Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote an op-ed for The Japan Times and makes some thought-provoking observations about the connections between the stockpiling of whale-meat, plutonium and policiy making in japan:

OXFORD, England — Mount Fuji stands as a powerful eco-symbol in Japan, invoked frequently to describe elements of Japanese nature and culture. According to Japanese writers and others, Mount Fuji's towering summit-cone and elegantly balanced slopes convey the remote majesty of nature, the essence of purity, a trove of immutable values, a model of aesthetic perfection, and a store of Japanese reserve, to name but a few.

Yet in illustrating how contemporary Japanese society actually works, the sacred peak faces competition from two other mountainlike entities. Lurking out of the public eye are two problematic stockpiles — of plutonium and whale meat — whose mountainous bulk not only looms over Japanese environmental policy and international relations but speaks to the problems that led to the 3/11 disasters.

Read the rest here:

A year after whole neighborhoods were killed by the Japanese tsunami, rumors of ghosts swirl in Ishinomaki as the city struggles to come to terms with the tragedy.

One reconstruction project appears stalled because of fears the undead spirits of those who perished last March will bring bad luck.

”I heard people working to repair the store became sick because of ghosts,” Satoshi Abe, 64, says, gesturing to a half-repaired supermarket. ”People died everywhere, here and there. The city is full of such stories

…anthropologist Takeo Funabiki says it is only ”natural” that stories of the supernatural abound after such an event.

”Human beings find it very difficult to accept death, whether they are inclined by nature to superstition or are very scientifically minded,” he says. ”A sudden or abnormal death, anything other than someone dying in bed of old age, is particularly difficult for people to comprehend.”

Read the rest at The Sydney Morning Herald

Tsunami recedes but ghosts linger
March 10, 2012
Everything from building work to taxi services are still affected by fears of undead spirits, writes Miwa Suzuki.

Anthropologists discuss football/soccer and culture at The New York Times and CNN:

Beatriz Vélez, former anthropology professor at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, studied the gender dynamics of football in her home city beginning in the 1990s. First, she wrote about the grudging acceptance girls received as token participants in the Football for Peace program, established after the murder of Andrés Escobar in 1994. Interviews betrayed the prejudice that girls face daily as they are pressured, subtly or directly, toward domestic life and ideals of feminine beauty. Boys in the program wanted the field clear of girls so they could play “real football.”

“In almost all Latin American countries,” Vélez writes, “the sovereignty of football among street games and leisure-time or break activities for men is absolute. All types of workers can be seen relaxing with this game.”

Read more at The New York Times: In Colombia, a Soccer Paradox By JOHN TURNBULL

Referring to Japan’s World Cup victory,

Merry White, a professor of anthropology at Boston University and an expert on Japanese culture, said the women’s performance illustrated some key qualities of Japanese society: hard work and resilience.

“It wasn’t only skills that got them close. … It’s the effort that counts,” White said.

“They believe in will,” she said, showing “when we put our minds to something we can do it.”

Read the rest at CNN: Japan’s character seen in women’s World Cup victory

In the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese often proclaimed their society to be “allergic” to nuclear technology—particularly nuclear weapons. What has been far less acknowledged in Japan is a persistent pattern of discrimination against those deemed “contaminated” (including atomic-bomb survivors, descendants of the customary “untouchable” outcaste, certain foreigners, and other stigmatized groups). One potentially explosive question in the aftermath of the tsunami and nuclear crisis is whether the shock of the disaster will continue to encourage cohesion and altruism—or whether, in time, the taint of radiation will lead to exclusion in a society fixated on purity.

Press here to read the rest of this Daily Beast editorial by Peter Wynn Kirby, a researcher with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford and a research fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

The Human Fallout for Japan
Peter Wynn Kirby

One of the most interesting turn of events during the current nuclear crisis in Japan is how by Thursday, March 17, 2011 the ongoing drama of the catastrophe was displaced from the headlines by stories about the rebellion in Libya. Just as it seemed the story of the nuclear crisis came to a head with startling revelations about more widespread damages to the reactors, higher levels of radiation than previously detected, flaws in Japanese leadership and the contamination of food crops as far as ninety miles from the stricken Fukushima plant the media seems to have turned its attention to a different front.

By the end of the week stories about the escalation of the nuclear crisis and to a lesser degree, the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami still appeared the media, but the headline grabbing story in the media has become the conflict in Libya. As catastrophic and unprecedented as the tragedy in Japan is, the media’s attention seems to have waned. One wonders if media gatekeepers sense that their consumers have tired of the drama in Japan, or perhaps because of the US’s primary role in the no-fly over zone, American and audiences are more concerned about events in Libya than in Japan. Or perhaps that warfare is more vivid than the invisible threat of radiation.

Historically, the media has always had a fairly short attention span for disasters, including even catastrophic ones like those that have occurred in the last year; beginning with the nightmarish earthquake in Haiti which destroyed the fragile infrastructure of a nation and whose toll took over 300,000 lives. The Haitian earthquake is a tragedy that is far from over and whose misery continues to unravel largely because of the lack of continued aid and attention from the international community.

As stunned as the world was by misfortune of Haitian people attention quickly turned to the more powerful, but less destructive quake in Chile. Then came the terrible floods in Pakistan, which killed of thousands and left a nation in anguish but received only little more than passing attention from the international press. The horrific and relentless floods in Australia captured the world’s attention very briefly despite the disturbing magnitude of the disaster. Next up was the recent earthquake in Christ Church, New Zealand. It made front-page news for a few days but now seems to have lapsed form the media and the public’s view.

