Category Archives: Culture

The Heat Didn’t Kill Them. The Gap in Their Preparation Did.

I once stood in a flooded industrial park in Thailand listening to managers say, “We never expected the water to reach here.” I heard the same disbelief, decades later, in a report about a family in Lyon, France, whose apartment had quietly turned into an oven. An 84-year-old grandmother with dementia. A husband on medication that made the heat more dangerous than he realized. A son next door who still couldn’t reach them in time. Outside, 42°C. Inside, 38°C by mid-afternoon. Nobody saw it coming, even though everybody did.

This is the story of Europe’s 2025 heatwave, one of the deadliest on record. But the real story isn’t about heat at all — it’s about gaps, between a warning and an action, between living next door and actually being ready. After twenty years studying disasters, I’ve come to believe those gaps are the most dangerous part of any catastrophe.

When and Where: A Disaster Written in the Sky

From April through September 2025, a “heat dome” — a stubborn zone of high pressure — parked itself over western and southern Europe, trapping warm air and blocking nighttime relief. Climatologists now call it the sixth-deadliest heatwave in recorded world history. The western Mediterranean recorded its highest-ever sea-surface temperature anomaly for any month, part of why nights in Spain, France, and Italy stayed brutally warm.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Imperial College London found that human-caused climate change directly caused most of the summer’s excess heat deaths in European cities. That same summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that access to a safe, healthy environment is an enforceable human right. This was never just weather — it was natural, political, and social at once. The real question is why people died in cities with working alert systems and open hospitals. That’s not a meteorology question. It’s a household one.

Who: The Household Is Where Disasters Are Won or Lost

In my own research on Japan’s 2011 tsunami, I learned that a disaster’s outcome is rarely decided by the hazard alone — it’s decided by conditions already sitting inside people’s homes long before disaster strikes. The Lyon family is almost a textbook case.

Picture a fourth-floor apartment in a 19th-century stone building, built to hold heat through cold winters, with no elevator and no air conditioning. Inside: a grandmother who could no longer reliably feel thirst, a daughter on blood pressure medication, a husband on diuretics that quietly worsen dehydration, and a son next door with no formal plan to check on them. None of these facts alone sounds like tragedy. Together, they form a vulnerability map that fits millions of households across Europe.

Three details struck me. Beta-blockers and diuretics are among Europe’s most prescribed drugs, and both impair the body’s ability to cool itself — yet a simple spring conversation with a doctor about this almost never happens. The old stone buildings so many Europeans love were built to keep heat in, not let it out. And proximity isn’t preparedness: the son lived right next door, yet there was no agreed check-in time, nothing written down. Closeness gave a false sense of security that quietly replaced real planning.

Why It Mattered: When Public Help Is There But Not Reachable

I often use a framework from Japanese disaster studies: jijo, kyojo, kojo — self-help, mutual help, and public help. The 2025 heatwave shows this triangle breaking down in a very human way. Public help was technically present: France issued top-level heat alerts, Lyon activated its heat plan, hospitals stayed open. But “present” and “reachable” turned out to be different things — doctors’ phone lines were jammed for three hours, and emergency rooms were overwhelmed within 48 hours. This is the typical failure mode of any major disaster: public systems work as designed, until everyone needs them at once.

That’s exactly why self-help and mutual-help have to be strong enough to fill the gap — and here, they weren’t, at least not at first. No pre-season heat check on the apartment, no rehydration salts on hand, no registration with the city’s vulnerable-persons registry. What ultimately helped wasn’t a government plan; it was a neighbor who lent her portable air conditioner. Real mutual-help, but it shouldn’t have to depend on luck.

How: What Forensic Investigation Reveals

Looking at this through a forensic lens — tracing root causes instead of settling for the obvious explanation — three things stand out. Heat is an invisible disaster: no flooding water, no shaking ground, no siren, so by the time a family notices something is wrong, hours may have passed. Caregiver exhaustion rarely makes the statistics, yet it’s real — one woman here carried nearly all the caregiving alone for five straight days. And an aging population isn’t just background information; it’s a measurable, foreseeable source of future risk, especially in buildings never built for a hotter world.

