We Live with the Sea: Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan

Speaker: Andrew Littlejohn, Leiden University

As oceans rise, many governments are intensifying efforts to defend the towns and cities bordering them. Worldwide, advocates of coastal infrastructure argue that the best way to protect people from unruly waters is separating sea and society through complex new systems of seawalls, dikes, and canals. However, after Japan’s triple disaster of 2011, many tsunami survivors resisted attempts to protect the northeastern coastline through new infrastructures. 

We Live with the Sea addresses the controversy surrounding safety and infrastructure following the tsunami. While the Japanese government proposed infrastructural transformations in its wake, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Andrew Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. Arguing that modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, he theorizes instead what he calls “ecologizing safety” as an alternative way of conceiving and enacting safety and infrastructure. 

Andrew Littlejohn is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. The core question motivating his research is how we can live more sustainably in a world damaged not only by intensifying hazards but also many of the technologies we develop to mitigate them. He is currently leading an ERC Starting Grant-funded project called “climate citizenship” exploring how adapting environments to climate change increasingly depends on and seeks to stimulate public participation.