None of this is new. The monstrous tsunami that that shocked the world and unleashed a flurry of destruction on several Southeast Asian nations made headlines for sometime. Nevertheless, despite the horrific magnitude of the event it slipped from the media’s radar. Eight months after the event, while the stricken nations were still struggling to recover Hurricane Katrina came ashore in the gulf. Almost without looking back, the media’s attention turned to the Gulf Coast and forgot the unparalleled tragedy in Southeast Asia.

As shocking as the media’s headlong pursuit of reporting the most recent sensational story and rapid abandonment of previous disasters it is an all too common pattern. One that perhaps reflects our modern day culture’s increasingly desensitized attention span for suffering and our addiction to ever more sensational stories.

The public, politicians and especially the media have a penchant for what seems like short-term memories when it comes to disasters. We tend to neglect the fact that major disasters have long-term, often second generation impacts that require us to invest in long-term recovery efforts rather than to take the band aid approach that typifies most modern day disaster response.

The media tends to only revisit earlier calamities with occasional anniversary stories. Such coverage often only consists of a retelling of the early days of the event and neglects the continuing plight of the disaster victims; thereby ignoring the fact that in the wake of calamity disasters continue to unfold for extended periods of time. Thus, the cascading series of events that unfold in the wake of most disasters are all but ignored except by the local media. Unfortunately, at times media retrospective accounts can downplay the seriousness of previous disasters as have some recent accounts that have surfaced during the current Japanese nuclear crisis. It causes one to wonder if revisionists accounts of Chernobyl are possible what future revisionist accounts might be made of the current nuclear crisis.

It is troubling to wonder how the media and our culture seem to take such vicarious interest in disasters. For disaster researchers like myself I am disturbed by what may be another tendency: our refusal, despite irrevocable empirical evidence to the contrary, to recognize that in recent years the frequency, magnitude and severity of disasters has increased tremendously,

The recent tide of major catastrophic events underscore the emerging reality that there is an urgent need to develop the conceptual tools, strategic and material tools to confront the increasing challenges of disasters which have been made more potent and complex by environmental degradation, climate change, and the increasing production of technological hazards. In another words, rather than continuing to view catastrophic events as isolated episodes we need to systematically examine the cumulative forces that confront us in the guise of disasters and begin to address the larger issue: why is it that disasters of such magnitude are becoming so commonplace?

Gregory Button has been researching disasters for over three decades. His most recent book is: Disaster Culture: Knowledge and Uncertainty in the Wake of Human and Environmental Disasters (Left Coast Press 2010). He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Tennessee Knoxville.

Barbara Rose Johnston and Hugh Gusterson ponder nuclear realities at the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences

Barbara Rose Johnston:

Radiation is invisible, how do you know when you are in danger? How long will this danger persist? How can you reduce the hazard to yourself and family? What level of exposure is safe? How do you get access to vital information in time to prevent or minimize exposure? What are the potential risks of acute and chronic exposures? What are the related consequential damages of exposure? Whose information do you trust? How do you rebuild a healthy way of life in the aftermath of nuclear disaster?

Hugh Gusterson:

As an anthropologist, I am always interested in what humans learn from their mistakes. Can humans change their behavior, thereby improving their chances of survival, not just through natural selection, but also through cultural learning? Or are we hardwired to repeat our mistakes over and over, like humanoid lemmings?

More to the point, what lessons will we learn from the nuclear accident at Fukushima, an accident thought to be impossible just two weeks ago?

In this nuclear world, what is the meaning of ’safe’?

By Barbara Rose Johnston | 18 March 2011

The lessons of Fukushima

By Hugh Gusterson | 16 March 2011

Keibo Oiwa, a Japanese cultural anthropologist and environmentalist, speaks to Democracy Now about the current nuclear crisis:

And I’m really realizing again that, you know, democracy is so hollow now. I mean, we don’t have power. This is not democracy. We are controlled—we have been controlled by the government and the Tokyo Electric Company, you know, a private company. This is a big lesson to be—for us to be humble, in front of a natural—big natural power, power of nature. And we have to really look for a lifestyle and a way of thinking again, to live again with harmony, in harmony with nature.

Read the rest here.

In addition, see how Ruth Benedict is being used in The Telegraph to argue “Why the Japanese behave better than Westerners,” and in the National Journal to argue “Why Japan probably isn’t telling us the worst about its nuclear disaster.”

“In Japanese culture, there’s a sort of nobility in suffering with a stiff upper lip, in mustering the spiritual, psychological resources internally,” said John Nelson, a cultural anthropologist and chairman of the department of theology and religion at the University of San Francisco.

“There’s even a word for quietly enduring difficult situations: Gaman.”

Read the rest at the National Post.

John Nelson also spoke to USA Today about faith and pray:

Just as Americans flooded into their churches and synagogues, turning to God in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Japanese, too, turn to their gods in times of trouble, says Nelson.

They are praying for repose, for the spirit of the dead to find peace and comfort in the Pure Land — a kind of Buddhist paradise.

They pray to Amida, the Buddha in the Pure Land, and to Kannon, the bodhisattva (goddess) of compassion who is an intermediary with Amida.

They will pray, “Praise to the Buddha of the Pure Land.” Or, “Help me, Kannon (goddess of compassio). Save me. Bring me food. Make me warm.”

And like people everywhere, Nelson says,

They will pray for miracles.