2019 Volume 25 Pages 93-108
After the Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese Association for Environmental Sociology（JAES）established an ad hoc committee on the disaster to facilitate an understanding of the changing situations of impacted people and their environment through academic works. This committee has made a great effort to deepen the discussion on related issues through workshops and seminars.
As part of this effort, the committee proposed three theses on the theme of the continuity and disruption of life due to the Great East Japan Earthquake from the perspective of environmental sociology. This article attempts to establish a bibliographical introduction to these three arguments thereby highlighting their significance. The perspective of environmental sociology has revealed those aspects of everyday life that have been disrupted or lost. At the same time, environmental sociologists have carefully sought to understand that which people have maintained and strived to continue since before getting caught up in the structural change brought about by the earthquake disaster.
From this multi-viewpoint perspective, the discussion can be divided into the following three areas :
（1） The identification of the constituents of the damage caused by a large-scale complex earthquake disaster, and research on how to visualize damage.
（2） Research on how to grasp the temporal change of damage and its problems.
（3） Research on how physical reconstruction proceeds and clarification of how the reconstruction of life goes on.
Taking into consideration the focus of the above research, environmental sociology has a high potential to bring hitherto hidden damage to the surface and make it visible. Environmental Sociology can work as a powerful tool for the investigation and presentation of better measures to contend with large-scale complex disasters.
