Paper Short Abstract:

What role do material traces play in how people navigate the epistemic challenge of knowing and narrating disasters and other crises? This paper explores this question by examining attempts to leverage the knowledge produced by Japan's tsunami ruins within conflicting social and political projects.

Paper Abstract:

What role do the material traces left by disasters and other crises play in the stories we tell about them? In particular, the stories we tell about what the crisis was and how we can know it? In 2011, a tsunami struck northeastern Japan following a magnitude 9.1 earthquake. This paper explores how survivors incorporated the ruins it left into the stories they told about what the ‘disaster’ (shinsai) was and what practices those stories in turn depended on and enabled. The ruins in question include remains of government buildings, elementary schools, police boxes (kōban), and the seawalls supposed to protect people. I examine attempts to integrate tsunami ruins narratively into social and political projects by investigating how different groups mobilized interpretations of those ruins to reveal “what went wrong” and thus should be done. In some narratives, tsunami ruins functioned as what I call ‘critical allegories,’ or objects interpreted as revealing the fraught histories of inappropriate development that produced them. However, other survivors and officials argued that ruins revealed nothing more than the tsunami itself. In preserving them, the latter sought to institutionalize dominant accounts of what had gone wrong. And by doing so, they provided support, sometimes inadvertent, for policies seeking to further develop the coastline. By exploring the conflicts between these groups, the paper asks how people navigate the epistemic challenge of knowing and narrating ‘disaster’ and what role conflicts over their material traces play in this.