Detouring: A theory of fun in disaster preparedness

Abstract

We live, it seems, in an age of preparedness. From risk calculations to scenario planning, experts engage in anticipatory governance, bringing the future into the present as a site of intervention, discipline and subject-formation. However, in my ethnographic research in Japan and elsewhere, disaster preparedness educators – city officials, non-profit organisations and community leaders educating lay citizens about preparedness – lament that most people do not engage with preparedness. In response, playful activities have appeared, which teach preparedness through fun. In this article, I argue that taking the fun of playful preparedness seriously reveals a theory of what I call ‘detouring’. In detouring, prepared citizens are made through distractions, rather than disciplinary government. Preparedness educators understand that most people would rather ignore terrifying disasters. Thus, they devise fun strategies to draw people away from their daily concerns so that learning preparedness becomes possible but in a temporary and light-touch way. Furthermore, echoing this approach among my interlocutors, I write in patchwork ethnography ways, appreciating deviations from ‘research’ and ‘the field’ as opportunities for theorisation. Could detouring, then, be a theory for understanding how we face uncertain futures, both as researchers and as people inhabiting this earth?

A logic of fragility

According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), more disasters have killed and affected people between the years 2000 and 2020 than in the previous two decades (UNDRR, 2020). Although climate-related hazards dominate these statistics, geological events also continue to strike, such as a mass earthquake killing over 55,000 people on the Turkey-Syria border in 2023 (British Red Cross, 2024). Even in countries renowned for their advanced disaster preparedness systems, such as Japan, destruction from disasters continues.

Given these proliferating disasters likely to worsen in the coming decades and centuries, especially due to climate change, being ready is paramount. Beck (1992) characterised the modern world as ‘risk societies’, an assessment still pertinent today. More recently, anthropologists and others have characterised the current era as one of preparedness, in which experts and political decision-makers seek to mitigate risks, knowing that these cannot be calculated or avoided (Anderson, 2010; Lakoff, 2007; Samimian-Darash, 2022). Scholars have identified this risk mitigation as the core of anticipatory governance, making the uncertain future actionable through securitisation and scenario planning (Anderson and Adey, 2011; Samimian-Darash, 2016). These Foucauldian-inspired studies generally focus on experts and government actors, with lay citizens portrayed as subject to the governmental disciplines of these preparedness regimes.

However, the preparedness educators whom I studied and with whom I worked in Japan and Chile since 2016 – city officials, staff at non-profit organisations and community leaders working to educate lay citizens about disaster preparedness – do not think we live in an age of preparedness. This article focuses on my research in Japan but, in both countries, preparedness educators told me that most people do not engage with preparedness in their daily lives. In Japan, a Cabinet Office survey from 2022 showed that, while over 60% of respondents said they spoke about disaster preparedness with family members and those close to them, less than half had stockpiled food or participated in evacuation drills (Cabinet Office (Japan), 2022). As disaster scholars have noted about various parts of the world, most people do not take up preparedness in their everyday lives, whether because they avoid thinking about traumatic memories or terrifying futures (Lewis et al., 2011) or because they struggle with more urgent concerns such as making a living and caring for loved ones (Sou, 2019). Researchers note that citizens do not engage much if at all, with preparedness actions, whether in the face of bushfires in Australia (Eriksen and Gill, 2010) or ahead of a multitude of disasters in China (Han and Wu, 2024).

Thus, researchers and practitioners alike are devising new ways to understand and improve how people can prepare better for a disaster-prone future. One of these endeavours involves the use of playful methods such as games. A number of institutions use games for disaster preparedness and climate change education, from the American Red Cross and the US Department of Homeland Security to United Nations agencies and governments (Buchanan, 2023; Gampell and Gaillard, 2016; Miglioranza, 2020; UNDRR, 2024). Many of these efforts target children but some also recruit adults, such as the game-based methodologies that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)'s Climate Centre has developed (IFRC, 2025). Play is not only the purview of children but also captures broader ways of thinking and being in the world (Malaby, 2009; Woodyer, 2012). Hence, play in the realm of disaster preparedness does not only entertain children but constructs a particular way to engage with disaster-prone futures.

This article proposes to take seriously playful forms of disaster preparedness, and particularly the experience of fun, as a productive starting point for an anthropological theory of what I call ‘detouring’ or ‘yorimichi’ in Japanese. A theory of detouring can aid anthropologists in understanding how people are being made into prepared citizens, not through governmental disciplinary techniques, but through distractions. Analysing disaster preparedness as anticipatory governance only tells one side of the story. Attending to fun elucidates how people are temporarily taken away from daily routines to engage with disaster preparedness techniques, only to return to their everyday lives soon afterward. Preparedness educators hope that this temporary detour will encourage people to incorporate preparedness in their everyday lives – what Japanese preparedness educators call ‘becoming everyday’ (nichijōka) – even if in minor ways. Detouring, then, allows for theorisations of subject-formation outside analyses of discipline, rationalities of risk and governance, helping anthropologists understand better other ways that people are taught to engage with uncertain futures.

