Corrupt Places

Chapter: “Building legitimacy through the spatial aesthetics of the illicit: non-state urban actors in post-3.11 Japan”

By John Edom with Margrete Bjone Engelien and Hannah Wood, in Francesco Chiodelli, Tim Hall and Ray Hudson (eds), The Illicit and Illegal in Regional and Urban Governance and Development: Corrupt Places, Routledge, 2017.

Book available here.

An abandoned department store at the main intersection in the historic centre of Ishinomaki, the built gradient from public to private exposed by the destruction of neighbouring buildings. Photo: Hannah Wood (2015)
A weekend play event for local children, temporarily occupying streets usually reserved for traffic. Photo: Margrete Bjone Engelien (2015)

This chapter examines how aesthetic and spatial interventions employed in urban recovery in Ishinomaki following the Great Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 refer to at times contradictory frameworks for understanding the licit and the illicit in contemporary Japanese society, in particular how these interventions build legitimacy through a ‘redistribution of the sensible’.

Ishinomaki Laboratory benches on Nakaze Island, Ishinomaki. Photo: John Edom (2015)
A shaded alleyway leading to an inner courtyard in Higashimatsushima, a suburb of Ishinomaki. Photo: Hannah Wood (2015)

The article focuses on the spatio-linguistic concepts of omote and ura, that inscribe licit and illicit values into understandings of urban space, the emergence of non-state groups as legitimate urban actors in Japan, and the exceptional spatial, social and economic conditions engendered by 3.11, as well as the potentially exclusionary consequences of the actions and interventions of these groups in the urban space of Ishinomaki.