Matter of absence: Navigating loss and renewal through post-disaster material culture

Abstract

Environmental disasters deeply affect communities, leaving both physical and emotional scars. For survivors, these ‘traces’ of the material world that was lost can help to appease the absence of the ordinariness of their familiar everyday lives. This paper, based on ethnographic research in North-Eastern Japan after the 2011 tsunami, explores how salvaged objects and surviving spaces and landscapes can help disaster-affected populations make sense of their new realities. The paper identifies three performative strategies employed by survivors to engage with this material absence of their ordinary lives: reconstruction, integration, and untouching; further showing how salvaged objects and altered landscapes play a central role in rebuilding identity, memory, and new trajectories into the future. By examining how survivors interact with ‘traces’ of material absence, the paper contributes to the growing field of post-disaster material culture, highlighting the agentic power of absence to make sense of their experiences, while empowering their coping with loss and reimagination of new futures.

Introduction

Natural hazard disasters are profoundly disruptive events, with the damage and destruction of communities and social systems (Howitt, 2012), disturbing the patterns of ordinary life in sudden, violent, and often permanent ways (Overholtzer and Robin, 2015). Making sense of such life-altering events constitutes a significant part of the process of healing for individual survivors and communities (Moulton, 2015), where material culture as inherently connected to sense-making (Riley, 1992), is being increasingly recognised as a core component in post-disaster sense-making and recovery. Ordinary objects (personal and everyday items) and spaces (homes, neighbourhoods, familiar landscapes), in particular, play a central role in how people structure their understanding of and position in the world (Overholtzer and Robin, 2015). Taking stock of ‘what remains’ after the destruction can be seen as a way of building a new foundation for moving forward. Such actions and re-engagements have been found to instrumentally help disaster survivors place the disruptive event and loss as part of personal and collective memories and histories (Kirmayer, 2016; Moulton, 2015). However, post-disaster sense-making is not just about making sense of what happened, but also about how to live on with what was lost: the enduring material absence of the past. How do people live on and manage their relationship with the sudden and permanent absence of their ordinary life worlds; that which ‘no longer remains’?

In this paper, I will explore this question through the ethnographic observations and interviews, carried out in disaster-struck communities in North-Eastern Japan between 2015 and 2016. During the 13-month fieldwork, I interviewed over 60 disaster survivors from four different coastal communities, many of whom had lost their homes and belongings in their entirety. To remain sensitive toward the on-going trauma in these communities, interactions such as interview with disaster-affected community members were strongly participant-led, allowing people the agency to choose what they want to tell me and how they choose to respond to questions. To understand everyday life in the post-disaster communities, the research data has been further enriched by spending longer continuous periods of time in the communities to gain a sense of the pace of daily existence and how people navigated daily routines as well as build relationships of trust with residents and research partners. Alongside the interview data, my own observations from 2015 and 2016 as well as a subsequent visit in 2025, collected written materials, and reports of the advancement of the recovery and resumption of daily life in these communities, also integrally inform this paper's analysis.

The paper introduces three performative ways through which people in the post-disaster region in Japan engaged with the material absence of their ordinary worlds as strategies for sense-making: Reconstruction, integration, and untouching. Through a discussion of these three distinct processes, the paper shows that when disaster-affected populations interacted with remaining material landscapes, their own salvaged possessions, and memorialised relics, they approached them as ‘traces’ of the ordinary life worlds that were lost to the disaster. Such engagements operate in a cycle, where the trace can simultaneously help people materialise the absence of that which was lost (Hetherington, 2004; Meyer, 2012) and make the absence of these lost ordinary worlds present through the material register of the traces (Buchli, 2010: 187). These tangible physical engagements with the traces of ‘what remained’ thus offered survivors performative avenues to make sense of the absence of that which ‘no longer remained’. In doing so, the paper will contribute to the body of literature on material agency by exploring its operations and qualities in traumatic contexts, where loss of ordinariness, belonging, and identities are exacerbated by the rapidly fluctuating socio-material reality of post-disaster recovery (Sou and Webber, 2019), and showing that material absence can be a highly productive conceptual framework for exploring post-disaster sense-making (Campbell et al. 2019).

From a methodological and analytical standpoint, the ethnographic episodes presented in this paper will equally contribute to opening further debate on the importance of on-going reflection on the post-disaster experiences at different points in time. Years later, Tohoku's disaster survivors continue to actively engage with the fateful experiences of March 2011 in multiple ways. The disaster gave birth to a new generation of communal storytellers (kataribe) (Fulco, 2022) whose work remains prevalent in the region today; I myself sat in on multiple kataribe events in the summer of 2025, for instance, with the stories continuing to centre the emotional, affective, and embodied confusion during the disaster event and in the years of subsequent recovery. Furthermore, residents who have returned to their old neighbourhoods still grapple with the altered social and physical make up of their communities, with people's perceptions of the more engineered landscapes after the reconstruction work remaining in flux (Boret and Gerster, 2021). Some still search for loved ones who went missing in the disaster (NHK world news 11.3.2026), while disaster museums and memorials have generated a new culture of disaster heritage (Littlejohn, 2021), with the on-goingness and temporal layering of the disaster being palpable in the region.

What this paper will emphasise is that these ways of engaging with the past are not merely cognitive, but also materially engaged affective and embodied processes that continue to be lived in people's daily lives. By returning to explore people's voices and experiences from 10 years ago, the paper aims to illustrate how those stories provide vital insights into the ways in which disasters continue to be materially traced into these communities, and the nature of ‘the post-disaster’ as an enduring material and emotional condition. In this way, the paper will draw on Armstrong's (2010) provocation on the significance that can be drawn from working with the multiple layers of time and materiality, and Trigg's (2009) work on place-based memory and its refusal for chronological sequencing and narration. How the material traces and remnants of the ordinary material life once lived, but now lost, can generate understanding of the ways in which absence and presence continue to intersect (Buchli, 2010) and empower (Napolitano, 2015), especially in post-disaster settings.

