[Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of a live conversation recorded on January 11, 2025 and moderated by Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus co-editor Tristan Grunow. This transcript has been edited for clarity.]
Listen to the audio recording of this conversation here:
TG: First, I’d like to thank Drs. Gordon, Shibayama, Morimoto, Gerster, Boret, and Sato for taking the time to sit down for this conversation. The first question I want to ask has to do with the sustainability of the Japan Disasters Archive and where things can go from here, especially as other disasters occur. Is the JDA something that can be replicated? And on what topic, if not only disasters?
Shibayama: 国立国会図書館の「ひなぎく」については、東日本大震災を基本メインとしてアーカイブをしていました。その後、「ひなぎく」は様々な災害も扱うようになっています。これは東日本大震災の教訓をしっかり伝えていくということ、他の災害とどう違うのかということで、2016年熊本地震などの災害アーカイブと「ひなぎく」で連携をしている。今後、2024年能登半島地震なども同じように連携をすると思われます。「ひなぎく」は、東日本大震災のアーカイブという大きな役割があり、東日本大震災に関連する災害も扱っています。ただし、風水害に関しては、扱っておらず、基本は地震関連の災害のみとなっています。
Regarding the National Diet Library’s Hinagiku, it is mainly an archive of the Great East Japan Earthquake. After that, it started to cover various disasters as a way to convey the lessons of the Great East Japan Earthquake and how it differs from other disasters such as the Kumamoto earthquake in 2016. From now, we will continue to work with the Noto Peninsula earthquake. While Hinagiku is largely said to cover the Great East Japan Earthquake, it actually covers many natural hazard disasters. However, it doesn’t have much on storm or flood damages, instead it mainly focuses on earthquake damage.
Boret: Returning to the question about whether or not it is possible to have a similar dynamic of a digital archive being built after any event. I’ll bounce back on what Andy said [in the APJJF article]. What we felt when we were overseas, away from Japan, is a sense of urgency. And I think this is characteristic of natural hazard disasters as compared to other forms of events, in which we cannot anticipate how long they will last. If you think about the COVID pandemic, if you think about the war in Ukraine, these are slower events or slower disasters.
But when it comes to a tsunami – and Andy mentioned the amount of data coming in every single day, every single minute, in a country in Japan as well, which is so digitalized already – then, yes, there is a sense as an academic who is used to collecting data, to think that I need to keep those [data], and I need to keep those and very fast. We also didn’t have access to fieldwork. So that would be the one aspect of what distinguishes 3.11 from other [types of events].
And I’ve seen it happening in other events like the 2004 tsunami, where [projects] really struggled because they didn’t [start collecting data] from the very beginning. There was no one who thought “we need to archive everything that’s going to happen.” Of course, they didn’t have the same circumstances. You cannot compare [events] in terms of logistics and things. But there is the World Memory Archive of the 2004 Indian tsunami. I was involved in that [project] and I think there’s quite a lot of holes and missing parts in it.
TG: The JDA is described as a participatory archive that breaks down the distinction between archive creators and curators on the one hand and archive users on the other. So can you say more about the benefits of a participatory archive where users also play a curatorial role along with how to ensure the relevance and significance of its contents?
Morimoto: Yeah, this is a very important question. A core of the JDA is that it is a participatory archive, and I went back and forth in terms of how I think about the participatory dimension – what it means not only to archiving, but other things as well. More and more, I’m thinking about how JDA’s participatory feature actually replicates what was happening in the world with the technological revolution, because social media was growing at that time; the power balance of traditional media to the individuals was shifting at the moment; we got a lot of [content] from Twitter coming out, as opposed to the traditional media going on the ground and reporting.
In a way, even without having the participatory feature, people were already participating. It’s just that they didn’t have a platform where they could upload what they have into some collective depository. I think in that sense, when we were thinking about the design of the archive to enable or take advantage of people already participating, the way we designed the archive became participatory. It was not something that we created to make people participate in the crowdsourcing sense, but we were thinking, “okay, how are we going to capture what’s happening in the world in the way that our content is basically reflecting what’s happening in the world?” But just like the social media, there is a lot of junk and misinformation and conspiracy theories, so quality control is particularly important.
Oftentimes people talk about information literacy and digital literacy, [and] you have to be able to evaluate [and] judge the information you’re getting to be able to really not be impacted by false information. Now AI is coming, and I think that’s changing the ways that information is being passed around – not just Gaza, Ukraine, NATO.
But, with JDA, we realized that there has to be a staff person who monitors what comes in. Sometimes we had to delete material because it was not relevant or sometimes perhaps it was harmful. So we did have an individual and are still working to make certain that the kind of information coming to our archive is connected to what we’re interested [in]. But I think in the world of the internet nowadays, all the business goes to content moderators who actually do that kind of work, right? So I think it’s just the nature of the fact htat when we give powers to the individual, we have to think about how that is then translated to the collective. I think the participatory dimension has a lot of potential, but at the same time, there are a lot of issues in terms of quality controls.
Sato: I’ve been using JDA as a user for one year, but it’s not easy to ensure the relevance and significance of the content. Things that we can think are not relevant may become more relevant in the future. And things that we think not important may become more important in the future. I think that a wide variety of data and collections should be allowed.
