Japan offers a distinctive institutional approach to disaster remains. National and local governments support the preservation of selected ruins as disaster memory facilities and integrate them into museums, educational programs, guided tours, and regional initiatives such as the 3.11 Densho Road network. Through these programs, disaster remains become part of long-term recovery infrastructure that sustains reflection on past events and transmits lessons across generations.
An important component of this memory infrastructure is the practice known as kataribe. The term kataribe (語り部), meaning “storyteller,” historically referred to narrators who memorized and recited myths and genealogies in ancient Japan. Over time, the term acquired a new meaning. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it came to describe individuals who share first-hand experiences of war and disaster. At disaster memory sites, kataribe connect preserved ruins with lived testimony and transform personal experiences into collective knowledge about risk, preparedness, and responsibility.
Here, I present how Japan’s approach to disaster memory represents a deliberate system of learning, and that its principles offer important insights for other countries that frequently experience disasters such as Türkiye. This reflection draws on my field observations between Nov 2025 to March 2026 on disaster memory sites in Japan to consider how societies learn from painful experiences. It highlights in the concluding section lessons that may inform approaches to disaster memory in Türkiye.
How Japan Treats Disaster Remains as Long-Term Learning Infrastructure
Japan does not preserve every damaged structure. Preservation is selective, debated and often contested. But in certain cases, communities and authorities decide that a site’s educational or moral value justifies its stabilisation. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Image 1) (Genbaku Dome) stands as the most internationally recognised example: a partially destroyed building deliberately maintained in its damaged state. Its skeletal dome anchors memory in the city’s everyday landscape.
Image 1. Ruin of Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall1
After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster2, preservation of selected disaster remains became part of the reconstruction process. National authorities, prefectural governments, and municipalities evaluated damaged sites and incorporated certain structures into long-term recovery planning as spaces of collective learning. As reconstruction advanced, decisions about demolition and preservation were carefully debated. Japan does not preserve every damaged structure. Preservation is selective and often contested.
In specific cases, authorities and communities determined that particular buildings held educational, historical, or moral significance. In several instances, preserved structures were formally transformed into disaster memory facilities. These sites function as publicly accessible museums and educational environments. They host guided tours, school visits, and structured storytelling sessions. Visitors move through the buildings with trained guides who explain what happened before, during, and after the tsunami. Preserved structures therefore operate as active platforms for transmitting lived experience rather than as static ruins.
For example, Nakahama Elementary School ruins (Image 2) remain open to visitors, with visible waterlines marking the height of the tsunami. Exhibitions inside the building present evacuation processes, community response, and recovery efforts. The building functions simultaneously as a preserved ruin and an educational site. In this case, the evacuation strategy allowed students and staff to reach safety, illustrating how timely decisions and preparedness can prevent loss of life. Similarly, the ruins of Ishinomaki City Kadonowaki Elementary School were retained and opened to the public as disaster memory sites. At Kadonowaki, rapid evacuation to higher ground enabled students and teachers to survive the tsunami and subsequent fire. These sites therefore demonstrate how effective evacuation practices can shape different disaster outcomes.
Image 2. Preserved Ruins of Nakahama Elementary School (Özdoğan, 2025)
At Okawa Elementary School (Image 3), however, the outcome was tragically different. Seventy-four children and ten staff members lost their lives when the tsunami struck the school grounds. While many schools in the same region successfully evacuated students, the preserved Okawa site reveals how delayed decision-making and uncertainty shaped a devastating result. Today, the site communicates the scale of this loss and explains the evacuation decisions that influenced the outcome. Guided tours address responsibility, emergency response, and the consequences of institutional choices. The site thus serves as a space for reflection, accountability, and collective learning.
Image 3. Okawa Elementary School Ruins (Özdoğan, 2026)
Whether the stories shared at these sites highlight successful evacuation strategies or tragic failures, the preservation of disaster ruins in Japan follows structured institutional processes. Legal frameworks, dedicated funding mechanisms, and prolonged negotiations between authorities and local communities guide decisions about which structures should be retained. In this context, ruins remain through processes of consent and governance. These decisions also acknowledge an important ethical tension: preserved buildings can serve as powerful educational tools for future generations, while at the same time reopening painful memories for those directly affected.
