Article in Preparation: “Post-Humanity Crisis on the Isle of Green: Disaster and Recovery After the 1785 explosion of Japan’s Aogashima Island.” (Working Title)

When the earth trembles without warning, the “natural” disasters that ensue are never entirely natural. The 1875 explosion of Aogashima, an island located some 300 km south of the Japanese main islands, was a disaster that unfolded along the fault lines of social control, political fragmentation, and the whims of tectonic activity. This contribution examines the slow-moving crisis of yearlong eruptions and the ultimate displacement of an entire local community, as well as decades-long attempts at re-colonization of an arid volcanic isle. Based on official correspondence between the disaster’s onset and the marginalized refugee community’s official return to Aogashima five decades later, I trace down the ideals and systems of knowledge that informed the emergence of public and private relief systems, and projects to make an arid island arable. Striking at the height of the disastrous Tenmei Famine (1782–87) and carrying through to the crises of the Tenpō era (1830–44), Aogashima’s evacuation and re-colonization offers a local perspective on the evolution of a protective relationship between state, subjects and an increasingly commercialized economy over the decades leading up to Asia’s first industrial revolution.