The ghosts of Ishinomaki: space, hauntings, and the materialized absences of disaster

Ishinomaki is a city of 150.000 people, in Tohoku, Japan. It is infamously famous for being the city with the most casualties in the 2011 Eastern Japan triple disaster: a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, a more than 30 metres high tsunami, and a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. My contribution aims utilizing the geographies of affect and post-disaster to look at how cities can be haunted by the ghost of disaster, trauma and loss. I will look, on the one hand, at how absences are materialized in the ghostscape of Ishinomaki: as the city was partially destroyed, many moved out, leaving the city centre depopulated and abandoned. On the other hand, I will look at how the narratives and ghost stories built around the disaster add a new layer of spectrality to the city.