I arrived at this theory of detouring due to two interactions in the field, which I explain in further detail below. In the first, I told some Japanese preparedness educators about my interest in theories of play, and they replied that they thought of their work as ‘fun education’ (tanoshī kyōiku) and not necessarily play (asobi). This exchange prompted me to disaggregate play from fun. The second instance happened in two group interviews I conducted with city officials in Japanese rural towns who had used playful preparedness methods to try to educate residents about preparedness skills. I expected them to talk about the importance of measuring effectiveness. Instead, they explained the fun activities as providing an opportunity or catalyst (kikkake) for people to think about disaster preparedness, even if only in small and temporary ways. ¹ They did not assume that this one experience would transform people into becoming absolutely better prepared.

I am not concerned with fun, therefore, as an inherently positive experience (which it might be), but in terms of what it does in the world and how it orients people in particular ways – in this case, through detouring. As simply a catalyst, the kikkake that fun in playful preparedness creates does not definitively make people adopt preparedness at home. A theory of detouring accepts catastrophes such as disasters to continue to happen, that people will be injured and lives will be lost. Teaching people to become prepared citizens through fun and make survival possible for them in the future exists in this acceptance of life's brittleness. I call this a ‘logic of fragility’ that contrasts with the logics of securitisation, risk mitigation and fortification in analyses of anticipatory governance (Fisch, 2022; Zeiderman, 2016). The logic of fragility acknowledges that life is fragile – that a natural hazard, a personal tragedy or simply the contingencies of life can devastate our worlds, no matter what we do. The logic of fragility takes disaster-prone futures as possibilities for which everyday life can be designed through play. Preparedness educators cannot and do not guarantee survival through this design but offer methods to increase the chances to live. A theory of detouring enables an understanding of how this offering happens. Indeterminacy and contingency are part of life and what make life, as Malaby proposed in his theories of play (Malaby, 2002). The preparedness educators I have known recognise this fact of human existence, both in seeing the unpredictability of fun experiences as full of possibility and life itself as brittle. The detouring that fun enables helps us understand better the work of such actors who accept disaster-prone futures without despair or militarism. In other words, fun as a theory of detouring explains people's embrace of contingency while they guide but leave open what the future holds.

A note on methodology: I conducted this research and wrote about it in the ethos of patchwork ethnography, which echoes the arguments about distractions and detouring that I make. In 2020, my collaborator-friends and I proposed the concept of patchwork ethnography as a way to name the practices that many ethnographic researchers have been devising amid competing responsibilities that make continuous long-term fieldwork impossible (Günel et al., 2020). We contend that honesty about how our multiple intersecting obligations and choices shape knowledge production – how caring responsibilities, disabilities or precarious employment curtail field trips – can render research more inclusive. Although many of us feel ashamed when we cannot conduct several continuous months of fieldwork due to personal circumstances, the fact is that all anthropologists have always juggled personal and professional responsibilities, both the demands of ‘home’ and ‘field’, whether one is doing long-term uninterrupted fieldwork or not (Günel and Watanabe, 2024). Patchwork ethnography calls on researchers to openly recognise this constant shift between home and field as part of research design.

In this article, I build on Kate McClellan's call in the 2021 Patchwork Ethnography webinar to see distractions as possibilities (McClellan, 2021). I consider distractions, not as obstacles to overcome but as situated contingencies with potential to advance theory, while recognising that they can also lead to the end of one's research career. In this sense, my methodological and writing practices in this article resonate with the argument about detouring – that is, just as theorising fun as a mechanism of detouring facilitates an understanding of the making of prepared citizens through diversions, researching and writing through patchwork ethnography means attending to distractions as part of knowledge production. As such, in this article and elsewhere (Watanabe, 2026), I experiment with the levels of honesty in explaining how I arrived at a concept, which often comes as much from conversations with loved ones or from frivolous activities as they do from academic readings, seminars and peer review in publications such as this one. I hope this openness also demystifies processes of academic knowledge production. We produce theories out of interactions with others, not only interlocutors but also academic colleagues and family members. Detours, distractions and deviations – engaging with moments that feel like (or people tell us is) a waste of time might be key to how we survive and continue to do anthropological work amid the disastrous futures to come.

Playful preparedness in Japan

In July 2017, I arrived in Kobe to begin my first month of fieldwork. Using small grants, I had slowly begun a project examining the international cooperation around disaster preparedness between Japan and Chile. This would be the only month of research I could manage that year due to teaching and administrative duties at the university, in addition to a week in Chile and two weeks in Japan earlier in the year, the latter of which was mostly taken up by family obligations. On a hot and humid day, I went to the office of a non-profit social design organisation to start my volunteering-cum-research. Plus Arts’ small office and the seven staff and volunteers there became part of my daily routine for a month. That summer, the use of play in preparedness education became central to my research.

Plus Arts is most well-known for an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan (literally, ‘In a Pinch! Frog Caravan’). In 2005, Nagata Hirokazu, the founder of Plus Arts and the artist Fuji Hiroshi devised an event combining a toy exchange activity with disaster preparedness education. Children bring toys to give away and receive points for them on a stamp card. Using the points, children can ‘buy’ toys that other children have brought. If they lack points, they can earn them by taking part in games about disaster preparedness.

