Enhancing Local Responses through Disaster Resilience in Schools and Communities in Japan
Risks and Conflicts: Local Responses to Natural Disasters
ISBN: 978-1-78190-820-4, eISBN: 978-1-78190-821-1
Publication date: 13 August 2014
Abstract
Schools play an important role in Japan by becoming evacuation centers after disasters. Depending on the nature of disaster, the school can be occupied for several days to several months. Therefore, schools play a crucial role in disaster risk reduction and can contribute to very strong bonding with the local communities. This chapter describes the experiences of six cities with the roles of schools during disasters. Kamaishi, Kesennuma, and Natori, three cities affected by the tsunami, have shown the important role that schools played in the time of disaster. Although some schools were destroyed in these three cities, people spent significant time in other schools as evacuees. Pre-disaster preparedness of schools and communities helped a lot in this regard. Taking the experiences from the East Japan disaster, Saijo, Owase, and Oobu cities in West Japan demonstrated their preparedness for future disaster. The chapter also shows that school-centered disaster preparedness before the disaster leads to an effective role during the disaster and also facilitates post-disaster recovery with schools as the center.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge support from CWS [Church World Services] Asia Pacific and MERCY Malaysia for conducting this study.
Citation
Shaw, R. and Matsuura, S. (2014), "Enhancing Local Responses through Disaster Resilience in Schools and Communities in Japan", Risks and Conflicts: Local Responses to Natural Disasters (Community, Environment and Disaster Risk Management, Vol. 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 207-230. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2040-7262(2013)0000014015
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013 Emerald Group Publishing Limited