37 Interface Eric G. Dinmore Collecting, Curating, and Presenting “3-11” with Harvard’s Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters Like most other observers at the time, I was horrified at the tragic, devastating scale of the Great East Japan Earthquake and associated tsunami and nuclear catastrophes of March 11, 2011. “3-11” blended natural elements , such as active faults and a violent surf, with tragic miscalculations stemming from the nuclear safety myth and faith in concrete seawalls. Sara Pritchard referred to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdowns as an “envirotechnical disaster.” She specifically pointed to how the meltdowns blurred the boundaries between the natural and the technical: they came from a tsunami triggered by a massive earthquake offshore from the Daiichi plant, emergency crews injected seawater into the damaged reactors, and plant workers and locals in the plant’s vicinity bore the major effects of radiation. Despite attempts by the Tokyo Electric Power Company and others in Japan’s so-called nuclear village to assert that Fukushima Daiichi, and nuclear power plants in general, were technological creations cut off from nature, 3-11 demonstrated that the natural and technical could not be so neatly divided (Pritchard 2012). The disaster exploded in the faces of arrogant technocrats and utilities executives who had convinced themselves of their ability to bend nature to their will and manage natural resources like parts of a complex machine. 3-11 has largely dropped from the attention of the mass media outside Japan over the past three plus years, yet it is far from over. Residents in disaster-stricken areas of Japan’s northeastern Tōhoku region strive to rebuild and agonize over the future of their depopulating region—all while coping psychologically with staggering loss, toxic environments, 38 Interface and the indifference of outsiders. Untold masses of debris from the tsunami have washed into the Pacific Ocean and now intermingle with floating islands of polystyrene, plastics, petrochemicals, and other human-made wastes. Meanwhile, commentators inside and outside Japan debate the soundness and economic viability of atomic energy, while Abe Shinzō’s cabinet pushes to reactivate the country’s plants. Although its full consequences will not be understood for years, 3-11 has compelled us to reexamine Japan’s postwar developmental history, especially its local-level and ecological legacies. Despite my shock at the disasters, and despite my sustained hopes for rebuilding Tōhoku and revising Japanese energy policies, I have not looked closely at 3-11 in my scholarship. I am a historian who writes on development, energy, and resources in mid-twentieth-century Japan; the disasters are tangentially related to my work, but it would be a strain to incorporate them meaningfully into my writing. During the 2011–12 academic year, however, I confronted images and records of 3-11 on an almost daily basis. To secure research time away from my heavy teaching load at a small liberal arts college, I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies (RIJS). Normally, RIJS fellows teach one course during the year, but I took up a different form of institutional service. Based on my research interests and time in the teaching trenches, then RIJS director Andrew Gordon asked me to work on a newly launched digital humanities project, Harvard’s Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters.1 Appropriate to the theme of this issue of Verge, I became a collector and curator of online 3-11 documentation. During my year with the Disasters Archive, my conception of what it means to collect changed fundamentally. As a historian, most of my professional collecting had entailed routine, though revelatory, trips to brick-and-mortar libraries and archives to examine physical records. Archives, to me, meant proprietary repositories that were often difficult to access without the proper educational training and professional credentials. My research experiences in Japan, where one sometimes must present a letter of introduction just to glance at an archival collection , reinforced my assumptions. Yet after a steep learning curve at RIJS, I learned that the Disasters Archive was conceived as an entirely different kind of collection. It contains almost no proprietary records, and it aspires to become an...