These games include learning together how to convert a blanket into a stretcher to carry an ‘injured’ large frog from one place to another, pretending to rescue it. A promotional video on the Iza! Kaeru Caravan website shows children, about six or seven years old, looking focused and ecstatic as they lift up the frog. ² The adults (presumably parents) who are helping carry the frog are also laughing as they work together with the children. The event also includes card games and tabletop games on preparedness knowledge and skills. One type of game shows players how they can turn ordinary objects, such as plastic bags, into resources for survival like slings for broken arms. The games draw on survival skills and advice from hundreds of survivors of past disasters interviewed by a professor, Atsumi Tomohide, and his university students, in collaboration with Plus Arts staff members.

I soon learned that a wide range of actors have adopted Plus Arts’ methods. Iza! Kaeru Caravan became so popular that, by the time I began my research, Plus Arts rarely organised its own Caravan. Plus Arts staff members teach one- or two-day courses for municipalities and neighbourhood organisations that want to implement their own Caravans. The Japanese government's training for international disaster experts always includes a lesson on Plus Arts’ activities. Consequently, local governments and community groups in other countries, such as Chile have also put on their own versions of the event. Numerous municipalities across the country invite Nagata-san to train their staff on playful methodologies. Corporations contract Plus Arts to design preparedness activities for their employees and as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. The Government of Japan's Cabinet Office showcases Iza! Kaeru Caravan as a model for how to encourage people to participate in preparedness (Cabinet Office (Japan), 2017).

Plus Arts’ work fits within a broader trend in disaster preparedness in Japan that emphasises citizen participation. Preparedness measures tended to focus on infrastructural projects throughout the twentieth century, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the cataclysmic tsunami that followed revived the governmental focus on infrastructures (Fisch, 2022; Kimura, 2016; Takahashi, 2023). Nevertheless, decades earlier, the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake had pushed other approaches to the foreground (Watanabe and Kimura, 2025). The devastating magnitude 6.9 earthquake demolished roads and buildings in Kobe and nearby areas, preventing emergency services from reaching survivors. Police headquarters, fire stations and municipal buildings were badly damaged. Coordination between different agencies failed (Maki, 2009). Experts and government officials today state that 80% of victims survived thanks to the help of neighbours and family members. Subsequently, the government adopted a three-pronged principle of self-help (jijo), mutual help (kyōjo) and public help from state agencies (kōjo), the last of which is seen to be least effective when the next big earthquake strikes. The government White Paper on disaster preparedness clarifies that ‘self-help’ includes families (kazoku mo fukumu) and that mutual help indicates support among people outside the family, such as neighbours (Cabinet Office (Japan), 2021: 60).

The 1995 earthquake also gave rise to playful forms of preparedness education. Social psychologists Yamori Katsuya and Atsumi Tomohide have pioneered participatory work with survivors of 1995 and other communities, producing popular creative outputs such as games (Asahi Shimbun, 2004; Yamori, 2009). A Google Alert I have set up for the word ‘disaster preparedness’ in Japanese, bōsai, regularly yields online pieces about playful preparedness. These range from stories about former athletes who use sports as a fun way to introduce disaster preparedness to children (Yomiuri Shimbun, 2024) to profiles about organisations other than Plus Arts that promote fun and playful activities for preparedness education (Nippon Foundation, 2022). Similar to Plus Arts, many preparedness educators also talk about turning ordinary items, such as garbage bags, into resources during disasters (Orange Page, 2023). Understanding how playful preparedness inserts disasters and preparedness into people's everyday lives can shed light on the mechanisms of making catastrophic futures thinkable and actionable for citizens in Japan and elsewhere.

On fun

Playful preparedness usually targets children and their families. Hence, one could analyse activities such as Iza! Kaeru Caravan as domesticating the terror of disasters and making preparedness an important component of citizen-making for children, and thereby, for all citizens. ³ My aim in this article is to push this argument further by examining how play and fun, are not simply decoys for power, but rather, the social mechanisms through which preparedness educators persuade children as well as adults to incorporate preparedness in their everyday lives. Unlinking play from the ideology of innocence attached to childhood and the valence of positive emotions (Malaby, 2009: 205), and instead, foregrounding the specific dynamics of play makes it applicable to adults too, not only children.

My collaborator in Japan, Kimura Shūhei, helped push my thinking in this respect. By the time he came to visit the Plus Arts office as part of our joint fieldwork in the summer of 2019, I knew my way around. While Kimura-san sat at the long table in the organisation's cramped meeting space, I pulled out plastic cases with materials for games to show him. Kimura-san commented that all the activities seemed to encourage taking everyday objects in a different way, like treating shopping bags as a sling. He offered that Plus Arts’ games appeared to ‘see things in a doubled-up or duplicate way’ (nijūka shite miru). It is about dislodging the framework of the everyday (nichijō no furēmu wo hazusu). ⁴

As always, Kimura-san and I were thinking along similar lines. Theories of play often draw on Goffman (1974) who, based on Gregory Bateson's work, proposed the concept of ‘framing’ to explain how people make sense of a specific social situation through the continuous production of context. Bateson's (1969: 180) theory of the ‘as if’ states that the same activity can be perceived differently – an animal's bite seen as an angry bite or a playful nip – depending on the context or metacommunication. Holding these different frames in view constitutes what I would call playfulness. Playful preparedness posits everyday objects, such as garbage bags as if they were resources for survival in the future, all the while knowing that it is still just a garbage bag.

