In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. While the Japanese government proposed and enforced infrastructural transformations in the wake of the tsunami, these changes did not consider the impact on residents who built their communities and livelihoods around the coast. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn highlights alternative proposals offered by the local residents as well as the environmental, ecological, and more-than-human dependencies and imbrications those proposals reveal. In doing so, he argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect, showing how attempts to “ecologize” safety may offer more sustainable ways of thinking about security, preservation, and infrastructure.

Andrew Littlejohn is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: “Living with Everything Together”  1
Part I. “What Kind of Town This Was”
1. Histories of Entanglement  37
2. What Happened That Day  61
Part II. A Total System
3. Partitioning the Sensible  89
4. On Higher Ground  118
Part III. Protecting Otherwise
5. Ecologizing Safety  151
6. Political Becoming  178
Conclusion: “A Town Where We Live with the Sea” (Umi to ikiru machi)  201
Notes  211
References  217
Index  237