Community/place-making in Otsuchi ¹: A conversation with Mio Kamitani

This section attempts to explore the history of how experiences in place-making, recovery, and community resilience have been shared between localities and across national borders. The section is followed by two other “talk to the actor” pieces to trace how recovery programs and policies have been travelling and have advanced across disastrous events and borders. It is of our special interest to see how local and specifically conditioned ideas that were introduced from elsewhere gave rise to a particularized practice at a particular time. We talked with Mio Kamitani, the CEO of Oraga Otsuchi Yume Hiroba, a non-profit organization based in Otuchi, one of the towns in Tohoku that were significantly damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Learning from this rare female community actor in the Tohoku region, we were able to see how the disaster was an episode that revealed long-existing local issues embedded in broader unequal development.