Disaster Mitigation Education

What is the Disaster Mitigation Education?

In the disaster mitigation education so far, we focused on the emergency management just after the disaster took place, such as the training of evacuation and distinguishing fires. In these trainings the children are not motivated very much. Everybody think he or she will never experience his or her house catching the fire. Nobody can image lively the influence of the earthquake on them because the cycle of the earthquake is much longer than the cycle of human lives. Many people think that typhoon and volcano have nothing to do with them. Thus, the less motivated training turns out to be fruitless and many people come to regard the disaster mitigation education as meaningless event.

See the chart 1. Roughly speaking, the disaster mitigation education can be done at every step of the disaster cycle in the chart. The emergency management is important just after the disaster took place. Besides, if we learn the mechanism of the earthquake, or the direction of the typhoon, for example, we will be more aware of the disaster and well prepared for it. To think of the factors causing vulnerability in a city is closely related to the disaster mitigation. Nobody will die by the earthquake of the Japanese seismic scale 5 in Japan, but many people may lose their lives in the developing countries by the earthquake of the same scale. It is easy to find the social problems there. The students will notice that to learn economy is related to learning disaster mitigation. During the process from emergency management to recovery, the students will come to notice that not only the hard aspects, such as the building code, the reconstruction of the railroads, super highways, the strong system of water supply, gas supply and so on, but also the soft aspects, such as the importance of the community, the neighboring help, the importance of human lives, the welfare and human rights, also have close relationship with the disaster mitigation. This shows that the disaster mitigation have closely related to every activity of the study at school. Thus, it is possible for the teachers to do the disaster mitigation education in every subject, if he or she wants to.

Disaster Mitigation Education as Citizens' Education

It seems to be impossible to let 100 specialists live in one town with the population of 10,000 in order to make the city to cope with the disaster more functionally. But if every citizen advances a little in the disaster mitigation, the capacity of the city to cope with the disaster increases drastically. What takes an important role to advance the citizens' ability, skills and will to cope with the disaster is "the disaster mitigation education."

The disaster mitigation education is the citizens' education. I have mentioned that the most important lesson of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster is that the citizens noticed for the first time that the lives of the citizens should be protected by the citizens themselves. The, how the citizens protect themselves? This is the point that the disaster mitigation education takes an important role. It is reported that the specialists indicated the possibility of the strong earthquake in Kobe area. Most of the citizens, however, didn't know the fact. The fact was only known to the specialists and the insurance companies. Some say that the old houses must be replaced with the newly built houses but ordinary people don't have enough money. Others say that the retrofit of the fragile houses is urgent but the language of the specialists is difficult for the ordinary citizens to understand. There were the distance between the specialists and the citizens before the great Hanshin-Awaji Disaster. There was a missing ring between the specialists and the citizens as shown in the chart 2. It is the disaster mitigation education that can connect the two rings.