ABSTRACT
Using cultural events to reshape narratives and imaginaries in places hit by disasters is not uncommon. In addition to their economic benefits, cultural events can be used as an essential tool for placemaking, offering possibilities for local communities to make sense of traumatic pasts, reimagine their future, and generate a sense of place through connections between people, whether locals or non-locals. This chapter investigates how and in what ways the locals involved in the Reborn Art Festival (RAF) in Ishinomaki, Japan, directly or indirectly utilize the festival to negotiate trauma and placemaking processes after the triple disaster which took place on 11 March 2011. On that day a seism of 9.0 magnitude was followed by a tsunami, and by a meltdown in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the evacuation of 409,146 residents from the Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures and 19,630 casualties (Tagore-Erwin, 2018). Ishinomaki, the second-largest city in Miyagi prefecture with a population just over 139,000 inhabitants (Ishinomaki no jinko oyobi menseki, 2021), is one of the places hit the hardest: 3,553 people were lost, 423 are still missing, and 50,758 people were evacuated (Tagore-Erwin, 2018).
