From lessons of 3/11, Japan scientists share knowledge of disaster resilience across Pacific

As a disaster mitigation expert, Takako Izumi has spent her career envisioning worst-case scenarios and how to save lives and protect vital infrastructure.

Still, nothing could quite prepare her for the destruction caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which struck off the coast of the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011, killing some 20,000 people and causing trillions of yen in damage.

“Of course, I was just very, very shocked,” Izumi says during an interview at her office at Tohoku University in Sendai. “I just never really thought that such a big disaster could ever actually happen in Japan.”

Izumi wasn’t alone.

At Tohoku University, where a disaster research and prevention group had been in place since 2007, faculty members scrambled to support local reconstruction efforts, beginning work on the multidisciplinary studies of 3/11 that would come to define the school’s disaster research. Experts in geology, medicine and economics — among other fields — combined their knowledge and began to promote practical research into 3/11 to be better prepared for disasters.

That initiative eventually gave rise to the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) in 2012.

Now, as Japan’s top researchers continue to glean new information from what the World Bank estimated was history’s costliest natural disaster, some scientists are shifting their focus toward passing on that knowledge to the rest of the disaster-prone Pacific Rim in order to help ensure that other nations are adequately prepared in the event of their own 3/11.

“One of our roles as IRIDeS is that we really have to keep conveying what we mean by disaster risk reduction and the creation of a disaster resilient society,” Izumi explains.

“We have to share the importance of keeping memories and ask ourselves how best we can do that, be it through disaster education for children, or by strengthening a region’s disaster capacity. I think that's a very important role for IRIDeS.”

Lessons from disaster

When 3/11 hit, Izumi was working on a project with an international nongovernmental organization in Malaysia. But the scale of the destruction in her homeland prompted her to return to Japan in the aftermath of the disaster, using her expertise in public relations to procure beds and re-equip hospitals in affected areas, before joining the academic research team at IRIDeS in 2013.

“At the time, the coastal area was just totally flat, as everything had been washed away,” she explains, referring to the coast of Sendai. “There was a lot of recovery work going on, but you couldn’t even imagine what was there before, as nothing had been rebuilt yet.”

Despite the problems that the area faced, the creation of the IRIDeS soon established Tohoku University as the pre-eminent center for disaster risk reduction research in Japan and as an integral part of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) — a consortium of 45 universities spread across the Ring of Fire region encircling the Pacific.

Boasting expertise in 51 research fields as diverse as oral storytelling, history, tsunami mapping and civil engineering, the IRIDeS’ contributions to risk reduction span all stages of the disaster cycle — mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery — with the aim of using the lessons of 3/11 to make future societies better able to cope with ever-evolving natural hazards.

Leading the institute's collaboration with APRU, Izumi has, for her part, developed programs aimed at achieving one of the institute’s key overarching goals: the projection of those lessons outward to other locations struggling with their own disaster preparedness and recovery.

Reducing risk

During her time working for the U.N. and other NGOs, Izumi’s role was often limited to disaster response and recovery — entering a disaster zone and coordinating efforts among the various organizations and levels of government once the damage was already done.

“Whenever I visited a country before, it was always after something had happened,” she says, a sense of exasperation still ringing in her voice. “The government officials I spoke to always said the same things — ‘Why didn’t I do anything before it was too late?’ or, ‘There must have been something more I could have done.’”

Those experiences fueled Izumi’s desire to conduct research on more forward-thinking, anticipatory areas of disaster science — focusing more on preparedness, reduction and resilience, rather than recovery.

Given her experience in Southeast Asia, Izumi naturally began to think about ways in which she could share Japan’s disaster knowledge with other countries.

At IRIDeS, in tandem with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), plus local government and educational institutions on the ground in Malaysia, Izumi oversaw the development of the SeDAR Japan Partnership Programme as the practical realization of her research aims.

Based in the Southeast Asian nation’s Selangor state, the project’s science-based approach to disaster risk reduction taps easily understood communication tools such as hazard mapping and simulation to increase awareness of potential disasters among affected communities and then encourage community members to play an active role in subsequent risk-reduction activities.

“We conduct workshops in which we communicate what the disaster risks are, and what disaster risk reduction is, and what (affected communities) can do,” Izumi explains. “That's the most important message, the understanding that there is a role that they can play.”

