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  • Teach 3.11: Participatory Educational Project Puts the Kanto-Tōhoku Disaster into Historical Context
  • Lisa Onaga

1. From the Here and Now

My first visit to the countryside of Fukushima Prefecture took place in the early autumn of 2008. The occasion was a notable “return” to a historic center of premodern Japanese silkworm egg production for two busloads of members of the silk and sericulture industy, en route to the annual Silk Summit held at the Fukushima Agricultural Technology Center. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Onaga-san, look there.” I looked out the window and saw in the distance a large, white, rectangular building tucked in amid the greenery. “That’s a nuclear power plant,” the retired scientist told me. “If that explodes, we’ll die.” At the time, I was unsure what to make of this jolt of information. Wrapped up in my own thoughts about fieldwork and research, I had certainly forgotten that moment until now.

Place-names such as Fukushima and Tōhoku need little introduction today. Following the disasters that unfolded in Japan on 11 March 2011, people around the world have flocked to social media and news outlets, bearing witness to viral videos of the Kanto-Tōhoku earthquake’s devastation and the horrifying tsunami that followed it. The tense play-by-plays of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima and speculations about health risks associated with their failure have focused intensely on the here and now, with good reason. As the hours melted together in those very raw early days of the triple disaster, a number of things seemed to become apparent to many of us Japan-watchers: a consternation with the media’s reproduction of facile if not circular explanations of how Japanese stoicism and civility stem from “Japanese culture,” which seemed to perpetuate a myth of homogeneity; a gulf in the quality of reportage between those with and without Japanese language skills or access to technological or scientific expertise; the use of ambiguous metaphoric language in the foreign press; and, perhaps most important, an overall challenge in ascertaining the lay of the land. [End Page 417]

In times of crisis and disaster, can an individual realistically grasp a panoramic state of the field? As people desperately struggled with the scientific and technical details of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, one challenge that seemed to emerge from the catastrophic coalescence of the natural and man-made disasters appeared to touch on the ability to collectively consider, as a public if not as analysts, matters of temporality and historicity to appreciate why events unfolded as they had. What is happening as the chaos of the present proffers a deluge of information that intensifies the resolution of a digital archival grain? Laudatory media accounts of Japanese disaster preparedness call into question the degree of preparedness of the academic community, especially in the humanistic studies of contemporary and historical science and technology, to lend some voices of analytical calm in stormy times to bring the past to light, if not to participate in the discomfiting divination practice that many in the world also demand, that is, to bet on the future. The multilingual educational project Teach 3.11 (teach311.wordpress.com), conceived little over a week after the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on that ill-fated day, serves, at very least, to help make it easier for people to learn about the history of science and technology related to the three disasters.

2. Launching Teach 3.11

Teach 3.11 officially launched efforts to build a participant-powered, digital educational resource in partnership with the Forum for the History of Science in Asia, a special interest group of the History of Science Society, on 2 April. Although the three cofounders—Honghong Tinn, Tyson Vaughan, and myself—were all graduate students at Cornell University at the time, the idea to operate Teach 3.11 as an institutionally independent website has been important from the start, given our second goal: to encourage the collective wisdom of scholars working at the intersections of history of science and technology and Asia.

The project’s modus operandi came from conversations that occurred simultaneously about...

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