Dissertation Title
Imagining Tōhoku
Chair: Nancy Stalker
(Proposal Defended: November 2019)
Dissertation Abstract: This project examines how the popular imagination of the Tōhoku region (northeastern Japan), constructed especially from the post-WWII period by the mass media and consumerist campaigns targeted to urban dwellers, influenced the post-3.11 Disaster Japanese government policies/society. The “imagined Tōhoku” encompasses socioeconomic representation of the region, including longing to homelands, evoking nostalgia to countryside lifestyle. This research involves investigation of ethical values in the following ways. The “imagined Tōhoku” within the media often does not reflect the moral and cultural values of the population of Tōhoku. My project illustrates how popular constructs often deny the Tōhoku population’s moral questioning of cultural stereotypes that are used against them. It questions the ethical values of rapid modernization. Postwar Japan confronted the moral dilemma of whether to choose high-speed economic growth or to retain countryside values. It chose to pursue modernization by using the labor force and cultural stereotypes of Tōhoku as its foundation for its development. Yet, the country dismissed Tōhoku areas’ modernization attempts as the media consistently represented the region as being socioeconomically backwards. The project poses the question of how to ethically balance between preservation of tradition and pursuit of modernization while not labelling a part of the country as backwards.