Fifteen years after the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, 23,410 people were still evacuated in February 2026. Building on my KAMC2025 presentation, which outlined the design of a four-year visual ethnographic study of the transition experiences of long-term evacuees, this presentation focuses on one of the methodological choices within that design.
The unit of research in this study is the family rather than the individual. However, families are not monolithic entities; the life courses of their members diverge, as do their accounts of shared experiences. Rather than resolving this divergence, I adopted what Oscar Lewis called a 'Rashomon-like technique' — seeing a family through the eyes of each of its members. Each member of the participating family was interviewed separately about the same events. This presentation reports on the first family to participate in the research, spanning three generations. Their accounts of the same events, such as leaving their homes on the day of the evacuation and the scenes they witnessed in their neighbourhoods, differ not only in the details, but also in their understanding of the significance of these events. While one person experienced it as 'a sense of the end of life in this house', another experienced it as 'a sense of the beginning of an extraordinary period lasting only a few days'. Rather than treating these differences as inconsistencies to be resolved, this approach analyses them to reveal how positions within the family shape the meaning attributed to a given event.

Authors:
Kana Ohashi, Tokyo Keizai University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Kana Ohashi is currently working as an Associate Professor at Department of Communication Studies, Tokyo Keizai University, Japan. Her research interests include people’s experiences of moving home and visual ethnographic methodologies.

See this presentation on the full schedule – On Demand Schedule

Bookmark