And the advantage of JDA is that it gathers a wide variety of data that may not seem relevant or significant. There is a possibility of being able to search for people’s voices and activities that are not preserved in official documents.
Gordon: One aspect of the construction of the archive and what goes into it that is important is the question of what materials, what categories of materials are archived. Photographs, of course, are included. Documents are included. Social media, for instance, tweets are included. Newspaper articles, media reports are included.
The one aspect of this project – that is the Japan Disaster Archive Project, and of the National Diet Library Project – that’s unique, is the archiving of websites. And this does require curation. We’ve been very fortunate to have on the staff of our archive project a woman, Koko Howell, who has for over a decade had the job of looking at the internet in real time, making judgments about what are the topics that are interesting – and people give her suggestions as well – and then working together with the organization called Internet Archive – sending to them the URL with some metadata that we create, and then the Internet Archive stores it because they have an extraordinary capacity for preserving websites, and then feed those [URLs] back to us. So it’s a cooperative relationship with the Internet Archive.
And we work in tandem with the National Diet Library, which also archives websites, but does this with a set of legal restrictions and also legal obligations to archive official websites. They’re not allowed to archive a website that’s a blog of an individual. So we do that kind of work. They archive official pages and then we exchange so we can let our users draw on those and they can let their users draw on ours because we are the ones who are in a different legal environment in the United States [and] able to do that. And so that’s an aspect of international cooperation that’s hidden but interesting.
And there’s another aspect of that which is whether you ask permission to make a copy of somebody’s website or whether you just do it. So, there’s an “ask permission” model and an “ask forgiveness” model. Internet Archive itself operates on the “ask forgiveness” model. They archive whatever they think needs to be archived or whatever one of their partner organizations wants them to archive. And then if somebody objects and says, “why on earth did you without permission put my website in your archive?” They say, “I’m sorry,” and they delete it. They’ve had some lawsuits too, but they bear that risk, not us. And so that enables us to collect widely. And I think it’s really valuable to capture the internet in real time and then freeze it – take it, in a sense, offline. It’s not offline, but it’s no longer a live website, because those disappear.
TG: At the same time, one potential issue of archiving everything is that it means you might also unintentionally archive deliberate misinformation or even disinformation. Dr. Morimoto brought up quality control before. So how is quality control of what goes into the archive enforced? Or is there value in making a record even of things that are incorrect, deliberately or otherwise?
Gordon: The question of a participatory archive and what you actually save that’s contributed from outside is really tricky. It (this issue) exists in multiple aspects. We have about 800,000 tweets. I’m sure nobody has done a systematic analysis or scrubbing of them, but I’m sure that there’s misinformation in there. But our feeling at the time – and it’s still my feeling – is it’s important to have the misinformation there so that people can analyze the flows of commentary, reaction, overreaction, conspiracy theories, and so forth in order to better understand how the media environment or media ecology works in the case of this particular disaster or others.
On the other hand, when people contribute items to the archive through building a collection, that’s where we do, as Ryo said, curate. But in that case, it’s more a question of relevance, because somebody can build a collection that’s comparative and so they’re going to bring in all kinds of information to their collection that doesn’t relate to Japan or the (3.11) disaster. But they want a reader of their own collection to think comparatively. We don’t necessarily archive that. It first is put into somebody’s collection, and then our staff looks and only actually adds materials to the archive things that are relevant. So I think we filter for relevance, but we’re not really filtering for truth.
At the workshop outreach event we had with Japanese teachers in 2020 February, some of the teachers wanted to use the archive to promote media literacy, which meant incorporating the factual problems as they saw it and then having the students see those and discuss them.
Gerster: At the moment, I’m doing a similar thing with my students in class. What I find very interesting with the JDA is that you have to work very closely with the source material, especially if you’re curating your own collection or if you’re planning on presenting that collection. With PowerPoint, of course, you can twist some information or maybe people would give a source that might not necessarily reflect what they want to say.
But if students are working with the archive, I think one big merit is that if people from the outside look at the collection or watch the presentation, they immediately have access to the source information and can check. So that also forces students to work closely with the data. For me, it’s a good tool to teach the students to look at “where’s this data coming from?” “How does it relate to the news that we are seeing today?” for example. Or maybe “are there other sources?” The JDA also has a note or comment function. So that’s usually the place where I ask them to reflect on that.
Of course, it’s challenging, because depending on the grade of the students or also their age and where they’re coming from, the way they treat the data can be very different. But also during the course itself is a great time to discuss these issues, too.
TG: Staying on the topic of how we can use the JDA in the classroom, can you talk about how the participatory nature of the archive impacts how students engage with the archive and its materials? Do you find that students are more motivated by the act of participation in creating the archive, perhaps?
Boret: I taught the first part of the few years [of the class, where] we’ve been using the archive and Julia has been taking over [since then]. At the beginning, it was really a DIY system. The archive was [still] putting itself together, facing challenges and putting forward its merits. So the students were using its merit in terms of searching for themes they never thought about. I had students drawing parallels between Fukushima and movies – horror movies, including Godzilla. So, yeah, some of the students were actually, comparing Fukushima and Godzilla. And the same student was [for example] an engineer working on rocket science, literally speaking. It’s really something that the archive could bring.
