We Live with the Sea

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: "Living with Everything Together" 1

Part I. "What Kind of Town This Was"

1. Histories of Entanglement 37

2. What Happened That Day 61

Part II. A Total System

3. Partitioning the Sensible 89

4. On Higher Ground 118

Part III. Protecting Otherwise

5. Ecologizing Safety 151

6. Political Becoming 178

Conclusion: "A Town Where We Live with the Sea" (Umi to ikiru machi) 201

Notes 211

References 217

Index 237

"Littlejohns sophisticated project returns us to the Japanese village, free of nostalgia yet committed to making sense of the embodied knowledges, practical traditions, and human and non-human relations that organize life there. Deeply ethnographic and attentive to the politics of the everyday, it reveals the complex and conflicted processes of reimagining and restoring fractured infrastructures and reorganizing communities in the aftermath of unimaginable catastrophe."-Christopher T. Nelson, Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill



"Taking us into the debris of progress-modernist seawalls meant to contain the risk of flooding-Littlejohn contrasts their futility with the alternative ways to ecologize safety that local residents have creatively devised. Speaking to the times about the world(s) we should, but often neglect to, seek entanglements with, We Live with the Sea is utterly powerful: a theoretical and ethnographic tour-de-force."-Anne Allison, author of Being Dead Otherwise