Toward a Critical Disaster Studies in Japan and Beyond: Issues in Theory and Research

At the core of Japan’s disaster prevention and management, a model for global initiatives, is advocacy for policy and practice grounded in technological and structured systems to deal with disasters in all their phases through government-derived institutional models. Over the past two decades, however, this stance has been challenged not only by the scale of the disasters but also by magnifying intricate socio-political, historical, and economic variables constituting them. Latest events, including the current Covid-19 pandemic, have brought to the surface underlying questions of governance, inequality, community and trauma, cultural beliefs and ideologies shaping people’s experience of the crisis, fragile cooperation between municipalities and local entities that are situated in the community, and the vulnerability of the socio-economic and political systems where these events happen. Starting from the case of Japan, the purpose of this session is to present the directions of a growing body of contextual research aiming at exploring such questions while also developing more critical, context-based interpretive and integrative approaches to disaster, risk, vulnerability and resilience. The journey requires an epistemological shift to regard disasters as context-based events bounded up in human history and taking place over time, rather than solely hazardous events to predict, control and mitigate. The session welcomes presentations that address the complexity of disaster events in communities in Japan and beyond by exploring enduring critical questions related to the long-term availability and distribution of resources and power constituting their social construct.