Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters Open Access

‘3/11’ was the most catastrophic event in Japan’s postwar history. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and caused multiple reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant. Given its scale, diversity, complexity, and severity, no one has yet been able to fully comprehend the picture of the 3/11 disaster and the recovery process. However, Daniel P. Aldrich, an American political scientist and the author of Black Wave: How Network and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters, has managed to accomplish this difficult task in his book.

In 2012, Aldrich wrote a much-acclaimed book entitled Building Resilience, in which he analyzed cases of disaster management and recovery in India, Japan, and the U.S. He argued in that book, based on the evidence, that social capital accelerates recovery from disasters. Black Wave extends this research concern, asking why people or communities in particular areas were able to survive and recover in a better and faster manner than people from other areas, even though they were all hit by the same devastating tsunami during the 3/11 disaster. He introduces two key concepts, namely network and governance, in constructing an answer to this simple but profound question.

The first chapter introduces the 3/11 disaster and explains the structure of this book and its theoretical approach. Chapter 2 focuses on the individual, illustrating how social ties and cohesion have helped disaster victims to survive. The chapter also highlights how strong local leadership accelerated recovery. This narrative itself is very persuasive, and chapter 3 brings in statistical evidence to support it. Here Aldrich makes use of quantitative analysis to argue that municipalities with lower crime rates exhibit lower mortality rates and that those municipalities whose political leaders actively work with the higher ranks of government exhibit greater recovery levels. In chapter 4, Aldrich compares disaster response and recovery performance among the three major affected prefectures: Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima. He shows how Miyagi Prefecture, which has strong connections not only with the central government but also with non-government organizations (NGOs) and non-profit organizations (NPOs), exhibited superior performance in disaster response and recovery. Chapter 5 describes how the national government lost the public’s trust via their decisions and policies, such as withholding information about radiation exposure during the emergency and investing in coastal protection facilities during the recovery. According to the author, this could be the most severe consequence for the central government in the long run (156). Chapter 6 expands the scope of this study to an international level, comparing disaster responses in different countries. This comparison shows that countries with good governance face less damage from disasters. Chapter 7 is devoted to summarizing and discussing the findings of this study. The crux of this book is thus quite clear: Japan and other nations regularly facing disasters should reallocate their budgets toward community-friendly physical and social infrastructure to reconstruct and strengthen social ties (189).

There are three features that distinguish this book from the existing literature on 3/11. First, based on interviews with more than a hundred individuals from various sectors, it provides a vivid description of how network and governance operated during the disaster response and recovery phases. This methodological approach was useful in convincing the reader of the significance of network and governance in disasters, two elements often overlooked in empirical analysis. This form of conjoined quantitative-qualitative analysis works as an exemplary model for young social scientists and researchers.

Second, this book provides analysis of multiple layers of society, from the individual to the international. This is an interesting approach as it succeeds in illustrating how individuals function—how they are at the same time self-reliant and mutually cooperative by relying on their own social ties. The structure of this overlay is the main idea of the book: a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach are both necessary to build resilience in society.

Lastly and most importantly, this book successfully explains the 3/11 disaster, both the tsunami and nuclear disaster, in a single framework. Many people, including scholars in Japan, tend to distinguish these two disasters from each other due to the uniqueness of the damage caused by each of these events. The tsunami inflicted damages on physical structures that are visible, but the nuclear accident resulted in damages that are less easily seen, such as the potential health risks facing the population in the affected areas, the radiation stigma around agricultural products, and emotional suffering. However, the book’s approach based on the functions of network and governance enables us to understand the disasters within a unified framework. Here, 3/11 is illustrated as a disaster of collapsing human networks and mutual trust, rather than as damage to physical infrastructure. In that sense, both disasters are similar, and recovery can only be achieved by promoting trust, nurturing networks, and creating new forms of governance that will enable the existence of active networks.

The empirical evidence that is deployed to demonstrate how networks and governance matter for disaster resilience is, of course, a great academic contribution. In particular, I was most impressed by chapter 3’s analysis of the work done by local political leaders during the disasters. Previously, the role of local political leaders had been unclear, since it was always ‘overlooked’ in Japanese disaster research. Even literature on the 1995 Kobe earthquake has not provided significant insights on the function of local political leaders. Therefore, it is interesting to learn about the existence of powerful political leaders who accelerate post-disaster recovery. This finding raises a new question: Is this a uniform pattern for every disaster in Japan, or is it unique to 3/11? Personally, I feel that local politicians gained importance because of the lack of NPOs and experts on recovery planning in the context of 3/11. This is why I believe this book deserves to be read by everyone who is committed to disaster management and civil society.

I would also like to approach the arguments made in this book from my own experience. As the author mentions (111), the NPO Cash for Work (CFW)-Japan was established in December 2011, and I served as its president then. CFW-Japan worked to create job opportunities for people who became unemployed due to the disaster damage by undertaking several job-creation projects along with local NPOs. But we faced a very serious issue: There were many jobs and many jobless people, but the lack of coordinators who could match jobs to appropriate persons hampered the project’s success. I believe the feeling of scarcity of human resources was shared by many social entrepreneurs who devoted themselves to the recovery of Tohoku. I also faced the reality that the affected region faced a chronic lack of young and capable people at the time, as many have migrated to urban areas to seek better education and economic opportunities.

The author argues in chapter 4 that Miyagi ‘was the most adept at building and maintaining vertical and horizontal connections’ (103). This is probably true, but we should also consider the fact that Miyagi prefecture benefited from having Sendai as a quasi-capital of the Tohoku region, with a population of more than 1 million and a GDP of 4.4 trillion yen at the time of March 2011. Because of that, Sendai had the advantage of numerous business opportunities and human resources, as well as physical infrastructure for transportation, communication, and office space. Many national ministries and private companies have regional branch offices in Sendai. The number of universities and schools there are much higher than in other areas in Tohoku. Most importantly, Sendai has been an attractive destination for educated young people. Out of all high school students in Miyagi who proceed to university, 58.4% choose to stay in Miyagi in 2019. On the other hand, the corresponding number for Iwate and Fukushima stands at 29.0% and 20.4%, respectively.

All these facts raise the question of whether network-building and social capital accumulation occur independently from economic prosperity. If so, the author’s recommendation that we should invest in ‘social infrastructure’ would have very limited impact on disaster management policies. Regarding this point, the author seems to believe that the investment in social infrastructure instead of physical infrastructure would overcome this issue of ‘peripheral economies’. I am in full agreement with the author’s recommendation, but I am not as optimistic as the author appears to be. I admit that some attempts to create social connections, such as the ‘Ibasho’ concept presented in this book, are very effective and meaningful. However, how much time and money is needed for a society to build social ties to the extent that it can protect society from future hazards, in the manner that physical infrastructure can, remains an open question. We need to address these kinds of issues to strike the right balance between the bottom-up and top-down approaches. In this sense, I believe this book has opened a preliminary, but important, door to shifting the global paradigm of disaster management in a necessary direction for the coming age of frequent disasters.