Regional Memory and Image before the Great East Japan Earthquake Narrated in Residents' Oral History

A Case Study in Moune, Kesennuma City, Miyagi Prefecture

Abstract

This study attempts to find out the regional memory and image shared by residents before the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Oral histories were obtained by conducting interviews in a small community of Moune in Kesennuma City, Miyagi Prefecture from March through December, 2012. Two analyses, the correspondence analysis based on text mining and the spatial analysis using GIS, were applied to the oral histories of seventeen residents. The regional image and memory before the earthquake were thus extracted, which help local residents to plan and implement community-based reconstruction.