The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 10 | Issue 10 | Number 2 | Article ID 3703 | Feb 27, 2012

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Tohoku’s Futures: Predicting Outcomes or ImaginingPossibilities?　　東北の将来−−結果の予測か可能性への想像か

William W. Kelly

Tohoku’s Futures: PredictingO u t c o m e s o r I m a g i n i n gPossibilities?

William W. Kelly

The natural disasters and human failures of3.11 and the ensuing nuclear plant andradiation crises have dealt incalculable damageto Japan's Tohoku region–to its naturallandscape, to its societal infrastructure, and tothe lifeways of its people. The massive loss oflife, the ravaging of communities, aquacultures,and arable land, and the destruction of schools,businesses, and housing may have beenconcentrated along Tohoku's Pacific coastaltowns, but like the tsunami itself, its damage,dislocations, and repercussions have sweptacross the entire region, powerfully althoughunequally.

We are among many other scholars who havebeen drawn to these tragedies and theiraftermath from our deep personal andprofessional involvements with the people andplaces of Tohoku, and the challenge and thecontext raise a basic question: what can we asanthropologists and other social scientists offerat this moment? What is distinctive about ourperspective? I have two remarks about this as acontribution to this discussion. One is aboutprediction and imagination. The other is aboutlocal leadership and political amalgamation.

Scene from Kesennuma

Tohoku was already challenged by a fragileeconomy of farming, fishing, and subcontractorfactories, and by a population declining innumbers and aging in composition. In theaftermath of 3.11, the urgent question ofTohoku's future is being framed by extremescenarios. Should it reconstruct itself byrebuilding the economic patterns, materialfoundations, and social structures of theimmediate past? Can it seize this moment toreinvent regional livelihoods and lifeways in

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entirely new directions? Or are the blows likelyto prove fatal to both vitality and vision?

The central dilemma is this: to rebuild regionallifeways and life worlds in forms resemblingpre-3.11 seems impossible in the wake ofdevastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclearpower plant meltdown, but to reinvent theregion through reimaging new forms ofcommunity and economy also appears beyondthe capacities and resources of the region.

The horrifying videos showing massivenumbers of vehicles, farm equipment, andfishing boats, of homes, work sheds, stores, andmunicipal buildings being swept through thetowns and across fields and back into the seaare tragically indelible 1. They also vividlytestify to a moment of reckoning for theFaustian bargain of a regional economy built ona heavily-subsidized infrastructure as Japanesepolitics over many decades showered ruralareas with seawalls, roads, ports and publicfaci l i t ies—and promoted and fundedinefficiencies and distortions in locallivelihoods. In one afternoon, the savage seareclaimed the excesses of this developmentalinfrastructure and destroyed the hubris ofplanners and politicians.

As many ethnographers of Tohoku have shown,res i l ience , res is tance , reso lve andresourcefulness have characterized theNortheast f rom the deep past to thecontemporary present. They are qualities that Imyself have experienced and appreciated inover 35 years of close attachment to the Shōnaiarea of Yamagata Prefecture.

Scene from Kesennuma

The dignity and determination of the region’sresidents are not in question, but are thesequalities sufficient for the magnitude of thecurrent challenges?

Within the economy it was surely fishing andaquaculture that was hardest hit. Is it reallypossible for recovery after the loss of life, thedevastation of sea beds so vital to shell fish andsea weed cultivation, and the destruction ofmost of the fleets and docks and processingplants?

Farming too suffered, both directly andindirectly, with the pall of suspicion that nowhangs over large areas of Tohoku production,including rice, vegetables, dairy products, andmeat. Even if this cloud lifts, can farmingmeaningfully recover if the average age ofIwate farmers now approaches 65?

And what about the hundreds of subcontractorfactories and assembly plants that dot theTohoku prefectures, often far from the coast?We quickly learned how vitally and intricatelyconnected they were to global supply chains forthe automotive, electronics, and otherindustries. But many of their delicatelycalibrated machines were destroyed by theearthquake tremors and their supply linesdisrupted for weeks. We then learned howquickly the parent corporations could shift

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their sourcing and their production nodes toother parts of Japan and abroad. Will they comeback? Why should they come back?

And even if a modicum of jobs return andinfrastructure is rebuilt, who among theyounger workers, with families of youngchildren, will choose to return to a region ofcontaminated soils, despoiled seascape, the lowdread of radiation, and the tortuous pathtowards community reconstruction?

