The Sociology of Structural Disaster: Beyond Fukushima provides a sociological framework of structural disaster to better understand extreme events and disasters such as Fukushima, considering their socio-political and historical contexts. The author of this book, Miwao Matsumoto, is an emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo. His professional fields are sociology of science and technology, sociology of the global environment, sociology of science, and comparative social history of technology, and he argues that traditional concepts such as “risk society” and “risk sociology” may have limitations when it comes to analyzing specific cases of extreme events and disasters. By employing the concept of “structural disaster,” this book addresses diverse issues related to Fukushima, revisiting historical, political, and social dynamics, and also unpacks factors underlying the disaster. Matsumoto not only focuses on the Fukushima disaster itself but also examines the wider historical and institutional contingencies associated with it.
