3/11 Citizens/Government

So I was leaping along— leap... leap... leap...when during my duties as a librarian I auspiciously (or do I mean suspiciously? Probably a combination of both) stumbled across this book: Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge. I saw Fischer on the spine and thought “wut? I didn’t know anthropology as critique guy was into political ecology.” Well when I opened the cover it was of course a different Fischer but that this book would seemingly come to me of its own accord seemed almost magical. I have since then only had time to read the preface and skim the introduction to the sections but even in just reading the set up of the book and the problems that it addresses, it echoed the same sentiments I found in the Tōhoku diaries chapter of the book I mentioned last week.

Gerald Curtis, the author of the chapter, went to Tōhoku about a month after the disaster and documented some of his experiences there as well as interviews with various people. One of the issues that was brought up was this gap, this dissonance between the desires of the local people and the actions of the government.

(Ex) Prime Minister Kan failed in many ways to address the fallout of the tsunami (and apparently fumbled massively with the Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster). For example, the decisions about who would be relocated from the evacuation center to temporary housing was done by lottery. While this seems fair, it contradicts the communal nature of the citizens in the area.

Along this area of the coast there were fishing and farming towns. It was the pristine picture of Japanese rural life. Many of the people from these villages were born and raised in these towns. For them, this life was all that they knew and they weren’t interested in getting a new one. Instead they wanted to be relocated with their friends and neighbors. Especially for elderly people, dying from loneliness/dying alone or kodokushi (孤独死) is a real threat. Especially in the hecticness of being relocated to a new home, being separated from friends and family, if they were to die, it may be days before the body is discovered, only furthering the distaste for being relocated at random.

Not to mention that there wasn’t a quick nor reassuring government support for rebuilding these cities. A local fisherman that Curtis interviewed actually saw all of this destruction as the opportunity for radical change. With everything laid to waste, there is now open to possibility to reconstruct the area in new ways, no longer restrained by the previous infrastructure. The fisherman’s idea was to consolidate the fishermen into a few larger ports instead of every man for himself in small ports along the coast. They could form a coalition and work together from a central headquarters. However, the likelihood of this kind of change to happen is only really viable while attention is still focused on the area. As time passes it will fade into memory along like many of the other natural disasters (ex. Hurricane Katrina) and without the help of NGOs, foreign volunteers, etc. the difficulty of the efforts will only increase.

So part of the dissonance comes from the government’s detachment from the way of life of their people. Even in this time of tragedy and distress, bureaucrats are too busy trying to follow all of the protocols (making for a slow response) rather than doing what directly needs to be done. Fischer in his preface outlines this same kind of issue. People all agree that democracy is the way to get things done but are participating less and less due to disenchantment with the effectiveness of the system to bring about the changes they want and need. His set up is that, if politicians don’t pay attention or care about us (the citizens) then should we be turning to experts? Surely they in all their knowledge in this technological world will be able to take us into consideration while creating new things.

I look forward to reading more of this book because I want to see how he answers these questions of bridging the gap between citizen and government. If I can, I will be applying those concepts to how the events of 3/11 played out in Japan as a sort of case study.