渡邉 剛弘

This article examines how a community of oyster farmers in Hokkaido, Japan recovered from the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami, which damaged their aquaculture in Lake Akkeshi. It focuses on how, over the years, nested governance structures facilitated iterative learning, which helped build resilience against unexpected external crises. Drawing on adaptive management and resilience studies, this study examines the historical development of the local fishery cooperative association (FCA) as a series of responses to socio-ecological disasters — responses that this article characterizes as iterative learning. During the recovery after the 2011 tsunami, the FCA functioned as an information hub that directed the flow of knowledge and resources through government and industrial hierarchies, to the benefit of the farmers. This research, conducted between 2015 and 2017, is based on interviews with farmers, cooperative administrators, and government officials, as well as an analysis of archived records, fishery regulations and post-disaster subsidy programs.

In late 1980s Japan, loan sharks surfaced as heroes in graphic novels set in the world of predatory moneylending. A genre of manga about usury gained popularity as monthlies began to run serialized stories that parody class inequality through gratuitous, chauvinistic depictions of sex and violence in the urban underground, while offering an ethnographic view into the lives of hustlers and gangsters, confidence artists and street lawyers. This article examines two usury manga titles as morality tales that speak to the widespread anxiety caused by the personal debt crisis in contemporary Japan. These street usurers point to a desire to escape a foundational ethical code of capitalism: the obligation to reciprocate. Yet this break from debt morality requires a redemption that involves theft, slavery, and death. These manga comment on the forms of debt in Japan's consumer-driven capitalism, as they relate to the postwar labor form and the technology of inscription used in authenticating the identities of economic subjects.