(Tierney & Oliver-Smith, 2012). Emotional signs such as anxiety, depression and grief, as well as behavioural effects such as sleep and appetite changes, ritualistic behaviour and substance abuse are also common (Lindell & Prater, 2003). The earthquake and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan had not only physical and socioeconomic impacts such as income and job losses, but also psychological and physiological impacts in terms of health impairments such as fear and anxiety related to mental distress from fatalities, injuries or radioactive contamination (Rehdanz et al., 2015). There are also psychosocial impacts with long-term adaptive consequences such as changes in risk perceptions and increased hazard intrusiveness (Lindell & Prater, 2003). Often stories around the recovery of communities following an earthquake emphasize how they overcame physical impacts, paying less attention to psychosocial recovery. In fact, the disaster management literature often portrays well-being of communities as something secondary to the management of physical impacts of earthquakes (Tierney & Oliver-Smith, 2012). However, from a destination and place perspective, both are equally important and deeply intertwined.
The psychological impacts, including well-being, are often understated but require greater attention in disaster management models. Yet, there is no consistency in the literature neither on the extent to which community well-being can be affected nor on the length of time it takes for communities to recover (Prayag et al., 2019a). For example, a study on the psychological adaptation of those affected by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 in Japan, shows that 16 years later, residents with at least one immediate family member who died in the earthquake reported lower life satisfaction, more negative effects and more health problems (Oishi et al., 2015). While it is well established that victims tend to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depressive symptoms, there are also stories of personal growth over time (Lowe et al., 2013). Strong evidence exists to suggest that life satisfaction and well-being decreases substantially in places closer to the disaster (Rehdanz et al., 2015). However, culture has a significant role to play in both recovery of individuals and communities (Palm, 1998) as well as future risk perceptions. Rehdanz et al. (2015) found that residents’ evaluation of their overall quality of life after the Fukushima disaster was marginally lower and they attributed this to the Buddhism and Daoism philosophical traditions, emphasizing the dialectical nature of things. East Asians, for example, display a high degree of equanimity in the face of negative emotions and events (Rehdanz et al., 2015). However, in a contrary study on the well-being of elderly survivors from the same disaster, Sugano (2016) suggested that psychological well-being and health of survivors changed little compared to pre-disaster levels arguing that the state of the Japanese economy is potentially a reason to explain why life satisfaction was not significantly affected by the earthquake.
At the destination level psychosocial issues during the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand have been well documented (Becker et al., 2019). In a review of 31 papers on the psychological impacts of the Canterbury earthquakes on mental health, Beaglehole et al. (2019) found that the mental health of people was affected and strategies needed to be implemented to enable communities to respond to psychological distress. The Canterbury well-being survey which has been ongoing since the initial earthquake, specifically indicated that aftershocks were a major source of anxiety in the greater Christchurch population, with the worst anxiety levels occurring approximately 18 months after the initial mainshock (Morgan et al., 2015). In helping to facilitate community recovery, strategies included community access to free counselling, extended general practice consultations and health promoting initiatives (Beaglehole et al., 2019). The authors argue that these facilities and initiatives had the possible effect of lowering the adverse consequences of the earthquakes on mental health. In addition, social relationships have been found to be the strongest predictor of subjective well-being following disasters (Diener & Seligman, 2002). This issue is discussed in more depth below in relation to earthquakes and resilience.
The existence of prolonged aftershocks that result in communities going through periods of impact, response and recovery several times has not received significant attention in the emergency and disaster management literature (Becker et al., 2019), nor in terms of the effects on tourism (Mazzocchi & Montini, 2001; Mazzoni et al., 2018). As a result, many disaster management models, including those in tourism, tend to be relatively static. Another significant omission in these models is that issues of self-efficacy, empowerment, optimism, innovative thinking, selfesteem, agency, decision making and perceptions are often considered in isolation from business and physical impacts in terms of understanding how people cope with shock, disturbances and stressors (Brown & Westaway, 2011). Increasingly, emphasis needs to be placed in these models on the adaptation of individuals, organizations and communities to changed circumstances, and therefore the idea of bouncing back to a pre-earthquake reality, which is contested in the resilience literature as will be discussed later, should be viewed through a resilience thinking lens (Hall et al., 2016; Hall et al., 2018). These models often also ignore that some individuals and communities can have a ‘fresh start mindset’, which is the belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of past or present circumstances (Price et al., 2018). This mindset is related to the ability of individuals to choose to reinvent themselves by initiating new goals and adopting new lifestyles to create different futures.
To this end, disaster management and recovery models, and the role of tourism within them, should explicitly account for psychosocial recovery and building resilience. Psychosocial recovery has linkages to the psychological resilience of community members and emotional attachment to places that contribute to psychosocial recovery and which is also very significant in the tourism literature as well, both in terms of residents of a destination as well as visitors (Amsden et al., 2010; Kamani-Fard et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2019). The positive psychology literature abounds with studies arguing that psychological resilience allows individuals to cope with adversity and positively adapt to a changed reality (Kimhi, 2016; Hall et al., 2018). A high level of community resilience enhances individual’s coping during stressful situations and is therefore instrumental in faster post-stress recovery (Sherrieb et al., 2010; Chowdhury et al., 2019). Indeed, as Hall et al. (2018: 155) concluded
A resilient community, organisation or destination requires strong interconnectivity. This is similar to individual resilience which is much dependent on formal and informal relationships (Biggs et al., 2012). Nevertheless, social capital requires skilful investment and management for accumulation for use in times of need (Reich, 2006). Therefore, the development of trust between actors and actor engagement and learning are important for resilience (Adger, 2000), especially because when actors trust one another there is an increased likelihood of working towards common goals and outside everyday silos (Hall, 2008). From a tourism perspective, this should not be regarded as a surprising observation; rather it should be standard tourism planning and business practice. Perhaps, as in many things, the focus needs to be not so much on finding new ways to do things but on making sure that the strategies that we know work and helping to ensure that tourism businesses, employees and destinations survive and grow: collaboration; providing a decent standard of living and quality of life for employees and managers; developing trust and talking between actors; and caring about customers, staff and the community.
Earthquakes and Impacts on the Tourism System
Earthquakes have profound effects on all parts of the tourism system. However, the literature examining how tourist destinations, businesses and individuals prepare for, cope, and adjust to disasters is limited (Khazai et al., 2018) and, arguably, that on tourist generating regions, transit regions and competitor destinations and attractions, as well as the tourists themselves, even more so. The focus of earthquake and tourism research tends to be at the destination level. In one sense this is not surprising given that the vulnerability of the tourism industry, at the destination scale, is substantially related to perceptions of safety, functioning infrastructure and visitor accessibility and mobility (Laws & Prideaux, 2005; Hall et al., 2018), all of which can be severely impacted by earthquakes. This perhaps explains the recent effort of many destinations
