논문: 저지대에서의 위험: 2011년 3월 11일 토호쿠 지진과 쓰나미의 역사적 맥락 (2011)

Editors’ Note: This is a Korean translation of a Teach 3.11 annotation. We invite volunteers to translate and/or contribute content in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese languages. Thank you. (한국어, 일본어, 중국어로 기존의 내용을 번역하거나 새로운 내용을 기고할 자원활동가를 찾고 있습니다.)

Smits, Gregory. 2011. “Danger in the Lowground: Historical Context for the March 11, 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (20), May 16

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gregory-Smits/3531

2011년 3월 11일의 재앙 이후 며칠, 몇 주간 일본의 주요 신문들은 산리쿠 해변의 쓰나미에 대한 역사적인 기록들을 무려 869년의 조간 쓰나미부터 다시 살펴보았다. 아마도 이미 예견된 일이었겠지만, 미디어들은 이 역사적 사례들을 인용하며 후쿠시마 재앙의 위험과 책임소재를 논했다.¹

수년간 지진의 문화사를 연구해온 그레고리 스미츠는 The Asia Pacific Journal에 실린 이 글을 통해 바로 이 역사적인 기억과 위험에 대한 이슈를 다루었다. 에도 시대 (1600-1868)와 현대 시대의 쓰나미의 역사를 분석한 결과, 스미츠는 우리를 의기소침하게 만드는 결론에 다다랐다. 즉, 제도화된 기억을 만들 수 있었던 몇몇 사례도 있긴 했지만, 위험에 대한 사람들의 인식은 심지어 한 세대만에도 쉽게 희미해진다는 것이다. 예를 들어, 뉴욕타임스²에 실린 “쓰나미 돌”에 대한 기사를 보면, 쓰나미 돌은 비록 재해에 대한 충분한 경고의 메시지를 담고 있었음에도 불구하고 별다른 관심을 받지 못했고, 사고가 일어난 후에야 재조명 받았다.

스미츠는 토호쿠 대학의 히라가와 아라타의 작업도 인용했다. 히라가와 아라타는 1611년의 끔찍한 쓰나미 이후 도쿠가와 시대의 도로상 우편정거장들이 모두 쓰나미의 사정거리 밖으로 재배치 되었음을 지적하며, 메이지 유신 이후 쓰나미의 위협에 대한 자각이 잊혀져 가고 있다고 주장했다. 스미츠는 또한 재해를 입은 적이 있는 지역의 주민들이 쓰나미의 위험에 어떻게 반응하는지 연구하여, 주민 구성원의 순환이 역사적인 기억을 바탕으로 한 성공적인 예방을 저해할 수 있다는 의견을 내놓았다. 예를 들어, 스미츠는 현대의 도호쿠 지방과 에도 시대의 오사카 지역의 거주민이 유동적이었던 것이 재난에 대한 비효율적인 대응과 유용한 역사적 기억의 손실에 대한 근거가 될 수 있다는 것이다. 이는 비록 도호쿠 지역의 경험으로 인해 각종 준비가 가속화 될 것이라곤 해도, 여전히 기나긴 재해 발생 주기와 인구 변화로 인해 도쿄와 미국의 북서부지역에도 잠재적인 위험 요소가 있음을 의미한다.

그러나 스미츠에 의하면, 온전한 역사적인 기억도 가끔은 경고를 불러일으키는데 실패한다. 하나의 사례로는 1856년 8월 23일에 있었던 산리쿠 해안의 쓰나미가 있는데, 스미츠는 높은 사망률의 원인으로 주민들 사이에 퍼져 있었던 믿음을 지목한 기록을 인용하고 있다. 1611과 1793년의 쓰나미로 볼 때, 쓰나미는 당시 겨울에만 발생하는 것이라는 믿음이 있었다는 것이다. 마찬가지로, 1854년 12월 24일에 오사카를 덮쳤던 쓰나미의 사례를 보면, 지역적으로 멀리 떨어져 있던 이가-우에노에서 일어난 1854년 7월 9일의 지진에 대한 기억이, 오히려 지역적으로 가까워 더욱 중요하게 고려했어야 할 1707년의 호에이 지진과 뒤이은 쓰나미에 대한 기억을 덮어버렸다. 그 결과, 여진의 피해로부터 벗어나고자 지진 이후 배에 올라탔던 수백명의 오사카 주민들은 뒤이은 쓰나미로 인해 사망했다. 이러한 사례들은 비록 역사적인 기억이 시간과 세대를 넘어 보존된다고 하더라도, 다음 재난이 닥쳐왔을 때 안전과 생존에 기여하기는 어려울 수 있다는 결론에 다다르게 한다.

