Place, sociality, health: Forms of relocation and recuperation in modern Japan

Abstract

After the earthquakes hit northeastern Japan and caused the catastrophic meltdowns at Fukushima on 11 March 2011, a large number of families chose not to relocate and are still living in contaminated areas. From the summer of 2011, Japan started a hoyo—health recovery camp which has been mainly aimed at helping people, especially children, to relieve the stress of their minds and bodies that have been affected by the radioactivity. This camp offers children therapeutic treatments by sending them for a few days to places that are out of the radioactive contamination zone. In the camp, a place with less pollution becomes the key link between the recovering person and the program, and the landscapes are therapeutic for the human body and mind. In this article, I focus on the health recovery camp as being a form of relocation and recuperation from a historical perspective and show how this camp provides a therapeutic landscape for healing. I consider the concept of therapeutic landscape which was developed by Wil Gesler in the early 1990s to be an insightful and effective approach for studying closely the process of healing in the nuclear pollution era, even though the cultural contexts of Gesler’s and the present study are very different. Working from a non-Western perspective and also from that of health recovery from radiation exposure, my study focuses on the interaction between health recovery camp participants and the natural, built, symbolic, and social factors which Gesler mentions as aspects of “healing environments.”