A discussion for living together with the dead in our post-disaster society

フッコウ　ニ　オケル　シシャ　トノ　キョウセイ　ニ　カンスル　イチコウサツ　ギセイ　ノ　システム　ヲ　テガカリ　ニ　シテ

ミヤマエ, リョウヘイ

Miyamae, Ryohei

渥美, 公秀

アツミ, トモヒデ

Atsumi, Tomohide

サイガイ　ト　キョウセイ　ケンキュウカイ

犠牲のシステム

語りの非対称性

幽霊譚

記憶の責任の感覚

disaster recovery

system of sacrifice

narrative asymmetry

ghost story

a sense of responsibility of memory

The present study discusses a kyosei (living together in harmony) with the dead in a post-disaster society. While most definitions of kyosei say nothing about harmonious living with the dead, we embrace this contradiction for the purposes of our analysis. We define recovery as a process of building a kyosei society following a disaster that includes harmonious living between survivors and reconciliation with the loss of loved ones. However, when we discuss kyosei, we must also examine social, economic and ethical sacrifices made in the process of recovery that work against kyosei. These sacrifices create a structure that produces a gap between exploiters and the exploited, that is, those who benefit at the expense of others in disaster recovery. The structure is called the system of sacrifice (Takahashi, 2012). Disaster capitalism, for example, allows a few people (e.g., entrepreneurs, politicians) to economically benefit from survivors. Furthermore, the system of sacrifice leads to an ethical maxim; we must not talk about the dead because the dead can never reply – it literally means just a monologue by survivors. This inability to talk about or with the dead is one of the obstacles to creating a post-disaster kyosei society. However, we often hear stories of the dead from survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011. We believe that the story of ghosts and dialogue with the dead is a key to building a kyosei society. We describe the days in Banda Aceh, where there were many victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, as an ethnography and introduce the story of a ghost in the city of Ishinomaki following the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of why survivors tend to tell ghost stories with a sense of responsibility for disaster deaths from a memory theory perspective.

渥美, 公秀