¹ The author would like to thank everyone in Yamada for their willingness to share their stories and especially Shimizu Seisho and Shimizu Noriko for hosting her during fieldwork. I am also indebted to Alexander Balistreri, Lodewijk Brunt, Tom Gill, Peter Kornicki, Barry Plows, Morioka Rika, and David Slater for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

² Asterisks indicate pseudonyms.

³ Yamada-machi had about 20,000 inhabitants before the earthquake; on October 1, 2011 there were 17,735 registered. (accessed October 7, 2011).

⁴ See e.g.: Lynn Blinn-Pike, “Shelter Life after Hurricane Katrina: a Visual Analysis of Evacuee Perspectives,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters Vol. 24, No. 1 (2006), pp. 303-330.

⁵ Linda Jencson, “Disastrous Rites: Liminality and Communitas in a Flood Crisis”, Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2001), p. 51.

⁶ Susanna Hoffman, “The Regenesis of Traditional Gender Patterns in the Wake of Disaster,” Anthony Smith and Susanna Hoffman eds, The Angry Earth. Disaster in Anthropological Perspective (London: Routledge 1999), p. 174.

⁷ Data as of December 19, 2011; they exclude the district of Toyomane, a village further inland that had merged with Yamada in 1955. (accessed December 28, 2011).

⁸ A Zen Buddhist temple. http://www.ryushotemple.sakura.ne.jp/index.ht ml (accessed July 7, 2012).

⁹ Minami shōgakkō or Southern Elementary School; hereafter: Minami Elementary.

¹⁰ Iwate Nippo. 2011. “Yamada de hinanjo seikatsu chōsa. Kenburijji dai kenkyūsha” [Cambridge University researcher conducts study on life in shelters in Yamada], Iwate Nippo 4 June, p. 27.

¹¹ Cf. Brigitte Steger, “Secrets in a tsunami evacuation center,” Anthropology News Vol. 16 (November 2011), http://dev.aaanet.org/news/index.php/2011/11/1 4/november-seaa-news/ (accessed November 23, 2011).

¹² David Slater, “Moralities of Volunteer Aid: The Permutations of Gifts and Their Reciprocals,” Tom Gill, Brigitte Steger and David Slater (eds): Coping with Disaster: Ethnographies from a Tsunami and Nuclear Devastated Japan. Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming.

¹³ Bernet Elzinga and J. Douglas Bremner, “Review: Are the Neural Substrates of Memory the Final Common Pathway in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?” Journal of Affective Disorders No.70 (2002), pp. 1-17.

¹⁴ Due to the blurred memories of my informants the timing of the following events as well as details are unclear.

¹⁵ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo(London: Routledge. 2002 [1966]).

¹⁶ Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan. An Anthropological View(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21-50.

¹⁷ W[alter] L. Hildburg, “Some Magical Applications of Brooms in Japan,” Folklore Vol. 30, No. 3 (1919), pp. 169-207.

¹⁸ Elizabeth Shove, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience. The Social Organization of Normality (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 84.

¹⁹ Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 2.

²⁰ See also Peter W. Kirby, Troubled Natures. Waste, Environment. Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), p. 115.

²¹ Waka osh ō shan. This is a young priest who was working at the Ryūshōji until the end of March. On March 11, the day of the disaster, the Shimizus were out, and only returned late at night using small mountain roads, as coastal streets had been impassable.

²² According to interview with Satō. Satō fled to the temple rather than the town hall, because he had occasionally worked for the osh ō san and knew that the Shimizus were out that day. He knew the young osh ō san, and thus helped to take care of others immediately.

²³ According to Yamada town hall (accessed October 7, 2011). In the memory of my interviewees, this was considerably later.

²⁴ Shimizu Noriko pointed out to me that for this reason, even several months later, rice was served on small plates rather than in rice bowls.

²⁵ These rice balls were for the employees of the town supermarket who were at that time still working in two small places or rebuilding the large supermarket as the first store opening in the center of town in early August. Mase Keizō, the young owner of the supermarket, was also staying at the temple. Shimizu explained to me that they wanted to support him with preparing the onigiri every day, because he worked so hard to provide the town with this important part of infrastructure, and he also often brought special food treats for people in the shelter to enrich their meals.

