Abstract
The devastating and lingering impact of the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant has made the process
of disaster recovery from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake even more complicated and difficult. Because even experts
sometimes provide totally different views on the safety of radioactive contamination, the boundary between
scientific truth and misconception has been blurred considerably. This makes fuhyo higai, or damages caused by
harmful rumors and misinformation, a serious problem. In this study, we first made an overview of diverse types
of fuhyo higai. Secondly, we conducted field research at Oarai Town, Ibaraki Prefecture, one of the disasteraffected areas. Our results showed that in Oarai, a visible but relatively minor "Rashomon" problem, defined as
the coexistence of contradictory interpretations of the same events, covers up a different Rashomon problem that
is invisible but more serious. To overcome this, an "opportunity creation" approach that shows Oarai’s different
and new face, such as town vitalization via animation, will be more effective than an "emergency management"
approach, which focuses on only the issue of radioactive contamination.
