Panel H: Voices from Tohoku: Oral Narrative Translation Project

Abstract

This Oral presentation showcases the methods of transforming an oral narrative interview with a community member affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Accident on March 11, 2011 into a five-minute video presentation. The data for the project has been provided by the digital archive project, Voices from Tohoku, which includes over 500 hours of oral narrative interviews with community members from seven different communities in Japan affected by the disaster. This particular interview was conducted in Japanese with a woman living in the coastal town of Ogatsu, in Miyagi prefecture. The tsunami heavily damaged the town, with over 80% of its buildings destroyed, displacing the vast majority of residents. The interview was conducted in 2014, roughly three years after the disaster, while the town was still struggling to rebuild. The narrator is a community leader spearheading a reconstruction project in her town. The interview with the narrator offers insight into community experiences of post-disaster reconstruction efforts. Through the methods of advanced translation from Japanese into English and the application of qualitative research methods for identifying significant community concerns, the projects aim to create an engaged public anthropological project through a multimedia video presentation.