2025 Volume 24 Pages 138-152
More than 30 years have passed since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake on January 17, 1995. This paper is an introduction to depicting the ethnography of the city, using the “dawn” as a metaphor that vividly captures the principles of the city that made up Kobe after the earthquake and the phase of its transformation. Dawn is a natural daily phenomenon that is time and space at the boundary where the darkness of night and the light of morning mix. Especially on the day of the earthquake, we are able to get a glimpse of the dynamics of the “souls” crossing the boundary and being formed by all throughout the society. In considering the dynamics of the city society that became apparent after the earthquake, we focus on the imagination of the people who imagine the city as public spaces, and re-examine the kind of transformation this city has undergone in relation to the souls. Specifically, this paper focuses on “Souzouteki-Fukkou [Build Back Better]” and “Tabunka-Kyousei [Multicultural Coexistence]” as public imaginaries with roots in developmentalism and nationalism that have been organized throughout the modernization process of Kobe as a port city. In discursive understanding, including existing research, these have usually been discussed separately. However, reconsidering the context of the city surrounding Kobe after the earthquake, especially with the view of the experiences of people moving through the inner-city area, these are complementary and fundamental imaginations in reimagining public spaces. It is necessary to reconsider them as creative imaginations. Based on sociological imagination theory after the thoughts of post-colonialism, we reconsider the cognitive problems of these imaginations and re-examine the societal logic that constitutes the domination of the “souls”. Looking back on the process of my fieldwork, this paper implies that alternative imaginations that emerged from events allowed us to reconsider this logic.
