Community Resilience and Micro Human Acts

This chapter examines several practices in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (GEJET) of 11 March 2011, in which the efforts of micro-actors were tailored to community-level action, despite the strong influence of macro-actors. Through a multi-sited ethnography of the four phases of disaster recovery, using access theory as a theoretical basis, this chapter has shown that correspondences of the physical and social environment are one of the key factors in achieving community-level recovery. These environmentally mediated recovery activities strengthened individuals’ sense of place, and the GEJET were often the result of bottom-up interventions by external experts. These tailor-made efforts by experts were a minority and consequential part of the GEJET, although they can be understood as a genealogy of architectural planning studies in Japan. This chapter argues that sustainable efforts and comprehensive/pluralistic livelihood reconstruction require macro-structures for long-term engagement with expertise on human-environment relationships.