An individual research project that explores everyday practices and activities in altered environments after the TEPCO's nuclear disaster in 2011. I am interested in practices and experiences related to eating, maintenance and care of life spaces, and pasttime, in particular the aspect that how people are engaged to human and nonhuman beings in the surrounding environnment through these activities. Currently I am writing an article about mushroom collection and production in wild, semi-wild, and artificial settings.

Some of the outcomes of this project include:

• Tomoko Sakai (2025), Dwelling in a post-fallout landscape: Re-shaping and sustaining life in a former evacuation zone in Fukushima. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (currently online early view, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70013)

• Tomoko Sakai (forthcoming), When pollution goes feral: Living with the gifts of the mountains in a post-fallout landscape. Cultural Anthropology (The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, in Japanese).

Currently this research project is funded by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP25K04658.

Northern Ireland, under British rule, experienced over 30 years of conflict starting in the late 1960s, with working-class urban residential areas (low-income neighborhoods) becoming the front lines of the conflict. I have been conducting fieldwork in this region since the early 2000s, investigating everyday life during the conflict and in the post-conflict period. The outcomes of this research project include: 

• Sakai, Tomoko (2022) Humour and the plurality of reality: Comical accounts from interface areas in Belfast, Social Anthropology, 30(3): 143-160.

• Tomoko Sakai (2015) Everyday Life under a conflict: Memories and narratives of the Northern Irish Troubles (Jinbun-Shoin, Publication in Japanese).

Nearly 30 years after the Belfast "Peace" Agreement, the landscapes of these neighborhoods are still filled with buildings and monuments that evoke the history of conflict and division. In recent years, I have been exploring how embodied experiences of the traces of conflict shape people's memories of the conflict.

This projected started as a reserach group in 2021 which aimed to explore the sensations related to, and concept of, uncleanness and the avoidance of 'dirt', thus bringing new perspective to ethics. The project resulted in the publication of the Rhythm of Unpurity: A Study of Everyday Dirtiness  (Sayusha, 2024, publication in Japanese).