²⁶ The only context in which people pointed to indigenous or ritual pollution, albeit hardly explicitly, and the need for purification was in dealing with death and bodies. After the disaster, recovering, identifying and transporting bodies from underneath the debris was largely left to the jieitai, while local fire brigades concentrated on finding survivors. Fishermen had returned to the sea to rebuild the rafts for aquaculture, but there was no fishing going on in Yamada bay. Noone went to swim for fear of encountering bodies or body parts floating in the water. At the temple, ashes were delivered to the temple after dark and people were very keen to get advice on how to deal with the ashes and funeral rituals correctly. Many said that they sensed the ghosts that haunted the ruins of the town. In this article, however, I concentrate on cleanliness in everyday life in the shelter.

²⁷ Anpanman (first published in 1973) is the most popular animation and merchandise character for young children in Japan. In the stories, the hero Anpanman (bean paste bread man) fights against the villain Baikinman (germ/bacteria man) and his friends. The most effective weapons being soap, toothpaste and the like.

²⁸ Adam Burgess and Horii Mitsutoshi, “Risk, Ritual and Health Responsibilisation: Japan's ‘Safety Blanket’ of Surgical face mask- wearing,” Sociology of Health and Illness,[published online, 23 March] (2012), pp. 1-15, trace the use of the white mask among the common Japanese back to the outbreak of the Spanish flu in 1919. But it is likely that the origin of the mask as a means of protection against epidemics is in Manchuria, where the Malay-born and Cambridge-trained Chinese doctor Wu Lien-teh (1879-1960) developed and systematized it to be used in the combat against a pneumonic plague epidemic in Harbin in 1911. He later advocated the use of the white gauze mask through the WHO; cf. Wu Lien-teh, Treatise on Pneumonic Plague(Geneva: League of Nations, 1926), pp. 391-99. See also Ohnuki-Tierney, Illness and Culture,pp. 25-6; Kirby, Troubled Natures, p. 116.

²⁹ It is unclear who did this work, but I assume that either the jieitai, town hall officials or volunteers took the initiative.

³⁰ In public toilets, it is common for women to flush the toilet just before using it so that they cannot be heard urinating. To avoid water wastage, many companies, schools and universities use flushing sound devices (oto hime). Notably, a friend told me that during the electricity-saving campaigns in summer 2011, some companies switched these devices off, only to realise that water consumption went up rapidly. These women appear to feel that one of their most intimate activities is being witnessed; they are very embarrassed about it. By contrast, friends or immediate family often use neighboring toilets at the same time.

³¹ Scott Clark, Japan. A View from the Bath(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).

³² As opposed to a real onsen or spa, Shimada kōsen is a cold spring bath, the water being heated up to 43 degree C.

³³ Kuwayama Takami, “‘Gasshuku’ Off-campus Training in the Japanese School,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 1 (1996), p. 121.

³⁴ The recently amended 2005 Basic Plan for Disaster Prevention incorporates specific support for women, such as providing a room for changing clothes and for breastfeeding, the distribution of sanitary items, and the introduction of privacy partitions (see Saito Fumie: “Women and the 2011 East Japan Disaster”, Gender & Development 20:2, 267). Shirato, the town official, also confirmed that he had attempted to introduce partitions, but that the people in the shelter had refused them. He considered that this might have discouraged sexual harassment, since everyone could see everything. Although a small number of people mentioned the topic, I have not heard of any actual incident of sexual harassment at either of the shelters.

³⁵ Both women and men took it for granted that women would do the cooking; this was also the case in other shelters. While the women I talked to did not complain about this, one great frustration was that they were not paid for cooking nor for other household chores that contributed to the community (see Saito, Women and Disaster 2012, p. 269).

³⁶ Cf. Steger, “Secrets”

³⁷ Human Rights Now (2011) [Statement] “Regarding the establishment of evacuation centres with due consideration of the various needs of residents, including those of women,” (last accessed September 11, 2012)

³⁸ Joy Hendry, “Shoes: the Early Learning of an Important Distinction in Japanese Society”, Gordon Daniels (1984 ed.) Europe interprets Japan (Tenterden, Kent: Paul Norbury Publications, 1984), p. 219.

³⁹ See also Saito, “Women and the Disaster” 2011, 267.

⁴⁰ This is in part because women tended to be employed locally and on short-time or part-time employments and most of the little businesses were destroyed by the tsunami. Moreover, government programs to create employment after the disaster concentrated on the construction industry and recovery. From the personal stories I have been told, I understand that men were also advantaged in the areas of employment that were previously done by both men and women.

⁴¹ Wada Hideki, Shinzai torauma (Disaster trauma) (Tokyo: Besuto Shinsho, 2011), p. 131.