A recent FAZ article (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/verarbeitung-der-pandemie-in-china-und-japan-19339874.html) discusses the cultural and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia, particularly through the lens of art and social resilience in China and Japan. The article highlights a special issue of the “Asian Studies” journal by the University of Ljubljana, which delves into the artistic processing of the COVID-19 pandemic in these countries. The research we conducted remotely in 2020/21 in the vicinity of Ishinomaki, Japan, is specifically mentioned as an example of how disasters historically prompt the mobilization of social capital. Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the area witnessed significant contributions from civil society towards reconstruction, involving not just local communities but also migrants. A decade later, the pandemic has further catalyzed the development of social networks and creative place-making, with the researchers interviewing various local figures, such as a guesthouse owner pivoting to accommodate students and a drive-in cinema operator using a sea wall as a screen.
This article underscores the importance of social capital in crisis management and recovery, demonstrating how communities in Asia have adapted creatively to the challenges posed by the pandemic, fostering resilience and transformation in the process. Social capital emerges as vital, with networks, norms, and trust enabling shared objectives’ pursuit, essential for community spirit and cooperation during hardships. Expanding this research for presentation at the 2024 Asian Studies Conference (ASAA), the focus will broaden to include similar cases across Japan and the Pacific Rim. This initiative aims to explore social capital’s nuanced impact in diverse cultural contexts, offering valuable lessons on resilience and recovery strategies adaptable globally.
Further reading:
Social Capital, Innovation, and Local Resilience -Tokyo Neighbourhood in Times of Crisis
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Community and Justice in Crisis
The Pacific Rim Community Design 2023 Sendai took place from 16-18 September 2023. At Day 1 all participants visited Futaba, a town erased by 3.11, the Futaba Disaster Museum and listed to the major and how the town tries to recover. He showed us around the derelict city hall where the time stood still and displayed the time of the event: 14.46pm at 3.11. Afterwards we had the opportunity to see one of the local elementary schools and how also here time stop suddenly when the triple disaster hit. Parents were able to pick up belongings some 7 years later, but some never did as the memory must have been too sad.
From former 6500 residents just 100 returned (09.2023) or moved here (e.g. newcomer) since the lifting of the evacuation order on 30 August 2022. Many areas near the destroyed coastal areas are mainly planned for work/shopping but not living or residential purposes (even though around the new JR Futaba station (which is located along the Joban line) new low rise housing is constructed at the moment, offering affordable and subsidied houses and apartments for rent).
Also many (new) companies settle in the area, some are still under construction, attracting even more companies as 70 percent of the construction cost can be covered by public funds. Newcomer who plan to settle in the town can receive 200man/ 16.000 Euro, returnees cannot receive this, which leads to more inner conflicts and shows how complex the situation is. Thanks to all who organized this tour, it was a very inspiring to see the development, even though the town might never recover fully.
On day 2 we visited the Tomioka Archive museum, its impressive installations which featured items which were collected from private homes (70 percents of the items on display) including clocks, calendars but also a wrecked police car which reminds the visitor of the tragedy of the triple disaster which caused so many death, not just immediately but also many years later (the Futaba museum mentioend a number of a total of 2337 disaster related death in Fukushima by 31 March 2023). Minachan who is working as story teller for a local NGO eventually joined us on a bus tour around Tomioka showing us the former shotengai (central shopping street), schools, station buildings and even the fundament of her own house which is she now rebuilding in Tomioka.
