“The next disaster happens when people have forgotten about the last one.” Passing on disaster lessons to the next generation is one of IRIDeS’s missions. Based on field studies on disaster monuments, festivals, and ceremonies all over Japan, the folklorist Professor Shuichi Kawashima has been examining how these are utilized to pass on disaster recollections.

In 1860, a fatal landslide occurred in the Sanzengouchi district of Otaomachi, in Nagasaki Prefecture. To commemorate the dead, there is a custom in the district of distributing a type of steamed bun called “Nenbutsu-kou Manju” on the 14th of every month, 14th being the date on which those who had died in the disaster were discovered. No particular explanation of why the buns are handed out on that day is available, and the original meaning of the ceremony has become relatively obscure. However, although the event has, so to speak, become a custom, the food fascinates children in particular. Professor Kawashima considers that children who receive steamed buns on a regular basis learn the true meaning of the custom and learn about disaster at a certain stage. This knowledge then feeds into disaster prevention in the locality. The fact that this district saw no fatalities in the torrential rains that occurred here in 1982 has drawn a good deal of attention.

The Jizo-bon Festival is held on August 23, 24 every year at Osaka’s Taisho Bridge, to commemorate the victims of the 1854 earthquake and tsunami. There is a stone monument with inscriptions detailing the past tsunamis, named “Jizo-san” [a Buddhist deity who protects children]. Every year, inscriptions are made in black ink. In the process, people come to understand and learn about the circumstances of the time the disaster happened. Offerings are made to the dead and then distributed in the district. Local people believe that because they hold a memorial service for the dead at the Jizo-bon Festival, the dead do not curse or haunt them. At the same time, those who receive the offerings learn about past tsunamis without having experienced them. Jizo-Bon is largely a children’s festival and promotes disaster prevention education right from childhood.

In Japan, death in a disaster is seen as abnormal, and those lost in disasters have been offered memorial services for long. According to Professor Kawashima, the inner motives of the people offering these services are actually those of achieving secular benefits through religious practice and avoiding being cursed or haunted by the dead. Yet, caring for the dead leads people to envision disasters that happened in the past.

Professor Kawashima also points out that while commemorative monuments and memorial monuments for tsunamis tend to be confused with each other, they are different. Commemorative monuments are generally built by the local administration. They assume a timeline running straight from the past into the future, and as such, they bear messages addressed to the future, intended to educate future generations about past events and enable them to learn from those events. Memorial monuments, on the other hand, are built as a result of prayers for the repose of the souls of the disaster victims, and they assume a recursive, circular timeline. They are built to address the people of the past. Commemorative monuments tend to be forgotten with the passage of time, but memorial monuments, through their regular cycle of annual ceremonies, turn people’s minds toward the victims of disasters. Professor Kawashima believes that memorial monuments have a greater impact in transmitting awareness about disasters to subsequent generations. There are also cases of memorials being built as commemorative monuments but ending up being treated as memorial monuments.

Because people forget things, they come up with ways to preserve their memories. In order to achieve effective disaster prevention, it is not enough to just understand the physical phenomena. We need to have an in-depth awareness of how people live their lives. How have people who survived a disaster thought of the dead? How have they passed on their experiences of the disaster? Finding answers to these questions can offer us clues on how to pass on the memories of past disasters to future generations. Looking at the customs commemorating the dead from disasters all over Japan, Professor Kawashima intends to shed further light on them from the perspective of disaster prevention.