And it brought a framework, if you like. It brought a framework in which the student could explore various things, which often – when they go on a platform like, not to name it, but Google, or other search engines – they have almost too much freedom. So at least the archives give a framework.
Secondly, definitely students had to contribute at the time because as much as they were using the framework of the digital archive, sometimes they were coming out short when it came to the number of items they would find for particular topics. And that’s when they would keenly screenshot web pages, even sometimes even scan some documents and share them on the archive. Of course, that was – as we talked about earlier – that [material] was then later monitored by the (JDA) staff.
In terms of topics: so this was this kind of DIY culture that we had at the beginning, using PowerPoint – before the JDA had its kind of own presentation option – and then it would be shared, and so forth. But the collections were still there. The collection aspect still remained in JDA and the students were proud. And I think that’s what you cannot find anywhere else, and that’s – I’m sorry, I’m sliding towards more the education part – but it’s where the students not only feel they are doing their homework – they are in a class, they are doing their homework, they are presenting – but they know they have a trace somewhere of their work.
I’m not sure if they will go back to [it], if not motivated by other classes or so forth. But at least they do have a trace, and we use this trace ourselves then to compare. Until a certain point, yes, students were very much identifying with the [3.11] disaster, wherever they came from, whether they came from China, Japan, Europe, they all identified with the earthquake. And slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, as the disaster grew further away – because they were too young, some of them were born on the day of the disaster – then we see a different pattern.
Gerster: Thank you for mentioning this, because I think – just as Seb mentioned – a big difference between the time when he was teaching the course and now that I’m teaching the course is of course the time that passed since the 3.11 disasters: now it’s been 14 years almost. In the beginning, the symposium that we hold each year together with Harvard University was called “Perspectives from Japan,” because, in the beginning of the course, the students could somehow identify with the disaster, just as you mentioned. But now it’s not only that most of the participants on the Japanese side are actually also from other countries, [but also that] we have students from Korea, China – and last year somebody from Malaysia took part. For them, it’s an event that happened in the past in a different country. And now they’re coming to this country, and many don’t even realize that the city they’re living in, Sendai, was also severely affected by the disaster because you can’t see it in everyday life as much anymore. But, at the same time, we can also see a difference with the Japanese students because – just as you mentioned – 14 years for younger people is a much longer time span than for us, for instance. So I think when Seb was teaching, there was still this identification with the topic itself, so they could jump into other aspects that they were interested in.
When I’m teaching the course, I have to start with the basics, like “what happened?” “where can you still see the influence of the disaster and the recovery in your everyday life?” For me, one important change was to actually take the students to areas where you can still feel that and talk to the people who are still recovering and dealing with the impact. And I think that’s where the participatory feature of the archive plays a very important role because, of course, when the students use the archive for the first time, they start with the questions that they have that for the students nowadays is “what happened?” “what happened on the day?” So they naturally search for information that was released in 2011, then, maybe, material that reflects what’s discussed on the news nowadays: decontamination procedures in Fukushima, for example, or the release of the water from the power plants and things like that.
But taking [students] to the disaster-affected areas – for example, last year we went to different towns in Fukushima; I asked them to take notes, to take pictures, and to contribute them to the archive as well, because then they can use that in their collections, too – that not only updates the archive, but also forces them to reflect on what kind of data they were choosing and how they approach different topics, what’s represented in the media nowadays, what’s missing.
TG: One thing that really struck me in the article you all wrote for APJJF was not only how the topics students have been interested in have changed over the years as we get further from the disaster itself, but also how students in different areas seem to gravitate towards different topics. For example, you write that students in Japan seem to focus on local issues and experiences and disaster preparedness, for example, while those in the US tended to view the disaster through social issues like gender equality and social justice. This brought to mind the question of how can we as scholars and educators continue to make use of the archive such as this and make the content meaningful for our students the further and further we get from 2011? Does the meaning of the materials change or maybe the uses of the archive change over time?
Morimoto: My sense is that the longer time goes from the original event, the more important an archive like this becomes. We talked about the initial sense of urgency, which is very important [because] we need the sense of urgency to actually collect as many things as we can, not having the judgment as to what is important or what should become important, because we have no idea [about], in 10 or 15 years, what becomes important. But I think the challenge is how to sustain this effort in the longer term so that whatever you create can be used in fact as an archive of the historical event. And I think JDA, along with other projects we’ve collaborated with, all sort of struggle with that sustainability question. JDA has been lucky enough to be able to go so strong for almost 14 years, but with some other archive projects that wasn’t the case.
And then what are we going to do about those initial efforts? Who’s going to take responsibility for those materials? Those projects are equally important, but for one reason or another [they] cannot sustain the effort due to for the (limit of) resources and other issues.
Time definitely helps the value of an archive, [because] without [an archive] we don’t have access to that particular moment in time. But in order to invest into the future value of an archive, I think there are a lot of challenges. And this is something – you know, I’m an anthropologist and I work in contemporary things – I didn’t really think about. I took it for granted that this is an important thing that happens.
