Nietzsche was close to the tragic end of his lucid existence when he reflected that, ‘this absurd state of affairs must speedily be brought to an end; we are skating upon very thin ice, and the warm breeze of a thaw is blowing.’ This reflection foreshadowed his own future and the world’s. It would take a few more decades before the the Great War arrived and the ice cracked.

With the impending anniversary of Japan’s triple disasters, this piece reflects on an important lesson I learnt from the research I did on the Fukushima nuclear accident: some things break. On 11 March 2011, a huge earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a massive tsunami that struck the Tohoku region.

This piece was first published in The Japan Times in late January 2021. The year 2020 undoubtedly defied expectations and predictions. Yet as a new year commences, the experience has not deterred many from offering predictions about what is coming next. While it might be tempting to decisively announce that the world after COVID-19 will be fundamentally different, it really is impossible to say.

This piece was first published on E-IR. An important truism within disaster studies is that all disasters are human-made. What this insight conveys is that how people act – before, during, after – plays a crucial role in shaping how a disaster unfolds, even if the trigger is from nature.

Welcome to ‘Imperfect notes on an imperfect world’, an open-ended experiment sharing my writing on this platform. I am a scholar based in Japan, my research and teaching draw on politics, ethics, sociology and related fields. The title hopefully gives a bit of a sense of the perspective you can expect here, a sketch book of thoughts and reflections on our world. Humans are wonderfully incomplete, constant works in progress.