Paper short abstract:

Based on field research in shelters in Yamada (a coastal town in northeast Japan), this paper explores what hygienic challenges survivors of the 2011 tsunami have faced and how they have restored order as well as a sense of security and social stability through practices of cleanliness.

Paper long abstract:

On 11 March 2011 an earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the northeast coast of Japan. It was followed by a tsunami, fires and a nuclear disaster. In June and July 2011 I conducted ethnographic research in Yamada, a coastal town in Iwate Prefecture where more than half of the residential buildings were destroyed, and several thousand local residents found temporary refuge in shelters following the earthquake.

In this paper, I discuss the coping strategies of survivors by focussing on issues of cleanliness in shelters. I will show what challenges they faced in overcrowded shelters lacking basic facilities (water, electricity etc.), and how they avoided and treated contamination with infectious diseases. I discuss how dirty, unusable toilets affected their sense of stability and shame. While the difficulties in taking care of personal hygiene after the disaster were unsettling, people became somewhat insensitive to unwashed clothes and body odour; sharing dirt and germs for them became a source of intimacy and solidarity. I argue that the first bath they had after the disaster did not only wash away the accumulated dirt but also started a transition from a state of apathy, memory loss, tension, and angst, to a 'normalisation' process. Survivors soon re-established hygienic conditions in the shelters by resorting to 'traditional' methods of han (group) structures and gender divisions of labour. Through working together for a clean environment and adopting (new) practices of cleanliness they tried to make sense of and re-assert control over their lives.