But my sense of the importance of the value of the [content] is not necessarily reflective of what the public thinks of as important, because they have the sense of “well. if I just type it in a search engine I can get the information I want.” But with digital materials the half-life is actually a lot shorter than the physical material. And then we just assume that the information will be available all the time, ready-made for us. But that’s in fact not the case. So, digital archiving has very interesting challenges – different from physical archives – even though the correlation between the time and the value would be probably the same with the physical [archives].
TG: Now, going back to the issue of continuity and sustainability, in recent years two of your project partners have actually terminated their digital archives. So can you explain what steps you’re taking to ensure that you don’t lose data or functionality, as well as share your thoughts on the sustainability of digital archiving as academic institutions are replaced by government ones, such as the National Diet Library?
Gordon: It’s a complicated question, and there are many aspects to the question of sustainability. One thing I’ve noticed in the last 14 years – stepping far back – is that the term “archive,” when it becomes [the Japanese word] “a-kaibu” and is connected to digital, doesn’t carry the same weight for most people and organizations in Japan that more traditional understanding of an archive does. It is very rare for a brick and mortar archive to shut down and throw away its stuff, or shut down and close its doors and put its stuff in storage – I suppose it happens once in a while when an art museum sells off its holdings because it’s going bankrupt, [but] it turns into a huge controversy.
But digital archivists are not necessarily committed to archiving in the same way, and especially when they’re not organizations that have that understanding of what it means to archive something. So there is that sort of basic challenge that is built in to the project of digital archiving – I don’t think only in Japan – but we’re seeing it in this case. And so, as you say, there have been projects that have shut down.
But in that case, the connection with the National Library and also with Tohoku University especially is crucial. I really don’t see problematic aspects to this being a government organization. The partnership with the National Diet Library that we’ve had goes back to the very beginning, and their role has become the holder of last resort of things that closed down. They are committed in principle to allowing our archive to reconnect to a project that they take over because it shuts down. That happened in the case of the Japan Red Cross Archive. It happened in the case of the Yahoo Photo Collection, [and] the Urayasu City Collection. I think those are the three. Then it just becomes a question of the time and money that the JDA has to restore the connection. And we may or may not restore all those connections, but the material will exist. So I think that role that the National Library plays is crucial, and it’s not new. It’s been ongoing since the beginning. But there is no good solution to sustaining the connections. The strength of a networked archive relates to sustainability, cutting in two directions.
It also relates to the question of curating controversial information. Because each partner takes the role of building its archive, the partners are making the decision about what belongs in an archive and then we connect with them and we allow our users to have access to it. So, in that sense, it’s not only our decision about what belongs in an archive, it is the decision of the partners as to what belongs in the archive. I think that’s a strength in a way because it means there are multiple curators with their varied perspectives on what belongs. The cliche is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and a network has this fragility. There’s really no way to fully compensate for or overcome that weakness. I think over time there’s likely to be more attrition and it will be up to users to not only look at the Japan Disaster Archive but to look at the collection that the NDL holds. They can still draw in the information and bring it into a collection, [but] it will just be less of a one-stop shop, I think.
TG: So often we think of archives as passive repositories of information, documents and materials, etc., rather than something that requires agency and action in selecting what gets preserved and what does not. Can you speak to the question of in what ways is the creation of an archive a political act? And what are the opportunities for potential social transformation through this archive?
Boret: I don’t have such an overview as maybe Shibayama-sensei and others would have, but just one thing I can contribute to [this conversation] is: I started to work on the issue of disability and met some of the locals who are trying to put up an archive or actually some records of the experience of people and families with children with disabilities. And that started only a couple of years ago.
And they find it difficult because sometimes just raising your hand and saying “my experience matters!” is already kind of like trying to put yourself above others, which in Japan is already a problematic issue. So listening to these [archival interviews] – and we’re talking about a dozen at the moment, so very few interviews – you can sense how people are managing to make a point, but without emphasizing their own struggles. So they are actually pointing out the fact that, for example, they remember they couldn’t have any bread for their children, and they were struggling to get some food – which I thought at the time “hey, this is just like everybody else.”
But that’s the point. They don’t want to point out that they are singular issues, but they were saying, “we are part of the problem.” And I think having the archives and the voices recorded somewhere, that is an ongoing process. And that’s also part of the issue of sustainability. If we cannot sustain these institutions – because archives are institutions – then a lot of voices will not be recorded and therefore not part of our history. And so in this sense, there might be a link with activism.
Gerster: I’m also working quite a lot on gender and disaster memory at the moment. I wasn’t quite aware of this before stumbling into this topic, but disaster memory is very male-dominated. I think that’s true for archives, and also for other institutions of memory, for example, museums. And part of that lack of representation of women, part of the reason for that is, of course, a lack of awareness in the decision-making boards that are also very male-dominated.