After lunch we visited the Tomioka winery which started 2014/2015 to plant vines to better use the area and create something for future generations. Three school friends (who are now in their 50s) came together, used their own land and funds to start the procedure and continue to realize the project with the help of crowdfunding and many volunteers to finally to suceed to produce 500 bottles per year (as of 2022). Most of the bottles go to the crowdfunders, volunteers and all people involved but they have high hopes to be able to sell wine very soon to the general public. More about their initiave can be found here: https://tomioka-wine.com/
Our final stop brought us to Namie Cafe and the Ocafe, which is the initiave of a former residents and other women to tell the stories of 3.11 and their survivor.s Oka-san rebuilt and opens her house as cafe to all who want to know more about the disaster which especially hit Namie town but also many other local communities so hard. We listed to three kamishibai stories, narrated by three amazing women who work effortless to create a local network to which we should listen to and learn from so that such disaster will not happen again. If you are in the area, give them a call, surely they are welcoming you: https://ocafe-utuwa.mystrikingly.com/
On monday all participants came together at the Tohoku Universitie’s International Research Institute of Disaster Science – IRIDeS together to discuss their impressions, listen to different researchers and finally to poster presentations who featured many new ideas. Many thanks to all the organizers for all the efforts, energy and time as they took months to prepare this event, lets not just talk but realize how to create livable communities.
Ocafe is growing 1000 Sakuratrees to give to schools and other groups
Neighborhood Transformation in East Asian Cities: Is “Gentrification” the Right Frame of Reference?
15 – 17 May 2022 (Postponed from August 2021), hybrid set-up
In this symposium, we are interested in the following question: Is “gentrification” the best concept with which to describe what is going on in Asian cities, or do we need other—or additional—frames to understand the Asian context at the neighborhood level? Our goals in this symposium are to 1) understand what is going on at the neighborhood level in Asia; and 2) identify more appropriate terms and lenses with which to describe transformations in Asian cities, using locally-specific language and frameworks.
The geographical scope of the symposium is East Asia, including Northeast Asia and the ASEAN countries in Southeast Asia. Contributions may be in the form of individual case studies or comparative work involving multiple cities in the region. Selected papers presented at the symposium will be published together as an edited volume or a special journal issue, depending on the strength and coherence of the contributions.
Given the ongoing uncertainties arising from Covid-19, this will be a blended event with participants (both panelists and audience members) having the option to join the panel proceedings online if travel to Chiba is not possible, or if they prefer to participate online.
Panel: Heide Imai, Florian Purkarthofer
Gentrification, Revitalization or what: Changing Spaces, Places and Scapes in Japan
While the core meaning of gentrification – the spatial expression of economic inequality – is still a relevant research topic for metropolitan regions, the forms, structures and processes of urban change are differing by place and neighborhood. Yet, there is also a rich discourse about revitalization and recovery of cities and neighborhoods, facing population decline due to aging and migration into the metropolitan areas. Looking at newly opened coffee shop, galleries and shared work spaces in those places, one might be forced to rethink the overly simplified dichotomy of gentrification (bad) and revitalization (good). Hence, the paper tries to move beyond such concepts to ask how the ambiguity of urban change can be understood.
The case studies — rich in data and from different urban spheres in Japan, which experienced decline, failure but also rebirth and revival — allow us to develop a deeper understanding for the ongoing restructuring processes which happen around us, yet we cannot fully understand until we know how they affect the everyday life of the ordinary residents, users and visitors (often in contrasting ways). We use metropolitan case studies from Tokyo (Kiyosumi Shirakawa) and outside the metropolitan area (Morioka) to substantiate our pursuit. While the influx of richer households is still replacing poorer tenants in Tokyo, the arrival of new (wealthy) people in many shrinking cities throw-out japan is perceived as a blessing, reducing the number of deserted houses. And while some symptoms might seem similar, the actual meaning and impact on the city and its social fabrics can be antithetic.
Focusing on changing spaces in contemporary Japan, we try to show that urban change is multifaceted and context-sensitive and that it needs more than two buzzwords to grasp its complexity.
