Tsunami Tendenko: A Sociological Critique

Abstract

This paper examines the concept of tsunami tendenko from the disciplinary perspective of sociology. Tendenko as a tsunami evacuation strategy advocates a rapid individual response to an imminent tsunami threat by moving quickly to safety, disregarding others, even one’s own family members. The concept developed within a mature disaster subculture along the eastern coast of Japan as a grassroots response to large repeated tsunamigenic earthquakes in which entire families perished. High death tolls in tsunami events were attributed to the desire of families to reunite before evacuating, thus losing precious seconds and minutes during which they could have fled individually, saving their lives. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, tendenko once again became a topic of interest in the news media and among academic researchers and government officials. In this critique of the concept of tendenko, two basic assumptions are examined: that tendenko is facilitated by the human tendency to act individually rather than collectively in a crisis situation, and that practicing tsunami tendenko will save lives. The study draws upon both basic sociological knowledge of human behavior and the extensive disaster research literature to challenge the first assumption and upon demographic research in Japan to question the second assumption.