Unspoken narrative restoration using tsunami-damaged photographs following the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami

This study investigated how unspoken narratives contribute to disaster survivors’ mental recovery. It was based on disaster survivors’ responses to the return of their tsunami-damaged photographs; i.e., we examined situations in which they did not or could not speak about a photograph’s content. Although previous studies have addressed disaster survivors’ narratives, few have attempted to analyze “unspoken narratives”. We consider that there are two kinds of experience, ‘type-A experiences’, which are describable (can be explained or narrated), and ‘type-B experiences’, which are indescribable. This study attempted to address three questions: How can outsiders share type-B experiences? How does the dynamism of type-B experiences change over time? How do type-B experiences relate to recovery from the losses caused by a tsunami? Our discovery of and subsequent study of such unspoken survivor narratives was based on over three years of fieldwork in Noda village, Iwate Prefecture, which experienced fatalities and severe damage in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Our fieldwork included the recovery, restoration, and return of survivors’ photographs, as a means of aiding the post-disaster recovery of individuals and the community. In ethnographies based on our fieldwork, we described ways in which survivors can use tsunami-damaged photographs to share indescribable memories with outsiders. In addition, we analyzed how such memories can change over time. It was proposed that the unspoken narratives consisted of indescribable memories of the survivors’ everyday lives, which could be shared with the other participants of group gatherings through the damaged photographs. We concluded that revealing unspoken narratives could facilitate the construction of new communities as part of the recovery process after disasters.