Journal of Geography | 2021
Overview of the Special Issue “Local Records of Natural Disaster Events: A Wealth of Spatiotemporal Information for Future Use”
Abstract
Any natural disaster consists of various natural and human-related events that occur successively following a source geophysical process and affecting human lives in many ways. Each event varies in terms of spatial scale, initiation time, and duration, and affects human activities differently across several disaster phases. Therefore, the reports of a disaster need to record each event’s spatiotemporal occurrence and relationships between events. Among the various kinds of disaster report, those focusing on local areas are particularly expected to carefully record the information mentioned above. Ten years after the beginning of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster, many survey reports from various perspectives have described this huge and complex disaster. This special issue focuses on local reports of the 2011 disaster and other natural disasters. The contents of local reports of a natural disaster vary depending on publishing bodies, report writers, informants, etc. Although residents of an affected area are often important witnesses to various disaster events on a personal and local scale, they are in many cases inexperienced in recording with spatiotemporal accuracy. Practical support from experienced researchers or journalists, using appropriate maps and photos, can effectively extract and organize the residents’ observations and personal experiences as primary sources of the event’s occurrence in the local area (Iwafune, 2018; Iwafune and Tamura, 2018). Such information on the occurrence of events and how they interrelate in a local area applies to other areas and future ages. The article by Tamura and Iwafune (2021) reviews numerous reports of large tsunami disasters on the Sanriku Coast, Northeastern Japan, since the late 19th century. Most reports of 1896, 1933, and 1960 tsunami disasters were prepared by local intellectuals in the affected areas supported, in some cases, by municipalities. After the 2011 tsunami, most stricken municipalities published reports with financial assistance from the national government. Some of them received reporting and editing assistance from outside experts, including scholars and journalists. Based on a critical analysis of the above, this special issue aims to identify useful information that can be found in personaland local-scale disaster records and to propose an effective report-creation system. Disaster archives provide an effective means for managing and disseminating disasterrelated materials and information. Suzuki (2021) traces the history of disaster archives on repeated tsunami disasters in the Sanriku coastal area. Then, she looks at archive management projects developed in recent years in various areas of Japan and points out problems in collecting, organizing, preserving, and uti地学雑誌 Journal of Geography(Chigaku Zasshi) 130(2)143\xad146 2021 doi:10.5026/jgeography.130.143