Zoning of Disaster Risk Area in Tsunami-Prone Communities

A Community which No Longer Accepts the Newcomer Households

Abstract

 Purpose of this paper is to explain the prospective affect of designation of disaster-riskarea by exploring the tsunami experiences of a community which has more than 400 years of history. Many tsunami-prone communities are placed along the rias coast of Sanriku in Tohoku whilst suffering from tsunamis repeatedly. After the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, vast land of such communities was designated as disaster-risk-area, therefore many of them would stop accepting the newcomer households within any longer. This was a sort of an “ideal situation” for Yaichiro Yamaguchi who, as both a geographer and folklorist, conducted intensive fieldworks on both the tsunami in 1896（Meiji Sanriku Otsunami） and the tsunami in 1933（Showa Sanriku Otsunami） in the communities which were rather destined to go through them by the Sanriku geography.

 What he observed was a rather shocking fact that the large part of the tsunami affected areas were filled with newcomer households only several years after the former tsunami. Some of them were collected according to the kinship for the succession of the family reigns and the others were newcomers with migratory occupations such as fishermen or craftsmen without genealogical relationships. They even brought the local survivors, who once moved uphill after the disaster, back in to the tsunami affected areas. Yamaguchi therefore finds that some communities were destroyed and lost more than half of its members at both of the tsunamis in 1896 and 1933 successively. He argues that the tragedy occurred since such newcomers did not “know” how tsunamis hit the coastal communities by experiencing them “directly”.

 However, this paper attempts to question the meaning of “knowing” or “not knowing” the tsunamis. Since the border between these two conditions was quite crucial for the argument of Yamaguchi who would have witnessed so many tragedies brought about by the Showa Sanriku Otsunami in 1933. Now, after the tsunami in 2011, his “ideal” situation is going to be officially implemented by zoning the disaster risk area while allowing no inhabitants inside. Whereas, not a small part of disaster risk area designated in 1933, were again filled with inhabitants untill those communities went through the tsunami attack in 2011. A community this paper deals with, is one of such communities. Surprisingly, while losing 54 houses out of 62, all the 6 victims were inhabitants outside of the disaster risk area away from the harbour. This paper tries to analyse why the inhabitants of disaster risk area “knew” the tsunami by describing their history graved ubiquitously in their living environment and media which informed every single inhabitant, without excluding anyone, of the disaster risk “directly”.