Watson (2019: 3) states that ‘play’ can be thought of as an adverb, ‘in the sense of how one does a game… one might play a game playfully – or angrily, or reluctantly – just as one might drive a car playfully, or angrily, or reluctantly’. Thus, a game is not inherently play, and work is not inherently ‘not play’ (Malaby, 2007: 97; Watson-Gegeo, 2001). To do something playfully means keeping two or more possible worlds in view. As Nachmanovitch (2009: 12) summarises: ‘The opposite of play is not work or seriousness, because work can be play and play can be serious… The opposite of play is one-dimensionality or literal-mindedness’ (see also Kalshoven, 2012). Scholars of play (asobi) in Japan have made similar arguments that play is always already serious (Cox, 2002).

Playfulness as an adverb points to a particular way of framing the world to produce a certain experience. When I gave one of the first papers on this project at a university in 2019, Hans Steinmüller recommended the work of game designer and media studies professor Bogost (2016). According to Bogost (2016: 79):

In Marshall McLuhan's terms, fun is the process of flipping figure and ground, taking something unseen and forcing it to become visible again or anew and taking something obvious and hiding it away temporarily.

Seeing his young daughter make a game out of rushing through a shopping mall, Bogost realised that play and fun are never about ‘free play’ in the sense of having no limits. Play is about doing what we can with the materials and situations at hand and doing something different than their intended purpose. In the context of preparedness, then, playfulness is about seeing the present through a refracted prism, always aware that other worlds, other lives, other futures, are possible.

Bogost's articulation takes us from play to fun. Although he seems to collapse the two, Plus Arts’ staffers pushed me to think of them separately. If play describes an ‘as if’ approach to the world, fun points to the movement that playful preparedness induces as it takes people temporarily outside of ordinariness to help them see everyday life in slightly different ways.

Taking fun seriously

During a month-long field trip to Japan in February 2023, Nagata-san asked me to give a talk to the Plus Arts staff members about my research. A week before this seminar, I travelled from Kobe to another city with two Plus Arts staffers to observe a municipality's delivery of their version of Iza! Kaeru Caravan. On the drive back, I decided to test out my ideas about play with these staff members. I briefly explained the theories of the ‘as if’, emphasising my interest in how the future appears as if it is in the present. They listened without interrupting me. I laughed nervously when I finished: ‘But maybe “play” (asobi) isn’t the right word to describe your work’.

One of them commented that she didn’t actually think Plus Arts does play.

‘Play for me is about spontaneity (shizen jihatsuteki), like when children are playing, making up their own games’, she explained. ‘But Iza! Kaeru Caravan is already designed and the children play within those given rules’.

The other staff member agreed that most of what Plus Arts does is fun education (tanoshī kyōiku), not necessarily play (asobi).

I gave my seminar the following week and took it as an opportunity to ask more about my analyses of their work. I posed to the staff what they thought about my propositions about play. Did it fit with the interpretations of their own work? The two staffers repeated what they had told me. The others nodded.

‘Play does have a wide range of interpretations and meanings’, someone said.

He thought that saying ‘we are using games’ might fit better in describing Plus Arts’ activities (pitatto hamatteru kamo).

I then decided to shift gears slightly

‘What does “fun” (tanoshī) mean? How do you think it works?’ People groaned and chuckled at the challenge of trying to answer the question.

‘Fun is what someone on the receiving end feels but it can’t be manipulated (sōsa dekinai)’, one staff member suggested.

‘It's what makes people want to take action (yaruki)’, said another.

A third person piped up.

‘If something is fun, you get engrossed (muchū ni naru), and you want to do it over and over again. This means that you end up revising the things you learned, and you learn pro-actively (shutaiteki na manabi)’.

When an activity is fun, it is not forcefully imposed on the participant; it becomes something that people want to do.

‘And, of course, a game in itself doesn’t necessarily make something fun’, added someone else.

These moments prompted me to reconsider my sole focus on play. Revisiting Plus Arts’ website indicated that fun, indeed, is as important as play in their vision. The mission statement says (Plus Arts, N.d.):

Let's do fun things, rather than correct things (tadashī koto yori, tanoshī kotowo). Disaster preparedness drills look boring. It looks like a lot of work.

I know it's important, but maybe we don’t have to do it now…

Even in a country like ours that has experienced several earthquakes, many people have this attitude.

Plus Arts began by looking straight on at this reality.

Maybe things that are fun (tanoshī) will reach people more than things that are correct.

Maybe play (asobi) rather than drills (kunren) will create excitement for everyone.

Although I still find the ‘as if’ dynamics of play useful in thinking about how the future is made present, examining fun as distinct from play can shed light on a slightly different pedagogy at work in playful preparedness.

If playfulness flips figure and ground in an ‘as if’ approach to the world, we might think of fun as describing one possible experience among many within playful contexts. As one of the peer reviewers for this article pointed out, not all play is fun, and play can involve negative as well as positive experiences. But fun need not be associated simply with a positive experience that cannot be analysed. Evi Chatzipanagiotidou commented during a talk I gave on a draft of this paper in 2023 that an anthropologist could look at fun in two different ways: what fun is and what fun does. The first of these inquiries would take us down the works of Huizinga (2016), Goffman (1972), Csikszentmihalyi (2000) and Fine and Corte (2017), for example, to get at the players’ affective and relational experiences that define fun.

