As part of our ongoing content, we feature authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Today, we are excited to bring you our interview with Naru Fukuchi!

What is your article “Children’s Everyday Actions After Disaster: Cultural Meaning, Developmental Timing, and Moral Agency in Post-disaster Japan” about?

This article explores how children’s everyday behaviors after the Great East Japan Earthquake can be understood not simply as symptoms or “problem behaviors,” but as culturally and developmentally meaningful adaptations.

After the disaster, I visited schools, evacuation shelters, and temporary housing sites throughout Miyagi Prefecture. There, I observed children quietly playing video games together, hiding shoes, giving away sweets, and showing unusual reactions around food and money. At first, I interpreted these behaviors from a psychiatric perspective. However, over time, I began to feel that symptom-based explanations alone were insufficient.

For example, the repeated “shoe hiding” behavior initially appeared to be simple mischief. But when teachers and I explored the behavior more carefully, it seemed that children were repeatedly recreating the emotional experience of “losing something important and finding it again.” Through play, they may have been trying to restore a sense of safety and predictability.

In this article, I interpret these behaviors through the lenses of cultural psychiatry, developmental psychology, and medical anthropology. I wanted to suggest that children are not only passive victims of disaster, but also active participants in rebuilding meaning, morality, and relationships within their communities.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I originally began my career as a pediatrician before moving into psychiatry, and I now work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University, where I practice as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Japan. During graduate school, I specialized in public health and conducted epidemiological research on suicide within communities.

Because of this background, I have long been interested not only in individual psychiatric symptoms, but also in community mental health and the social environments that shape people’s wellbeing.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, I joined outreach teams that visited evacuation shelters and temporary housing sites. Later that same year, the Miyagi Disaster Mental Health Care Center was established, and I became one of its founding members. Eventually, I served as the director of the center.

Even now, fifteen years after the disaster, I continue to conduct home visits and school visits in affected communities. Recovery is not simply about rebuilding infrastructure; it is also about how relationships, daily life, trust, and cultural meaning are gradually reconstructed over time.

My research interests include disaster mental health, child and adolescent psychiatry, community mental health, cultural psychiatry, and medical anthropology. I am especially interested in how culture shapes the ways people suffer, recover, connect with others, and rebuild meaning after crises.

What drew you to this project?

Immediately after the earthquake, I entered the field primarily as a child psychiatrist. I was trained to observe psychiatric symptoms and trauma-related reactions, and initially I approached the children in that way.

However, in schools and shelters, I repeatedly encountered situations that could not be fully explained through symptom-based psychiatry alone. There were many phenomena that only became understandable when viewed at the level of the community, relationships, and Japanese society more broadly.

At the same time, I had opportunities to learn about disaster recovery processes in other countries. Through those experiences, I gradually realized how deeply culture and mental health are connected. Every society has its own ways of expressing distress, maintaining relationships, and restoring meaning after disasters.

This led me to ask broader questions: What aspects of Japanese post-disaster recovery are culturally shaped? How are ideas such as harmony, reciprocity, endurance, and collective responsibility formed? And what kinds of support actually help communities recover in culturally meaningful ways?

I also conduct quantitative research and statistical analyses, and I value evidence-based approaches very much. But I began to feel that some realities cannot be fully captured through numbers alone. I wanted to share the interpretations and questions that emerged from my field experiences and invite others to think about them together.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

One of the most memorable experiences for me was the “shoe hiding” phenomenon described in the article.

Teachers at several schools noticed that children were repeatedly hiding each other’s indoor shoes. They felt that something about the behavior was unusual, but they could not fully explain why. Even I initially thought, “This probably has nothing to do with the disaster.”

However, as we explored the behavior together, it gradually became clear that many psychological and symbolic meanings might be embedded within it. The children had all experienced sudden loss during the tsunami. Important things had disappeared instantly and unpredictably.

I eventually began to understand the repeated cycle of “losing and finding” as a form of post-traumatic play.

There is actually a story I did not include in the paper. At one point, we intentionally introduced a playful “Easter egg” activity in which children hid and found objects together within a structured game. Interestingly, after that experience, the shoe hiding behavior almost completely disappeared.

That experience left a deep impression on me. It reminded me that children often recover through play, relationships, and shared meaning-making rather than through direct verbal explanation alone.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Recently, I have become very interested in LEGO® Serious Play®. Rather than simply building objects for fun, it is a method that uses LEGO to support communication, reflection, therapy, and team building. I also became a certified facilitator.

I use it in work with children, families, and professional teams. Through these experiences, I have increasingly felt that individual treatment alone has limits. If we truly want to support mental health, we also need to create healthier environments, relationships, and communities.

I am also currently reading Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux, which explores how organizations can be structured around trust, self-management, and shared purpose rather than hierarchy and control. It resonates deeply with my growing interest in how communities and care systems can become more alive and human-centered.

This has made me think more deeply about how people build trust, form connections, and create spaces where they feel psychologically safe. Perhaps that is one reason why I was drawn to LEGO in the first place.

I have also been reading more works in medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry recently, especially writings that explore care, community, loneliness, and social connection in contemporary society.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

I hope readers will become a little more cautious about interpreting children’s behaviors too quickly as pathology or “symptoms.”

Children often express distress, recovery, morality, and hope in indirect ways. Sometimes these expressions appear through play, silence, sharing, rituals, or seemingly strange everyday behaviors.

I hope this work encourages people to ask not only “What symptoms does this child have?” but also “What meaning might this behavior hold within this child’s relationships, culture, and lived experience?”

Children are not simply passive victims after disasters. They are also active participants in rebuilding connection, meaning, and community.