- June Jeon

1. Lyn, Tan Ee. 2011. “Japan’s tsunami history ignored: report; Previous study also downplayed; Size of past waves were not considered when Fukushima nuclear plant was built,” The Gazette (Montreal), April 14.

2. Fackler, Martin. 2011. “Tsunami Warnings for the Ages, Carved in Stone,” The New York Times, April 20.

BOOK: Pray for Japan (2011)

Editor’s note: The author of this annotation translated this book into English in April, 2011, while an undergraduate at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

prayforjapan.jp. PRAY FOR JAPAN: 3.11世界中が祈りはじめた日. 講談社, 2011.

Purei fō japan dotto jēpī. PRAY FOR JAPAN : santen’ichiichi sekaijū ga inorihajimeta hi. Tōkyō: Kōdansha, 2011.

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, the volume of messages sent and received by Japan’s 20 million Twitter users spiked 500% to over 5,000 per second. That night, a 20 year-old Keio University student Hiroyuki Tsuruda (@mocchicc) began to catalog some of these messages on the website www.prayforjapan.co.jp. The site went viral immediately, receiving six million hits in the first week. In response to the project’s popularity, on April 26, Kōdansha published Pray for Japan, a collection of roughly seventy messages from the website, in Japanese and parallel English translation, alongside photographs of solidarity from around the globe. Sent by users in the disaster zone, around Japan, and abroad, some messages are personal anecdotes of kindness or interactions with strangers on the day of the disaster; others users simply affixed notes of hope and encouragement with the #prayforjapan hashtag in the hope that it would reach someone in need of comfort. Although Pray for Japan shares the attribute of being a Twitter-sourced book with the English-language Quakebook project, all of the messages in Pray for Japan were written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and quoted directly from user’s Twitter feeds. The editors contacted the users afterwards and gained the permission to publish the messages. In this sense the book is a valuable primary source, and to my knowledge the only book of its kind published in English.

Pray is Japan is but one of several Twitter projects related to the disaster, a fact that demonstrates the significant role the social networking service played on 3/11. As phone lines were overwhelmed and traditional media grappled with the enormity of the disaster, people turned to their smartphones and computers to make contact with loved ones and get information about the conditions on the ground in Tōhoku and Tokyo. In the days afterward, Twitter became a place for strangers to share their thoughts and feelings as people struggled to make sense of the events. Because everything posted on Twitter is automatically in the public domain, popular tweets spread far beyond individuals’ social circles through the practice of “retweeting.”

Although it contains only a selective collection of the millions of messages sent about the disaster, Pray for Japan is a valuable compilation of a new genre of primary source material, documenting what took place on Twitter on and after 3/11. The book also exemplifies how social networking can enable strangers such as Tsuruda and the international group of volunteers that worked to translate the site into a dozen languages to collaborate to produce more lasting contributions to public discourse than fleeting 140-character messages. Selling for 1,000 yen, the book became a bestseller in Japan, with sales in excess of 70,000 copies, and has been used as an English learning tool by several schools in Nagoya. Royalties totaling three million yen as of July have been donated to the Hatachi Fund of the Nippon Foundation. A digital version of the book, with the messages in Japanese, English, and other languages, will be released as an iPad/iPhone app by the end of the year.

- Sam Holden

In February, 2012, Pray for Japan became available worldwide as an iPhone/iPad app in six languages, which may be useful to teachers and students wishing to learn about 3.11 via Japanese language classes.

FILM: The Sketch of Mujō (2011)

Ōmiya, Kōichi [大宮浩一]. 2011. Mujō Sobyō. 無常素描 [The Sketch of Mujō]. Tokyo: TOFOO Films. HD documentary film, 75 min., http://mujosobyo.jp/

Ōmiya Koichi’s The Sketch of Mujō [Mujō Sobyō] is the first documentary film to take a ground-level view of life in Iwate prefecture following the 3/11 disaster. Ōmiya combines different types of “sketches”: short interviews with those who survived the disaster and astonishing views of the devastated landscapes of Miyako City, a farming and fishing community that bore the brunt of the tsunami. The film brings voices and images together with a meditation on the medieval concept of mujō — the transience of all things. A longstanding theme in Japanese art and letters, the classical expressions of mujō appear in the opening passages of The Ten Foot Square Hut [Hōjōki] and The Tale of the Heike [Heike monogatari]. Ōmiya’s film explores both the reality of the disaster, and the notion of mujō as a term of reconciliation.