What strikes me most: everything this family eventually did — buying a portable air conditioner, setting up twice-daily check-ins, reviewing medications, installing reflective window film — could have happened months earlier, for a fraction of the cost of the crisis it prevented.

Why This Matters to You

I’ve spent much of my career arguing that a disaster’s outcome is shaped less by the hazard itself than by the choices made before it arrives. The 2025 heatwave is one more piece of evidence for that. The heat dome was driven by decades of emissions, beyond any one family’s control. But how that family responded was shaped by choices about medications, buildings, and communication made months earlier — the kind of choices any reader in their twenties, thirties, or beyond can make for an aging parent, a neighbor, or themselves.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction argues resilience is built from the household upward, not handed down from policy alone. I believe that completely. The gap between the alert that reached a phone and the hospital bed that followed wasn’t a failure of warning — it was a failure of preparation. Unlike the climate itself, that gap is one we can close, starting at home, before the next heat dome forms.

Source: When the Heat Dome Becomes a Death Trap: Social Lessons from Europe’s 2025 “Bloody” Heatwave — disasterresearchnotes.site, drawing on the World Meteorological Organization, Copernicus Climate Change Service, LSHTM/Imperial College London, and the International Court of Justice’s 2025 advisory opinion.

When Help Can’t Come: What the 1995 Kobe Earthquake Still Teaches Us About Surviving Disaster

In 15 seconds, 6,434 people lost their lives — and the rescuers who saved the most were not professionals. They were neighbors.
6,434 lives lost in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake80%+ of deaths caused by building collapse and falling furniture1–2% of survivors rescued by professional emergency services

I was in Kyoto that morning

At around 6 a.m. on January 17, 1995, I was just waking up in Kyoto. I remember feeling a faint tremor. I thought it might be a dream. When I walked to the nearby station to check the trains, and then arrived at my office to find no one there, I turned on the television — and saw images I have never been able to forget: elevated expressways on their sides, rows of wooden homes pancaked flat, smoke rising across an entire district of Kobe.

I was working in tourism at the time. That morning changed the direction of my life. I went on to join the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention in Japan, investigating disasters from Katrina to Ondoy to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. I now research disaster resilience at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. And across every disaster I have studied, one truth keeps surfacing: what happens in the first 15 minutes is determined by what people did — or did not do — in the weeks and months before.

Fifteen seconds. 6,434 lives.

At 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, the Nojima Fault ruptured beneath the northern tip of Awaji Island, generating a Japan Meteorological Agency magnitude-7.3 earthquake. The strongest shaking lasted no more than 15 to 20 seconds. But in those seconds, the outcome for most victims was already decided. More than 80 percent of those who died were crushed or suffocated beneath collapsed buildings and toppled furniture — almost all in wooden structures built before Japan’s 1981 earthquake-resistant building code revision. The majority died almost instantly, before any rescue could have reached them. Over 100 fires broke out simultaneously. A 600-meter section of the elevated Hanshin Expressway toppled sideways. Water mains ruptured across the city, leaving fire crews with no water to fight the flames. More than 300,000 people poured into evacuation centers in mid-January cold.

“Kobe did not fail because rescuers were slow. It failed because, when an entire city is struck at once, professional rescue is physically impossible at scale. That was the lesson. It took the world by surprise.”

Who actually saved people?

A post-disaster survey conducted in one Kobe ward asked survivors rescued from collapsed buildings a single question: who helped you get out? The answer was striking. The overwhelming majority were freed by themselves, by family members, or by neighbors — by people who were physically present in the first minutes. Professional rescue services — fire departments, police, the Self-Defense Forces — accounted for only an estimated 1 to 2 percent of rescues in the acute phase.

