Abstract
This paper examines the meaning and the reason why evacuees visited their original residence from evacuation sites frequently and returned soon after the nuclear disaster in the case of Haramachi ward, Minamisoma city, Fukushima Prefecture. This paper also analyzes the temporal change in the life structure of nuclear disaster victims and clarifies how evacuees visited and returned to their original residences and were connected to the “reconstruction process” for recovery from damage and adaptation to a new environment. The following three aspects characterize the “reconstruction process”. First, it is based on the regional uniqueness and historical continuity of the life structure, and has been aimed at rebuilding these over time in the process of “visiting and returning”. Second, although recovery and adaptation differ between early returnees in urban areas and long-term evacuees in rural areas, the social process of reconstruction is formed by supporting each other. Third, it emerges as a practice in an attempt to fill the gap which the “early return” policy has treated as equivalent, between cancelling the instruction of forced evacuation, return from evacuation, life reconstruction, and reconstruction of the area.
The reconstruction policy after the nuclear disaster has forced evacuees to select the “early return or immigration” by evacuation order cancellation without sufficient institutional security and restoration, and to rebuilding their lives. As a result, they were forced to divide socially and abandon their local life. However, they have formed the “reconstruction process” by resisting the “reconstruction” that the government tries to force and, social disorganization by “visiting and returning” from evacuation sites.