But another issue is just what you mentioned right now: there are some curators who are aware of the lack of representation of women in these museums, for example, but when they ask women, for example, to contribute their testimony or share their experiences, many would say, “but my experience doesn’t matter, please ask my husband.” Of course, one of the issues is a very conservative understanding of social roles in this area. But another issue is also that people whose experiences are thought to be important are often chosen by their role in society. So the testimonies that we see in museums or that we might find in history books tend to be people who are thought of as being representative of their community: often older men. So I think in that sense, a participatory archive like the JDA can encourage all kinds of people, and women included, to share their experiences. And if they don’t feel comfortable – for example, as you just said, in Japan it’s often seen as bragging, if you say “my experience matters, too!” So if people are concerned about this, they can do it in an anonymous way. So, I think there are many chances given to all kinds of people to create a more inclusive form of disaster memory [through the participatory function of this archive].
Sato: 僕もこいうことをちょっとたまに思うんですけど、このアーカイブは、ただ検索するだけじゃなくて、自分で情報を加えたり、それからコレクションを作るのは、自分で物語を作るみたいなことで、いろんなネット上のゴミのような絵だ（映画？）から、3.11の復興と3.11とは何かという、小さな歴史を書くような作業になっているんじゃないかと思うんです。すごく歴史を考えることが開かれるようになったものだと。で、これにはやっぱりすごく意味があるような気がしていて、例えばこの3.11の復興の在り方とか、福島の復興の、福島のこととか、今言われているようなことで本当にいいんだろうかともっとみんなのいろんな声があってあいうふうに防潮堤を作られてほしかったところも多かっただろうし。
福島はやっぱり地域が完全に生活も地域もなくなってしまったし。そういうことについてもっと声があるはずでそういうものをこのアーカイブは描いていける可能性があるものじゃないかという気がしていて今の近代的な復興とか災害対策ではないもっとあるべき災害対応の形とかあるいは社会の姿とかそういうものを考えていくツールになっているんじゃないかなというような気がしてやっぱりこういうものを使っていくと何か潜在的な社会変革の機会みたいなものにつながっていくのかなというふうに作業して思いました。
I sometimes think about this: because this archive is not just about searching, but you can add information and make your own collections, it’s like making your own story. There’s a lot of garbage on the internet about the recovery after 3.11, and what 3.11 means, but I think this way you can write your own history of 3.11. In this regard, it raises a lot of questions about what history really is, and this makes it even more meaningful. For example, we can ask questions about the recovery after 3.11, and whether what is being said now is really okay, and there are many places where I think people would have liked to have had more people’s voices heard and more seawalls constructed. In Fukushima, the community has completely lost its livelihood and community.social connections. I believe that this archive has the potential to depict such voices, and that it can be used as a tool to think about a more ideal form of disaster response or society, rather than the current modern reconstruction or disaster countermeasures.
Morimoto: I wouldn’t say I have a problem with the question, but I find the question interesting because there is an assumption, or at least the attribution, of agency to the archive. But with our comments about the participatory archive, basically the way we think about the archive is as more of a depository in which the different archivists are contributing. So by nature it’s based on their own selection. And I think the network structure [of] the archive safeguards against it being political because we are enabling all the different biased curations to exist [at the same time], but be in conversation with others that come with a particular ideological background. So the way I want to think about JDA is that “yes, there’s an activist potential because we give more powers to the people who basically archive material, not because the archive is political or has an activist potential.”
Gordon: I have a thought about this question of the bias of an archive, for example, as Julia mentioned, in terms of whose voices get included and women’s voices not getting included. There’s about 1,100 testimonials contributed to the archive, and that’s a crowdsourced [collection]. Anybody in the world can write up an essay, and I don’t think we filter them at all, and you can contribute it directly to our archive. It’s not done through a partner. But I have not systematically analyzed them. There’s over 1,100, and we don’t ask people to indicate their gender identity in a contribution, so far, as I recall. I don’t think so. But still, it would be an interesting exercise to do a rough analysis of those crowdsourced voices. So that’s one thought I have.
But on this question of the politics of the archive, my first reaction to this question was similar to Ryo’s: “Wait a minute, we’re just creating an archive that’s got a bunch of stuff, and the politics are what the users make of it.” And I think at the explicit level, this archive is not a political act in the sense that we are not only putting forward information that would lead to a certain conclusion or that would limit you to a certain set of topics.
But there is a deeper politics, I think, or an implicit politics, for this kind of a project, especially with the participatory aspect, which is: it implies a trust in the wisdom of crowds. It implies a certain trust in democratic means of discourse. It’s sort of like creating a public sphere or square, a hiroba. With the participatory aspect, it’s a little bit different from a brick-and-mortar archive.
And that has certain risks. Somebody can walk into a public hiroba that exists in an actual place and commit a horrendous act. That happens sometimes. Somebody could jump into our virtual public sphere and try to hack or try to disrupt. We fortunately haven’t had any significant problems like that so far, but I think that [forum creation] is the core sort of politics of this archive, at least as I have come to see it.
This also connects to the question of what types of events are amenable to this sort of digital archiving, and I think it was Sebastian who earlier mentioned wars, for example, which extend for a long time. And so the flow of information is ongoing and the idea of archiving it becomes even harder. But there’s also, I think, the fraughtness of an event like that, in that the contrasting positions, the contesting positions, are at the level of people killing each other, [which] makes it very, very hard to do a digital archive that isn’t, for instance, from the perspective of Ukraine, [or] from the perspective of Russia in that war. The idea of doing a more all-encompassing digital archive is really hard – and I’ve had conversations with my colleagues at Harvard who are in the field of Russian studies or Ukrainian studies – and it’s just not going to be possible to do something all-encompassing, at least now.