A matter of absence

Considerations toward material culture have gone through a significant evolution in relation to post-disaster recovery and disaster risk mitigation. Where recovery after disasters used to primarily refer to infrastructure restoration, the sociality of the material world and its impact on people's wellbeing has become more pronounced in post-disaster recovery (Tierney, 2007). Today, material recovery ranging from housing design and town planning to issues of accessibility and sociality of safety, are integrated into post-disaster recovery processes as core principles, developed in active collaboration with affected populations themselves. Affective and emotional aspects of material culture are likewise gaining scholarly traction (e.g., Hastrup, 2010). While it is the affective elements of crisis and recovery that often direct people's underlying well-being and capacities for coping (Lupton, 2022), and remain as the underlying intensity when communities refer back to the memories of the disaster as communities (Samuels, 2016), the frameworks that govern the practical advancement of the recovery process, such as governmental policies and guidelines, continue to disregard the impact of affective intensities, much to the frustration of victims (Barrios, 2017; Vainio, 2020).

When tsunami survivors I spoke with in Japan had encountered the post-disaster landscape for the first time after the 11th March 2011, they were not sure what they were seeing, or even where they were physically standing in the space that once housed their ordinary life worlds. When they spoke of these encounters, years later, they still used metaphors like ‘war’ and ‘hell’ as short hands ‘to name’ the intertwined physical, emotional, and affective tension and confusion they had experienced in that moment. These articulations illustrate how the content of what people were seeing exceeded their abilities to interpret what they were seeing (Polt, 2014). Where prior to the disaster the material world stood as an almost unnoticeable mundane background to ordinary performance of daily life in their hometowns, residents now described physical disorientation and the lacking sense of ‘instinctiveness’ in the once familiar spaces and landscapes (Vainio and Martini, 2023). The overwhelming reorganisation of socio-material reality due to catastrophic events often produces this kind of ontological confusion. Surviving individuals and communities need to make sense of what happened and rebuild meaning back into their new reality (Weick, 1993), while fundamentally renegotiating their relationships and attachments within an environment that no longer feels ordinary or familiar (Sou and Webber, 2019).

Material culture plays a significant role in this sense-making process (McDonnell, 2023), not only in the preservation but also in the production of meaning back into the system (Stengs, 2014: 235). To make sense of things, seeking physical connection with the material world after catastrophic events is common (Silver and Grek-Martin, 2015; Wilford, 2008), witnessed for instance in the actions where survivors return to inspect destroyed homes and neighbourhoods, and efforts to salvage personal belongings (McNeil, 2012). It is a natural impulse to do so. Humans draw a sense of comfort, safety, and security from homes (Easthope, 2004), while the material possessions we own form an integral part of who we are and how we live (Ekerdt, 2018). Following Miller's (2005) argument that we ‘cannot experience anything except as form’ (p. 8), where our access to reality happens through the physical and sensory qualities perceivable in that reality, the survivors’ urge to seek connections with what remains of that once familiar reality becomes more than rational.

What was left after the tsunami, however, were mere fragments. Salvage activities after the 2011 disaster in Japan were widely covered in the media, and later as the foci of academic projects (e.g., Morimoto, 2014; Nakamura, 2012), with the spontaneous photo salvage activities by emergency and volunteer teams in Japan gaining specific media attention (Shiraiwa, 2013). Vast amount of other matter besides photographs was also collected by survivors and volunteers alike, such as school bags, memorial tablets (ihai), books, documents, and mundane everyday objects (Gerster et al. 2021). Various ways of re-connecting with the natural world such as the sea and the mountains were likewise reported (Delaney, 2022), while communities were quick to acquire or model equipment for reviving festivals celebrating the communities’ continued heritage (Lahournat, 2016). These fragments, or ‘traces’, of objects, buildings, the natural world, and even physical performances, were not only used as ‘points of orientation’, to use Hastrup's (2010: 101) phrasing, but also as a way of re-establishing relationships with the material world that was now absent (Collett, 2012). Seeking ‘traces’ of lives ones lived is thus not only about attesting that homes, neighbourhoods, and towns used to stand here, but also a way to gain a sense of agency to deal with their overwhelming absence (Hastrup, 2010).

‘Traces’ can offer an apt analytical avenue for exploring sense-making in post-disaster settings, where the overwhelming absence of the once familiar surroundings now forms the primary affective, emotional, and physical setting for recovering populations to start rebuilding their lives. These traces left behind after destruction can have a powerful capacity to generate emotions, bodily sensations, and memories (Frers, 2013), thereby making that which is absent present in the world around them. As Napolitano (2015) suggests, the ‘trace’ can be understood as a material reminder that embeds affective circulations, carrying and transmitting intensities across time. This ‘haunting’ or ‘spectral’ quality of traces (Gordon, 2008; Hetherington, 2004; Navaro-Yashin, 2009), can illustrate the agentic power absence can have on the observer in such spaces or in the presence of such objects.

Although the world prior to the disaster cannot be brought back to life, approaching the post-disaster material landscape through ‘traces’ illuminates how sense-making is constituted simultaneously through absence and presence: For something to be perceived as existing, we must simultaneously accept the possibility of it not existing (Poulis, 2025). Through these ‘traces’, the elusive presence of absence continues to move and produce meaning (Meyer, 2012), with post-disaster worlds being temporally and physically in transition, simultaneously ‘neither fully present nor completely absent’ (Martini, 2022). In this way, material traces of the past are also ‘actants’ that have the ability to affect human actions and transform and impact people's understanding of the reality that surrounds them (Kirchhoff, 2009; Van Oyen, 2018). While the once familiar socio-material and physical life now exist only in remnants and fragments of the ordinary that haunts, traces can also empower the observer (Napolitano, 2015: 47). As salvaged personal belongings, relics, or empty post-disaster spaces and landscapes suddenly stand in isolation of the thick material webs of connections and meanings, they feel ‘out of place’ (Douglas, 1966) and ‘out of time’ (Viney, 2015), thus requiring ‘appeasement’ (Lipman, 2019). By re-negotiating attachments and identities with and between objects and places, people can help to attune the temporal and physical rupture in the sense of ordinariness people feel after disaster events.

