Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, volume 18, pages 205 ^ 212

DOI:10.1068/d213t

Space, materials, and the `social': in the aftermath

of a disaster

Takashi Harada
Department of Sociology, Konan Women's University, Kobe, Japan;
e-mail: harada@konan-wu.ac.jp
Received 12 May 1999; in revised form 22 October 1999

Abstract. How do spaces and materials relate and create the `social' contexts? How are material
`order' or the `social' meaning such as collectivity and individuality interrelated? In this essay I explore
the relations of spaces, materials, and the `social' using several episodes in a public shelter after the
great earthquake happened in Japan in January 1995. Sudden collapse of continuous interrelations of
the materials and spaces in a metropolitan area reveals the process of the (re)creation of both
collectibility and individuality through the delegation through the delegation of the spaces and
materials at large and small scales.

``Have you ever slept on the wooden floor of the gymnasium?'' a 17 year-old girl asked a
21 year-old student. It was a midsummer evening. I was walking with them near the
junior high school where a `public shelter' was just closing after offering a variety of
services for nearly seven months. The student, who had worked with other people
(including me) as a volunteer at the shelter, did not answer. She added.
``One month, two months ... . My back and legs hurt constantly at the time.''(1)

How should we understand the phase `Sleeping in a gymnasium'? What does it mean?
Is it just a phrase suggesting a way of sleeping? If not, what else?
Early in the morning of 17 January 1995 an earthquake had struck the second
largest metropolitan area in Japan, located in the western part of the main island.
According to some statistics, over four million people were affected in some way or
other (Department of Humanitarian Affairs, 1995).
In this paper, I discuss the relations between space, materials, and the `social', using
the episodes that happened at a public shelter in Nishinomiya City where I worked as a
volunteer for seven months. This is not about `ordinary lives' in mundane day-to-day
circumstances. Rather, they are extraordinary öand personalöepisodes in a very
specific area of Japan at a time of disaster. But that unfortunate and devastating
situation offered me a chance to explore some of the links between spaces, materials,
and the `social'. So what are their relations? One answer is that materials are put into
some space, but then those materials make other spaces and give each of these more or
less loose or rigid meanings which we take to be `social'. This is a story explored in a
variety of theoretical traditions: classically, by Henri Lefebvre, in the Marxist tradition
(see Lefebvre, 1991); again in the context of phenomenology; and, to a smaller but
increasing extent, in actor-network theory, the topic of this special journal issue, where
it comes in a variety of forms which all insist on the importance of materiality. Some of
the concerns of actor-network theory are caught by the `baboon story' told by Michel
Callon and Bruno Latour. Their suggestion is that baboons manage a social structure
more or less without materials, whereas people delegate social relations into material
(and we might add spatial) form. This process tends to hold social relations in place (see
Callon and Latour, 1981) and allows them to extend across time and space, and also, one
(1)These sentences are taken from my fieldnotes and from tape-recorded interviews with former
refugees.
206 T Harada

might add (as newer actor-network pieces have suggested), tends to hold people together
(see Gomart and Hennion, 1999; Mol and Law, 2000). This material and spatial order-
ing of the `social', then, helps us to make ourselves.
In this paper I discuss what happens if the material `order' or the `social' meanings,
which we take for granted, suddenly collapse and we try to continue our `social' lives
under extraordinary and materially different conditions. What we find is that spaces
and materials need to be recreated and named, and that this process allows for the
(re)creation of both collectivity and individuality.