But my focus in this article is on what fun does. Taking seriously when our interlocutors talk about fun, and not explaining it away as actually being about resistance or critique (or not only that), can shed light on what people want to accomplish when invoking fun (Shen, 2024). For instance, fun as a euphoric experience with others, a moment that stands out from everyday life for its affective intensity, could summon an ‘attentional pull’ (Durkheim, 1995: 212; Throop and Duranti, 2015; Turner, 1982: 58). And such a pull can be manufactured. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and sociologist Stith Bennett (1971: 45) outline how institutionalised forms of play, that is, games, create specific conditions with boundaries, rules and time frames that enable players to forget themselves and the world (see also Schüll, 2012). This invitation to an experience of abandon and concentration, allowing participants to momentarily block out society, attracts attention (Watanabe, 2021). Institutionalised activities like Iza! Kaeru Caravan, coded as ‘fun’, then, have an effect in the world – they pull people away from everyday life, even if temporarily. According to preparedness educators, this attentional pull can be repeated, enticing people to come to playful preparedness events over and over again.

Fun as detour

Preparedness educators design Iza! Kaeru Caravan as a fun experience. But does learning really happen? Do preparedness educators think that citizens are better prepared after participating in the event? In January 2020, I set off with these questions to two regional and rural towns in Niigata and Okayama prefectures. I was in the country for a couple of weeks, primarily to visit my parents. But I took a few days to conduct interviews with municipalities that had organised their own Iza! Kaeru Caravans the previous summer. News about Covid-19 was only just appearing on TV in Japan, as a puzzling story far away. I first headed to a town in Niigata, 4 hours north of Tokyo.

After the customary exchange of business cards, three city officials and I sat around a table. Each of them placed in front of them a print out of the interview questions I had emailed in advance, some with handwritten notes on the margins. As a conversation starter, I asked them about the kinds of disasters they face in the town and their preparedness plans. The only man in a suit pulled out a thick booklet, the city's disaster preparedness plan. Opening to a page, he explained that six rivers converge in one district, creating a serious risk of flooding. The threat of earthquakes, fires, tsunami and landslides also exists but the main risks come from floods.

The man in the suit explained that the last big flood happened in 1998 when they experienced groundwater flooding, but the rivers did not overflow. The major river running through the town is one of the biggest waterways in Japan, and if this river's banks burst, it would be catastrophic. But residents had not faced a flood of that magnitude, so they did not see preparedness as a priority. Thus, the municipality's disaster preparedness departments prioritised raising citizens’ awareness.

‘What do you think the games in Iza! Kaeru Caravan you organised achieved or could achieve in terms of disaster preparedness?’ I asked.

One of the men in a navy blue sweater replied that he thought of the event as a first step in making people aware of existing preparedness techniques.

‘I want Iza! Kaeru Caravan to be an opportunity or catalyst (kikkake) for people to think about disaster preparedness (bōsai)’.

Another city official echoed his thoughts.

‘When we try to involve people in preparedness activities, many often say they don’t need to do it, even if they don’t really know how to be prepared. With Iza! Kaeru Caravan, we can at least get children to engage with certain skills and knowledge. It creates a kikkake’.

I circled the word ‘kikkake’ in my notebook.

A couple of days later, I visited another rural town in Okayama prefecture to interview city officials. Their words echoed those of the staff in Niigata. The two men I spoke with told me that, even if Iza! Kaeru Caravan is a play-thing (asobi goto), the participating child might remember something when he or she grows up, even if it is a small detail.

‘It's about creating a kikkake to engage with preparedness’, said the man.

I returned to the UK for the start of the second semester with the word ‘kikkake’ circled over and over again in my notebook. I had expected these city officials to tell me something bureaucratic and measurable about the impact they hoped to see with Iza! Kaeru Caravan – an event that takes immense amounts of work to pull off. Their ambiguous answers about kikkake surprised me. They used playful methods to raise awareness about preparedness in their towns but all they expected was a seed to be planted in the lives of the participating children and their families, a seed that would, hopefully but not certainly, become an opportunity for them to think about and implement preparedness measures at home.

I had to put on hold these thoughts about kikkake for a few years as Covid-19 took over our lives. My administrative duties as Undergraduate Director consumed me to the point that I forgot to apply for sabbatical during those years. I also spent many hours in front of the TV. Streaming companies took advantage of our couch-potato existence and promoted discounted deals to which I succumbed without any resistance. My partner, however, hated all our streaming subscriptions. Andy preferred surfing the TV channels, which he appreciated for leading him to documentaries, films and TV shows he would not have come across otherwise. Indeed, we stumbled across unexpectedly interesting programmes.