The spontaneous materially driven activities carried out by survivors, such as the immediate object salvage work, therefore not only illustrate people's attachments to belongings but can also signal how through engagement with material culture they tried to actively manifest the enduring absence of their ordinary lifeworlds into the presence (Collett, 2012; Hallam and Hockey, 2020). How people relate to and negotiate the absence of matter itself is therefore a significant aspect of post-disaster material culture and sense-making, where material traces can help people not only maintain a connection with the past but also negotiate new meanings, enabling a more seamless bridging of the past and the present.

In Tohoku, the diversity of these material traces, ranging from personal objects, to scarred landscapes, neighbourhoods, remaining buildings, and homes are all meaningful, but have been rarely discussed in conjunction with one another. While the photo projects have gained a great deal of international media coverage and scholarly attention, perhaps due to their emotional intensity and universally recognised personal and cultural significance (Edwards, 2013), it is important to further acknowledge the huge diversity of material engagements that are witnessed in post-disaster settings. In this paper, I will cover a multitude of different surviving matter that survivors engaged with alongside photographs, such as clothing and land. Following Meyer's (2012) notion of absence ‘not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter’ (p. 103), through the ethnographic narratives in this paper, I will explore these traces through the lens of material agency and their capacity for empowerment in sense-making processes. This is particularly relevant for post-disaster contexts, where material loss in the form of destroyed landscapes, towns, homes, possessions, and neighbourhoods suddenly reigns over the material abundance that once stood in these places, through which people re-build attachments and relationships with place and belongings. Traces can therefore illuminate how people relate to those empty landscapes, absence of familiar neighbourhoods and loss of their worldly belongings, becoming important to understand from the perspective of post-disaster sense-making.

Reconstructing and reconnecting

The 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster was one of the most catastrophic events of its kind to hit Japan, resulting in 23,000 people dead or unaccounted for, destroying 130,000 homes and displacing 400,000 people, while leaving behind over 20 million tons of debris (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP], 2012), and rendering entire communities permanently uninhabitable due to the nuclear fallout. The physical scars of the upheaval were visible across the north-eastern coastline for years after the impact, with temporary housing complexes dotting the landscape, noise of construction filling the air, and roads, pathways, and access points continuously changing, placing ordinary life in a state of long-term flux for the survivors. While the recovery today has formally come to its conclusion, the disaster's impacts have, however, permanently altered the settings of daily life. In 2025, when I last visited Tohoku, the elevated land, tsunami walls, and relocated neighbourhoods have created physical settings where much of the old shape of towns and views have disappeared.

Alongside the devastating loss of family members, friends, and neighbours, the sheer force of the disaster meant that many of the persons I interviewed in Tohoku had also experienced extreme material losses, the destruction and inundation of their homes, belongings, and entire neighbourhoods to the tsunami. Daisuke and his wife Akiko were two such survivors. After climbing to the community's emergency assembly point that stood upon a hill right above their house, Daisuke explains: ‘We stood here, watching the waters rise. Suddenly, our house lifts off its foundations and floats into the sea. We realised at that moment that we had lost everything’.

During this conversation with Daisuke, we were visiting his neighbourhood. The area had been cleared, and some of the foundational reconstruction work had begun, but there were no signs of life, and it was hard to imagine a tightly built small neighbourhood had ever existed there. As we stood in the newly reconstructed harbour area, gazing out at the hills where a collection of about 30 houses had once existed, Daisuke pulled out a pamphlet with photographs of his former house and held one up against the barren hilly landscape behind it, visually showing me where his house had once stood: ‘If you look here’, urging me to stand next to him and look to the direction he was pointing behind the photograph, ‘my house was right there, close to the edge of the sea’. The juxtaposition between the foregrounded photograph with a typical rural domestic building basking in the sunlight and the barren hills behind it was stark. Daisuke then continued to vigorously explain the position of the various neighbouring houses and natural landmarks, helping me to visualise what his community had looked like before the disaster.

Reflecting on the moment Daisuke lifted up the photo of his house against the empty landscape, made me realise how little these more ‘mundane’ images of pre-disaster landscapes, buildings, roads, and towns, have featured in the abundance of photo salvage projects, that primarily focused on collecting and restoring family photos (e.g., Collett, 2012; Morimoto, 2014; Nakamura, 2012). However, these seemingly ‘mundane’ photographs of the environment and everyday life could be found across Tohoku in multiple places; town halls, community centres, shops, and other private venues. What potential role do they play in helping people confront the physical absence in their communities? During one of my visits to Minamisanriku, Haru, a local resident, took me to the Shizugawa Junior High School, which overlooks the town's landscape and offered a view of the ongoing rebuilding efforts. As we approached the side of the hill for a better view, a large landscape photograph of the town taken in 2007 became visible. Haru quickly drew my attention to it, saying, ‘it's sad to look at this photo, but I’m glad it's here. This [photo] helps people in the town see that old, familiar view in front of them’. Much like Daisuke, Haru too then began to point to different buildings and areas depicted in the photograph, sharing small anecdotes about life in the town before the disaster.

