Disaster recovery requires a vision of the community. This study will introduce the concept of 'symphonicity' which can be defined through the use of a 2X2 table. One axis of the table includes voluntary and pre-voluntary type societies corresponding to intentional and unintentional societies, respectively. The other axis includes the traditional distinction between community and association or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft." Symphonicity, lies in the voluntary-community cell, which can be realized by moving the society either from voluntary-association or from pre-voluntary-community. However, moving a society from one quadrant to the other requires effort and vision. The authors of this study have been conducting fieldwork in Noda Village, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and have identified two possible tools for community recovery. One is a movement to establish a community-radio-station for which various village groups produce their own program; while the other is "Picturescue" in which volunteers picked up tsunami-damaged photos taken before the tsunami and returned them to the original owners. Our participant observations revealed that these two activities motivated the survivors toward Symphonicity: community-radio led survivors to establish a sense of community with local pride, while Picturescue reminded survivors of the community before the disaster, further reinforcing their rationale for choosing to remain in the community. The socio-psychological and practical implications for utilizing such tools for recovery are discussed.

Following the East Japan Great Disaster and Tsunami in 2011, research have focused on the recovery of tsunami-damaged family photos by volunteers organizing "Photo Restoration Gatherings". This research have by and large focused on the photos themselves, or the volunteers engaged in the recovery, but not the survivors. Few studies on disaster recovery have tended on how the narrative and the remembrance of pre-disasters may affect the survivors. This study examined how the survivors react to viewing family photos that had been recovered from the tsunami by volunteers of the photo restoration gatherings. This study was carried out over a year through fieldwork in gatherings in Noda village, a tsunami stricken area. Four ethnographies were conducted, demonstrating that during the recovery phase, the survivors suffered not only from "the first loss" consisting of physical loss of losing loved ones and possessions, but also from "the second loss" which was anxiety of losing the memories pertaining to the subjects of "the first loss". This study reveals how the photo restoration gathering can counter "the second loss" through encouraging "collective memory" and "unintentional remembering".

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