Media companies today compete for customers’ attention in the form of algorithmically curated distractions (Cook, 2018; Pedersen et al., 2021). We live in a world, not so much full of distractions but one where uncalculated detours are devalued, the kind of distraction that has nothing to do with what one already knows, that changes one's outlook or tastes in unanticipated ways. To paraphrase Andy, we face not so much a crisis of attention but a crisis of distraction. In true patchwork ethnography fashion, I realised that a distraction from work – watching TV and talking with my non-academic partner – could in fact inform my research-related theorisations. Applying Andy's observation to my field material helped me see that the city officials with whom I spoke understood the fun experience of Iza! Kaeru Caravan as offering the kind of unanticipated detour, a kikkake, that beckons people to turn away slightly and temporarily from their attention on daily priorities and their existing tastes, without trying to radically change their ordinary lives. Although these preparedness educators manufacture distraction just as media companies do, these designers of institutional play seek to distract only temporarily and never to reinforce people's algorithmically determined tendencies. Playful preparedness events invite people to spend a couple of hours in a fun activity, learning about preparedness skills and then return to their lives. Hopefully, they will implement some change to be better prepared, but this might be in a very small way or none at all.

James (1890) argued that attention as concentration is essential to making sense of life's chaos. In contrast, the embodied and ambient state of being confused and scatterbrained defines distraction (James, 1890: 404). Benjamin (1935) also contrasts concentration or attention against distraction. For him, concentration characterised how people related to works of art, while what he called the masses’ ‘absorption of art’ as seen in architecture and film could be explained as ‘reception in a state of distraction’ (Benjamin, 1935: 19). Distraction marks the modern condition.

And yet, most scholars tend to devalue distraction. In protest, Taussig (1991) argued against the reading of ideology and meaning in everyday life that interpretive anthropologists like Clifford Geertz promoted because they missed the embodied ways in which people actually navigate their lives. He argued that Benjamin's distraction or what Taussig called a ‘tactile eye’ would be a better way for anthropologists to approximate the everyday. Similarly, in a study of ordinary life, Highmore proposes that distraction should be considered, not as the opposite of attraction, but as ‘a form of vacillation of attention and sometimes fascination and that it can be a productive state for encountering the new in everyday life’ (Highmore, 2011: 119). He argues that distraction is ‘the mobility of attention’. Distraction is another form of attention that can open our eyes to aspects of the world often dismissed as unimportant.

In the case of fun, I prefer the term ‘detouring’ rather than ‘mobility of attention’ because I want to underline the soft touch quality of the idea of kikkake, where the emphasis is on momentarily taking people's attention away from their everyday needs but without force (see also Nozawa, 2015). As James and Taussig intimated, this approach is ‘ambient’, like the Bible Society that Engelke (2012) studied in the UK. This is a form of persuasion and subjectivation that appeals to the senses and relies on materiality, rather than a discursive strategy tapping on reasoning alone (see also Roquet, 2016). The sensory and material affect of fun in playful preparedness draws people to it in a loose and non-preachy way.

In the case of playful preparedness, educators such as Plus Arts and city officials purposefully construct distractions. In many ways, on the one hand, their work evokes the Situationists in mid-twentieth century Europe who sought to create disruptions in everyday urban life in order to reveal the problems of capitalist societies. ⁵ The philosopher Debord (2006 [1958]), a central figure of the Situationist International, proposed what he termed ‘dérive’, in which ‘one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’ (Debord, 2006 [1958]: 62). This meandering or ‘drifting’, as others have called it (Highmore, 2011; Wark, 2015), intended to disrupt the functionalist top-down plans of urban design, while recognising that one could never completely escape it. The Situationists’ call to wander to interact with everyday life differently resonates with the playful preparedness educators’ efforts to create detours through fun.

On the other hand, however, playful preparedness might also evoke another but fundamentally different method of intervention in everyday life: nudge theory. Drawing on behavioural economics, Thaler and Sunstein (2009) argued that nudge techniques aim to transform behaviours through indirect environmental strategies, steering people toward better decisions without curtailing their freedom of choice. Like detouring, nudges seek to bring about change through subtle mechanisms, rather than direct prohibitions and prescriptions. Nudge theory gained tremendous popularity as several governments and institutions took it up as one of their core policy principles (Hockley, 2022).

Despite these affinities, however, the differences in aims between Situationists, nudge theory and playful preparedness matter. Situationists posited dérive as a challenge to hegemonic capitalist urbanism, akin to De Certeau's (1984: 37) ‘tactics’ as an ‘art of the weak’ in the city. Ultimately, the Situationists sought to unmask the spectacle of modernity and ‘make the alienation of modern everyday life evident by intensifying the condition of alienation’ (Highmore, 2002: 237; see also Ferrell, 2012). The goals of playful preparedness educators are not so revolutionary, nor are they anti-capitalist. In contrast, nudge theory is pro-capitalist, and moreover, espouses what Thaler and Sunstein (2009: 9) call ‘libertarian paternalism’. While individuals’ freedom of choice is purportedly protected since they are not prohibited from making any decisions, leaders and professionals as ‘choice architects’ determine nudge techniques and ensure measurable outcomes (Pedwell, 2017). Playful preparedness is neither libertarian nor paternalistic: individual liberty and freedom of choice are not foundational principles and, although guided, educators do not implement interventions to produce measurable outcomes. Thus, although similarities exist in how Situationists, nudge theory and playful preparedness try to redirect people's everyday actions, the differences in aims and logics matter.

