Community disaster prevention

"Be quiet! Shut up!" These were the first words that I said just after the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake. I could not understand what on earth had happened to us. Looking around and outside, I realized it was an earthquake in the end. Firstly, to secure our safety, we went out of our apartment building. Going to a nearby shelter, we found it was packed with old people and there was no place for us and so we went back to our car and stayed inside. I had to go to my workplace, the fire department, but without my car I was unable to. Then I decided not to go and to help the suffering people in the community instead. Even if being fired, I thought it was more important to secure my family's safety first.

Looking around the community, I felt strongly about the lack of community interactions in the city. In rural areas, people in the same community help each other when someone is in trouble or in an emergency. After the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake, we decided to help each other and began a new project called "Disaster Prevention Welfare Community Projects" that will coordinate both disaster prevention activities by the police and fire department and welfare activities by people of the community and volunteers. And now in 16 areas such cooperation projects have been organized.