A jumble of freight containers

Prediction and imagination

So these are some of the factors why I havebeen so pessimistic since 3.11 when I calculatethe prospects and predict the chances for aTohoku recovery and renewal. But as themonths of watching and listening and caringstretch on, I have become more and moreuncomfortable with such a judgment. Who am Ia n d w h o a r e w e , w e m u s t a s k a santhropologists, to predict Tohoku’s future? Onwhat basis can and should we be making suchprojections for the devastated region?

The roles and responsibilities of socialscience—especially our own discipline ofanthropology—are weighty matters aboutwhich much has been written and debated.Here I can only assert my own view, which isthat we anthropologists have neither theanalytical disposition nor the moral right toprognosticate on the futures of those among

whom we work and whose lives we seek tounderstand. To foresee is a claim “to see for” aswell as “to see forward.” We should do neither.

But if it is not our place to predict, it is our roleto imagine. Prediction deals in likelihoods;imagining deals in possibilities. We should notbe asking “WHAT WILL?” but rather “HOWMIGHT?” We must avoid the smugness ofprediction and embrace the harder work ofimagining.

And how might we ask “how might” instead of“what will”? What is to be the source of ourcontributions to imagining the possibilities forTohoku?

The anthropology of Japan has deep roots inTohoku. One small measure is that over 10% ofthe 340 or so English-language anthropologydissertations done on Japan over the last sevendecades have been sited in Tohoku, to whichone must add the even larger corpus ofextended field studies done by our Japanesecolleagues in sociology. Together, thesebooks and articles add up to an exceedinglyrich ethnographic archive. The topics haveranged across the gamut of the field’sagenda—kinship, language, politics, gender,work, health, tourism, schooling, and muchmore—and it is this ethnographic archive, anaccumulation of understandings, that we mustdraw upon. In what ways can the ethnographicpast speak towards the ethnographic future?

Local leadership

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Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai of Minamisomamade a plea to the world via YouTube, “Ibeg you…to help us.”

Other papers in this group are themselvesdemonstrations of this, and here I only suggesttwo further brief examples. We know from ourarchive that local leadership and regionaldevelopment in Tohoku have characteristicallybrought forward two kinds of local leaders,whom one might tag the pipeline operators andthe judo masters.

Pipeline operators are conduits of centralresources to localit ies, who use theirconnections and influence to activate the flowsof subsidies that pour from the center - themoney to spend but also the directives on howto spend it and the plans and the planners forjust how it is to be spent. They have opened thefloodgates to top-down subsidy-development,which often chokes out bottom-up sustainabledevelopment like an invasive pond weed.

But we know that there have been conditionsfor and examples of the latter. There are thejudo masters, who have the poise and balanceto flip the heavy-handed center, to deploy theresources from the outside for more localneeds. People like Hayano Senpei, at the centerof Jackson Bailey’s invaluable historicalethnography of Tanohata: the combative and

irascible mayor of Tanohata from themid-1960s to the 1990s, who skillfullyleveraged central institutions to enact a home-grown vision and a local agenda for identityand livelihood 3. And there are others. They arein Shōnai and Akita and elsewhere in theethnographic archive.

Imagine the disparate outcomes if one or theother type of local leadership should prevailand let us imagine the circumstances that canproduce one or the other.

This is something we can and should contributeto.

“Gappei”

Another line of inquiry that we Tohokuethnographers might usefully pursue inimagining possible futures is the effects of ahal f -century of local administrat iveamalgamation on the post 3.11 region. Therewere 33 administrative cities, towns, andvillages directly affected by the tsunami andearthquakes along the Tohoku coast on March11, from Iwaki in the south up to Hachinohe inthe north. Their total area is 3000 squarekilometers, of which the inundated acreage hasbeen photo-mapped to be about 440 squaremiles (some 7% of the total area of theseadministrative units).

What does it mean that every harbor, everycoastal village and town, directly destroyed bythe tsunami is administratively embedded in alarger local political unit? How is thismitigating or exacerbating the difficulties ofrecovery and the lines of renewal? Politicalamalgamation, we know from the ethnographica r c h i v e , h a s e c o n o m i c a n d s o c i a lconsequences, and it has produced, dependingon the circumstances, new solidarities and newfrictions. What is happening in these 33shichōson and what are the lessons from theTohoku archive that may be brought to bear?Ethnographers can and should help to answerthese questions in ways that could help to

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envisage the future of local communities.

