Living with natural disasters: Narratives of the Great Kanto and Great Hanshin Earthquakes (Japan)

This dissertation explores the fundamental complexity of the relationship between individual, society and natural disaster culture. Understanding the relationship requires a critical examination of people's deployment of natural disaster as tropes---what people have had to say about disasters, how they have situated them in history, how they have used them metaphorically.; The focus of this investigation is on two major Japanese earthquakes in the twentieth century: the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923, and the Great Hanshin Earthquake that leveled Kobe in 1995. These earthquakes provide comparable moments and sites of conflicts over various rhetorical representations, in which assumptions concerning and perspectives on Japanese society were restructured in response to a major disaster. The dissertation examines the manner in which the particular setting (location and time) and the enduring experience of earthquakes interact in the construction of earthquake discourse.; Another focus of the dissertation is to look at natural disaster more generally as a construct, a rhetoric that reshapes personal, political and social experiences. Earthquakes that people experience and to which they have affective response are largely a product of how they have come to talk about and frame their experience. Quake disaster is a captive of our language community; the natural disaster, beyond its physical presence, is a social phenomenon, and this fact is often lost in the immediacy of the crisis and in scientific investigation. This study foregrounds the constitutive and constructive role of language in approaching natural disaster issues.; An investigation of the range of attitudes and ideas embodied in Japanese experiences with earthquakes allows access to a more insightful understanding of culture and history through the perspective of massive destruction, particularistic shards of memory, and the choice of language and means of expression to describe past experience, present, politics, and future visions of city and country. The study opens up the discursive space necessary to critique and renew questions about relationships among individuals, society, and disaster culture in a rapidly changing historical sphere of development.