Beyond individual preserved ruins, Japan has also developed networked approaches to disaster memory. A significant example is the Denshō Road initiative in Miyagi Prefecture. Denshō Road connects multiple tsunami-affected locations across municipalities into a coordinated memory corridor (3.11 Densho Road Promotion Organization, 2019). The term Բ̄ means “transmission,” emphasizing the active passing down of experience. Through mapped routes, interpretive signage, educational programs, and digital documentation, schools, seawalls, museums, and coastal ruins are integrated into a regional network of remembrance and learning. Within this framework, disaster remains and other disaster memory facilities function as curated environments where memory is interpreted and transmitted. The ruin becomes a pedagogical space, and storytelling becomes part of recovery infrastructure.
Kataribe Practice as Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
Yet material remains do not sustain memory on their own; memory becomes socially alive only through those who interpret, narrate, and transmit experience across generations.
After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, survivors began publicly recounting what they had witnessed (Yoneyama, 1999; Zwigenberg, 2014). As they aged, institutions developed successor programmes, training younger speakers to carry forward their testimonies. This institutionalization of storytelling reflects a broader Japanese practice known as kataribe. The term kataribe (語り部), meaning “storyteller,” refers to individuals who share lived experiences of war or disaster with visitors in order to transmit lessons to future generations (Ogawa, 2025). Over time, this practice evolved into a structured form of public education, often supported by museums, memorial institutions, and local organizations. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), storytelling therefore takes place through organized formats. Visitors encounter guided talks, scheduled testimonies, and educational programmes designed to ensure that the memory of destruction remains active and publicly accessible.
Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, kataribe practices expanded across the affected Tōhoku region (Fulco, 2020). Survivors began guiding visitors through damaged coastal areas while recounting their experiences before, during, and after the disaster. These testimonies extend beyond personal narratives. They frequently include reflections on evacuation decisions, communication breakdowns, and community responses. Through these accounts, lived experience becomes a source of practical knowledge.
In this way, memory operates as a form of pedagogy. Storytelling connects personal testimony with collective learning, translating past tragedy into guidance for preparedness and future risk awareness.
Image 4. A kataribe, who was vice principal of the school at the time of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, guiding visitors through the preserved Nakahama Elementary School building (Özdoğan, 2025)
The stories shared at these sites are often deeply painful, as explained by the tragedy at Okawa Elementary School. Yet kataribe consistently emphasize the importance of transmitting this difficult past. During a recent visit to Fukushima, I met Kimura Nariyo, a kataribe who lost his seven-year-old daughter in the tsunami. In recounting the events of that day, he described how she and her grandfather had returned to their home shortly before it was struck by the wave. He also explained that search and rescue operations in the area were suspended due to the Fukushima nuclear accident, which meant that his daughter could not be searched for immediately. By sharing this story with visitors, Kimura preserves the memory of his daughter while also reflecting on the broader circumstances that shaped the tragedy. His testimony has also become part of his activism to preserve the remains of the school where other children survived, arguing that the site should remain as a place of collective learning and reflection.
Image 5. Kimura Nariyo, a kataribe who lost his seven-year-old daughter recounts the events of the day she died, describing how she and her grandfather returned to their home shortly before it was struck by the tsunami (Özdoğan, 2026).
Absence of Memory Infrastructure in Türkiye: Lessons from Japan’s Approach to Disaster Memory
In Türkiye, the rapid removal of disaster debris is frequently framed as evidence of effective crisis management (Doruk, 2025). Clearing ruins demonstrates administrative capacity, technical competence, and the return to normalcy. Reconstruction projects are announced, new housing blocks rise, and the visible landscape stabilizes. Yet while the physical environment is rapidly reordered, the experiential dimension of disaster often remains institutionally unarticulated.
Unlike Japan’s selective preservation of disaster remains, Türkiye has not developed a structured framework for retaining, interpreting, and transmitting disaster memory through material sites. Debris removal is treated primarily as a technical and logistical necessity rather than as a political and pedagogical decision. The question of whether certain structures should be preserved as sites of collective learning rarely enters official reconstruction planning in a systematic way.
As a country that has experienced major earthquakes approximately every five to ten years, Türkiye possesses an extensive archive of lived experience. However, platforms dedicated to collecting, curating, and transmitting that experience remain limited. Survivors recount their stories within families, neighbourhoods, activist circles, or legal proceedings, but sustained public mechanisms for intergenerational reflection are underdeveloped. Memory circulates informally, yet it lacks durable institutional infrastructure.
