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Paper short abstract

After the 2024 Noto Earthquake, Wajima initiated the Traveling Morning Market to send vendors to events across Japan. Our study employs the concept of foodscape to examine how this mobile market can support post-disaster recovery, rethink cultural heritage, and establish new rural-urban relations.

Paper long abstract

The Noto Earthquake on January 1, 2024, caused devastating damage and the loss of more than 700 lives. In Wajima, the harbor area and the Morning Market (asaichi), which was the city’s major tourist attraction, were largely destroyed, and rebuilding efforts are expected to still take many years. As one recovery initiative, members of the Morning Market Association launched the “Traveling Morning Market.” Through this project, vendors travel with their stands to events or pop-up stores at locations across Japan. By doing so, the Traveling Morning Market not only raises awareness for the disaster and its aftermath but also offers a chance for local vendors and producers of local food to sell their items during the ongoing rebuilding process.

We investigated this new approach of post-disaster recovery and tourism mobility through qualitative interviews with organizers, vendors, food producers, and customers to capture its development, potential, and challenges. We employ the concept of “foodscape” to explore the social relations and cultural practices involved into the project of the Traveling Morning Market. Foodscape is defined as “a dynamic social construction that relates food to places, people, meanings, and material processes” (Johnston & Baumann, 2014, p. 3). It serves here as a lens to capture the Traveling Morning Market beyond distribution and sale of local food, but moreover its role as a nexus point, in which cultural heritage, identity, and post-disaster recovery come together to shape a new community and their representation.

Furthermore, this case study adds to the discourse on rural revitalization in Japan. With many regions suffering from a declining and aging population, markets like that of Wajima risk to disappear soon, and with them not only local chains of supply and production, but more importantly social networks and cultural heritage. Thus, we ask in how far the idea of a “Traveling Market” could be a valuable approach in supporting rural communities and to establish new links between countryside and cities, such as through “relational population” (Dilley et al., 2024) and by updating the concept of “antenna shops” (Thompson, 2004).