Public and private

The public shelter was an institution set up as an emergency measure, but actually it
`continued' for seven months. It was constructed just after the earthquake when people
started escaping from their houses to the nearby schools. Here are the words of a
refugee spoken after the shelter was closed, which show the initial spatiality and
materiality of the shelter:
Story 1
``On the first or second night, I cannot remember exactly, a teacher entered the area for
Japanese sumo wrestling in the gymnasium. After a glance, he shouted, `Ten by ten, one
hundred people in this room!' ''
A particular undifferentiated space and the number `ten by ten' exactly indicate the
prevailing `social' condition. There would be no other things to be grasped or described
in the shelter, because it was just an emergency space. Quick divisions were needed,
divisions between people, a space for a body to lie down. But that was allöand indeed
all that was possible.
On 20 January, three days after the earthquake happened, I arrived at the public
shelter/junior high school. My first impression was that this was a very open space. It
seemed that I could walk around and enter any room in the school freelyösomething
that would not normally be possible. And there were many staff, including teachers and
volunteers: I felt that I might have nothing to do. But after staying for twenty-four hours
I was appointed head of the food storehouse, a small meeting room in the junior high
school. This was because the teachers of the junior high school were busy doing many
things around the school and almost all the volunteers were stopping only for a short
time, so being there for a longer time was enough to qualify me to be in charge of food,
drink, and many other things.
On 29 January the municipal educational bureau decided to restart school classes
again from 30 January, so the refugees in the classrooms of the main building in the
school moved to the large wooden floor of the gymnasium. They were divided between
three spaces on two floors in the gym. There were also some refugees in the schoolyard
where people and families stayed in their cars. It was mid-winter, and the lowest
temperature was below zero in the night.
On 31 January, a middle-aged man, Mr A said at the shelter meeting ``I have been
staying in my car in the schoolyard because I like to live only with my family.''
On 12 February, a middle-aged woman, Ms B, said at the meeting ``I think this place is
like one big family working together, because we have been taking part in work such as
toilet cleaning and delivering food. So I cannot bear `strangers' hanging around in our
shelter.''
On 22 February, Mr C asked ``Do you know why we have been camping out in the
schoolyard?'' He had pitched a tent as soon as he had moved from the main building
to the gymnasium as he had two small children, and was trying not to bother the
refugees in the gymnasium.
In the aftermath of a disaster 207

A gathering of people in one `collective space' had suddenly appeared at the junior high
school. Probably many of them did not know the exact extent of the damage resulting
from the earthquake, if it was possible to measure it at all. They simply escaped from their
houses or rooms. They did not know what would happen next. Pushed together, treated
in the first instance as an undifferentiated group of individuals to be spread out across the
gym floor, distinctions and differences started to grow up. These were distinctions and
differences which worked in several ways, socially, materially, and spatially.
One of these is entirely consistent with the argument made by Callon and Latour.
For as they tried to maintain a kind of family life, people started to use the available
materialsöand to make spaces with those materials. They started to delegate. The car
and the tent provided ways of doing this by dividing up space so that they could keep
away anybody except family members. It made a difference to them whether they were
in the school gym or a car in the schoolyard. It is tempting to say that cars and tents
made private space, whereas the gym was a public space. But this is perhaps not quite
right. To be in a gymnasium with other people makes us very private in a sense,
because the physical gaps between the groups mean we can always see the distance
between our own family and others. Conversely, to be in a car sometimes means being
very public, because people in the car can see out, and many `strangers' in the school-
yard can see in. So a space changes its meaning according to whether you can see out
and whether people outside can see in.
But there were other forms of differentiation going on that relate to materials and
spacesöbut less directly. For instance, as I have noted, the teacher who came into the
sumo wrestling area could not count or make lists of the names of the refugees at that
moment. He lacked the time, the resources, and the materials. He just calculated the
number of `bodies' of refugees in a very rough way irrespective of their names, sex, age,
occupation, income, the extent of damage to their houses, or their prospects with regard
to future living conditions. They were simply `refugees' and they were counted exactly
equally. In these undifferentiated conditions there was perfect anonymity. People were
distributed across an empty space. They were considered refugees because they were in a
junior high school which had been designated as a public shelter to cope with the
emergency. But anonymity was not possible for very long in the shelter: within a month
or so we had started calling each person by name. This meant that we started identifying
and classifying each person in terms of the damage to their houses or by their estimated
income and how necessary it was for them to stay in the shelter. Materials, which up until
then had been unrelated, entered into this form of division too öbut much less directly.
Either way, perhaps the concept of the `big family' catches what is important about
this process of individualisation: we were not strangers to each other for we lived in this
school sharing `domestic' work. On the other hand, we were different from `outside'
people: space and materials propelled processes of identification and individualisation.
On 1 February a teacher of the junior high school announced at a meeting that we
could cover the wooden floor of the gymnasium with plastic insulating boards which a
firm of building materials suppliers would make available within a few days. On
2 February some people suddenly brought to our shelter many of the insulation
boards, so that each refugee had two boards. They put them on the wooden floor
and sat or lay down on them. After that, by 9 February the plastic boards that the
teachers had talked about had arrived. I found, the next morning, that the wooden
floor of the gymnasium had been separated into many square spaces with the boards
propped upright. Each board was 182 cm long, 91 cm wide, and 2.5 cm thick. They
were not put onto the wooden floor but were made into structures 91 cm high by fixing
them together with parcel tape. So part of the wide space of the gymnasium was
208 T Harada