The film is narrated by farmers and fishermen, retirees, and doctors. There is neither a voice over, nor any overt directorial presence in this film. Fishermen speak of their boats destroyed or swept away, the poisoning of the sea with industrial pollution unlocked by the disaster, and above all, their concerns about the future. Uncertainty and a sense of shock weigh heavily in every interview. One woman recounts that after the tsunami there was no television, but that once power was eventually restored and they could see televised images again, they suddenly felt more vulnerable; she must come to terms with being a survivor even though she feels as though she is not allowed to live her life. The interviewee resolves to be strong, and to live for her friends who did not survive.

Ōmiya devotes a considerable amount of time to simply looking at the effects of the disaster. A series of long tracking shots from moving vehicles and boats take in the sheer expanse of the devastation, gradually transforming our sense of its limits. Boats, ships, cars and trucks lay inert, their metal skins crushed. Immense cement breakwaters have been toppled like toy blocks. Rescue teams comb the debris, and cranes slowly chip at destroyed buildings, like insects laboring over a vast pavement of destruction. In these scenes, Ōmiya refuses the facile optimism of green shoots, of a lyrical return of nature and its creatures. Instead, we are shown mountains of debris, obliterated landscapes, and through these combined views a sense of overwhelming scale becomes more concrete. Tracking shots grant us time to reflect, to begin to organize our thoughts about what we are seeing.

While the views of landscape are sustained, the interviews with people are uniformly brief. There is a sense of cordial anonymity. Ōmiya’s interlocutors are never introduced as characters in a “story” of this tragedy. They are not given the permanence of proper names, but this distance is also his way of protecting them, of gently listening as they find the words to express their experiences. Viewers thus gain a broader sense of the people of Iwate, of their concerns about their families, their métiers, and their shared future. A monk observes that the economic prosperity of postwar Japan was never really shared by Tōhoku. It has always been a place where people struggled with the fortunes of nature. Now, the people of Tōhoku are praised everywhere for their strength and resolve — values that are being forgotten elsewhere in Japan, gradually eroded by waves of technological progress and economic prosperity. He submits that these values need to be preserved, and learned anew by others.

In this respect, the film’s title is slightly deceptive, for Ōmiya does not simply propose that we make sense of the disaster by recourse to the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. Rather, he foregrounds his own sense of urgency, his haste to capture and quickly communicate the experience and image of disaster before it becomes lost. This prompts us to ask: what threatens our understanding and future recollection of this catastrophe? How can we come to terms with disaster, but without forgetting its fundamental experience of fear? As an exploration of this dilemma, The Sketch of Mujō sides with the work of memory more than the acceptance of transience.

— M. Downing Roberts

This film is distributed by http://tongpoo-films.jp/

劇場情報：http://mujosobyo.jp/theater.html

Foreign screenings:
Region: Paris, France
Event: RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC LE JAPON
Date & Time: 15th Oct. am10:30~
Place: La Pagode

Region: New York, USA
Event: Dialogue of Cultures International Film Festival
Date & Time: 20th ~ 23rd Oct.
“The Sketch of Mujo” will be the closing event on the 23rd.
Place: School of Visual Arts

ARTICLE: Danger in the Lowground: Historical Context for the March 11, 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)

Smits, Gregory. 2011. “Danger in the Lowground: Historical Context for the March 11, 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (20), May 16. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Gregory-Smits/3531

In the days and weeks following the disaster on March 11, 2011, the Japanese popular press revisited the tsunami history of the Sanriku coast, going back as far as the 869 Jōgan tsunami. As perhaps expected, the news media invoked this history in discussions of risk and blame, particularly in light of the Fukushima disaster.¹

Gregory Smits, who has studied the cultural history of earthquakes for several years, tackles the issue of historical memory and risk in this article published in The Asia Pacific Journal. By considering the histories of tsunamis that occurred primarily in the Edo (1600-1868) and modern periods, Smits comes to a rather disheartening conclusion: despite some apparently successful cases of institutional memory, the perception of risk seems to fade quickly, within even a generation. For example, the “tsunami stones,” reported in the New York Times,² may have provided a warning to some, but apparently had been a less remarkable feature of the landscape to others, before the disaster granted them new relevance.

