An Examination of Telling The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake to The Next Generation

focusing on the collaborative remembering of narrators and audiences

Abstract

The present study is the examination of telling The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake to the next generation. Authors conducted fieldwork at Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in Kobe and analyzed collaborative remembering between narrators and audiences. In the classification of their narratives, they were divided into 3 groups, consisting of victims’ stories, rescue corps’ stories and the stories about natural sciences. We distributed the questionnaires to visitors before and after their visits and examined their images of the Kobe earthquake. While ‘house’, ‘dead person’ and ‘big earthquake’ were listed up before their visits, ‘living person’ and ‘volunteer’ were picked up after their visits. They showed that visitors interested in the life and helping each other by visit. Besides, we divided victims’ stories into 2 groups to examine collaborative remembering. One was the story that they emphasized the concrete wisdoms about disaster prevention; the other was the story that they emphasized the importance of the life and helping each other. We examined the difference of audiences’ reactions from theoretical views called ‘mastery’ and ‘appropriation’.