and cultivate post-traumatic growth. The final paper turns to kamishibai to examine how this revitalized medium mediates between individual testimony and collective memory, supporting the transmission of disaster experiences across generations. Together, these papers illuminate how communities draw on context-specific, affective, and narrative-based strategies for coping with and preparing for disaster, while also highlighting shared structural constraints and offering critical perspectives on official disaster responses. By bridging disaster studies, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, history, trauma and memory studies, the panel provides an integrated view of resilience, care, and agency within Japan’s evolving disaster preparedness landscape.
| Abstract in Japanese (if needed) |
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
The research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate kataribe's role from the perspectives of Narrative Exposure Therapy, testimonial therapy, and post-traumatic growth after the triple disaster in Tōhoku (Japan) by exploring two case studies of community-led initiatives.
Paper long abstract
The study focuses on the figure of the kataribe (storyteller-witness), who has historically played a central role in Japan's post-disaster reconstruction planning. These figures are recruited voluntarily through bottom-up activities by local groups and associations, and serve multiple purposes: (1) Revitalise the area through events, workshops, and exhibitions on local history, encouraging tourism in the region; (2) Contribute to the creation of an archival repository based on testimonial accounts; (3) Perform a pedagogical-educational function in the field of DRR.
Notwithstanding, little research has been done on the relationship between kataribe and their role as storytellers and guides for listeners at disaster sites or memorials. These activities, repeated over time, constitute a form of Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), which, based on the principles of exposure therapy used in cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy, exposes the kataribe to habituation, thereby reducing dysfunctional emotional responses. The witness's activity can actively contribute to the reworking of traumatic memories associated with the event and promote the coherent reconstruction of one's own experience, leading to post-traumatic growth (PTG).
The study aims to explore two case studies of community-led initiatives that focus on the activities of kataribe, specifically the Tomioka Fukushima kataribe and RE: Project tsūshin of the Sendai Cultural Foundation, both of which emerged after the triple disaster in Tōhoku, Japan. In doing so, the research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the activities of kataribe from the perspectives of NET (Neuner, Schauer, Elbert, & Roth, 2002), testimonial therapy (Lira & Weinstein, 1983), and the possible implications of post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi et al., 2018). The ultimate goal is to demonstrate how testimonial activity is not only a form of empowerment for individuals that contributes to post-disaster community reconstruction, but also, and above all, it enables therapeutic outcomes and enhances mental well-being through the verbalisation of psychological trauma, reconstructing the fragmented identity of survivors, and acquiring new awareness of their value and role within the local community.
Paper short abstract
Ethnographic findings show persistent gendered disaster biases in Japan’s recent earthquakes. This paper examines how women navigate vulnerabilities through kokoro no kea and spiritual care as culturally grounded, non-pathologizing support when formal services fall short.
Paper long abstract
Disasters generate long-term psychosocial impacts that often remain invisible, particularly among populations facing intersecting vulnerabilities. In Japan, despite three decades of gender mainstreaming in disaster policy, responses to the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquakes and the 2024 Noto Peninsula Earthquake reveal persistent gender biases. In Kumamoto, a disaster culture focused primarily on hydrogeological hazards left communities underprepared for seismic events, compounding women’s risks within a deeply conservative gender environment. In the Noto peninsula—a region with persistent demographic decline and entrenched traditional norms—more women evacuated than men, and conditions in evacuation shelters were especially harsh. Age-related needs, gendered expectations, and rigid community hierarchies intensified women’s emotional and practical burdens during displacement and throughout long-term recovery. Drawing on ethnographic research (2016–2020 and 2024), this paper examines how women navigate these intersecting vulnerabilities through culturally rooted, non-pathologizing forms of support, particularly kokoro no kea (emotional care) and spiritual care offered by religious organizations, and rinshō shūkyōshi (clinical religious specialists). Findings show that participants regarded kokoro no kea and related community-based practices as more attuned to their lived realities than formal psychological and mental health services, which are undermined by social stigma and often medicalize emotional distress. By situating kokoro no kea within Japan’s gendered disaster landscape, the paper argues that spiritual and emotional care functions both as a vital coping mechanism and as a subtle form of resistance, enabling women to redefine wellbeing amid structural vulnerability.
Paper short abstract
This research examines how kamishibai, once tied to state propaganda and considered obsolete, has re-emerged as a medium for communicating disaster experiences in Japan, mediating individual testimony and visual storytelling while raising concerns about the instrumentalization of trauma.
Paper long abstract
Narrating traumatic events presents profound challenges, yet such experiences also generate innovative forms of storytelling that convey lived realities and communicate moral or educational messages. Kamishibai, a traditional Japanese form of visual storytelling that pairs illustrated panels with oral narration, exemplifies this dynamic. Popular as street entertainment in the early twentieth century, it later served as a vehicle for wartime propaganda before declining in the 1960s. In recent decades, however, kamishibai has experienced a notable revival, particularly as a means of recounting personal experiences of disaster. This research asks how a medium once tied to state propaganda and presumed nearly obsolete has re-emerged as a compelling tool for communicating disaster experiences in contemporary Japan. Drawing on anthropology, history, and material culture studies, we examine kamishibai’s unique features that make it suited to post-disaster storytelling: its embodied and performative qualities, its tactile and visual immediacy, and its grounding in communal memory practices. We argue that the renewed appeal of kamishibai stems not only from its accessibility and emotional resonance but also from its capacity to mediate between individual testimony and collective memory in the aftermath of trauma. At the same time, the medium’s historical entanglement with shifting political and educational agendas underscores the need to remain attentive to the risks of instrumentalizing traumatic narratives. Through this lens, kamishibai emerges as a significant and ambivalent cultural form within Japan’s evolving landscape of disaster storytelling.
Paper short abstract
The increase in hydrogeological risks is challenging current disaster preparedness. Comparing Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan, this study examines how non-dominant groups perceive and adapt to these hazards, questioning the limits of vulnerability discourses on age, gender, and nationality.
Paper long abstract
Climate change is intensifying hydrogeological risks worldwide, including heavy rainfall, typhoons, and flooding. Unlike large-scale seismic events, these hazards are often seasonal, partially predictable, and characterised by cumulative, recurrent impacts that blur the boundary between everyday disruption and disaster. However, disaster preparedness frameworks have traditionally prioritised low-frequency, high-impact events, leaving significant gaps in understanding how populations perceive and respond to increasingly frequent hydrogeological threats. Following the 2021 (Europe) and 2020s (Kyushu, Japan) extreme flooding experiences, this research addresses this gap by examining risk perception across three contrasting national contexts—Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan—selected for their differing levels of exposure, preparedness, and public awareness. The study employs a comparative qualitative approach, focusing on non-dominant narratives, with a particular emphasis on stories of place belonging, mobility constraints, and the experiences of foreign residents.
By showcasing these perspectives, the research explores how everyday challenges and adaptive capacities are translated into emergency situations across distinct social and cultural settings. The findings reveal context-specific strategies of coping and preparedness, while also highlighting shared structural constraints. The discussion contributes to debates on disaster risk reduction by questioning the analytical limits of the prevailing “vulnerability discourse” and proposing a more nuanced understanding of risk, agency, and resilience under conditions of escalating climatic uncertainty.
Keywords: disaster preparedness, vulnerability discourses, hydrogeological hazards