Re-engaging with everyday objects and actions has been shown to play a crucial role in re-establishing continuity between the past and present (Harada, 2000; Nakamura, 2012; Overholtzer and Robin, 2015), which is why salvaging objects and physically re-engaging with destroyed landscapes and neighbourhoods after disasters can be psychologically comforting. Knowing exactly where to look, Daisuke's neighbour Akira, an amateur photographer, started looking for memorycards and digital cameras as soon as the danger of the waves had subsided. He was eventually able to salvage dozens to hundreds of photos of his community from over the years, saying his impulse to do so was driven by an urge to ‘help us remember exactly what used to be here and where everything was’. Photos can enable people to mentally reconstruct and reconnect with the past in its exact physical shape (Edwards, 2013). This was specifically important as it helped to stir very distinct memories and a sense of nostalgia in people. By reconstructing connections to the past through remnants like photographs, survivors were able to ‘bring past into present focus’ (Sedikides and Wildschut, 2018: 48), providing both emotional and psychosocial support amidst the on-going recovery and continuous flow of physical and material changes to the once familiar and stable landscapes. In this way, by providing clear visual anchoring points, the photo displays facilitated sense-making, helping survivors come to terms with what had occurred and navigate their new reality.

The terms ‘reconstruction’ and ‘nostalgia’ have of course become disfavoured by academics and practitioners in the contexts of disasters for running the risk of replicating past vulnerabilities (Cheek, 2024; Curato, 2018). Or for providing unrealistic ideations for post-disaster recovery for survivors, potentially exacerbating the distress of feelings of loss and being out of place already caused by disaster-related experiences (Albrecht et al., 2007; Warsini et al. 2014). While much of this terminological critique is valid, based on the ethnographic observations and discussions with disaster survivors in Japan, such nostalgic ideations and engagement with reconstructive practices, were not mere resources for memory and recall, or more negatively, ways for people to cling onto the past. Rather, these nostalgic and reconstructive performances precisely illustrate the cyclical nature of sense-making processes, where the past shapes templates for understanding the future (Aaltonen, 2009), thus providing the scaffolding through which new trajectories into the future could emerge, helping people exercise their agency to move forward.

Photos showing the past shape of the communities are thus particularly powerful vehicles against the unruly landscape and physical communities in disarray. As post-traumatic landscapes can evoke forgetting alongside memory (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2006), viewing photos can help to restore memories that are now absent in the landscape itself (O'Meara, 2015). While more prolific and spontaneous during the active recovery period, public photo displays and collages can still be found in multiple places in Tohoku today. Some in a more informal shape, like a collection of newspaper clippings and photographs that I saw on the wall of the Shiogama ferry terminal in 2025, disaster museums across the region hosting them in abundance, while others are becoming more established elements in the landscape. Displays similar to the one that Haru showed me in Minamisanriku in 2015, for instance, can today be found atop Ishinomaki's Hiyoriyama. Situated along the popular walking route with vistas over the city into multiple directions, photos of the pre-disaster city are placed in front of the views of the newly developed cityscape, offering visitors glimpses of a now absent world. These photos were, and still are, highly performative, not just a matter of passive and uncritical consumption for purposes of recall (Wade et al. 2016). The juxtaposition of the old in front of the new, accentuates how the once familiar ordinariness is absent in the presence, while simultaneously present in its absence through the photos that both preserve and transmit collective memory.

Photos are thus vehicles that can help to both stabilise identities and validate pasts (O'Meara, 2015: 1): During the active recovery period, the erection and consumption of these photo displays helped to physically manipulate the unsettlingly empty landscape of the post-disaster destruction. They enabled people to reconnect with a familiar and comfortable sense of order within the overwhelming disorder, giving them agency to regain control over the very disorientation they were feeling. The purpose of their on-going display today, on the other hand, is not to help people escape ‘back into the past’ but rather come to terms with the past's permanent absence. These engagements with the photos can enable momentary materialisations of the past within the altered landscapes.

While the initial purpose of these sites and items was to establish a physical connection and reminder of the world that was no longer, new meanings that have formed in the post-disaster life slowly begin to impregnate these displays. The landscape photo in Minamisanriku, for instance, is now a well-known feature in the town today, becoming updated more distinctly as a memorial site (Fulco, 2022), signalling the transcendence of matter beyond its original meaning (Katō, 2017), as well as the development of transgenerational memory into landscapes (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2006). Alongside photo displays, salvaged personal belongings, and other disaster relics slowly begin to integrate into new routines, becoming part of the new sense of ordinariness that is taking shape. Some displays fade into the background, such as pre-disaster photos, markers, and memorial plaques, which might be passed by without much notice. Sometimes, salvaged items in private spaces acquire new purposes, woven into the creation of new memories.

Integration

‘I was too afraid to go back up there, my husband threw whatever he could find down to me’, explained Aya about how her and her husband salvaged personal items from their house that the tsunami had thrown atop a five-story concrete building. I usually never asked people directly about their experiences of the disaster's unfolding, as I could never be sure how traumatic the day had been for them, but most people nevertheless invariably drew the discussion in that direction. Aya's story, however, was still exceptional. During the chaotic meeting of her small two-story home and the concrete building in the raging waters, Aya was straddled on the roof of her house, heading towards an almost certain death if the house had been sucked into the open sea during the tsunami's receding. A few days after her miraculous survival, Aya and her husband decided to return to the wreckage of their house, that now sat high up in the sky, and rummage through whatever belongings they could find. One of the rooms in their house had suffered surprisingly little damage, she explained, and from there her husband haphazardly picked whatever clothing and general household items he could grab. ‘Including my wedding dress!’, Aya exclaimed. ‘We still have my wedding dress, a little blue canoe, and some t-shirts and other clothing we salvaged at the time. It's been nearly five years now. All these things, we still use them today. They have continued to live on with us into the future’.

