Search

This article investigates instances in which mobility justice is highlighted in post-disaster tourism in eastern Tohoku, Japan, a coastal area almost completely destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. After this unprecedented disaster, some of these towns have directed their recovery efforts toward the development of post-disaster tourism as a means to counteract outmigration and loss of jobs. By using the broader frame of mobility justice in tourism and geographies of affect, this article seeks to showcase how affective relations between people and post-disaster places, and between international tourists and locals, can foster a better understanding of the big and small injustices enacted at different scales in the area. In particular, this article focuses on the potential of 'recognition justice' to rebalance the scale between top-down policies and local needs. Post-disaster tourism performances utilize the mobility of information through global media, spreading survivors' narratives, stories, and images. A politics of affect built around landmarks in the post-disaster landscape the tsunami has contributed to the creation of immobile nodes, which become locus of contestations and opportunities to leverage mobility justice and broader recognition justice for the local populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the relationship between risk perception and evacuation behavior, and the sociospatial contexts that affect evacuation. It is argued that risk perception and contextual conditions have a joint effect on evacuation. Data were collected from 3,756 evacuees in sixteen cities and towns affected by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off the Pacific coast. Using geographic information systems (GIS), data from questionnaires on risk perception and activity diary surveys on behavioral response were combined with geospatial data. The main finding was that high risk perception leads to evacuation behavior, but that the difference between immediate and delayed evacuation depends on the sociospatial context. Delayed evacuation, compared with immediate evacuation, tends to occur in the following contexts: (1) the physical context (e.g., being inland at the time of the disaster impact); (2) the household context (e.g., the need to confirm the safety of household members); and (3) the social context (e.g., the need for assistance with mobility). This study extends the literature on disaster science and cognitive-behavioral geography by considering the relationship between perception and behavior in urban spaces in emergencies. The findings are relevant to the development of disaster preparedness planning to minimize human losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As North Korea emphasized its "second mission," the reunification of the two Koreas, with its nuclear weapons, South Korea has been mobilizing all potential resources to deter North Korea's attempt. Indeed, it rapidly improved its relations with Japan as well as strengthened the U.S. extended deterrence through the "Washington Declaration" in early 2023. The United States, South Korea, and Japan even initiated their trilateral summit meeting to discuss their combined deterrence posture against North Korea. This article evaluates South Korea's current nuclear preparedness, including preemptive/preventive strikes, missile defense, and civil defense, identifies weaknesses, and analyzes whether Japan can mitigate the weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although COVID-19 has commonly been narrated as an impediment to the arts, I argue that it also offered exciting new opportunities to engage audiences with exhibitions focus on public health crises. In this article, I reflect on my experience of curating Picturing the Invisible with students at Technical University Munich (TU Munich) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized in memory of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, the exhibition was shown at the Royal Geographical Society, London (October till December 2021) during the so-called "second wave" and at TU Munich (June 2022) amid the rise of the Omicron Variant. Departing from the common tendency to narrate events as having been successfully organized despite the pandemic, this paper presents the virus as co-creating—perhaps even co-curating—the exhibition. To do so, I provide a brief overview of Picturing the Invisible, before going on to analyze the role that the virus played in calling me to organize this project (as both a researcher and as a lecturer), how it has made it logistically possible, and how it presented new opportunities to engage foreign audiences with the experience of Japan's triple disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On March 18, 2011, one of Germany's most famous children's book authors, Gudrun Pausewang (1928-2020), publicly spoke about the connection between 3/11 and her award-winning 1987 classic, Fall-Out (Die Wolke). I posit that Michaël Ferrier's texts with a 3/11 theme highlight the synchronic as well as diachronic dimensions of the Great East Japan Disaster and therefore go far beyond Pausewang's 1987 approach to think globally about nuclear energy and technological risk scenarios. While Pausewang's novel focuses on the tragic experience of a young adult who copes with the aftermath of a nuclear accident in Germany in the 1980s, Ferrier strategically reveals the complexities of knowledge and uncertainty in the wake of environmental and human catastrophe as an on-going crisis or déjà-vu of Chernobyl and Hiroshima. My analysis explores Ferrier's (re)mediation of the convolution of this crisis across various media, including documents of popular culture, by