Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan

The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan.

From juvenile literature to civic manuals to policy statements, Koikari examines a vast array of primary sources to demonstrate how femininity and masculinity, readiness and preparedness, militarism and humanitarianism, and nationalism and transnationalism inform cultural formation and transformation triggered by the unprecedented crisis. Interdisciplinary in its orientation, the book reveals how militarism, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism drive Japan's resilience building while calling attention to historical precedents and transnational connections that animate the ongoing mobilization toward safety and security.

An important contribution to studies of gender and Japan, the book is essential reading for all those wishing to understand local and global politics of precarity and its proposed solutions amid the rising tide of pandemics, ecological hazards, industrial disasters, and humanitarian crises.

“An absolutely compelling book that takes us through Japan's post-disaster generative project, as men sought to make the nation manly again, women took charge of domestic securitization, and children were taught to be resilient in a neoliberal reality. It is rendered all the more fascinating as the reader's mind inevitably turns to the recent COVID-19 epidemiological disaster in an added cross-temporal comparison.” —Koichi Nakano, Dean and Professor of Political Science, Sophia University, Japan

“Koikari's superb analysis exposes the politics fueling Japan's post-3.11 resilience culture, unpacking conservative ideologies of gender and nation in cheerful tales of kizuna (bonds) and good will projects. Fast-paced, fearless, and rich in archival research, Gender, Culture and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan reveals the agendas animating the "common sense" of disaster preparedness.” —Jan Bardsley, Professor Emerita of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, USA