It was the ‘living on’ in Aya's statement that thus drew my attention. Vast volume of matter was diligently collected, cleaned, and put on display in school and community halls for owners to collect after the disaster (Gerster et al., 2021). Similarly, some salvaged items have become memorialised, like the post box in the Utatsu district of Minamisanriku, or entered into museum collections, like the Kamome boat belonging to a school in Rikuzentakata that was displayed at the national museum in Tokyo, for instance. These public displays, like the replication of disaster views through landscape photographs outlined above, are all public ways of ‘treating’ complicated objects and views, recognising the ambiguous value in what Stengs (2014) calls ‘sacred waste’. While items that were exposed to public gaze in this way were ‘set apart’ and provided ‘special treatment’ (Stengs, 2014: 235), items in private spaces, like the things Aya collected, seemed to be approached quite differently. Their original meanings and purposes went beyond a mere memory of the now absent pre-disaster life but were rather actively drawn back into the ordinary presence as agents in the new post-disaster reality: Not only to attune the sense of loss, but also to make it acceptable to ‘live on’ irrespective of that loss.

‘When the disaster happened, we lost everything’, Aya explains. To deal with the loss and sense of displacement that suddenly dominated her everyday life she started to regularly pray at the shrine on one of the islands of her hometown, ‘and there happens to be this ‘power spot’ for fertility there’. Her two children running around us during our meeting were a testament to how unexpectedly her and her husband's family soon changed after the disaster. Despite trying to have children before the disaster, ‘it just never happened’, as Aya put it. During the interview, she laughingly (but also with noted seriousness) attributed her children's presence to the supernatural powers of the shrine and her own ritualistic visits there to attune her own physical and emotional confusion. At the moment of her first child's birth, Aya reconnected with the wedding dress, remodelling it and wearing again for her children's miyamairi ¹ at the local shrine. ‘Like me it survived the tsunami’, she explained, further emphasising the significance of the wedding dress’ integration into her new reality.

Throughout the salvage and subsequent life of the wedding dress, Aya would have experienced multiple concrete tactile connections with the now absent past: catching it as her husband threw it from the wreckage of the old house, carrying it home, washing and tending to it, storing it, remodelling it, and ultimately wearing it again. Items like these from the past are emotionally important as they concretely connect oneself with the physical world/people that are no longer, who once touched those same belongings or belonged in the same landscape, thus helping to bring that which is absent into the present and into physical contact with oneself again (Daniels, 2024). Through their work on tactile memory, Harries (2017) explores the possibilities of objects, that, in this way, transcend time, being able to dissolve the distinction between the past and the present. The re-integration of surviving objects and places from the past into the post-disaster context, enabled people like Aya to physically feel the past in the presence. The old and new folds, forms, and stitches in Aya's wedding dress exhibit the crossing of these multiple meanings and temporalities embedded into the dress: Joys of marriage, grief around infertility, loss of home, neighbours, and community to the disaster, incredible survival of both her and her husband, and the birth of their children.

Aya's narrative around her wedding dress illustrates, almost becoming a metaphor, for the transforming and continuously living biographies of matter itself (Clarke, 2014), where the wedding dress came to materialise the folding in of the past into the continuation of life and future aspirations. By reflecting on Aya's story, I was able to recognise further examples of this material integration I had witnessed in Tohoku before. Momoko's story and the actions toward the inherited land where her mother's house once stood, also exhibited efforts to collapse the unbearable absence of the past into the presence. Due to new post-disaster zoning regulations (Murakami et al. 2014), Momoko's land on the edge of the sea in rural Ishinomaki could no longer be used for residential purposes. For Momoko, in its empty state it stood as a constant reminder of her mother's death, and the destruction wrought by the disaster. ‘This land is right next to the main road that brings people into our hamlet, it's almost the first thing they see. I felt I could not leave it as it was after the disaster’, she explained. ‘If I did, people would come here and think there was never anything here to begin with’. Motivated by the anxiety of seeing her mother's memory, and by extension, the community's history, becoming forgotten, she began to reclaim the space and fill the absence of former life in her community with new life. What began as a spontaneous act of planting roses gradually evolved into a larger community effort, as others joined her in creating a space for both remembrance and renewal. ‘I didn’t really plan it, and I never asked for help. But other people in the community came to see what I was doing, joined in, and together we created this place for ourselves. In a way, it helped us regain our self-respect’.

What was palpable in both Aya's and Momoko's reflections above is how the performative handling, manipulation, and use of land and belongings. Through the lens of embodied cognition and embodied memory (Foglia and Wilson, 2013; Groth, 2017), we can see how both Aya and Momoko's physical engagement with matter, these tactile and embodied actions allowed them to access memories and experiences, that may have been difficult to articulate or identify, helping them to integrate memory as an active agent in the creation of the future (Culbertson, 1995). In this way, both the wedding dress and the land assumed new roles and became instrumental agents in the integration of processes of memory, change, and continuation; helping that which was physically and materially lost to also ‘live on’ into the new and altered post-disaster reality.

For Momoko especially, the physical labour and engagement with her ancestral land made her not only feel closer to her mother and the community that once stood in the place, but also helped to alleviate her anxieties over her community becoming forgotten. At the time of our speaking in 2016 stood as a floral oasis amongst the neighbouring parcels of ancestral land, all of which had largely been left unattended. Today, Ogatsu is much changed, as is Momoko's land. What stood as a small picket-fenced area amidst an otherwise empty landscape, today a large garden with a huge variety of not only roses, but fruit trees and other plants can be enjoyed by visitors and locals alike. The site also hosts a cafe and organises regular events around gardening and disaster preparedness, and is a destination for school field trips as well. For Ogatsu, that has experienced considerable population exodus since the disaster, and where the physical character of the community has experienced probably the largest alteration I have witnessed in Tohoku since the formal recovery has come to its conclusion, places like Momoko's garden seem particularly meaningful for the entire community. While much changed, the same flowers Momoko planted together with her neighbours and disaster volunteers, continue to feed off of the land that has sustained life in the community for generations, cut short by the disaster. In this way, through the physical manipulation of the land, Momoko maintains a connection with the past, while simultaneously helping the past to come back to life and continue to gather time, movement, and change (Gosden and Marshall, 1999).

