Social Resilience in Disaster Recovery Planning for Fishing Port Cities: A Comparative Study of Prewar and Twenty-First-Century Tsunami Recovery Planning in the Northern Part of Japan

Abstract

This study examines early disaster recovery and prevention planning projects in fishing port cities in the northern part of Japan after the 1933 Sanriku tsunami, the later modernization of those cities, and their current recovery from the 2011 Great Northern Japan earthquake. This work reframes the goal of disaster recovery and of disaster prevention planning in our society as social resilience—the ability of a community to cope with and adapt to stresses such as social, political, environmental, or economic change. Drawing on the author’s field research in Kesennuma, this study also describes postwar economic and industrial development in fishing ports that changed social and spatial structures. It shows that postwar administration and planners ignored the prewar disaster recovery and prevention planning based on local social systems, which caused fundamental problems in redevelopment and disaster prevention planning after 2011.