This is not a criticism of those services. They responded. But roads were blocked, phones were down, and simultaneous structural collapses across an entire metropolitan area created a physical impossibility: no rescue organization, however skilled or well-resourced, can be everywhere at once when an entire city falls. The real rescuers that morning were the neighbors who grabbed bicycle frames and iron pipes to lever beams off pinned family members in the dark.

This single finding — 1 to 2 percent professional rescue — is widely credited as the moment Japan’s disaster policy pivoted permanently toward community-level preparedness. It gave rise to the framework now central to Japan’s DRR thinking: Jijo–Kyojo–Kōjo.

The survival ratio in a city-scale disaster (acute phase)

Self-help (Jijo)  — 70%Mutual (Kyojo)  20%Public 10%

This is not a rigid formula. It is a policy reminder: in the acute phase of a city-scale disaster, survival is predominantly a household and neighborhood question. Public help is essential — but it is slower and finite. Self-help is the foundation that lets you reach the moment when mutual-help and public-help can act.

The Tanaka family: a story rooted in real experience

In my research, I use case-based scenarios to make these dynamics visible. Consider a composite family — based on documented experiences in Kobe’s Nagata Ward — that I will call the Tanaka household. Hiroshi (42), a shoe-factory worker; his wife Keiko (39); their teenage daughter Aoi and young son Ren; and Hiroshi’s mother Sumiko (71), who has limited mobility from arthritis and takes daily blood-pressure medication. They live in a two-story wooden row house built decades before the 1981 code.

When the quake hit, the second floor partially collapsed onto the first. Hiroshi and Keiko were pinned by a fallen wardrobe. Aoi was trapped under a collapsed beam. Sumiko could not move. It took nearly an hour — with neighbors using a bicycle and a length of pipe — to free Sumiko as fire spread through the block. They evacuated barefoot, in nightclothes, in near-freezing air. Sumiko’s medication bottle was buried in the rubble. So were the bank books, the property deed, and the insurance papers.

Every difficulty this family faced was foreseeable. Almost all of it was preventable. That is the defining lesson of Kobe.

What you can do — starting tonight

As a researcher who has walked through disaster zones from New Orleans to the Philippines to Japan’s Tohoku coast, I am often asked what the single most important thing a household can do is. The honest answer is that it is not one thing — but all of the following are straightforward, low-cost, and evidence-backed.

1. Anchor all tall furniture in your bedroom

The number-one killer in Kobe was not the earthquake itself, but falling wardrobes and bookshelves onto sleeping people. An L-bracket costs less than lunch.

2. Place shoes and a flashlight beside your bed

Glass-covered floors in the dark are a serious injury risk after any structural event. Do this tonight before you sleep.

3. Build a 3-to-7-day stockpile of water and food

3 liters of water per person per day, plus food requiring no cooking. In Kobe, water mains in some areas were not fully restored for months.

4. Keep essential medications grab-ready

At least one week of any chronic-disease prescription, children’s inhalers, or blood pressure drugs — in a sealed pouch outside the collapse zone. For Sumiko, this was a near-fatal omission.

5. Digitize your key documents

Photograph your ID, property deed, insurance policies, and bank documents. Store copies in the cloud and with a relative in another city. Lost documents delay every form of recovery assistance.

6. Agree on two meeting points

One just outside the building, one nearby landmark. Assign who is responsible for each vulnerable member. Do not rely on mobile phones — lines fail in disasters.

7. Run a household drill twice a year

A kit you have never practiced with, with expired medication and no agreed plan, is a false comfort. The preparation is the practice.

Mutual-help: the neighbor you know is the neighbor who digs you out

Self-help has limits. Sumiko survived because neighbors came. In modern cities, it is not uncommon to not know the person living next door. But my field research across Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines confirms the same finding repeatedly: communities that recover fastest — and lose the fewest lives in the acute phase — are communities where people already knew each other before the disaster.

