Amachan: Japanese TV drama and heritage creation in a post-disaster town

In 2013, the television drama ‘Amachan’ won the favours of Japanese viewers with record-hitting ratings, and generated a significant tourism growth in the rural area of northeastern Japan, where the drama is set. The story starts before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, and portrays the issues of a small fishing village, such as poverty, depopulation, and the increasing need to rely on domestic tourism for revenue. These needs lead the main characters to re-invent their everyday occupations as tourist attractions during the summer season. Train station employees, female sea-urchin divers (Ama) and even high school students plot and discuss on how to make their village more popular. Amachan offers a deep view on bottom-up management of locality and tradition in the rural, post-disaster Japan. It our aim to analyze how the drama deals with heritage re-invention both within the plot (as the characters struggle to attract tourism) and in its real world effects (as Amachan positively affected tourism). When the media became a means for the recovering area, to attract domestic post-disaster tourism, the Japanese television industry re-imagines history and landscapes to pursue specific narratives where traditional self-representation is re-adapted and merged with new necessities, in order to cater to tourists from all over Japan. This, in turn offers a novel analytical frame to address new creations of heritage in post-disaster narrative.