Untouching

While integrating material traces back into the presence helped many people to ‘live on’, simultaneously ‘too much is changing!’, ‘we don't want to be forgotten’ and ‘it feels like nothing of the old town will be left’, were phrases commonly uttered by local residents across the tsunami-affected region, where anxiety and distress over the future was widespread. Many of the recovery plans across the region's towns and villages contained dramatic changes to landscapes and lived environments, in most cases utterly changing the layout of the towns and villages, bearing little resemblance to the towns people used to remember and inhabit (Nagamatsu, 2018). Despite recognising the need for increased resilience and the benefit of new housing, people also reported complicated feelings toward these plans. Feelings toward these dramatic changes were often articulated through fear of erasure, echoing a sense of loss, discomfort and detachment relating to the places that had been their homes for decades in many cases (Gagné, 2020; Posio, 2019; Vainio and Martini, 2023), now becoming unrecognisable.

Driven by financial and legal regulations set by the central government and Japan's existing legislation and policies on disaster recovery, the recovery was approached with great urgency by the authorities, which was experienced negatively across the region by the survivors in many ways (Gagné, 2020). Upon our meeting, Momoko for instance reflected on the future shape of her coastal community and the fact that they had collectively agreed to a tsunami wall being built. ‘We were in shock’, she said, referring to the first year of the post-disaster period when the recovery plans were intensely being prepared and presented to local communities. ‘Yes, we agreed to the tsunami wall being built. After time has passed, we know what it will mean to us, what it will look like, and we don't want it anymore. But there's no going back now’, she continued. Traumatised populations across Tohoku were often engaged in these multiple forward-thinking activities while they were still actively mourning the loss of family members and friends and coming to terms with the permanent absence of their familiar pasts (Martini, 2022). Momoko expressed a desire to ‘have more time’ and leave things ‘untouched’ for longer reflect the negative consequences that can come from too much forward-thinking too soon.

Resisting the urge to fill the emptiness with action, choosing instead to ‘untouch’, can be psychologically necessary and beneficial for sense-making (Delano and Nienass, 2015). While the decisions on the tsunami walls did become heatedly contested across the region (Littlejohn, 2018), sites collectively known as ‘disaster remains’, shinsai ikō (震災遺構), on the other hand, are perhaps the most striking examples of how leaving things ‘untouched’ can help people process the weight of decision-making itself. These tangible remnants of disaster have sparked debate over their role as local and national resources (Miyagi-Ken Shinsai Ikō Yūshikisha Kaigi, 2015), but their ultimate fate was left unresolved for a long time in many cases, maintaining them in a state of suspended uncertainty, reflected by the ongoing resistance to label them sites as memorials and seeing them rather as records of history (Morimoto, 2014). Sites such as the Okawa Elementary School in Ishinomaki and the Minamisanriku Disaster Prevention Building, and other locations ravaged by nature have since become imbued with multi-layered meanings. These range from symbolising the terrifying force of nature to embodying survival and the will to persevere (Mizukawa, 2025). Initially, the sites remained ‘untouched’ as a result of policy indecisions and ongoing discussions regarding whether the sites are valuable for remembrance, for education, or for stimulating tourism to revive the stagnant economies of the towns and cities that host such sites (Littlejohn, 2021), with the Minamisanriku Disaster Prevention Building, for example, enduring years of indecision before it was ultimately preserved.

Today, many of the disaster remains have become formally preserved and ‘fixed in place’ as specific sites, signalling the collective and personal aspects of the tragedy that impacted the region (Littlejohn, 2021). While they of course have been physically ‘touched’ and manipulated in many ways over the years, both physically through regular maintenance cycles as well as philosophically through their designation as sites for disaster education, for instance (Zhang and Izumi, 2024), their ethos as disaster remains is nonetheless vital to highlight. They are symbolically preserved as ‘remaining’ in the state of destruction, as physical traces of the life that was once lived, and the destruction that led to that life's permanent absence. These traces of the disaster thus continue to function as ‘connections to the previous life’ (Gerster et al., 2021: np.) that cannot be returned to.

In many ways, ‘haunting’ can thus be a useful way of describing the intensities within these sites, both then and today, where the past comes momentarily back to life in an unsettling way, demanding attention in its presence (Gordon, 2008: xvi), not only due to people craving and longing for the normalcy that once existed, but also due to the personification of death in these sites. The stark juxtaposition of the disaster remains within the otherwise completely altered landscape and shape of their hometowns was unbearable to some after the disaster. Hiroyuki, whose family had held a small shop in the town centre of Onagawa for decades, told me he would not be returning to the main inlet, as the town no longer contained anything ‘positive’ of the past within it. He did not directly refer to the police box as a negative aspect of this development, but its remaining as the sole concrete reminder of the now absent town, highlighted to Hiroyuki what he viewed as a complete erasure of everything he had loved most about Onagawa. Disaster remains, like all matter, have the ability to continue to discharge emotive energies for people (Navaro-Yashin, 2009), to haunt them, years, even decades after the event itself. For Hiroyuki, what haunted him was the lack of positive traces of the past and the absence of the atmosphere he longed for that prompted him not to return to his old neighbourhood, and rather empowered him to forge a different path for his family in a part of town untouched by the disaster, as well as the recovery.