insisting on the thematic and structural connections between his texts with a 3/11 theme, Pausewang's 1987 novel, and two German adaptations of Pausewang's novel, Gregor Schnitzler's 2006 drama film, Die Wolke, as well as a Anike Hage's 2008 graphic novel. Ferrier's works unapologetically reveal elisions that have occurred in mediated disaster narratives across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: After the Great East Japan Earthquake [GEJE], approximately 70,000 Japan Ground Self Defense Force [JGSDF] personnel were deployed, risking Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. The network approach to psychopathology suggests that symptoms may cause and exacerbate each other, resulting in the emergence and maintenance of disorders, including PTSD. It is therefore important to further explore the temporal interplay between symptoms. Most studies assessing the factor structure of the Impact of Event Scale-Revised [IES-R] have used cross-sectional designs. In this study, the structure of the IES-R was re-evaluated while incorporating the temporal interplay between symptoms. Methods: Using Dynamic Time Warping [DTW] the distances between PTSD symptoms on the IES-R were modelled in 1120 JGSDF personnel. Highly correlated symptoms were clustered at the group level using Distatis three-way principal component analyses of the distance matrices. The resulting clusters were compared to the original three subscales of the IES-R using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results: The DTW analysis yielded four symptom clusters: Intrusion (five items), Hyperarousal (six items), Avoidance (six items), and Dissociation (five items). CFA yielded better fit estimates for this four-factor solution (RMSEA = 0.084, CFI = 0.918, TLI = 0.906), compared to the original three subscales of the IES-R (RMSEA = 0.103, CFI = 0.873, TLI = 0.858). Conclusions: DTW offers a new method of modelling the temporal relationships between symptoms. It yielded four IES-R symptom clusters, which may facilitate understanding of PTSD as a complex dynamic system. Personnel from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force responded to the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, putting them at increased risk of developing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In recent years, psychological research has focused increasingly on methods to map the ways in which symptoms of psychopathology cause and exacerbate each other. The Dynamic Time Warping algorithm seems to be an appropriate and useful tool to analyse the interaction between post-traumatic stress symptoms over time, especially if these are not instantaneous or linear. This can improve our understanding of psychopathology and help move towards personalized medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rachel DiNitto's book, "Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan's Triple Disaster," examines the literary responses to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan. The book analyzes various narratives that address the cultural trauma and contemporary problems resulting from the disaster. DiNitto argues that these narratives provide counter-narratives to governmental and national narratives, and also explores the connections between Fukushima fiction and atomic bomb literature as well as global nuclear fiction. While the book has some repetition and could have delved deeper into the role of nonhumans in the narratives, it is a valuable resource for researchers studying literary responses to the disaster. [Extracted from the article]

We assess the radiological impact on Vietnam from a hypothetical accident at the Fanchenggang nuclear power plant (F-NPP), 65 km from Vietnam's Mongcai city. The accident was assumed to release, among other types of radionuclides, 1E + 16 Bq 131I in 24 h. The simulation of radioactive plumes using the FLEXPART model has revealed peak concentrations of radionuclides in the air and dry and wet depositions on the ground marking the passage of radioactive plumes over the receptor sites. The northeast monsoon wind drives the peak dry depositions in winter, while the peak wet depositions are associated mainly with the high monsoon rainfall in summer. The accident impact, reflected in the frequency of plume passage over the receptor site and the resultant radiation dose to people, decreases exponentially with the distance to F-NPP. The impact on Mongcai was most severe, implying people would be advised to stay indoors during plume passage. Meanwhile, at Danang, 630 km south of F-NPP, the impact was insignificant, as plumes rarely passed through, and the maximum dose was as low as the annual dose due to exposure from naturally occurring radionuclides in soils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, analysts and scientists are not in the position to create narratives for others but respect and tolerate the existing narratives that other share and serve as facilitators and mediators for co-creative processes that have the potential to produce new or adapted collective narratives. The two authors believe that new narratives on global change need to respect and include these universal patterns of a mutually convincing narrative but that such narratives cannot be fabricated or even pre-arranged but only be co-created together with the communities to which they are to be applied. Psychotherapy and the personal meaning of narratives While narratives in psychotherapy are personal, narratives found in myths, rituals and religion tend to be created and re-created within a community. The idea for this special issue emerged during the international conference "Narratives in Times of radical Transformation" that was conducted online from 19 to 20 November 2020. [Extracted from the article]

