Couple months ago, I accompanied my friends to do a research from Graduate School of International Development (GSID) Nagoya University, Japan. Every class year have to take an overseas fieldwork program and they should come to a third word country to do a 2 weeks research. Their topic was about comprehensive disaster risk reduction measures/policy by government and disaster awareness and preparation of local people in Bantul district, Yogyakarta. They focused in two kind of policy: first, disaster proof housing and second, disaster education.
A friend of mine from GSID told me that he felt strange about Bantul disaster victims and damages. More than 5,700 people died, more than 30 thousand people got injured and 200 thousand houses were destroyed. He thinks that the damage was too serious �Although, it just 5.9 magnitude earthquake,� he said. That fact of damages raised his curiousity to find the answer by a research. The research revealed that there were asymmetric coordination from every single department in handling aids after disaster, no fixed standard of disaster proof housing and poor disaster education program. �But, I think the most important to build is local people awareness of disaster. In Japan, it is important to spread the idea through disaster education that infrastructure, such as schools, which works for mitigating disaster should be built with earthquake-proof way,� he said. So, in this article I would like to concern about disaster education.
Disaster education is one of the important disaster mitigation way. The intention of defining �disaster education� is that I think people would act the way they have learned when disaster happens, and people would prepare for future disaster from the information or education provided by government and community. In Japan, they held disaster simulation monthly in each school from kindergarten to senior high school. Most of households prepare emergency bag to bring when disaster happen. Education material is exist in some subject matter such as geography, biology, and Japanese language. Disaster education idea in Japan could be tracked from 1854.
A man called Gihei (Gohei) Hamaguchi, the most influential resident of Hiro village, was at home on a small plateau overlooking a bay about which most of the village houses were. He became aware of something unusual in the offing when he saw the sea running away from the beach after he felt an earthquake. He knew all the traditions of the coast and realized that tsunami would be likely to come soon. But it was too late to send a message to the village before tsunami strikes the village. Then he made up his mind to set fire to a number of rice-stacks which were the crystal of farmers� labour of the year. Because of the fire, village people came up to the plateau in a hurry and found themselves saved from the violence of tsunami. After Tsunami struck, After the tsunami that swept main part of Hiro village in 1854, Gihei Hamaguchi sponsored village people for tree planting and construction of a protective embankment 5m high and 20m wide at the base. The tsunami struck again 100 years later, and the village saved. It became local wisdom and famous history of disaster mitigation in Japan. (source of this story Hamada, M., Kiyono, J., Kunizaki, N. and Suzuki, T.: Why didn�t you tell us earlier? ��Fire of rice-stacks�, Support activities for the education of disaster mitigation in Banda Aceh-, Journal of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. 90, No. 6, hlm. 43-46, 2005.)
That�s a story I shared today. People think that disaster mitigation program in Japan is established enough and many countries learn about it to Japan. However, my friends told me that March 11 2011 tsunami totally changed Japanese mind about disaster preparedness. Now, disaster study centers, NGO and government are doing some research to improve their disaster preparedness and mitigation program from recent tsunami experience.
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