You do not need a formal community organization to start. A brief greeting in the elevator. Passing along a neighborhood bulletin with a few words added. Attending one local meeting. These small acts create familiarity — and familiarity, in a disaster, means you are someone a neighbor will think to check on. That is not sentimentality. It is disaster science.

In the months after the 1995 earthquake, over one million volunteers descended on Kobe from across Japan. That outpouring is remembered as the birth of modern volunteer culture in Japan. It was remarkable. But the real mutual-help happened in the first hour — in the hands of people already there, already awake, already digging.

Disasters are social, not just natural

I want to close with something that three decades of research have made impossible for me to ignore. The scale of deaths in Kobe was not determined by the earthquake alone. It was determined by which buildings people were sleeping in, and which neighborhoods they lived in. Homes built before 1981 — concentrated in older, lower-income districts — collapsed at far higher rates than newer structures. The same magnitude of shaking killed far fewer people in neighborhoods with newer construction.

This is the core argument of disaster research as I practice it: the disaster begins before the disaster. Vulnerability — to poverty, to age, to disability, to housing precarity — shapes who is at risk long before any fault line moves. Individual preparedness matters enormously. But so does the society we build together. Ensuring that the most vulnerable households have access to retrofitting subsidies, medication coverage, and document support is not charity. It is evidence-based risk reduction.

At 5:46 a.m. on January 17, 1995, I was in Kyoto and barely noticed the tremor. Most people in Kobe had no warning at all. The question that has driven my research ever since is simple: what, in the days and weeks before that morning, could have changed what happened in those 15 seconds?

The answer — every time — is: quite a lot.

Key takeaway

The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake proved that when a city is struck all at once, professional rescue is overwhelmed within minutes — and the vast majority of survivors are saved by themselves, their families, and their neighbors. Real resilience is built before disaster strikes: anchor your furniture, stockpile for at least three days, protect medications and documents, agree on how to reunite, and practice. Self-help and mutual-help are not substitutes for public assistance — they are what keep you alive until it arrives.

Sources & further reading

Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake documentation: Cabinet Office, Japan (https://www.bousai.go.jp/kyoiku/kyokun/hanshin_awaji/)

Disaster Research Notes (Nakasu): disasterresearchnotes.site (https://disasterresearchnotes.site)

Sendai Framework for DRR (2015–2030): UNDRR (https://www.undrr.org/publication/sendai-framework-disaster-risk-reduction-2015-2030)

Note：

This is my personal experience and knowledge. Disaster preparedness depends entirely on your situation. Please use this article for your reference.

Why Your Culture May Determine Whether You Survive a Disaster

When disaster strikes, we tend to focus on the storm, the flood, or the earthquake itself. But after two decades of fieldwork across Southeast Asia and Japan, I keep coming back to something less visible — and just as powerful: the culture, institutions, and social structures of the communities involved shape survival just as much as the disaster itself.

It’s Not Just About the Disaster

Sociologist Benjamin F. McLuckie compared disaster responses across Japan, Italy, and the United States as far back as the 1970s. His key finding: how centralized a government is — how much decision-making power sits with national versus local authorities — significantly shapes what actually happens on the ground when emergencies unfold.

But culture alone does not explain everything. What really drives outcomes is a three-way mix of culture, institutions, and technology. A community that values collective action still needs neighborhood associations, shelters, and early warning systems to turn that value into real protection. Without those structures, values remain just values.

What I Found in the Field

My work on the 2011 Thailand floods — which disrupted global supply chains and devastated communities around industrial parks — brought this home clearly. Social cohesion and local governance structures were just as predictive of recovery as physical flood barriers. Through the Japan-Thailand SATREPS collaboration, my colleagues and I developed community capacity assessments and social vulnerability indices to help local leaders act before the next disaster, not scramble after it.

What struck me most was this: communities with strong internal networks recovered faster, not because they had more resources, but because they already knew how to work together.

