How is it Possible to Let People Visualize Disasters that They Have Never Experieced? -Disastern Educational Process Using the Case of the 1944 Tonankai Earthquake and the 1945 Mikawa Earthquake, Japan

Abstract eng:
Personal experiences of disaster are very important as instructional material for future disasters. This is because the feelings and behavior of the surviving victims, together with narratives describing their direct experiences, can provide researchers with new facts and ideas they would otherwise never have known. There is, however, no clear method for sharing such experiences. As such, we developed a method for converting victims’ past experiences into educational materials that could be used for the development of disaster awareness in society. This method consists of 4 steps: 1) conduct semi-structured interviews with victims of past major disasters; 2) reconstruct the episodes to produce images of the damage experienced, the victim’s behavior in the process of rebuilding their lives after the disaster, and the support received from the community and government administration; 3) pictorialize these episodes; and 4) make educational material combining information about the hazards involved in, and the extent of damage caused by, the relevant disaster with the newly created pictures of disaster episodes. The interviews consisted of questions that addressed the following three issues: 1) personal suffering and material damage from the earthquake, 2) the victim’s state of consciousness and course of action following the onset of the earthquake, 3) the amount of support and relief available. We applied this method to the 1945 Mikawa Earthquake in Japan. The magnitude of this earthquake was M6.8. The earthquake resulted in the deaths of more than 2,300 persons, with more than 20,000 houses collapsing. Moreover, it was not well covered in newspapers, to either other areas of Japan or the rest of the world, because the event occurred at the end of the Second World War, when the Japanese Government was reluctant to disperse bad news both inside and outside Japan. We conducted 20 interviews with victims of the Mikawa Earthquake and produced educational materials based on this content, including 130 pictures. We used these in panel displays set up at local community facilities and high school festivals to disseminate concrete information on earthquake-related disasters. With the help of systematic lectures and training, the pictures served to impart a strong impression to our audiences, and it became clear that the pictures drawn based on the interviews can function as effective materials for outreach activities on earthquake disaster mitigation.

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