Iza! Kaeru Caravan illustrates how detouring enables participants to see daily life slightly differently in the service of disaster preparedness, without instigating an anti-capitalist revolution nor measurable behavioural change. In 2023, I conducted a Zoom interview with two children, a nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl, accompanied by their mother. I wanted to learn more about their recent experiences at an Iza! Kaeru Caravan event and asked them to draw their favourite activities. The boy showed me a sketch of a red rectangular object with a blue line coming out of it, and a stick figure with a triangular body. I asked him to explain the drawing for me.

‘It's a fire extinguisher and puchi puchi’, he said.

‘What's puchi puchi?’ I asked. Puchi puchi is the ideophone and common term in Japanese for bubble wrap. But I didn’t understand what he meant in this context.

‘The puchi puchi poncho making activity’, he mumbled, looking down.

‘Can you tell me more?’

I sat on the floor in the living room of my grandmother's house in Kobe, half-empty since she had gone to a care home. Smiling, I tried to convey gentleness and encouragement through the screen.

The boy was reticent but in hearing my question, he ran to the other side of the room. His sister scrambled after him. They came back wearing the ponchos they had made from bubble wrap, grinning. The style resembled the ‘bōsai zukin’ or padded hoods that children wear in school evacuation drills. Each of their ponchos covered their heads down to their knees and were decorated with colourful stickers of cars and dolphins. I could see the pride in their creation. They lucidly explained to me the significance of this poncho hood.

I asked the mother if they emphasize disaster preparedness at home

‘Not really’, she said. ‘We do keep an emergency backpack somewhere’.

‘What's an emergency backpack?’ the girl asked.

Her mother explained that it contained a lot of things but she could not remember what exactly they were. She then added that she felt unsure about how to store water for disasters but felt alright about her ignorance because at the Iza! Kaeru Caravan event she also learned the importance of using whatever they already have at home. She did not have to go out of her way to be prepared.

‘So it sounds like you also learned things?’ I asked.

‘Sure. Like, wakame seaweed is good’, she said. I assumed she meant dried seaweed is useful as emergency food since it lasts a long time without refrigeration. I asked if she went out to buy wakame after the event.

‘No, no, items like wakame I already have’, she said. ‘Things I already have at home, if we use those things without forcing ourselves (muri no nai han’i de), that's OK. Then [once we use it up], we can go buy more again’.

The fact that what she learned fit with her already-existing lifestyle ‘without forcing themselves’ seemed key to her acceptance of this knowledge. The ponchos brought a little bit of excitement into the household but this already formed part of their everyday lives. Next time they buy a product with bubble wrap, perhaps they will include it in their emergency backpack as a potential resource. The ordinariness of these ‘new’ techniques meant that this family could adopt them without drastically changing their routines.

The interview captured for me the two important elements of detouring in playful preparedness: fun, and through that, a slight re-thinking of one's everyday life. A theory of detouring explains how something fun can become a catalyst for distractions from everyday concerns but in a way that makes people re-engage with their everyday lives in a slightly different way. Each game commands attention but the event overall functions as a gentle and temporary distraction from the rest of people's lives, allowing them to return to their ordinary routines with a slight modification that might allow them, perhaps, to survive.

Fun on the cusp of fear

Fun can only work as a detour if it is attractive enough to warrant attention. Playful preparedness educators demarcate a space as fun through material, aesthetic, and design decisions: the application of colours and child-friendly illustrations and the use of game mechanisms to create excitement. Assembled together in skilful ways, these elements communicate that the space and time one spends within the walls of the event will be safe and distract them from quotidian concerns in an enjoyable way. In the process, they will also learn about disaster preparedness but never to the detriment of the fun experience.

Plus Arts’ games and those of other organisations that use playful preparedness methods range in type. ⁶ Some teach people how to survive in the immediate moments of a disaster while others instruct players how to keep the home safe in advance of a disaster. In the emergency storylines, the ‘as if’ turns terrifying future disaster scenes into fun experiences in the present. ⁷ Creating the right kind of aesthetics and space of fun requires skill. But the ‘as if’ of fun plays out on a precarious balance, never assuring a definitive outcome, constituting an ambiguous and fragile process.

It takes work to carve out an enjoyable experience out of a potentially terrifying one. In the summer of 2019, Plus Arts staff tasked a university student intern with developing an interactive activity for one of their new games called ‘Find the Danger!’ (kiken hakken!). Plus Arts staff had developed it with the Japan Red Cross Society in 2018. ⁸ A board showed disaster scenes of a fictional town, and players had to identify mistakes. For instance, a picture might show the moments in a town before a flood, cartoon characters taking different actions. Players need to identify which characters would be safe and which ones would be in danger. The game targeted pre-school children below the age of five.

Each scenario had two versions: one image before the disaster (‘the problem’) and one after the disaster (‘the answer’). The intern devised several tricks to make the game engaging for children. One day, he decided to test his ideas on a staff member and me. He first placed the answer scene over the problem scene and covered the whole thing with a black piece of cloth.

After the introductory talk about the various disasters in Japan, the intern removed the cloth with a dramatic flourish. He had created cards for ten questions, each one depicting a character from the problem scene. Players had to choose one card to start the game. The intern suggested small tricks such as pushing one card above the others in a cheeky way, as if forcing the player to pick that one, and thereby creating excitement from the first stages of the game. Players then needed to find the character from their chosen card in the problem scene, like in the picture book-game Where's Waldo?. Once located, the intern asked if the character was taking a safe or a dangerous action. Players needed to discuss among themselves (or a child with a parent, if there are no other children in the group) and come to an answer. The intern had created one large card with a circle (safe action) and another one with an X (dangerous action), so that children could put their answer forward in a visual and tactile way. They then needed to explain the reasoning behind their answer.