The New Orleans Lesson

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, researchers noticed that Vietnamese-American communities in New Orleans recovered more quickly than many others. The easy explanation was “culture.” But the real answer was more grounded: strong churches functioning as organizing hubs, dense social networks built through shared migration experience, and established community leadership capable of coordinating a return. Culture mattered — but it worked through concrete institutions. That distinction is important.

Why This Matters Now

Climate change is making disasters more frequent and more severe. Yet many governments still treat disaster response as a purely technical problem — better seawalls, faster alert systems. Those matters. But they miss the human layer that makes those tools actually work.

When we recognize that community trust, family networks, and local governance are all part of the disaster equation, we can design better evacuation plans, more effective early warnings, and recovery programs that genuinely reach the people who need them most.

Every disaster holds up a mirror to the society it strikes. What we see reflected — who gets help quickly, who rebuilds together, who gets left behind — is shaped by culture, institutions, and history working in combination. That is not just a scholarly observation. It is, ultimately, a matter of life and death.

Sources:

McLuckie, B.F. (1977). Italy, Japan, and the United States: Effects of Centralization on Disaster Responses. University of Delaware;

Nakasu, T. et al. (2022). International Journal of Disaster Resilience and Built Environment. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-10-2020-0107;

Nakasu, T. (2023). Environmental Development and Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-023-04305-7

Great Kanto Fire Disaster 1923

The following is my past short essay for the institute after the study session on the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake at the open office event:

In 1923, an earthquake killed over 105,000 people in the Tokyo area (including Kanagawa, where contributes approx. 30% death toll of the total). But here’s the shocking truth—87% weren’t killed by the shaking. They were killed by fire.

September 1, 1923. The earthquake struck at 11:58 AM—two minutes before noon—when families across Tokyo were cooking lunch over open flames. Within an hour, over 100 fires erupted across a city built almost entirely of wood and paper.

The fires merged into massive firestorms, generating winds so powerful they created fire tornadoes—what survivors called “dragon twists.” At the Honjo Clothing Depot, 40,000 refugees thought they’d found safety in an open field. At 4:00 PM, a fire tornado swept through. Within minutes, 38,000 people perished—over a third of the entire disaster’s death toll, in one location.

What’s tragic is that seismologist Imamura Akitsune had predicted this exact scenario 18 years earlier. He warned that cooking fires would turn an earthquake into an inferno. His senior colleague ridiculed him publicly. Imamura was right.

Japan learned. In 1960, September 1st became Disaster Prevention Day. Every Japanese child now practices earthquake drills. Gas meters have automatic seismic shut-offs. Tokyo’s wide avenues and parks? They were designed as firebreaks. The deadliest disasters aren’t always the ones we expect. Sometimes the real killer comes after.

【The 2011 Chao Phraya River Floods Case Study Content: Nikkei BizRuptors (website)】

Balancing Continuity and Survival: Lessons for Overseas Manufacturers from Thailand’s 2001 Flood

【Project launched (website)】Disaster Risk Management in Aging Societies: Bridging Japanese Experience with Thai Policy Needs

Disaster Risk Management in Aging Societies

【Disaster Research】The 1983 Sea of Japan Earthquake and Tsunami: A Pivotal Disaster in Japanese History

On May 26, 1983, a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Sea of Japan, triggering a devastating tsunami that would change Japan’s approach to disaster preparedness forever. This catastrophic event, officially known as the 1983 Nihonkai-Chubu earthquake, claimed 104 lives and reshaped coastal communities along the Japanese coastline.

Three Critical Aspects of the 1983 Tsunami Disaster

1. Unexpected Tsunami Location Challenged Historical Beliefs

A longstanding belief persisted among coastal communities that tsunamis never struck the coast of the Sea of Japan. This normalcy bias—the tendency to minimize threat warnings and assume things will function as normal despite signs to the contrary—significantly amplified the disaster’s impact. Communities along the western coast had not prepared adequately for such an event, leaving them vulnerable when waves struck shores in Aomori and Akita Prefectures and along the eastern coast of Noto Peninsula.