There’s a politics of the Higashinihon Daishinsai [Great East Japan Disaster] and especially a politics of Fukushima. There’s also a politics of seawalls, “where do you build them?” There’s a politics of what you tear down and what you preserve in terms of ruins. The famous case, most famous, is probably Minami Sanriku. But those politics, however tense they might be, are contained within a certain space of relative civility, I think, that is different from a war. So it’s possible to create an archive. That in a sense is something particular to a disaster where everybody can agree that – although none of us here believe these are natural disasters purely or even mainly [natural], so there’s a social and political aspect to them all – but still we can agree that it’s a tragic event, a disaster, and everybody is trying from various perspectives to cope with it. And there’s a certain common ground point of departure, I think, that makes it a little easier than other types of world events.
TG: I was really intrigued by what Sato-sensei just said about how using the archive and its search tool allows scholars to write their own history of the event. But this got me thinking about to what extent those histories we and our students in the classroom are writing are ultimately being shaped by the search results we receive. In other words, are the stories we are telling being dictated and limited by the search algorithm and the available materials?
Gerster: Working with the students, it is challenging because part of the [Tohoku-Harvard student] program is that, at the end. they’re supposed to give a presentation [so there should be some variation for the audience]. Every year, we get a different group of students. I’m teaching the course all the time [so I know when specific topics come up repeatedly], but for them, it’s maybe the first time to think about that problem. So naturally, they might have similar questions what other students before them had as well. So, I think it’s important to give them the chance to think that through. But at the same time, I think it’s also important to let them understand that the archive shouldn’t dictate their research questions, but it can inform them. It should inform them.
So, part of the challenge relates to what we discussed before about media literacy. We have them check, “when was this article published?” Please check what happened between then and now. “Can you find something more recent?” If the student was in Japan at the time, maybe “can you talk to other people?” “How did they experience that?” Or if we have the chance to take them to the field, maybe they can ask questions that came up in reading material, or issues that other students addressed before, or challenge them to question if the issue at hand is something that comes up because the algorithm works that way. So I think the issues that we were discussing before about media literacy, those are exactly the points to keep in mind when working with [the JDA].
Gordon: I think this is a very important point in your question about guiding students to use the archive in ways that don’t fall into the trap of being captured by the archive and what it happens to have, or a recency bias. Since we’ve been collecting – especially websites – much more actively in the first four, five, or six years than recently, the JDA itself I don’t think has that recency bias. But the students, when they go outside of the archive, do.
More generally, this is an issue that all of us as teachers face – historians face it, of course, but I think others face it – which is: not becoming captured by an archive. This is very much discussed in study of colonial contexts from a post-colonial perspective, “how do you avoid replicating the colonizer’s perspective when you’re using the archive created by the colonizer?” And there are strategies to do that. So for me, the type of guidance that one would give to students using a traditional archive, for instance – and this is not related particularly to Japan, any part of the world where there’s a colonial and a post-colonial situation – is the same type of guidance we have to give to students using this digital archive. I don’t think that’s an issue that’s peculiar to digital archives.
Probably I’m the only one [in this conversation] who has lots of experience going into brick and mortar archives to try to find stuff. But I don’t see it as starkly different from searching a digital archive. What happens when you go into a brick and mortar archive, you have a topic in mind, you tell the archivist what the topic is, and they’ll show you a finding aid. They’re not going to just go bring out a box. They’re going to give you something and say, “okay, look at this finding aid which describes categories from A to Z with subcategories and tell us which box categories you want to see.” And then they bring those boxes out. And then you find out that some boxes are rich and some are poor in relation to what you’re interested in.
I see that as analogous to going into a digital archive with a topic you’re interested in, and then the finding aid is the metadata keyword choices. You throw in some keywords and you get a hundred and fifty items. In other keywords, you only get three and other keywords you get a thousand. And then you have to try with different keywords just like in the brick-and-mortar archive, [and] you look at the finding aid and you say “oh maybe I’m looking in the wrong category” and you go to a different category. So I think that iterative process is similar and it’s up to us who are teaching and using this for educational purposes or research purposes to think it through and to advise the students: “Don’t give up. If you use one keyword and you don’t get what you’re looking for, you’re not probably searching with the right keyword.” “Keep at it!”
TG: Finally, as a way to wrap up our conversation, I’m curious what you think have been some of the most meaningful impacts of the JDA in terms of how it’s been used by researchers, students, and even other outside groups, along with how it has impacted your own thinking and scholarship as researchers and educators?
Gerster: There are different aspects to it. One of the goals is, of course, what we were talking about before: to show [the students] the disaster isn’t over, and it’s not just digital materials that they’re working with. There are actually people being affected by this even now. And it also [continuously] influences the environment that they’re living in, because Sendai was affected by the disaster, as well.