separated into small sections. These separated spaces existed for over six months until
the shelter was closed in August.
Story 2
On 19 February, Ms D, a middle-aged woman, said to me, ``We have a problem with
strangers who are entering this shelter and using the free telephones and washing
machines.'' She asked me to make ribbons which all the members of the shelter could
wear as identification.
On 22 February we made and delivered the same number of red ribbons as there were
refugees in the shelter.
On 26 February, Ms D said to me, ``The ribbons don't work ... I saw a stranger putting
on a red ribbon and using the free telephone in the shelter.''
On 27 February, Mr E, a middle-aged man, said at the meeting, ``It is difficult to keep an
eye on the `strangers' walking into the shelter, much less to caution them.'' He worked
elsewhere at night, and was able to keep an eye during the day on the floor and the small
spaces separated by the plastic boards.
On 16 February we started to inform the head office for disaster management by fax of
the number of refugees in our shelter. Then we started making a list of refugees.
More materials. So what was the role of the plastic boards in the public shelter? There
are various answers. For instance, they were high enough to shelter people from the
cold winter draughts, whilst, at the same time, they were low enough for a person to
see what other people were doing, their family belongings, and to hear their voices. But
you could not see all the belongings within each space or hear low voices.
We started to talk about the spaces as particular people's `houses'. These small areas
represented the construction of `private space' in the `public shelter'. So the `public'
shelter changed to a collection of private spaces: you could not freely enter a square
surrounded by four boards because it belonged to a `specific' family or person. Their
belongings lay on the floor covered by a board, and at night they lay down and slept
there. But what, here, is the distinction between public and private? How should these
tiny spaces on the gym floor be described? They were a small part of the junior high
school, a small part of the wooden floor, a small part of the basketball court, small
spaces surrounded by several plastic boards but with no ceiling, a shelter from the cold
and wind, small spaces for sleeping and eating for family members only, places for
chatting with other refugees, spaces necessary for being registered as a member of the
public shelter, and prospectively spaces necessary for getting the right to move into
temporary public housing. And, moreover, they were an open and public space which
anybody could look into. They were, at the same time, material, social, and political.
And they were materials which had the symbolic meaning of `misery' after a disaster in
a metropolitan area. Materials, then, were working in complex and subtle ways.
If the boards became important markers of difference between members of the
shelter, then what about the ribbons? Here the effect was somewhat different. The
primary intention of the ribbon system was to limit membership, but we had no secure
way of delivering the ribbons to people, and we had no gate or checkpoint for checking
the exact correspondence between ribbons and membership. So, in fact, they were
materials which made a relationship between human beings and the space within
shelter. The red ribbons indicated that all the people who wore them on their shoulders
were equal as members of the shelter. So it became a very open and anonymous
system, in that people were generally not asked how they had acquired the ribbons.
Simply showing one was enough to establish membership. They had not limited the
membership.
In the aftermath of a disaster 209

