The Kobe Earthquake, which struck Japan just ten years ago, made us aware that a natural hazard could turn into one of the most serious problems for our society. Also, during the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction of the United Nations (the 1990s), more attention was drawn to the social factors of disasters that make the damage more serious and/or biased in the context of developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at such social factors of disasters. I have examined the related literature, and outlined my opinions on the position of anthropologicak studies in the present situation of disaster studies and practices. The paper consists of four sections: introduction, review, discussion and conclusion. The review section is divided into two parts: a review of the sociology of disasters, and that of the anthropology of disasters. Through a review of the existing literature, I illustrate past trends in the sociology of disasters, which have mainly dealt with communities in developed countries, as studies of the "management of emergency" from an organizational perspective. On the other hand, the features of the anthropology of disasters, which have mainly dealt with communities in developing countries, are considered as "fieldwork" in terms of method and "vulnerability" in terms of perspective. In the next section, I look into the current situation of disaster studies from a social-scientific perspective. The differences between sociology and anthropology identified above have gradually disappeared in the context of the involvement of many global organizations, such as the World Bank, the Red Cross and FEMA, involved in the local fields of disaster preparation and recovery. That situation requires anthropological studies to rethink and recreate their theoretical frameworks in order to contribute to illuminating the complex phenomena of disasters beyond the vulnerability theory. It is now necessary to focus on the period before a disaster strikes - the so-called processes of disaster mitigation and preparedness - because research on that stage makes clear the dynamic process of the accumulation and reproduction of "vulnerability" in everyday social life. A description of that process allows a practical contribution to the promotion of activities to mitigate future disasters, besides enabling a theoretical contribution, as it clarifies the fact that compared with other practices, the activities and practices related to disasters are strongly conditioned by past experiences and ("ethno"-) calculations of future risks. In the last section, I lay out some concepts describing activities that are related to the preparation and mitigation of disasters in a broad sense. First, to understand the mixture of explicit activities and everyday practices at the community level, I point to the significance of mezzo-level local groups with obscure boundaries that are formed in everyday life, as they can affect each individual's decision-making through their tacit roles or the information their members share. Moreover, I propose to take into account the interactions of many groups and organizations as "communication" following Gregory Bateson, and to analyze "disaster cultures" through the way that information, knowledge, tools and experience circulate, accumulate, and are arranged among the members of a group.