2. First Globally Broadcast Tsunami Disaster

The 1983 tsunami marked a historic milestone in disaster reporting as the first tsunami disaster broadcast worldwide in real-time. Civilians with home video cameras captured footage that was incorporated into media coverage, providing unprecedented documentation of the disaster as it unfolded. This extensive coverage catalyzed significant improvements to Japan’s tsunami warning system, enhancing wireless tsunami information transmission from the Sea of Japan to local areas.

3. Tragic Impact on Schoolchildren

One of the most heartbreaking aspects of the disaster involved a school excursion caught in the tsunami’s path. Forty-three schoolchildren were struck by the waves, with thirteen losing their lives. Teachers present during the disaster found themselves unable to protect all their students—a tragedy that would find haunting parallels during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Both devastating events occurred during daylight hours, presenting unique challenges for evacuation and response.

Legacy and Lessons Learned

The 1983 Sea of Japan earthquake and tsunami fundamentally changed Japan’s understanding of tsunami risk zones and highlighted the dangers of complacency in disaster preparedness. The disaster’s documentation and worldwide broadcast raised global awareness about tsunami dangers and influenced modern early warning systems that continue to evolve today.

For more information about normalcy bias and its impact on disaster response:

Day_153 : Reported Death Numbers

I will update a column of the NIED e-mail magazine which I wrote a long time ago because the content is not faded with time. (I will do this step by step in Japanese and English.) I will also add comments to update the situation.

Published February 4, 2010
NIED-DIL e-mail magazine: Reported fatalities due to disasters

January 12 There was a big earthquake in Haiti. The consequences are still a major social issue, but at an early stage, the President declared that the number of casualties reached 200,000.

At the time of the Hurricane Katrina disaster at the end of August 2005, the first report was 10,000 casualties. But, in the end, there were about 1,300. I felt that nationality, culture, and so on became apparent compared to Japan.

A typical case in Japan is the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. I was living in Kyoto and worked in Kyoto City at that time. I remember that around 7 a.m., it was reported on TV that there were only a few deaths. As time went by, it increased to hundreds and thousands.

The U.S. tends to have a top-down and strategic approach; on the other hand, Japan seeks bottom-up and accurate process to disclose the number. In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, reported death tolls in affected countries fluctuated, but taking this into account is a way to understand the disasters that reflect the country’s situations, including social backgrounds, cultures, economies, and so on.

Regarding Haiti, the number of reported deaths increases with time. I pray that the number will not be so huge.

P.S.
For example, the following World Vision website considers the current estimated death to be 250,000. In short, the first report ended up gaining some meaning.

https://www.worldvision.org/disaster-relief-news-stories/2010-haiti-earthquake-facts

Day_190: The Future of Safety: Emphasizing Disaster Risk Reduction Education

The Increasing Importance of Disaster Risk Reduction Education

In an era marked by more frequent and severe natural and man-made disasters, the necessity for communities to be prepared and resilient is paramount. The crux of achieving this resilience lies in disaster risk reduction education. This education covers a broad spectrum of activities designed to inform communities about disaster risks and the steps necessary to mitigate their effects. Beyond understanding the scientific mechanisms of disasters, this education emphasizes the human and social factors contributing to vulnerabilities, adopting a comprehensive approach that encompasses knowledge of disaster types, their causes, and management strategies. By equipping communities with essential knowledge and skills, disaster risk reduction education cultivates a culture of safety and resilience, essential for confronting disasters effectively.

Building Disaster-Resilience Communities through Education

Disaster risk reduction education’s role in fostering prepared communities is invaluable. It equips individuals with the knowledge and skills for proactive disaster risk reduction, promoting a preparedness culture and self-reliance. This education bridges scientific knowledge and local wisdom, enhancing community awareness of risk reduction measures and fostering community cohesion. The solidarity and collective responsibility nurtured through this education are vital for effective disaster response and recovery.

