Commentary on “Sources of Disaster: A Roundtable Discussion on New Epistemic Perspectives in Post-3.11 Japan”

The roundtable on 3.11 had the ambitious goal of tracing how the so-called triple disaster in Japan “changed our ways of knowing the world.” The variety of concerns, methodologies, and research sites brought into this discussion demonstrates how difficult that is to fully discern, even a decade later. This would be true of any largescale disaster, but particularly one in which a nuclear meltdown is nested within a “thousand-year” tsunami, and with the added circumstance of having been witnessed globally in real-time. “Sources,” to use a keyword from the roundtable, expand and amplify quickly following any large disaster, and the ripples of opinion widen far beyond the experts and officials who the day before had been quietly managing the condition of normality. Historians and social scientists are attracted to disaster sites for this very reason: the proliferation of voices, images, and texts, and the ways they overlay and conflict as they compete to define what happened and why. Disasters scale up preexisting controversies, create new ones, and influence how we frame the ones that follow. And just as the “return to normal” never really happens, arriving at postdisaster lessons is an ongoing political process and not just an observational or interpretive one. Scholars like myself and those who have participated in the roundtable can be drawn into disaster recovery as observers, interpreters, and chroniclers, but there remain limits to our influence on what is remembered, forgotten, planned, and implemented in the aftermath. We can certainly apply our skills and talents, however, as many of the participants have done here, to analyzing the complicated process of lesson-making: what has been taught and learned, by whom, and toward what purpose. Any short-list of how 3.11 changed the world would have to include the following: an increase in preexisting suspicions about nuclear power; a humbling of scientific and engineering communities involved with earthquake prediction and anti-seismic design; a deepened appreciation of the speed and scale at which even well-fortified