Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
85
Kunio, the father of Japanese folklore and, allegedly, of the Japanese anthropological school.
In the course of the interview, Yanagita humbly remarked that a well-trained and sensitive
western anthropologist could sometime grasp more than what common Japanese would
normally do. However, this does not mean that the complexity of Japanese culture can
become understandable, since it is partly obscure even to its people. This is the issue which
will be addressed by this article, how culture can become essentialized to justify practices and
ideas that not only to external but also indigenous observers find difficult to explain.
On March 11, 2011 (one month after the National Foundation Day, February 11)
Japan was hit by one of the most violent natural catastrophes of the last thirty years.
Following a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and a 14 meters tall tsunami, the territory around
Fukushima was hit with a violence that could have been perhaps foreseen but not expected.
Fukushima happened to be the place where four of the most problematic nuclear reactors in
the country were located, and the disaster spread further like an oil stain. Sixteen months after
the event, the overall figures on the casualties directly related to the disaster and on the
number of evacuated people (over 300,000) are not yet certain. What in the first instance
looked as a serious accident, though not even comparable to Chernobyl, gradually revealed
its true magnitude as, for instance, the area to be evacuated was extended from a 3 to a 20 km
radius and the meltdown of two reactors turned into three hydrogen explosions.
In recovering from this disaster, Japan has been giving the world another conflicting
message. It has surely astonished for its promptness to stand up again, for the hard-working
nature of its people and their common efforts to restart life in its traditionally poorest region,
the Tohoku. The Japanese message has also been one of concerted action, of an extremely
well organized collective answer to the hardships and the sorrow that followed 3/11. It is
doubtful whether another, perhaps Western European, country would have been able to do
the same. However, Japan has also given another, less high-sounding but inherently serious,
message; that is, one of the top three world economic powers has been unable to manage a
nuclear disaster of this entity. Following the explanations to this failure provided by two
Japanese sources, here I will argue that cultural explanations are very powerful tools that can
be used by different actors and with different motivations to confuse and obfuscate reality; or,
as Yanagita wisely noted, to render social actors unaware of the cultural foundations of their
own practices.
