Disasters and Childbirth Culture in Japan

Research Abstract

(Japan Foundation fellowship from January 2020)

I will explore the long term impact of frequent seismic instability on Japanese cultures of childbirth-care. I plan to collect childbirth stories of women, and of obstetricians and midwives who attended to them in the midst of earthquakes within serious ruptures in techno-medical monitoring and surveillance. My initial analysis of three childbirth stories of women who gave birth during the 11 March, 2011 disasters that I recorded in February 2016, and 11 childbirth stories published in a journalistic book in 2012 yielded results with far reaching implications. These stories reveal that women and care-providers navigated between two different types of risks: risks associated with birth in the techno-medicalised model of care and risks associated with earthquakes. Underlying the safety management imperatives of each are divergent space-time lines. Significantly, the decisions of care providers reveal a hierarchy of risks. Techno-medical surveillance of risk associated with childbirth proved to be secondary to the earthquake risk. Rather than high technologies, it was low-tech necessities that proved crucial for the management of safe births (Siono & Kikuchi 2016). I hope to collect a broader database of care-providers’ and women’s childbirth stories in the midst of crisis, and analyze professional formal discussions about disaster preparedness. My purpose is to assess the long-term impact of frequent earthquakes on professional conceptions of childbirth-risk and on institutional standards of care beyond the crisis. Research significance lies in the combination of two risk perspectives in examining the development of local childbirth models.