The Faultline of <i>Kokoro no Kea</i> : Mental Distress and Post-Disaster Psychosocial Care After the Great East Japan Earthquake
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Japanese concept of “ kokoro no kea” (care for the heart/mind) plays a crucial role in shaping disaster mental health response systems. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent nuclear plant accident, the government quickly implemented kokoro no kea initiatives. However, many locals reported reluctance to seek support from kokoro no kea teams. This article explores therapeutic governance in response to these disasters, a multifaceted, disavowed, and diffusive mode of governing. It highlights how recovery politics emphasized solidarity—referred as “kizuna” (social bonds)—while also gendering and pathologizing women’s fears and anxieties regarding radiation exposure. Through a narrative review of ethnographic studies, this analysis demonstrates that kokoro no kea is not simply a static post-disaster mental health and psychosocial support system; rather, it is an open, fluid, and evolving process where diverse actors—such as politicians, men, women, health professionals, and religious practitioners—interact with socio-political forces and cultural values, creating unique pathways for individuals and communities to foster connections, build trust, and nurture resilience in coping with psychological pain and loss.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".