Ten years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, and now Japan is in the midst of a struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The common thread is that the Self-Defense Forces have been dispatched for all of these crises.
The Asia Pacific Initiative think tank has made assessments of these crises and made proposals based on precious lessons drawn from the incidents. But has the nation itself made good use of such lessons? Perhaps to a degree, but it is necessary to review the nation’s risk management system under the worst case scenario and build a national consensus on how to utilize the SDF in such cases.