We live, it seems, in an age of preparedness. From risk calculations to scenario planning, experts engage in anticipatory governance, bringing the future into the present as a site of intervention, discipline and subject-formation. However, in my ethnographic research in Japan and elsewhere, disaster preparedness educators – city officials, non-profit organisations and community leaders educating lay citizens about preparedness – lament that most people do not engage with preparedness. In response, playful activities have appeared, which teach preparedness through fun. In this article, I argue that taking the fun of playful preparedness seriously reveals a theory of what I call ‘detouring’. In detouring, prepared citizens are made through distractions, rather than disciplinary government. Preparedness educators understand that most people would rather ignore terrifying disasters. Thus, they devise fun strategies to draw people away from their daily concerns so that learning preparedness becomes possible but in a temporary and light-touch way. Furthermore, echoing this approach among my interlocutors, I write in patchwork ethnography ways, appreciating deviations from ‘research’ and ‘the field’ as opportunities for theorisation. Could detouring, then, be a theory for understanding how we face uncertain futures, both as researchers and as people inhabiting this earth?
Chika Watanabe (2026) studied this question.