Though it took one month before our shelter eventually arrived at a point where
only established members could use the facilities, and we started sending returns of the
number of refugees each day to the municipal office to get the exact number of lunch
boxes, and sufficient bread and drinks for the next day. By this time our shelter could
identify the refugees who were members without the use of red ribbons. From the
members' point of view, it was understandable to want to exclude `strangers' from the
spaces where they had to live their lives. But it was also understandable that people
outside the shelter should think this was a public space and that the free telephone had
been installed for the benefit of the public in general.
We learn, then, that constructing the public shelter meant balancing the interests of
groups and individuals, visible collectivities and invisible privacy, within a small space
in this `damaged area'. It meant distinguishing between private and publicöthough in
ways which were complex. It meant the gradual mobilisation of increasingly complex
materials in order to make appropriate distinctions. Personal acquaintanceship replaced
red ribbons. And an apparatus of files and reportsötogether with plastic boardsö
distinguished between different members of the `big family'. At this stage another point
which was also developed within actor-network theory (though also within the Fou-
cauldian sociologies) becomes important; that materials in the form of texts are also
important in the process of delegation, in the process of creating structures, social
distinctions, which transcend particular times and places.(2) Except, to be sure, what
it means to be in place also starts to become more complex. Spaces become multiple,
perhaps multi-topological,(3) for networks imply the possibility of proximity or distance
in an informational as well as a geographical sense (see Thrift, 1996).

The `damaged area' and the `outside'

Story 3
Many people who lived outside the most damaged area came to our shelter night and
day to bring water, food, clothes, portable body warmers, and other thingsöeven though
they often lived in areas that had sustained damage themselves. They just put them
down, saying little. But they were very keen to see what was stocked in our storehouse.
And some of them seemed disappointed to see that the same things were already stocked
in our storehouse in large quantities.
The meaning of bringing goods to a shelter, for example a bottle of water, was in fact
lost the moment they saw the storehouse. This was the moment when the `social'
meaning or relations were constructed. Their motive for bringing a bottle of water a
long way was to assist the refugees visibly by the act of bringing öon the grounds that
we lacked water. Sometimes we told them that it would be better if they could take
them to other shelters. But I felt somewhat uneasy saying this.
Story 4
On 11 February I went to a gymnasium of another junior high school in the same city
with four voluntary staff of the shelter. It was located in a rather remote area. It was 112
hour's drive from our shelter during which we looked through the windows at the normal
scenery of modern Japan, with every building standing upright. In the gymnasium we
found a great pile of hundreds of boxes and parcels on the wooden floor. Several women
there were struggling to sort through the material from each box. One of the staff said to
us, ``Feel free to take anything you need.'' But there were only a few things already sorted
near the walls. We tried to find things that we needed in our shelter and did find some.
On 25 February we opened 200 parcels sent by anonymous people all over Japan and
delivered to our shelter from the municipal office. In the parcels, we found new clothes,
stationery such as notebooks and pencils, new household goods such as towels, and new
(2) The argument about the importance of texts is developed by Latour (1990).
(3) The point has been developed in Mol and Law (1994).
210 T Harada