Another important point is to feel the relationship between the material that they’re working with and the actual places. The JDA also has a geolocation function that allows you to use a map and then access the data to see the connection between a specific place and the data they’re working with. What I’ve experienced so far is that, of course, if we talk about the disaster in the classroom with people who haven’t experienced it themselves or who might not remember it that much because they were very young, there’s still this outside aspect to it. And I think you can’t really help that. That’s natural and that will continue. That’s the same for us when we talk about World War II, for example, or more recent catastrophes.
But here [in Sendai], since we have the chance to take the students to disaster-affected areas or to ask them, for example, “take the train” – they live in Sendai – so “take the train, go to the coast and just take one step outside of your normal living environment or just try to use the geolocation function and look around you, ‘how was Sendai station affected by the disaster?’” All these things help the students to embody the connection between something that looks like material created by somebody else and the present they’re living in. That, for me, was an important aspect. Sometimes it works, but not always. It depends on the person, but it’s important to reflect on that, I think.
Morimoto: I just wanted to add somewhere that because we’re scholars, we often talk about the scholarly dimension of the archive. But having worked with IRIDeS [International Research Institute of Disaster Science], where there are many disaster scientists really thinking about policies and other stuff, I realized that some people are using the archive for disaster preparation or disaster reduction. This is a very different perspective than academia thinking in terms of politics, of the memories. So I just wanted to throw that perspective of how our collaboration enables us to think about a different kind of, or imagine different kinds of, audiences who might be using this in the present or the future. Thinking about, “okay, what should I do if X happens to us?” “Let’s look at what people have done.” [These are] very different from the academic [questions] about, “Oh, let’s observe like who did some facts.” Or “give an interpretation about how this happened; A happened, and B” and stuff like that. When I was working on that, I have to think about, “okay, I’m more biased in terms of the scholarly kind of perspective, but I also have to remember, you know, what kind of information might become helpful for the public who might think of this in a very different way.”
Shibayama: 実際に使われた事例ってほとんどそんなにはない可能性はあって、私も把握ができてはいないですが実際に熊本地震の場合は災害の記録の アーカイブの中のいろんな帳表というのがあるんですけどそういうのを見てどういうふうなものを使えばいいかというのを見ていたりというのは事例としてはある私が聞いている。
そこまず実際の災害の時には先ほど言ったような役場とかで使われているというのは一部あったりというのがあるんですが、それ以外には記録紙に基本的には使ったり、あと伝承館というものも使ったりとか、あとその他にはメディアにもちろん使われたりというような形でやっています。あと岩手県の場合だと防災教育に基本的なプログラムとして使われているというのがよくやられているというところになります。
もともと地震工学の専門家ではあるんですが、もともとコンピューターにはかなり詳しい人だったのでデジタルアーカイブを始めるにあたってそこまで難しい技術としてはなかったんですが、ただしデジタルアーカイブというのはもともと図書館の文化がすごく強くてライブラリーのいろんな作法というか、日本でいうと作法が、いろいろあるんです。それがなかなか慣れなくてその中で、図書館とその地震工学というか、専門の工学という分野とは、やっぱりそこの分野がよく合わないっていうものが結構あったので、そこがかなり苦労をしたなというところになります。
あと、今回この皆さんずっと長く一緒にやっていますけど、やっぱりいろんな分野の人がいるので、話がやっぱり視点が変わるっていうのはかなりありがたかったなと思っています。工学だけだとやっぱり狭い分野にはなっているのでやっぱりこの歴史から見たりとか文化人類から見たりっていうのはかなり大きいところでそういうところは良かったなと思います。
There may not be many cases of actual use, but I have heard that in the case of the Kumamoto earthquake, there are a number of ledgers in the disaster archives, and there are examples of people looking at them to see what kind of materials should be used [for rebuilding].
In the case of actual disasters, some of them are used in town halls, as I mentioned earlier, but other than that, they are basically used in recording papers and in disaster memorial museums (denshōkan), and of course, they are also used in the media. In the case of Iwate Prefecture, it is often used as a basic program for disaster prevention education. I was originally a specialist in earthquake engineering, but since I was quite familiar with computers, it was not a difficult technology for me to start a digital archive. However, the digital archive was originally based on the strong culture of libraries, and, in Japan, different disciplines have particular ways of doing things, or in Japanese, manners. It was not easy to get used to this, and there were many cases in which the ways of doing things in library studies and in the field of earthquake engineering, or engineering as a specialty, did not match well, so I had a lot of difficulties.
Also, although we have been working together for a long time, there are people from various fields, and I am grateful for the different perspectives we were able to bring to the discussion. Engineering alone is a very narrow field, so I think it was great that we were able to look at this from the perspective of history and cultural anthropology, which is quite significant.
Gordon: The question of the skills that all of us have who have been involved in the building of the archive versus the skills that more traditionally and properly trained archivists would have is important. And we were figuring it out on the fly without training. I think the place where that became the most challenging, as Shibayama sensei said, is not so much in the technical aspects of the software and building the archive – because for that you can subcontract to people who do that with us – but it was in the metadata. It’s in standards for properly tagging things so that they can be found by users.