Japan’s model suggests many potential areas for adaptation.
First, selective preservation frameworks could be integrated into post-disaster governance. Rather than default demolition, municipalities could establish review mechanisms to evaluate the educational and historical value of certain structures before removal. Even a limited number of preserved sites, developed through community consultation, could function as long-term memory anchors.
Second, storytelling practices could be institutionalized as part of disaster education. Structured testimony programmes—similar to kataribe initiatives—could transform lived experience into pedagogical material for schools, urban planning departments, and public institutions. This would shift disaster memory from private recollection to collective preparedness.
Third, disaster memory could be embedded within regional networks rather than isolated monuments. A coordinated system linking preserved sites, museums, educational programmes, and digital archives would allow memory to function as governance infrastructure rather than symbolic commemoration.
These measures do not require replicating Japan’s model wholesale. Cultural, political, and institutional differences matter. Yet Japanese example demonstrates that through coordinated engagement among communities, educators, civil society actors, and public authorities, supported by political commitment and dedicated funding, these practices transform lived experience into institutionalized disaster knowledge embedded in education, public discourse, and spatial planning.
For countries such as Türkiye, developing comparable mechanisms (integrating similar practices into recovery and education frameworks) could help situate each disaster within a longer historical continuum and strengthen long-term learning, preparedness, and disaster risk reduction (strengthen long-term disaster learning and anchor collective memory within strategies of preparedness and disaster risk reduction).
End Notes
Originally completed in 1915 as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the building was severely damaged by the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. In 1966, the Hiroshima City Council decided to preserve the structure permanently, and conservation and reinforcement works were carried out to prevent further deterioration while maintaining its damaged form. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 and remains a central element of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, serving as a global symbol of remembrance and nuclear disarmament.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the northeastern coast of Japan, generated a massive tsunami that devastated coastal communities across the Tōhoku region. In addition, the tsunami triggered a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in what is widely referred to in Japan as the “triple disaster.”
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Future Readings Recommendations
Alderman, D. H., & Inwood, J. F. (2013). Landscapes of memory and socially just futures. In N. Johnson, R. Schein, & J. Winders (Eds), The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography (1st Edition, pp. 186–197). Wiley Online Library.
Arora, S. (2018). Post-disaster memoryscapes: Communicating disaster risks and climate change after the Leh flash floods in 2010. Communication and the Public, 3(4), 310–321.
Creighton, M. (2015). Wasuren!—We Won’t Forget! The Work of Remembering and Commemorating Japan’s and Tohoku’s (3.11) Triple Disasters in Local Cities and Communities. Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 9(1), 8.
Fuentealba, R. (2021). Divergent disaster events? The politics of post-disaster memory on the urban margin. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 62, 102389.
Garnier, E., & Lahournat, F. (2022). Japanese stone monuments and disaster memory–perspectives for DRR. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 31(6), 1–12.
Gerster, J., & Maly, E. (2022). Japan’s Disaster Memorial Museums and framing 3.11: Othering the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in cultural memory. Contemp. Jpn., 34(2), 187–209.
Gerster, J., Shibayama, A., & Ono, M. (2026). Storytelling and the Arts as Tools in Disaster Risk Education: Tohoku University’s “Kataritsugi” and the Stories of 3.11. In Handbook of Disaster Studies in Japan (pp. 391–406). Routledge.
Gill, T., Steger, B., & Slater, D. H. (2015). Japan copes with calamity. Peter Lang Oxford.
Maly, E., & Yamazaki, M. (2021). Disaster Museums in Japan: Telling the Stories of Disasters Before and After 3.11. Journal of Disaster Research, 16(2), 146–156.
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Özdoğan, F., & Kitamura, M. (2025). Artefacts of Disaster Memory: Understanding Disaster Memorials in Türkiye. 40.3, Volume 3: Heritage, Culture&Place, 43–54.
Perlman, M. (1988). Imaginal memory and the place of Hiroshima. SUNY Press.
Pisa, P. F. (2024). Understanding memory transmission in disaster risk reduction practices: A case study from Japan. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 100, 104112.
Zwigenberg, R. (2014). Hiroshima: The origins of global memory culture. Cambridge University Press.