kitchen utensils such as pans, pots, and kettles. But together with these materials we
found used materials such as harmonicas and recorders, underwear, pans, chipped rice
bowls, etc. And in one parcel box, we found a bundle of local newspapers reporting on
the earthquake with colour photographs of the city destroyed and burning. One of
refugees, who had been organising the materials with me, said, ``It is very tough to see
these newspapers.'' I replied, ``It would be better not to send anything.''
If we had had enough time we could have found everything we needed by checking
hundreds of boxes at another junior high school. But we did not know what was in each
of the boxes, which kind people had sent to the damaged area, unless we opened them
ourselves. These people were able to grasp the meaning of the disaster which had
happened in a different area; they had watched or read about the conditions of the
`suffering people' or `the people in public shelters in mid-winter' via live broadcasts or
newspapers. They sent things which they themselves thought might be useful. This was a
very simple expression of their sympathy, but these people were not living in the area
damaged by the earthquake themselves, and they identified themselves as people living
`outside the damaged area' by sending materials. Though they could read the news-
papers and find out what was happening, in fact the disaster itself happened far from
the places where they lived. I could not imagine why people should send newspapers
reporting the disaster to the people who were suffering. I suppose it was an attempt to
connect areas which had been damaged with those which were not. For example, `we
know how bad things are for you, and we really sympathise.' But for the refugees these
newspapers had an entirely different meaning. The disaster had really happened to these
people and they could not escape. A bundle of newspaper shows the difference between
those who read about the news and those who appear in the news. This difference consists
of spatial distance which is represented by sending materials and receiving them.
Story 5
On 28 February I saw an elderly woman carrying heavy luggage near the railway station.
``Can I help you?'' ``It is very kind of you.'' We walked to the station platform carrying
the luggage together. ``What is in this luggage? Dishes?'', I asked, ``Yes, I dug them from
my damaged house.'' ``Have you been back there many times?'' ``Yes, we have to a hurry
because our house is to be pulled down soon. My son has been helping me, but today he
is at work. He said not to do it by myself, because I will bother other people.''

I did not ask her, but I was sure that she was staying somewhere outside the `damaged
area' after the earthquake. What made her make many journeys with heavy dishes on
the congested trains and buses? Probably it was a strong desire for continuity in her
daily life. She was one of the people who had fortunately survived a disaster but had
had to abandon their former houses. In addition to the fact that they were alive, they
needed some things which had belonged to them before the quake. Or, rather, our
ordinary lives are constructed by the material objects which we use and which sur-
round us in the house, office, station, etc. The will and the act of bringing back
belongings by onself implies a desire for continuity. Part of the continuity of the elderly
woman's life was represented by the heavy china dishes.
There is one sense in which materials have the same weight and size anywhere on the
earth. But there is another sense in which they achieve their significance relationallyöin
relation to other materials, for instance by being inserted into social networks. Or, as
actor-network theory might put it, by forming `heterogeneous networks' which bring
together and help to create the material and the social. At which point do such materials
begin to make differences and similarities, continuities and discontinuities, both socially
and otherwise? They begin to perform and to create these, so that a bottle of water and a
bundle of newspaper showed the strong concern and worry about the `damaged area'
and `refugees' which were found outside the `damaged area'. And it became impossible to
In the aftermath of a disaster 211

say that the refugees had enough and that they could accept no more. But after
accepting them, those `inside' the `damaged area' had no choice but to stock them
together with many other materials. Though sometimes the refugees rejected them
like the newspapersöand other materials were thrown away too.
So materials created and represented distance and `social' miscommunication. That
is, they created difference. But at the same time materials sometimes represented
family continuityöor the continuity of an individual's life, by being carried from the
`inside' to a safe place on the `outside'. Thus it seems, as I mentioned above, that a
small china dish was able to represent the past decades, though the house or other
belongings no longer existed

Space and materials

Story 6
On 13 February, a woman, one of the refugees of the shelter, took a helmet covered with
mud from her destroyed flat. She put her shoes in the helmet. ``Are you riding a
motorcycle?'' I asked her. ``Yes'', she said, ``I'll ride my motorcycle if I can find the
key.'' She had dug her helmet out and found her shoes, but hadn't found the key.
It would have been all right if she was not able to find the key, because it is possible to
make a new key for the motorcycle. But I was impressed by her act itself. How would
you feel while digging out your belongings from the destroyed area where you used to
live? Digging up things covered with mud is a brave and assertive action, because it
confirms that your house is no longer there.
Story 7
On the evening of 31 March I was going home from the shelter. A 5 year-old boy living with
his father, mother, and a younger sister in the shelter, asked me, ``Where are you going?''
``I'm leaving,'' I said. ``To where?'', he asked. ``To my house,'' I replied. After a moment, he
said, ``My house ... collapsed.'' I couldn't say a word. His 3 year-old sister, who had been
following us, said ``Take me to your house!'' I just left the shelter without saying a word.