After doing three of the problem cards, players could move to the answers. The intern took out large cards depicting characters either with a circle (safe action) or an X over them (dangerous action). He revealed the answer cards in a suspenseful way, not showing them right away. He then used the answer cards to explain the rationale for each action. Finally, he removed the problem scene to reveal the answer scene. The final step involved discussing the situation of the characters, seeing what happened to them when the disaster struck. The last card summarised the take-away points about staying safe in a particular type of hazard.

The staff member asked the intern if she could take a look at the tsunami scenario. The intern explained that the tsunami images are quite shocking (shōgekiteki) compared to the other disasters. Most of the problem behaviours depicted people who did not immediately run to high ground such as those standing in shock or a teacher crouching down to comfort a crying child. Waves were only a few metres away. These situations were frozen in time, showing parents, teachers and children taking the wrong actions before a massive tsunami wave would devour them. In a real situation, these people would be dead in a matter of seconds.

Those involved in playful preparedness develop strategies to keep the fear at bay. The skilful manoeuvres create the ‘attentional pull’ of fun that turns playful preparedness activities into detours from everyday life. Thus, detouring here requires an intentional and institutional form of play; spontaneous ‘free’ play could not guarantee the sequestering of the horrific aspect of the scenarios. ⁹ But the line between fear and fun is a fine one since not much imagination is required to see that, in the game above, many of the characters would be dead or injured seconds after the answer scene. Just as preparedness education does not guarantee survival, the detours do not promise a definite re-reading of disasters. The effectiveness of playful preparedness is always uncertain.

A distracted making of prepared citizens

Plus Arts and other preparedness educators aim to produce citizens who are prepared for future disasters. Making prepared citizens often appears as an instrument of government and is subject to disciplinary techniques (e.g., Deville et al., 2014; Lauer, 2023). Community-based preparedness like that of Plus Arts might appear as a form of neoliberal responsibilisation in which individuals and communities shoulder the onus of preparedness in the name of ‘resilience’ or ‘empowerment’ (Benadusi, 2014). Accordingly, observers might see the use of playfulness and cute aesthetics, especially in the context of Japan, as ensuring ‘compliance to the social order’ (Ochi, 2012: 126) or a ‘friendly authoritarianism’ (Davidson, 2013). That kind of interpretation would gloss fun as simply a façade for governance. My contention has been that evaluating playful preparedness only through the framework of governance occludes other ways that people are being mobilised for disaster preparedness. Taking seriously the logic our interlocutors use can reveal other emic ways that people understand and practice the work of making prepared citizens (Schimkowsky, 2022). This logic in playful preparedness is the logic of fragility – an organising principle that simultaneously accepts the endpoint as well as the possibilities of life's contingencies.

The fact that we might die or lose what we value the most at any moment can cause anxiety. It is unsurprising that most people around the world would rather not think about preparedness or disasters. Preparedness educators understand that work is required to help people accept the worst to come but still see the possibility for collective survival. Fun as ‘simply’ a distraction, while being engrossing, performs this work well. Preparedness educators are not so concerned with measuring participants’ response or changes in behaviour. What they hope is that at least a few people will decide to buy extra tins of food every month – that people will realise how preparedness does not require a radical transformation of one's life.

An attention to fun has enabled me to develop a theory of detouring, which explains how educators use distractions to help people become prepared citizens in the face of increasingly disaster-prone futures. If play is ‘an attitude characterized by a readiness to improvise in the face of an ever-changing world’ (Malaby, 2009: 206), fun is the mechanism by which people carve out spaces outside of the established path in order to make these improvisations possible. As Japanese disaster scholar-activists argue, people might be more willing to engage with disaster preparedness if it is approached sideways as a form of ‘disaster preparedness that does not call itself disaster preparedness’ (bōsai to iwanai bōsai) (Sayre, 2011; Yamori, 2011). This work depends on taking people temporarily away from daily life so that, perhaps, they will see the world differently and find alternative ways to make the future.

A myriad of risks and uncertainties characterise the world, not only from disasters arising out of natural hazards but also from pollution, violence, illness and other threats. While structural changes are necessary to tackle many of these challenges, experts and decision-makers are also striving to save, manage and educate people to stem or survive these problems. Oftentimes, direct interventions to engage the public in issues such as climate change do not yield the desired results (Demski, 2021). Practitioners and policy makers know this. A theory of detouring captures how some subject-making efforts are happening through modalities of fun that distract people away from everyday concerns. Neither revolutionary like Situationists nor libertarian paternalistic as in nudge theory, fun as detouring encourages people to reframe everyday life through a temporary and light-touch suspension of ‘the real world’ so that possibilities become visible. This is not an optimistic proposition. Detouring does not promise a better future. Nevertheless, the preparedness educators I have met invite others – including anthropologists – to embrace the fact that detours, distractions and interruptions in life might be valuable for imagining and being ready for the world to come.