Social Memory and Social Capital in Community Resilience: Reconsidering Sociological Discourses on Post-Disaster Recoveries and Disaster Mitigations of Local Community after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

摘要

Despite the power of social capital and community resilience after disasters has been recognized, the postdisasterrecoveries and disaster mitigations after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami have still continuedto focus resources on physical infrastructures, based almost exclusively on data and knowledge of natural sciences.Against this backdrop or below the surface many sociological and ethnological studies on the Great East JapanEarthquake and Tsunami shed light on effective functioning of local communities and their social capital, or socialnetworks for the post-disaster recoveries and disaster mitigations; local community enhances individual andcommunity resilience. Some literatures point out the importance of local cultures and their traditional rituals orbuild environments and spaces of the rituals, and argue for the need for the “archive” of their memories because ofthe literally devastating effects of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on local communities and theirmembers, but they mainly select the cultural masterpieces of local community – macro-memory or Memory ofcommunity, like museums and galleries select and collect the masterpieces of humankind. This paper theoreticallyexplores the relationships among social, collective memories, traditional rituals of local communities and socialcapital, and unveils the important functions of collective micro-memories of everyday life and social networks,which are too familiar to speak about, intentionally memorize – unspoken and pre-conscious, but one of the keyfactors for social capital and community resilience.