It was very simple: I had a house to sleep in and could `escape' from the shelter, and they
had not, and could not. Before this conversation he probably had no idea about the fact
that I had a house to sleep in and to which I could freely escape from the shelter.
Once I had a chance to visit their ruined house to fetch a wooden chest before it was
due to be pulled down. I hesitated to walk into the house wearing shoes, but they seemed
not to mind. (Under normal circumstances we Japanese never enter houses with our
shoes on.) The chest was to be the only possession to survive the disaster, that is, if they
could obtain a new house. If I had taken the two children to my house, what would have
happened? They might have felt ambivalent about the the relation between the public
shelter and my house. They might have been at a loss as to where to stay. Moreover, I
would have been at a loss about myself: was I a volunteer even in my house? If not, who
was I? What about other children? My `social' role and relations with refugees were valid
only in the shelter/school.
Gradually the shelter became a more and more closed space. There were many
refugees. There was a schoolyard, a gymnasium, and within it many plastic boards,
ribbons, telephones, a fax machine, temporary toilets, water supplied by a wagon, and
the delivery of lunch boxes, bread, and drinks. We put up a number of notices
announcing details of dentists, surgeons, shops, and public baths ... . All these materi-
als helped to construct the `public' shelter. Some of them belonged to the junior high
school, but the space within these materials was the public shelter. In other words,
through the process of making private spaces for themselves in the shelter, the refugees
and voluntary staff were able to reconstruct their individuality and `social' context: the
212 T Harada

refugees lived and spent their time there. This suggests that `individuality' makes sense
only in a `social' context, and the ordeal of seeking continuity in our daily life is also
part of the process of individualisation. But, in conformity with actor network's
concern with material relations, I would also like to suggest that we construct ourselves
and we are constructed both `socially' or `individually' in space and with relations with
the materials. Even in the `damaged area', a walk that lasted just thirty minutes was
enough to change the meaning of one personömyself. I became conscious of the double
meaning of myself after the conversation with the small boy and his sister: I was `inside'
the `damaged area', but outside the `shelter'. The woman's action of digging a helmet
from her former apartment suggested a commitment to the continuity of her daily life ö
though not to the place where she had lived before the quake. The small boy and his
sister might think that they lived in the school/shelter as members of a `big family'. But
from my point of view, the public shelter had to be seen as a temporary space for
emergency use. Many of the materials we used belonged to the school and I felt that I
could not support their daily life for long.
The sentence I quoted in the first paragraph, ``Have you ever slept in a gymnasium'',
represents all of these processes. This remark is powerful because it shows the relation
between space and materials: the shape of the disaster is perfectly summarised here. In
this context, her second remark, ``one month, two months ... . My back and legs hurt
constantly at the time'', is the key to reducing the complexity of the disaster to something
that can be grasped as her personal experience. She transformed her first remark into her
personal experience of physical pain lasting several months. This is the process of
individualisation of the `social' disaster. I myself knew of the processes and conditions
of the shelter, having experienced them for over seven months (this knowledge which
made it impossible for me to reply). Her personal experience would show, besides her
private physical and mental meaning, the `social' meaning of the disaster in its exact scale.
The relations between the spaces and materials in a public shelter show that our `social'or
`individual' relations are always constructed and transformed by space and materials.
Acknowledgements. I would like to thank all concerned with the public shelter in Nishinomiya City.
I learned from them and probably found out what it means to really live in this overly materialistic
world. I also thank Professor John Law, Lancaster University, who showed me how is it possible to
research and describe this messy, complex world, Jerry S Eades, Professor of Shiga University, who
checked my first draft, and the referee of the journal, who gave me helpful comments.
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