And in this regard, Internet Archive is weak. They’re strong at preserving. They’re not good at attaching metadata. And so we provide, in that sense, a service to them by having our staff put in a set of keywords. But our staff is not mainly consisting of people trained in this field. So I think there’s a certain degree of cacophony in our metadata. Whether [a keyword is] things are singular or plural, for instance, as a very simple matter. And what words we use to denote certain topics, are they properly standardized? Because different people create different terms for tagging.
I was aware, and I think we were all aware of this problem from the beginning, and we’re thinking that at some point down the road, when there’s less urgency we can go back and clean up the metadata and bring unity to it. I think that is still a project for the future . I think perhaps artificial intelligence can help us with that at some point. But, I’m interested, Sato-sensei, [to Sato:] when you were using JDA and searching for information, did you have any difficulties because our metadata was not consistent?
Sato: 僕は結構情報を加えたんですね。JDAに載ってるデータだけにJDAの使い方は縛られない。自分が加えたいものを加えてコレクションを作っていけるので、そういう使い方をどっちかというとしていましたね。それで、今のこの関係の質問でいうと、自分はずっとその前は社会調査の、特に量的な分析の研究をしていて、3.11があって、釜石に、当時、東大の希望学の調査で行っていたので、そこで初めてインタビュー調査をいっぱい主催した人たちに会って、すごく衝撃を受けてそういうインタビューをしたり質的なデータの分析をだんだんするようになっていって、それで量も多くなってきたから途中からQDAのソフトを使うようになったんです、NVivoとか、ああいうのをやってたからJDAはすごく使いやすかったんです。あれはオンラインのQDAのツールだと思うので、だからそういう質的データ分析とこのJDAというのはすごく要求されるスキルとして近しいものがあるように思いました。
だからそういう意味ではあまり良いユーザーではなかったかもしれないですけど、でもそれは多分JDAにとってすごく重要な機能だと思います。JDAに載っているデータだけで何かを作ろうとするとそれに縛られてしまうので加えられるということがJDAの素晴らしい機能だと思います。
I added a lot of content to the archive. The content available on JDA doesn’t limit the way you use it. You can add what you want to add and create a collection. I used that method. So, in response to your question, I’d say that I used to do a lot of research on social issues, especially with quantitative analysis. On 3.11, I was in Kamaishi as part of a University of Tokyo survey for a study about hopeaspirations [hopeology], so that was the first time I started doing interviews and analyzing qualitative data. I was shocked by how much high-quality data I obtained from my interviews. But as I got more interview data, I started using QDA software, like NVivo. After doing that, JDA was very easy to use. I just think of as a tool for online QDA. So I think that’s a great skill to have, the ability to analyze data and the ability to do JDA. So, in that sense, I don’t think I was a good user.
But I think that’s a very important feature for JDA. If you try to make something with only the data that JDA has, you’ll be bound by it. But the fact that you can add content is a great feature of JDA.
Boret: To answer your question about what [using the JDA] brought to us coming from a different field: Shibayama-sensei mentioned that he was familiar with computers, technology and so forth, and he was obviously familiar with archives and history. We are more working as social anthropologists with thematics [such as] gender, disability, whatever it is. And so it was both new in terms of thinking about the technological aspect of the archive – how to develop tags and metadata and so forth – but I guess what it has really brought to me is a sense of history. And more than that, the sense that archives are making history in some sense – maybe with some limits, but in some sense.
Looking at the theories of social memory, for example, I’m now able to teach my students that memory is something we make, and something we consciously make as societies, as cultures. And there’s no taboo behind that anymore. There’s no such thing as an objective archive in a sense, and in the same way, there’s no such thing as an objective memory. And therefore – and maybe that traces back to some of the [earlier questions] – that when we are making the archive, then we have to think about all these perspectives, all these kinds of different people, different groups, different institutions who actually need the archives and to be able to preserve the priority. And in this sense, that’s what JDA and all these collaborators have been doing: to make sure this priority is maintained through time, [the archive] doesn’t become a single institution, [an] isolated institution.
That, for me – at least as an educator, at least as a researcher – that was one of the merits, in addition to participation: that JDA remained connected all the time to so many partners, and therefore being itself a window, a vista, on what was happening in Tohoku, and still happening because it’s still ongoing.
Gerster: I’m not really sure how to say this in a polite way… My background also wasn’t really in memory studies or anything related [to archives] before then. I wrote my dissertation about social recovery after the Great East Japan Earthquake. So, I was always really interested in talking to people and going to the field. The image that I had about archives before coming here [to the Disaster Culture and Archive Studies Section at IRIDeS] was this dusty thing, and you have to be quiet. It was just not really something that I was much interested in. But that’s where I got a job.
And then after coming here, I realized that it’s actually not at all like the [image I had]. Archiving is very much about the present. And it’s so political. There’s so many debates. It’s a process: what gets included and what doesn’t. Just as you said, we’re making history. And [there are essential issues] like how our perception of the past is being influenced by what is being preserved and what is not. So, working at the Disaster Culture and Archives section at Tohoku University opened up my view on this and also opened so many new possibilities about what to study, how we perceive history and memory, and whose experiences are included and whose are not, [along with] what narratives are created from those items that we preserve. That experience really shifted my focus and my interest in terms of research as well.
