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ABSTRAC
This paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability for conditions in the present. As such, I argue, it ultimately encourages us to cultivate attention and accountability toward material and conceptual problems in the present. The discussion then takes the idea of cultivating attention to the present to northeast Japan. I show there how an ending inflicted on the coastal residents by the tsunami of March 2011 has made space for precisely this kind of attention and accountability to the present.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rotiman makes clear that this epistemological production proceeds with hardened discursive boundaries that allow certain questions to be asked and solutions posed while simultaneously foreclosing other inquiries and interventions (Roitman Citation2014).
2 My thinking here around the question of scale is deeply inspired by Stefan Helmrich’s analysis of scale in a chapter of his book in preparation (Helmreich Citationin preparation).
3 For some history on the seawalls see Takayama (Citation2013, Hiroshige Citation2018).
4 In 2015, Japan’s major newspaper published a digest summarising the frustration and disappointment with the seawalls and reconstruction in general among coastal residents. See Shimbun (Citation2016).
5 For an excellent discussion of some of these issues see Shuhei (Citation2016).
6 For an exhaustive analysis of the various city planning (machizkuri) projects underway in northeast Japan see Kayo Murakami et al. (Citation2014).
7 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/事前復興 (Accessed September 25, 2019).
8 Such an approach is echoed in existing literature on disaster planning. See for example, Lakoff (Citation2010, Samimian-Darash and Rabinow Citation2015).
9 For scholarship in Japanese that looks at the Maehama Marine Center project through the lens of phenomenology see Hiroshige (Citation2018).
10 Chiba has published work on this project. See Chiba (january Citation2015).