Smits cites the work of Hirakawa Arata of Tōhoku University, who claims that the Tokugawa highway post-stations were all (re-)located beyond the reach of a devastating 1611 tsunami, and argues that the post-Meiji population had lost its sense of tsunami risk. Having investigated people’s reactions to tsunami risk after an area had been devastated, Smits argues that population turnover may be the greatest impediment to successful prevention efforts based on historical memory. In examples raised by Smits, Tohoku in the modern period and Osaka in the Edo Period, the lack of a stable population is given as the main explanation for the impermanence of useful historical memory and effective countermeasures. Long periodicity and the ease of population movement lead to concern for the possibility of a similar disaster in Tokyo and the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, although Smits expresses the hope that the Tōhoku experience might spur preparations.

Intact historical memory has also failed to provide warning in some cases, according to Smits. One such case was a tsunami that hit the Sanriku coast on August 23, 1856. Smits cites a record that blames a folk belief for the high death toll of that disaster. Apparently derived from tsunamis in 1611 and 1793, this was the belief that tsunamis only occur in winter. Likewise, in the case of a tsunami that hit Osaka on December 24, 1854, Smits thinks that the recent memory of the more geographically distant Iga-Ueno Earthquake of July 9, 1854, overrode the memory of the more temporally distant Hōei Earthquake and tsunami of 1707. As a result, hundreds of Osaka residents were led to their deaths when they fled to boats in the immediate aftermath of the shaking in order to ride out aftershocks. These cases lead to the distressing conclusion that even if historical memory were preserved through time and the turnover of generations, it might not be enough to improve safety and survivability when the next disaster strikes.

— Kristina Buhrman

1. Lyn, Tan Ee. 2011. “Japan’s tsunami history ignored: report; Previous study also downplayed; Size of past waves were not considered when Fukushima nuclear plant was built,” The Gazette (Montreal), April 14.

2. Fackler, Martin. 2011. “Tsunami Warnings for the Ages, Carved in Stone,” The New York Times, April 20.

FILM: Explaining the Nuclear Accident to Kids – Nuclear Reactor Boy’s Upset Stomach (2011)

Hachiya, Kazuhiko. 2011.  Unchi, Onara de Tatoeru Genpatsu Kaisetsu: Onaka ga Itakunatta Genpatsu-kun. うんち・おならで例える原発解説〜おなかがいたくなった原発くん [Explaining the Nuclear Accident with Farts and Poop - Nuclear Reactor Boy’s Upset Stomach]. YouTube video, 4:34 min, posted by GenkiRadio, Mar 16, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA&

This short animation by the media artist Kazuhiko Hachiya has made the rounds since the early days of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station. On March 15, four days after the tsunami crippled the Fukushima plant and brought the nuclear fuel in the reactors 1 through 4 to the brink of a meltdown, Hachiya posted a series of tweets that explained what is going on inside the power station through bathroom humor. We can assume that children are the target audience of the resulting video, a thoughtful feat of science, technology, medical, and disaster communication for kids. Hachiya presents the catastrophe using the iconography of Japanese ‘cute,’ or ‘kawaii,’ in which the highly dangerous Fukushima No.1 plant becomes Nuclear Reactor Boy, a little guy with merely an “upset stomach.” The workers at the facility risking their lives while desperately trying to avoid further damage of the nuclear fuel rods are depicted as doctors working “around the clock to make sure Nuclear Reactor Boy doesn’t poop.” The possibility of the reactor container explosion is likened to “poop,” and the radioactive emissions are likened to passed gas that a “Sniffer man” judges the “stinkiness,” or safety, of. This well intended animation avoids the fear-mongering that characterized the foreign press during the first two weeks after the earthquake. It also cautiously hints at the complicity of a general public that has in the past consumed energy without reflecting upon the severe problems and dangers resulting from nuclear power generation until the crisis. On this token, to some, the animation may evoke images of earlier promotional videos for children during the 1990s, in which the nuclear energy industry convinced people of the safety of this kind of energy. – Christian Dimmer

BOOK: Orphan Tsunami of 1700

Atwater, Brian F. et al. The Orphan Tsunami of 1700: Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in North America. U.S. Geological Survey professional paper, 1707. Reston, Va.: U.S. Geological Survey; Seattle: In Association with University of Washington Press, 2005.