The extended period of inaction where these sites were left untouched, for whatever reason, has in many ways also provided emotional and psychological space for individuals and communities to mourn and make sense of their experiences, while much like the photographs discussed above, also serving as practical landmarks to help people locate themselves in the now absent space (Gerster et al., 2021). The decision-making around their ultimate designation was wrought with difficulty, due to the concerns over these sites as places where death through the loss of family members becomes personified and thus intimately traumatising (Littlejohn, 2021). There were further worries about these sites permanently branding communities as ‘disaster towns’, while others took a more positive approach to the sites, reminding people of the dangers of natural hazards and the necessity to engage in disaster preparedness and risk mitigation (Mizukawa, 2025; Zhang and Izumi, 2024). I noticed these complexities in communities myself in 2016 as well. While Haru, a local resident in Minamisanriku, explained that some people still avoided driving past the remains of the building because it triggered painful memories for them, others like Daisuke in Onagawa were glad that the police box that the town had chosen to preserve remained as a relic to remind people about the destructive power of tsunamis. In communities where highly diverse and at times contradicting views like Haru's and Daisuke's existed side-by-side, ‘untouching’ itself could be a controversial decision too: By allowing time for reflection about the very existence of these sites for some, forced others to be haunted by the sites that evoked traumatic memories for them (Sakaguchi, 2021).

In a disaster where over 20.000 people lost their lives, and thousands remain unaccounted for, however, it was not just the disaster remains that raised complex questions. A number of other traces of the disaster remained ‘untouched’; buildings and relics that existed in a liminal space where they were not formally designated as memorials, nor as debris; and personal items that were carefully collected from the rubble, yet, remained unclaimed in school halls and community centres for years (Gerster et al., 2021). Indeed, traces of the haunted absence was (and perhaps continues to be) embedded into the entire region in multiple other ways too. While exploring the coastal areas of affected towns ten years ago, I was struck by how much material traces displaced by the disaster still remained strewn along roadsides, fields and other areas, years after the disaster and considerable clean-up operations. In Ogatsu, for instance, I visited the site of a local ink stone workshop destroyed by the tsunami, where the ground was littered with ink stones, both large and small. When I mentioned these items to locals, they acknowledged their presence, though I was initially surprised that what felt like significant artifacts of craftmanship had not been salvaged. Some locals, however, felt that the ink stones, now intertwined with the land, should not be touched as they held the spirits of people perished on the site, perhaps reflecting the Japanese understanding of the fluid boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead (Jensen and Blok, 2013). In this way, the objects became part of the landscape, preserving the memories of both the community and the people who remain.

Like Ogatsu, in Ishinomaki too, I walked through neighbourhoods where homes had been reduced to their foundations, with personal belongings like cookware, cameras, and toys scattered nearby. These items symbolised a community ravaged by the waves and the permanent relocation that followed (Vainio, 2019). In 2025, I visited the same neighbourhood again, that today hosts the site for the Ishinomaki Minamihama Disaster Memorial Park. The belongings I saw on the ground in 2016 are long gone, but the memory of the neighbourhood and the homes that once stood there has become traced into the shape and format of the memorial park. The streets within the neighbourhood from before the earthquake now form the main walkways of the park. Along the walkways, foundations of some homes have been preserved as physical traces of the ordinary life that was once led in this place, while small plaques with information about the neighbourhood and life on specific streets have been erected (with QR codes to access further details). Within the finished product of the recovery, visitors can thus actively re-call the memory of the past, while simultaneously being acutely aware of the scale of its absence in the present.

The embeddedness of these items into the landscapes, parks, forests, beaches, and roadsides illustrates the overwhelming nature of the physical scars and traces that disasters can leave behind (Dawdy, 2021). While these sites and items remain haunted in many ways, evoking complex feelings and memories, the ongoing process of untouching validifies their status as remains of an ongoing tragedy. To echo the sentiments in the opening of this section, disaster remains, as well as salvaged personal belongings, relics and mementos alike, are ‘emotionally charged spaces where the premise of committed remembering is pitted against the pervasive fear of forgetting’ (Mizukawa, 2025: 3). How remembering painful memories is hard but forgetting them can be equally tragic (McNally, 2005). When we approach disaster remains as ‘traces’ of the ordinary world lost forever, the focus of memorialisation shifts away from the trace itself, and rather to the absence of the world in which the trace belonged, signalling the enduring, or haunting, presence of that world through its very absence.

‘Untouching’ as a process thus illustrates the importance of time and space to negotiate the complex emotions that the sudden emptiness and absence of people's familiar ordinariness evoke (Edensor, 2008). At times, processes like ‘untouching’ can feel like indecision or paralysis induced by trauma, where the traumatised individuals and communities are seen as unable to engage effectively in decision-making processes (Rosenberg et al. 2022). While this can be true, it is important to not confuse such disengagement from decision-making with passivity. ‘Untouching’, as outlined above is a key example where avoiding making decisions on disaster remains, for instance, are conscious performances through which people actively slowed down the process of forced forward thinking, enabling space to make sense of the kind of memory or record they wanted to forge of their pasts, what had happened to these communities, and give meaning to the future that was unfolding. In this way they claimed space to come to terms with the social and physical emptiness and absence of ordinary familiarity in their communities, while considering the material effects any decision would have on their personal and communal lives.

Discussions

Understanding the active role of matter and physical spaces in post-disaster recovery is more vital today than ever as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of environmental disturbances that impact communities (Dodman et al. 2019). These events unravel the complex social and cultural entanglements between humans and objects, disrupting ordinary life and causing unimaginable losses (Overholtzer and Robin, 2015). However, post-disaster matter and the role of physical objects, spaces, and landscapes are often viewed through a primarily utilitarian lens in decision-making and planning (Sou and Webber, 2019), such as housing and key infrastructure to meet basic needs (Fukushima, 2014; Murakami et al., 2014). For disaster survivors, however, reconnecting with the traces of the now absent past, is profoundly meaningful as they seek to make sense of and bridge the gap between the surreal and the unimaginable with the real and the ordinary (Collett, 2012). Focusing on the entanglements between humans and nonhumans in post-disaster sense-making is vital, as the intangible qualities of material culture are still often overlooked in both formal discourse and the practical application of recovery processes (Sou and Webber, 2019).

