| This dissertation is an ethnographic account of disaster preparedness prior to and after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Drawing on two years of participant/observation in expert and lay preparedness activities in Tokyo, full-time work in an earthquake research laboratory, and an assistantship with a high-profile Japanese disaster consultant, this work inquires into a key tension in Japanese disaster preparedness, between, on the one hand, preparedness understood as a problem of increased consciousness, knowledge, and visibility, and on the other, preparedness taken as a broader milieu in which consciousness, knowledge, and visibility become precisely the problem.;Although Japan has been buffeted for millennia by earthquakes, typhoons and floods, disaster preparedness discourse in contemporary Japan draws its lessons largely from the 1995 Kobe earthquake which claimed more than six thousand lives. The administration's late and lackluster response in Kobe led to a general belief that the state is ill-suited to address neighborhood-level problems in the immediate aftermath of large-scale disasters. This dissertation focuses on the strategies, practical and philosophical, through which the burden of disaster preparedness has been redistributed from the state to civil society during the sixteen years since Kobe.;Each of the seven chapters of this work unpacks a different aspect of preparedness viewed through the lens of what I call 'preparedness-that-is-not-called-itself'. For the Japanese disaster preparedness volunteers who coined this perplexing term, it describes the subtle concealing of survival skills in community games and community activities, or within humdrum everyday life. I re-appropriate the term as an analytic lens through which to observe these humdrum cultural practices that address problems of preparedness without addressing the disaster head-on as a problem. Through case studies of inadvertent, involuntary, and non-purposive ensembles of preparedness, this dissertation traces preparedness as it is brought ever more comprehensively into the material and cultural structures of everyday life in Japan.;Hewing close to the Latin origin of the term 'security' (secura ) meaning "without care or concern" I argue that security strategies which aim to eliminate 'concern' by means of an ever-more vigilant 'concern,' also reproduce it. This 'concern for concern' I argue, is a conception of security grounded in the assumption that problems must be made visible in order to address them. Taking as my starting point a slip of the tongue from a disaster preparedness administrator who calls on an audience to, "Prepare for preparedness," this dissertation teases out the dimensions of a security milieu in Japan that defines itself not against concern or problems, but instead which moves beyond problem-orientation into civil society itself. With the term 'recursive modernity' I mean to indicate this very tension between problem-oriented approaches to security (`concern for concern') and culturally derived manifestations of preparedness (`preparing for preparedness'). |