And to conclude with a final provocation. Itwould certainly seem from Japan’s modernregional histories that gappei (merger) isinexorable and, to local testimony and scholarlyconclusion, often deleterious. But might weimagine the possibilities of pushing it to itslogical limits?

Tohoku, like New England in the US or theMaritimes in Canada, is a socio-geographicconstruct, a unit in the popular regionalmapping of the country, a precipitate ofcultural history, a grouping of convenience ofits six prefectures. Regions have no formaleconomic or political standing.

But what if the continuous calls for an “age oflocality,” for decentralization, for breakingTokyo’s stranglehold on the concentration ofpolitical, financial, and media power—what ifthese calls took at its literal word the state‘sown agenda of ever-larger administrativeamalgamation? Could we imagine a Tohokuregion of official standing and formalgovernance, a redrawing of the political, theconstitutional map of Japan towards a lesscentralized and more federated union ofregions that could offer the possibility and therights and resources for region-first and region-led designs for living?

Fanciful, I admit. From pipeline to pipedream,some might say. Tohoku is not Quebec althoughit may be Scotland 4. But my contribution hereis not that particular imagined form, but thelarger disposition behind it.

We can’t speak about Tohoku, to Tohoku, withwisdom but we can speak from understanding,a collective understanding that is broad anddeep.

We must clear a space between an appalledanthropology—with dire “Akira“-l ikepredictions of a Tohoku dystopia—and anapplied anthropology, with its stipulative tone

about what must be done.

What I am suggesting is not kibōgaku—I haveno hope for hope-ology, which seeks to take thepulse of optimism without an instrument orscale—but rather sōzōgaku, a deliberate andinformed effort to imagine both the what andthe how.

Our question is not what are the odds of aTohoku Ishin (restoration), but what might bethe forms of a Tohoku Ishin? Let us try to bring50 years of concern for this region and itspeople to bear on that question.

Notes

1. For a timeline of videos produced by NHK ofdifferent aspects of post 3.11 see here.

2. Winifred A. Bird and Elizabeth Grossman,“Chemical Contamination, Cleanup andLongterm Consequences of Japan's Earthquakeand Tsunami,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume9, Issue 33, No 1, August 15, 2011.

3. Jackson H. Bailey (1991) Ordinary People,Extraordinary Lives: A Study of Political andEconomic Change in a Tohoku Village.Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

4. An analogy pursued by the importantvolume recently published by the ShrinkingRegions Research Group. Peter Matanle,Anthony S. Rausch and Shrinking RegionsResearch Group (2011) Japan's ShrinkingRegions in the 21st Century: ContemporaryResponses to Depopulation and SocioeconomicDecline. London and Amherst, NY: CambriaPress.

William W. Kelly is Professor of Anthropologyand Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies,Yale University. He is the author of Deferenceand Defiance in Nineteenth Century Japan andco-editor, with Susan Brownell, of TheOlympics in East Asia: The Crucible ofLocalism, Nationalism, Regionalism, and

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Globalism and The Olympics in East Asia:Nationalism, Regionalism, and Globalism on theCenter Stage of World Sports.Recommended citation: William W. Kelly,'Tohoku’s Futures: Predicting Outcomes orImagining Possibilities?,' The Asia PacificJournal, Vol 10, Issue 10, No 2, March 5, 2012.

This is part of the series One-Year After TheGreat East Japan Earthquake: ReportsFrom The Field edited by Christopher S.Thompson and Dawn Grimes-MacLellan.

The complete series is comprised of thefollowing articles:

1. Christopher S. Thompson, The Great EastJapan Earthquake One Year On: ReportsFrom The Field

2. William W. Kelly, Tohoku’s Futures:

Predicting Outcomes or ImaginingPossibilities

3. Alyne Elizabeth Delaney, A Report FromOne Miyagi Fishing Community

4. Dawn Grimes-MacLellan, Students in theField at the Site of the Great East JapanEarthquake

5. Chr is topher S . Thompson, LocalPerspectives On the Tsunami Disaster:Untold Stories From the Sanriku Coast

See the complete list of APJ resources on the3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear powermeltdown, and the state and societal responsesto it here.