A cohort study of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases after the chornobyl accident: thyroid cancer in Ukraine detected during first screening. A significant excess of multiple myeloma incidence [standardized incidence rate (SIR) 1.61; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.01-2.21], thyroid cancer (SIR 4.18, 95% CI 3.76-4.59), female breast cancer (SIR1.57 CI 1.40-1.73), and all cancers combined (SIR 1.07; 95% CI 1.05-1.09) was registered (Bazyka et al. [8]). Thoughts and substantial progress of the radiation research field regarding the Fukushima nuc... The knowledge from the field of radiation epidemiology has a critical impact on cancer management, industry regulations and energy policy. Keywords: Nuclear disasters; long-term consequences of radiation exposure; emergency response EN Nuclear disasters long-term consequences of radiation exposure emergency response 561 568 8 02/28/23 20230301 NES 230301 Introduction One of the most compelling challenges in radiation epidemiology is the scientific evaluation of the long-term health consequences following nuclear radiation disasters. [Extracted from the article]

This paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability for conditions in the present. As such, I argue, it ultimately encourages us to cultivate attention and accountability toward material and conceptual problems in the present. The discussion then takes the idea of cultivating attention to the present to northeast Japan. I show there how an ending inflicted on the coastal residents by the tsunami of March 2011 has made space for precisely this kind of attention and accountability to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On balance, I Black Wave i is a useful contribution to the literature on not only disasters, but also on the nature of politics and civil society in Japan. The main title of the book is ' I Black Wave i ', a term which resonates so much with us who watched the images of the tsunami as it poured over walls, roads, and fields. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the trends and challenges of Taiwanese studies in Japan, focusing on political history. The first section reviews Taiwanese studies in Japan in recent years, with a focus on political research. The second section discusses the issues to be worked on for this discipline's future, especially pertaining to the discussion on "external" and "internal" legitimacy for the postwar Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan. The third section examines ways to comprehend the changes in the ROC's status in Taiwanese politics and society after the political transformation began in the 1970s. Taiwanese studies in Japan have long emphasized revealing the characteristics of Taiwanese society and history. Although such an attitude is still quite important, this paper highlights that knowing how to value the "Chineseness" of the ROC government in Taiwan is also an important subject. Further examination of the link between international and internal politics in Taiwan will be one of the most important subjects for future Taiwanese studies in Japan on politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glazing damage reported following recent New Zealand earthquakes, i.e. the 2011 (Mw 6.2) Christchurch and 2016 (Mw 7.8) Kaikōura earthquakes, exceeded what would be expected from glazing designed or tested to council's compliance pathways, which indicates improvements are required to the existing pathways. Two series of proof-of-concept tests were conducted to induce simulated seismic actions on glazing specimens to better understand the failure mechanisms of gasket dislodgement, cracks in the glazing, and dislodgement of the glass to improve existing compliance tests and engineering design. The Series 1 tests consisted of 6 mm annealed window glass clamped in a steel frame with the load applied to the glazing with hydraulic jacks positioned in three distinct positions. The Series 2 tests consisted of a reverse cyclic loading on a commercial window located near the bottom of a direct-fixed rainscreen specimen. The test results were used to formulate a method that could predict the likelihood of seismic damage to glazing systems, improve compliance pathways, and is useful as a forensic predictive tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck Japan on 11 March 2011 leaving more than 400,000 people, including 100,000 children, homeless. These displaced children lived in temporary housing and 'temporarily' attended schools, which provided them with professional mental health support after the disaster. This paper highlights the role of disaster mental health support teams from Miyagi Prefecture through a problem reported by one of the schools – the excessive feeding of fish by children who narrowly escaped the tsunami. The support team helped schoolteachers understand the perspective of survivor guilt by facilitating a group discussion among the children and exploring their feelings about the disaster, with a focus on the guilt of leaving their pets behind. The authors demonstrate the role of mental health professionals working with schools to help children resolve negative thoughts and feelings during disaster recovery, including the often-overlooked survivor guilt caused by life-threatening events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on first year of the partnership with Routledge exists between curating and publishing. Topics include editorial team in Taiwan successfully mitigating the damage done to academia by the Covid pandemic; and witnessing more state-supporting strategic research institutes working on emerging sectors like biotechnology.