On March 11, 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, also referred to in Japan as the Great East Japan Earthquake, partially destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. These events caused the deaths of 15,884 people, led to the evacuation of 300,000 others, and triggered a nuclear accident the causes and long-term consequences of which are still under investigation (Ahn et al., 2015; Guarnieri & Travadel, 2018; Hasegawa, 2013; Kalmbach, 2015). The series of events constituting the earthquake and tsunami, and the scale and amplitude of the ensuing nuclear disaster, were breathtaking and took the international community by surprise.
In Berkeley, California, the emotions aroused by the catastrophe and the threat of a nuclear disaster put residents on the alert. Like millions of others, I was glued to my computer—watching CNN live, trying to make sense of the information I had, and speculating on what was not yet known. Everywhere—in supermarkets, in playgrounds, at work—discussions revolved around the disaster, the sorrow, the pain, and the risk. On April 20, 2011, an interdisciplinary group of faculty members from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), gathered for an open discussion entitled “Coping with the Crisis: Implications for Japan’s Future.” i That evening, the panelists openly and genuinely shared their thoughts and their knowledge of what had happened—what it meant not only for the affected communities, but also for rest of us. The room was full, faces were grave; the discussion continued for many hours as people tried to sort out the information coming from diverse sources: Japanese government, news agencies, citizen science network, scientists (Shineha & Tanaka, 2017).
Residents, faculty members, and concerned citizens were wondering whom to trust and how to move forward from this point. ii This discussion was the first of many organized at UC Berkeley, generated by a group of dedicated and concerned scholars iii willing to use their knowledge and energy to limit the spectrum of the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and to inform the public and the policy-makers. Relying on an international network of experts, citizen scientists, academics, friends, and family members, they translated and discussed information, weighing contributions from those in a position to take part in this large enterprise of interdisciplinary sense-making. As a graduate student working on the earthquake risk in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was invited to participate in three of these workshops (Ahn, Guarnieri, & Furuta, 2017; Akera, 2007; Amir, 2018), where scholars tried to find a common language to describe the complexity of the disaster that had been such a deep emotional and intellectual shock. Building on what French philosopher Emilie Hache has described as a disregarded competence of the Moderns: the capacity to use our emotional response as the trigger for action to “collectively put words on a collective fear and draw energy to act” (quoted in Vincent, 2017) people in the room were joining forces to think through the multiple, and often contradictory dimensions of disasters on the scale of the Fukushima Daiichi event.
1.1 A Questioning Situation
Studying an event of the scope of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and ensuing nuclear disaster with the tools of academic knowledge is a humbling experience: no single discipline, method, approach, or scholar can either describe or explain the chain of reactions leading to a disaster of that scale.
As the discussions in the aftermath of the incident made explicit, the risk of a catastrophic event is thought of as an association of distinctive modalities, or modes of knowing, that crosses the traditional divisions of academic disciplines and methods: “[D]isasters come into existence in both the material and the social world and perhaps, in some hybrid space between them” (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman, 1999: 24). What seems coherent and valid from the perspective of the event is sometimes hard to articulate and prone to debate from the perspective of academic disciplines. To account for this complexity, anthropologists have argued that disasters “are both socially constructed and experienced differently by different groups and individuals, generating multiple interpretations of an event process. A single disaster can fragment into different and conflicting sets of circumstances and interpretations according to the experience and identity of those affected” (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman, 1999: 26).
What resources do we have to approach such a catastrophe? How can we deal with the different perspectives, meanings, and consequences of what seems at first a single event but whose ramifications and multiple specificities can easily overcome our capacity to think? How useful is the knowledge of past disasters in addressing new ones? Like all other disasters, the Fukushima disaster had multiple existences , multiple ways of “being in the world,” that were hard to reconcile. This apparent incompatibility seemed reinforced by the many ways in which the narration, the stories, and the analysis of the event were performed, across disciplinary fields and epistemologies.
1.2 The Uncertain Space of Risk
My field research—localized in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California, on the West Coast of the United States—seeks to explain how the possible displacement of two massive tectonic plates along the Pacific Rim could become “the Big One,” the next major earthquake—an event both feared and awaited, and yet invisible. The West Coast of the United Sates is particularly concerned by the possibility of large-scale earthquakes. In and around the Pacific Ocean, the junction of the Pacific plate with other plates (the North American plate, Cocos plate, Juan de Fuca plate, Nazca plate, Antarctic plate, Australian plate, and Filipino plate) creates a very active seismic zone, commonly called the “Ring of Fire.” In the past, other earthquakes have also been called a Big One: the M6.8 1868 Hayward earthquake was, for instance, a Big One before being dethroned by the M7.8 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The most recent earthquakes, however—the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the M6.0 2014 South Napa Earthquake that hit the city of American Canyon to the north of the San Francisco Bay Area—were never considered sufficiently strong to qualify for the name.
1.2.1 The Multiple Existences of the Earthquake
Risk and disaster are hard to characterize fully, and they resist the observer’s temptation to determine a single definition or a simple explanation. However, the manner in which experts, scientists, residents, and the public comprehend them has a considerable impact on the politics of mitigation and reconstruction. Since the end of the Second World War, a long tradition of research has explored and critically analyzed the intertwined relationships between micro- and macro-level events, and the multiple stakeholders involved in the unfolding of disasters (Boudia & Jas, 2007; Frickel & Bess, 2007; Hoffman & Oliver-Smith, 2002; Knowles, 2011; Lane et al., 2010; Lash, Szerszynski, & Wynne, 1996; Quarantelli, 1998; Solnit, 2009; Tierney, 2001; White, 1945; Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, & Davis, 2006). Over the past few decades, qualitative and quantitative approaches have continued to coexist, creating different forms of sociotechnical assemblages pursuing the same objective: obtaining a more precise representation of earthquake signals and generating a clearer interpretation of the mechanism that triggers the movement of tectonic plates.
In seismology and earthquake studies, long before the era of the constant monitoring of activity (Bossu et al., 2011; Taira, Silver, Niu, & Nadeau, 2009), knowledge of earthquake risk came from first-hand experience and the evaluation of damage in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe. Seismologists were therefore required to show some awareness of the sociotechnical context in which the disaster happened blurring the categories of expertise and lay knowledge, civic and scientific engagement. Building on years of field work and research, experts scientists used t...