Ordinary Life: Evacuee Mothers and the Politics of Home in Post-3.11 Japan

This article examines the enduring impact of temporary housing on mother-child evacuees from Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan. To manage the uncertainties of the radioactive fallout, many mothers “voluntarily” evacuated with their children from irradiated yet officially “safe” areas. Focusing on six evacuee mothers, this paper highlights how their efforts to rebuild an “ordinary life” are variously challenged by the administration of temporary housing. It analyzes how gender-specific harms are created by both pre-disaster gendering of the family and post-disaster dynamic of return-focused “hometown” recovery. It also highlights homemaking as a political act by demonstrating how the mothers contend with the dissonances of family-home while navigating prolonged displacement. What emerges here is a tension that signifies what I call a politics of “home” in post-3.11 Japan. Ultimately, the study contributes to investigating the intersectional impact of emergency response, gendered precarity, and societal norms, calling for a critical engagement with “home” in disaster recovery, especially when uncertainty is the norm, as with a nuclear disaster.