https://tohokukaranokoe.org/

Amidst the Corona-virus and Olympics, many still remember this sad day, the 9th anniversary of the triple disasters in Tohoku, March 11th. We'd like to bring your attention to new and revised content on "Voices from Tohoku." This is the largest video archive of the 2011 disaster (at least that we know of), and one of the largest archive done mostly by undergraduate students anywhere on any topic, we are told. The full archive has more than 500 hours of footage from more than 7 different communities in Tohoku area, northern Japan, collected over the course of five years by Sophia University students and affiliates.

The website https://tohokukaranokoe.org/ is a curated collection from the archive of hundreds of shorter clips--between 1-4 minutes--with Japanese transcription. The clips are thematically and geographically tagged for easy searching, making them useful resource for courses, presentations and research. Many groups around the world are using the archive and we are always happy to provide assistance to others who are interested. (For researchers interested in the full archive of unedited interviews, please contact me directly: dhslater@gmail.com.)

We have similar video archives on political activists--youths and moms--and of homeless men in Tokyo. We are currently working on foreign refugees with more than 200 hours of interviews. We plan to open similar web portals on these archives in the near future.

Thank you very much.
David H. Slater, Sophia University, Tokyo

About the Full Archive and Public Website

"Voices of Tohoku" is a Japanese-language website that features a collection of clips taken from our full archive, each with Japanese transcriptions and thematic tags. These clips were first provided to our primary audience--the Tohoku residents themselves--as some record of how people felt during the unfolding of events within community life in post 3.11 Tohoku. The stories are not always happy but we hope present some of the diverse and most mixed feelings during the period. One informant suggested that we make them available to the public. "After all," she said, "we only told you these stories so you would tell the world what really happened." This is our attempt to realize this intent.. (Each informant--or 'narrator'--selected their own clips to show and arrange. And of course, we have full release forms for all material.) The website is not fancy but it is functional, a work in progress.

During the data collection, we returned to each site for regular repeated visits for at least a year, always doing volunteer work to better understand the specifics of the community. Rather than focusing on the often horrific or heroic tales on "the day of," we tried to give the local residents a more expansive chance to talk about their lives, telling their own story, in their own words. Wanting minimal interruption, we often asked only three questions during our interviews: what was your community like before 3.11; how has it been from the disaster until today; what is your vision of the future?

We are not collecting any more Tohoku narratives, not because the situation is in any sense "over"--it is not--but because we do not have any more money to send students into Tohoku. We are currently translating the interviews into English and looking for better ways to make the full archive open to other scholars in a responsible and effective way.

We gratefully acknowledge support from Sophia University, the Toyota Foundation and a JSPS grant from the Japanese government. Also, we thank the many graduate students, post-grad scholars, colleagues, NPO leaders and of course, our many interviewees and collaborators in Tohoku, who have helped us make the archive what it is so far.

We are always open to working with other scholars to improve access--please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.

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