The processes outlined in the above ethnographic sections, Restoration, Integration and Untouching, are not meant as an exhaustive list of how people deal with the sudden absence of their familiar material ordinariness after disasters. Rather, reflecting on Maddrell's (2013) work on memorials, the purpose has been to illustrate how these different forms of material engagements reveal the dynamic and on-going negotiations between absence and presence when people face significant losses in their lives. In this paper, I have explored this connection through the notion of ‘traces’, and how as remnants of the once abundant and socio-materially complex ordinary reality, traces exercise their own agency and continue to move and empower people and contribute to the processes of making sense of what has happened.

The process of material reconstruction of the past played a meaningful role in post-disaster sense-making, with a future-oriented temporal focus. It offered survivors a way to combat the disorientation caused by the sudden collapse of their surroundings and relationships that often results from disaster events (Harada, 2000), providing avenues for survivors to process immense changes. Objects and spaces, like Aya's wedding dress and Momoko's land, while simultaneously symbols of loss, were repurposed to carry forward memories and experiences, and integrated back into new realities. Through ongoing interaction with these remnants, survivors created a tangible connection to their past, showing how both personal and collective histories become embodied in the present (LeCain, 2017). This process of ‘living on’ transformed material remnants into active agents of absence, easing the emotional impact of loss while fostering continuity in a changed world. While engaging with photographs from the times before the disaster, or manipulating items, belongings, and landscapes offered psychic comfort and helped people come to terms with the destruction and manage trauma by re-engaging with the past, the process of untouching was emotionally and psychologically more complex. In the case of disaster remains, the potential of materials and spaces to resonate traumatic associations (Convery et al. 2008: 61), ‘untouching’ became a process that provided the space and time for people to imagine how they could move on with the enduring absence toward a future.

Through the above ethnographic sections, the aim has been to illustrate not only how people make sense of the fact that their complex socio-material system called a ‘community’ could be there one day and gone the next, but also how despite loss, people actively maintain relationships with the absence of their material world (Holmes and Ehgartner, 2021), thus ensuring its continued presence in daily life. Through the on-going, and often overt, engagement with memorials, disaster remains, photo displays and objects in private possession, individuals and communities in North-eastern Japan continue to attune and appease the major ontological rupture the disaster caused. In 2015 and 2016, the time when majority of the ethnographic episodes outlined in this paper took place, while still in a state of flux, the disaster-affected region no longer bore the overt signs of disorder in the form of waste and debris that were gone. Construction was on-going and you could slowly start to recognise how the modelled illustrations of future communities in the recovery plans were becoming etched into the physical landscape. However, despite the rapid advancement of the recovery, traces of the scale of destruction to ordinary life were still of course apparent. Abandoned objects, broken coastal barriers, buildings whose fates remained undecided and the foundations of entire neighbourhoods could still be seen in some shape or other across the disaster-affected region. In the evenings when the construction crews went home, the quietness and stillness in the communities was palpable, resonating the ‘spectral presence’ of the absence of life once lived in these communities (Armstrong, 2010).

While the recovery in the region has today come to its conclusion, people have returned to their homes and neighbourhoods and life has assumed new routines and ‘instinctiveness’, the absence of the past remains distinctly detectable. Due to the ubiquity of the impact the tsunami had on the region, polished memorials, signs indicating the height of the tsunami, disaster museums and remains, are abundant. They stand alongside new housing complexes, public facilities, shops and freshly paved roads, as a counterpoint to the weathered empty feel of much of the broader region, as well as rural Japan overall, suffering from the collective ruination spurred on by population exodus and lack of infrastructure and social spending (Coates, 2019). Disaster-affected spaces and objects are thus accumulated with spectral resonances (Armstrong, 2010), where multiple layers of meaning and time have impregnated the affective atmosphere of the region, located within this collective ruination: While the ‘traces’ of the disaster can help locate the specific event in space and time (Navaro-Yashin, 2009), the context of rural decline within which Tohoku's recovery has been taking place sits alongside resilience the recovery, marking the broader identity of the locations (Trigg, 2009). Exploring the disaster through multiple temporal perspectives and frames, can thus help to tease out the different layers of spectrality that move the region.

The agency of matter becomes central, as their evolving meanings shape and are shaped by the lives, identities, and sense-making processes of their owners, illustrating the procedural nature of material agency (Ransom, 2019). At the same time, these objects carry the imprints of the world that no longer exists, continuing to embody and materialise the past even as they help construct a new reality. The various ways in which people engaged with this collective notion of ruins, for instance, by reconstructing familiar views, remodelling personal possessions, and leaving things in a state of destruction, represent ways in which people tried to weave the disruptive event of the tsunami into their collective and personal historiography: To make sense of the event within the chronology of time, while also actively recognising and managing the on-goingness of trauma that ‘took place and continues to be inextricably bound with that location in both affective and evidential manner’ (Trigg, 2009: 88).

Conclusions

The performative engagements with absence discussed in this paper highlight the intricate ways in which survivors interact with the traces of their pasts to navigate both the trauma and the potential for renewal. Rather than simply dwelling on loss, these engagements offer a dynamic means of making sense of the rupture caused by disaster, fostering a sense of continuity and possibility for the future. Revisiting the ethnographic material from 10 years ago has its own significance within this analysis, as it can refresh our recognition of the pain and on-goingness of collective trauma, induced by the initial loss and maintained by the enduring absence. Through processes like reconstruction, integration, and untouching, survivors actively negotiate their relationship to material remnants, turning them into tools for emotional processing and future-building, revealing the interplay between absence-as-agent and the survivors’ own empowered resilience to continue to ‘live on’ with loss. This fluidity in response not only reflects individual and collective resilience but also emphasises the centrality of material culture in shaping post-disaster identity and memory. The act of engaging with, or leaving untouched, certain remnants allows survivors to reshape their narratives and envision pathways forward, demonstrating how the disaster experience becomes temporally and spatially layered into physical landscapes and lived environments, memory as well as performances of daily life.