This report, available both for purchase as a book and as a downloadable pdf on the US Geological Survey’s website (http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/), combines documentary and geological sources with modeling in an attempt to give a full account of a tsunami thought to have been generated by an approximately 9.0 M earthquake originating in the Cascadia subduction zone on January 26, 1700. While the initial announcement of the connection between that 18th-century Japanese tsunami and the Cascadia fault – known as an “orphan tsunami” by researchers because it was not preceded by a locally felt earthquake – was announced in Nature in the 1990s, it is hard not to see a connection between the publication of this 2005 report and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, although that disaster is only mentioned in passing. The report and its underlying research emphasize the disaster potential of the Cascadia fault zone by relating a catastrophic past seismic event. The presentation of the findings and the style and language used only underlines that this report was aimed at alerting the general public to potential risk. The result is a very detailed reconstruction of a historical tsunami that could probably be easily given to an undergraduate or advanced high-school audience.

The report is divided into three sections. The first presents the geological evidence for a massive Cascadia earthquake and local tsunami, accompanied with related folklore accounts presenting a potential Native American memory of the event. The second section presents the Japanese accounts of the tsunami impact (although, as the wave was not preceded by a local earthquake, many of these accounts do not call the event a “tsunami”). The third section presents the authors’ case for the connection between the two events, although this connection has been assumed as a fait accompli throughout the work. Much of the second and third sections compare the Cascadia event to the 1960 Chile earthquake and tsunami, as the authors have taken the latter as a model for the former. Pictures and data from the 1960 tsunami therefore stand in for the 1700 event and add urgency to the authors’ call for better preparation for the future Cascadia megathrust quake which they are sure will come.

Oddly, for a work aimed at a general audience, the information about the Japanese documents is very detailed, including images of many primary sources, some of them glossed word-for-word. While glossing the documents instead of translating them makes them harder to parse for a general reader, this presentation means that this book could almost be used as an introduction to certain types of early modern Japanese sources. Also present in this report, although not as emphasized, is some of the background behind the study of historical earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, which has also benefited from a long-standing collaboration between historians (both academic and amateur) and seismologists in Japan. – Kristina Buhrman

Additional readings:

Satake, Kenji, Kunihiko Shimazaki, Yoshinobu Tsuji, and Kazue Ueda. 1996. Time and size of a giant earthquake in Cascadia inferred from Japanese tsunami records of January 1700. Nature 379, no. 6562 (January 18): 246-249. doi:10.1038/379246a0.

Introduction

Teach 3/11 is a participatory resource to help teachers and scholars locate and share educational resources about the historical contexts of scientific and technical issues related to the triple earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters in Japan.

• “What should I read?”
• “What should I teach?”
• “Who studies these issues?”

These represent a sample of the kinds of questions that have been directed at and among many Japan-watchers and analysts of science and technology since 3/11. As an independent initiative spurred by the hope of helping people find answers to such questions more quickly, Teach 3/11 is a participatory online project built in the spirit of international cooperation and solidarity that disaster recoveries depend upon, regardless where they occur. In partnership with the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, Teach 3/11 has a simple goal: to develop a list of teaching resources with the help of the the collective wisdom of scholars worldwide working at the intersections of history of science and technology and Asia.

Beginning on 14 April through the end of the month, we will make a post every weekday at 2:46 p.m. local time in Japan to remember the events that have since unfolded. We will also field the receipt of citation suggestions during our first phase of development through a self-imposed deadline of April 22nd in order to post the most relevant information about references, readings, and audio-visual materials to aid teachers interested in the most pertinent history of science and technology resources in the wake of 3/11 current events.  In our second phase of development, we will work on preparing contributed material for continued online postings, which will collectively result in an online teaching resource.

Beginning with materials in English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, our hope is to make Teach 3/11 as useful as possible for fellow educators everywhere. Here’s a sample of the kind of entries we’re aiming to compile. We’re also interested in compiling a list of study questions for students. Click here to get started.

Our lines of communication are open to the community. Contact teach3eleven [at] gmail [dot] com or @teach_311 to reach us. Bookmark and check teach311.wordpress.com as we make continual updates. As we increase our digital capacity, please stay tuned and help spread the word!

Thank you for participating in Teach 3/11.

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Banner image: A house floats intact in the Pacific Ocean, washed out to sea by the tsunami of March 11, 2011.  Credit: US Navy