Even though the AAS in Asia Conference 2020 will be streamed online this year between 31 August to 4 September 2020, we hope that some of you will join us on monday, 31 August between 12.30-2pm to contribute to the panel discussion entitled:
The City Remade, the City Evaded: Transformations of Life in and Away from Urban Japan
Panelists: Nathaniel Smith, University of Arizona, United States (organizer, presenter, chair) Heide Imai, Senshu University, Japan (presenter) James Farrer, Sophia University, Japan (presenter) Susanne Klien, Hokkaido University, Japan (presenter)
Abstract:
Urbanity is a filter for life in Japan, orienting labor, social space, and regimes of taste. This panel brings together ethnographically-driven research in the social sciences to consider changes in urban life as it evolves both within and beyond the megacity. We take up novel places like the “hidden” slices of urbanity found in the narrow back-alley, shopping street, or crusty postwar yokochō, consider the “bistro battleground” of a suburban neighborhood where entrepreneur chefs draw competing global culinary cultures into pockets of decidedly everyday life, examine forms of resistance to urbanity enacted by young “lifestyle migrants” pursuing new food ventures and hoping for a slower life in rural areas, and evaluate how parts of Tokyo stand as symbolic Petri dishes for the coming “diverse Japan” of the future, as tourism remakes and attempts to gentrify the famously gritty neighborhood of Kabukicho into a would-be welcome mat for the world. As Japan’s population ages and its rural centers wane, dynamic urban development in the Tokyo megacity is conversely reaching new heights. In the run-up to the Summer Olympics, we focus on how the megacity of Tokyo is being remade or evaded by locals and visitors alike and consider what revitalization campaigns, new forms of cosmopolitanism, and efforts to imagine alternatives to the clout of urban Japan reveal about changing aspects of society.
Heide Imai was presenting together with Florian Purkarthoefer (University Vienna) the paper Gentrification, Revitalization or what: Changing Scapes, Spaces and Places in Japanat the Cultural Typhoon Conference 2019, taking at Keio University from 1st-2nd June, as a first result of an ongoing research project called Gentrifying Japan.
The presentation attracted a wider audience and people from the field of interdisciplinary Asian and cultural studies including visual anthropology, critical social and community studies. The main questions which were raised during the presentation were 1) who is not included/not profiting and in what way people resist, protest or find other ways to make their voices against the ongoing processes heard, 2) what role do artists play in the process, as these often do not want to be part of differen tcreative policies, yet also need spaces and means to make a living, and 3) how our paper is contributing to the wider, global debate which we critized for being too general to be cover the diversity and complexity of different cases, especially of the existing variety of urban spheres in East Asia. With this feedback in mind, we will finalize our data set and prepare our paper for publication.
The 18th biannual International Planning History Society (IPHS) conference took place 15–19 July 2018, in Yokohama, Japan. Themed ‘Looking at the World History of Planning’, the conference asked to enhance and promote the diversity of perspectives and narratives existing in the research of cities and their planning history (select full papers and abstracts are available for public access from the IPHS website: https://journals.library.tudelft.nl/index.php/iphs/issue/archive). The conference consisted of diverse events.
In the panel entitled Planning Community without Planners, chaired by Nancy Kwak Dr. Heide Imai gave a presentation entitled “Urban Ordinaries – Vernacular Landscapes as Places of Diversity, Difference and Displacement”. The presentation was given as part of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP) which aims to encourage the study of cities as creations and creators of large-scale or global historical phenomena.
Dr. Heide Imai will present together with Florian Purkarthoefer (University Vienna) at the Cultural Typhoon Conference in June 2019 results of the ongoing research project Gentrifying Japan. Entitled Gentrification, Revitalization or what: Changing Scapes, Spaces and Places in Japan, the paper will move beyond the general concept of gentrification to ask how the ambiguity of urban change can be understood. Being rich in data coming from different urban spheres in Japan, which experienced decline, failure but also rebirth and revival, the case studies presented will allow the reader to develop a deeper understanding for the ongoing restructuring processes which happen around us, yet cannot be fully understand until we know how they affect the everyday life of the ordinary residents, users and visitors (often in contrasting ways).
Cultural Typhoon Conference, Mita Campus, Keio University, Tokyo, from June 1–2, 2019.
