The original stimulus - a story
It (the prefectural office) has been unable to communicate with the mayor and officials in Otsuchi after the town office was swept away by a tsunami while the mayor and town officials were apparently inside the building…. Nikkei
Two interpretations
Interpretation 1. www.japanprobe.com 13 March 2011
Why were the mayor and town officials inside the building at the time the tsunami struck? According to news reports, they were holding a meeting to discuss safety measures that should be taken. The town office was a two-story building only 1-kilometer from the shore, making it one of the worst imaginable places to sit down and have a discussion while a deadly tsunami was on its way. At the time this blog entry was posted, the mayor and town officials were still missing. It is possible that indecisiveness at a critical time resulted in their deaths, as well as the deaths of many town residents.
Interpretation 2. www.guardian.com.uk 22 March 2011
Koki Kato's last official act as mayor was to set up a command centre for Otsuchi's disaster response team, outdoors, in front of the town hall and facing the sea. The mayor in his usual hands-on style was helping workers haul out tables and chairs for the outdoor HQ when Japan's tsunami struck. "All of us scattered to escape," said Kansei Sawadate, a local government official who was at the meeting. They all made it back into the town hall building – including the mayor. But then, to Sawadate's horror and disbelief, the waters surged as high as the clock face on the second floor. "The people who went up on the roof were saved, and the people who stayed on the second floor were washed away," he said.
In the wake of the 11/3 earthquake, which caused tragedy on a massive scale, people are searching for explanations. Explanations are less for the earthquake itself, which to the modern mind can be understood satisfactorily by geophysics, rather for the manifold incidents that it precipitated. Questions abound. Why did so many people die in the tsunami despite it being a high risk area with evacuation plans? Why was the failure at TEPCO so large? Why is the Japanese evacuation zone so different to the evacuation proscribed by the US? Why did some foreign government’s order evacuations while others downplayed the risks? To make sense of all the information connected to the earthquake the unknown has to be placed alongside the known in a framework so that you can ‘comprehend, explain, understand, attribute, extrapolate and predict.” (Starbuck and Milliken in Weick 1995). For an event to make sense it has to fit inside ones ‘mental model’ of the world, when it doesn’t fit, the process of sensemaking becomes more intense. We have all needed to “make sense” of events that have occurred since the earthquake. In this paper I am seeking patterns in the sense being created and the discourses being developed.
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