ABSTRACT
The 3.11, a triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident that hammered Japan in 2011, is one of the worst disasters of the Anthropocene to date. This chapter retraces some emerging networked engagements with Japan’s sociopolitical state of things triggered by the disaster: Firstly local efforts of assembling human and non-human actors that “patch” a collapsed reality with temporary tools; then a spontaneous “citizen science” from a commuter town related to local agriculture, which redirects the locals’ attention from present uncertainties into their liveable future; and, finally, an expending network of eating together, offering or sharing food from the afflicted area, which fosters a sense of living in the same world beyond Japan’s strained political atmosphere. Following these, this chapter demonstrates how ANT has helped public anthropologists to gift a slow, ethnography-based story to the public to assist them to cope with the given reality, and hopefully, to help bring forth a better reality.