Comprehensive Strategies for Effective Disaster Risk Reduction Education

Effective disaster risk reduction education programs are characterized by their comprehensive nature, inclusivity, and adaptability. Essential components include risk assessment, community engagement, interdisciplinary approaches, and context-specific content, all aimed at addressing the unique needs and vulnerabilities of each community. Schools and community centers play pivotal roles in disseminating this education, serving as hubs for knowledge sharing and skill development.

Technological Advancements Enhancing Education Efforts

Technology offers innovative ways to enhance disaster risk reduction education. E-learning platforms, mobile applications, social media, and immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality are transforming how communities engage with disaster preparedness. These tools provide accessible, interactive, and engaging learning experiences, broadening the reach and impact of educational efforts.

Global Initiatives and Success Stories

Global initiatives, such as those led by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and frameworks like the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, highlight the international commitment to disaster resilience through education. Success stories from countries like Bangladesh, Japan, Haiti, New Zealand, and Mexico illustrate the transformative impact of comprehensive disaster risk reduction education programs. These examples demonstrate significant reductions in disaster-related fatalities and enhanced community preparedness.

Looking Ahead: Future Directions in Disaster Risk Reduction Education

The future of disaster risk reduction education will be shaped by technological innovation, community-led initiatives, and an increased focus on social and environmental justice. Collaboration and integration into broader development agendas, including the Sustainable Development Goals, are essential for addressing the complex challenges posed by climate change and urbanization.

A Call to Prioritize Disaster Risk Reduction Education

The path to mitigating disaster impacts lies in empowering communities with the knowledge and skills for disaster risk reduction and response. A collective effort from governments, organizations, and individuals worldwide is necessary to prioritize and advance disaster risk reduction education. Together, we can build more resilient and sustainable communities capable of withstanding the challenges of our changing world.

Day_152 : (In Japanese) 災害による報告死者数

かなり前に書いたメールマガジンのコラムですが、内容は、色あせていないので、復習を兼ねて、これから数回にわたり掲載致します。（同様に英語版も順番に掲載していきます。）

2010年2月4日発行
再掲ＮＩＥＤ－ＤＩＬメールマガジン：１回】災害による報告死者数
■災害による報告死者数■

１月12日ハイチで大きな地震がありました。その影響は、現在でも大きな社会問題ともなっていますが、初期の段階で大統領が２０万人の犠牲者が出ていると宣言しました。

2005年8月末のハリケーン・カトリーナ災害のときは、最初１万人との報道がなされましたが、最終的に１千3百人ぐらいになりました。死者が少ないのに越したことはありませんが、日本と比べてお国柄がこのようなところにもでるのかと感じます。

日本の場合で典型的な事例は、阪神・淡路大震災の時です。当時筆者は京都に住んでおり、京都市内で働いておりましたが、大きなゆれのあと、朝７時ごろは、死者の数がまだ数人だったとTVなどで報道されていたのを覚えています。それが時間が経つにつれて、数百人、数千人と時間が経つごとに増えていきました。

アメリカは、トップダウンで戦略的、日本は、ボトムアップで正確さ重視、そんな感じがします。2004年のインド洋津波では、周辺諸国の報告死者数が上下していましたが、この点をとっただけでも、災害がその国の経済や社会状況を浮き彫りにする一端が見えてきます。

ハイチに関しては時を追うごとに報告死者数が増えておりその状況が心配されます。初期の段階の大統領の宣言どおりの数字にならないことを祈ります。

2010年2月4日発行

P.S.

例えば下記のワールドビジョンのHPでは、現在の推定死者を、250,000人としています。つまり、最初の報告は最終的には、ある意味的を得ていたことになってしまいました。

https://www.worldvision.org/disaster-relief-news-stories/2010-haiti-earthquake-facts