Geographically shielded from the tsunamis and earthquakes that have devastated other nations in the Ring of Fire — Malaysia reported under 100 deaths from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, while neighboring Indonesia saw over 150,000 — the country is nonetheless prone to heavy monsoon rains, flash flooding and frequent landslides.

These hazards, while not life-threatening for the majority of citizens, are often treated as more of a burden than an existential threat, with the associated damage seen as something inevitable that must be tolerated, rather than as something that can be mitigated through careful planning.

Because the hazards are on a smaller — if frequent — scale, local communities forget the risks involved, doomed to suffer the same fate ad-nauseum, with no attempt made to offset the mounting long-term costs of the damage.

“It’s a big topic in the (disaster risk reduction) field,” Izumi explains. “People only tend to remember past disasters if the scale of the damage is huge, but if it’s not, they forget, even if the same thing happens every year.”

But if observed across a five- or 10-year period, Izumi added, “the accumulation of each year's damage is equal to that of one big disaster, and that's a problem in itself.”

To tackle that problem, the Japan-Malaysia program takes a layered approach to communicating disaster preparedness information to affected communities.

First, the project coordinators approach local government officials, offering a teacher training program in disaster risk reduction. This can then be passed along through the local leadership structure, then on to other local community leaders and finally on to residents.

Once at the community level, the accumulated knowledge is used to create a risk reduction plan for the area based on ideas brought to the table by residents themselves — be it the development of a first aid program for local children, or the creation of a hazard library that keeps the memory of past disasters alive.

From that stage on, explains on-site project coordinator Eriko Motoyama, the projects become self-propelled, as local communities — newly aware of their own agency in developing effective disaster awareness for their region — reverse the program’s top-down structure, lobbying those above them in the regional hierarchy for support in maintaining the project.

“The community leaders we work with like the fact that they can approach government officials and say, ‘Hey, here's a program that we've developed that will help us mitigate disasters at the community level and allow you to stop spending all your funding on addressing disasters once they’ve already occurred,’” Motoyama says.

“We all know that prevention is much cheaper (than recovery),” she continues. “So it then just becomes a question at the community leadership level of how to convince the state-level government to mainstream that knowledge and absorb it into their annual budget and planning agenda.”

Transferable risk reduction culture

The project in Malaysia works on the assumption that, the more aware a community’s individual members are of the potential for disaster in their environment, the more invested they will become in developing their own disaster preparedness.

For Mahesti Okitasari, a consultant with international development and regional planning expertise at UNU-IAS (United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability) in Tokyo, that understanding works to offset some of the issues limiting the effectiveness of disaster risk reduction in low- and middle-income nations such as her native Indonesia.

In Indonesia, she said, the population is very young and migratory. Many people living in disaster-prone areas lack the background knowledge to effectively cope with natural hazards, failing to either spot the warning signs or adequately prepare.

That reality, Okitasari argues, “makes Japan actually a very interesting case to look at in comparison to other Asian countries,” given that Japanese communities often have a much stronger attachment to their local environment, informing long-term decision-making.

“I think Japan has really caught on to the importance of learning and recording what's happening and how they can then respond to that in terms of urban planning,” she says, pointing to Japan’s long history of disaster-related record-keeping and the large-scale government funded infrastructure projects — including seawalls and levees — built to protect against natural hazards.

Projects of that kind — which are often also problematic from an environmental and social perspective — require vast economic investments, technological know-how and a legislative framework that many developing nations in the Pacific Rim simply do not have.

The vast wealth disparity between Japan and some of the other disaster-prone countries in the region is a major hurdle when it comes to sharing pricey disaster mitigation measures with other countries — what works for Japan isn’t always possible overseas.

For Izumi, the challenge then becomes finding ways to pass on the Japanese culture of disaster resilience — be it the lessons learned from 3/11 or from the countless experiences of disaster before that — in ways that overcome the differences in available resources.

“In Japan, we have such a long history of living with disaster, be it big earthquakes, fire or typhoons that we’re still experiencing, and we can never ever forget those experiences,” she says.

“To achieve disaster resilience, you have to be really prepared. You have to know how to bounce back and how to recover as quickly as possible, and that’s the key message we want to convey to developing countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.”