Shosuke Sato

Eight Personal Characteristics Associated with the Power to Live with Disasters as Indicated by Survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster

People perceive, judge, and behave differently in disasters and in a wide range of other difficult situations depending on their personal characteristics. The power to live, as captured by characteristics that are advantageous for survival in such situations, has thus far been modeled in arbitrary ways. Conceptualizing such characteristics in more objective ways may be helpful for systematic preparations for future disasters and life difficulties. Here, we attempted to identify the major factors of the power to live by summarizing the opinions of survivors of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake disaster. We conducted personal interviews with 78 survivors about their survival experiences and elicited their opinions about the power to live as relevant to those experiences. We then incorporated these opinions into a questionnaire that was completed by 1400 survivors. Factor analysis identified eight factors related to the power to live: leadership, problem solving, altruism, stubbornness, etiquette, emotional regulation, self-transcendence, and active well-being. All factors had sufficient internal construct validity, and six of them showed significant associations with one or more measures of survival success in the disaster, including immediate tsunami evacuation, problem solving in refugee situations, recovery during reconstruction, physical health, and mental health. Overall, the personal characteristics described by the eight factors largely overlap with those described in previous arbitrary models. Further research should investigate the domains, phases, and contexts in which each factor contributes to survival, address whether the factors are rooted in nature or in nurture, and explore their psychological or physiological bases.

Social web in disaster archives

Preserving social Web datasets is a crucial part of research work for disaster management based on information from social media. This paper describes the Michinoku Shinrokuden disaster archive project, mainly dedicated to archiving data from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and its aftermath. Social websites should of course be part of this archive. We discuss issues in archiving social websites for the disaster management research communities and introduce our vision for Michinoku Shinrokuden.

The Role of Tsunami Engineering in Building Resilient Communities and Issues to Be Improved After the GEJE

Twenty five years have passed since the Tsunami Engineering Laboratory (TEL) was founded in 1991 after the re-establishment of the Disaster Research Group at Tohoku University, Japan. The TEL contributes to the safety of society and coastal communities by improving tsunami knowledge and technology and reducing damage, particularly in tsunami-prone regions. In 2010, the Japanese government reported an earthquake and tsunami probability of 99 % within 30 years at Miyagi in the Tohoku region. The TEL initiated a collaboration between residents, the local government and experts regarding tsunami engineering, forming the group who established countermeasures such as evacuation drills based on hazard maps, disaster planning, structural construction countermeasures and offshore tsunami observations using GPS sensors for the targeting earthquake and tsunami. Nevertheless, eastern Japan, particularly the Tohoku region, was hit by a massive M = 9.0 earthquake in 2011. The earthquake named the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) generate a huge tsunami that caused large-scale damage to the eastern coast of Japan and resulted in an inundation area of more than 500 km2 due to destructive wave forces. The Sanriku area was considered to be well prepared for tsunami disasters based on past damage experiences. However, following the 2011 tsunami, several issues need to be addressed. Researchers must determine why the large destruction occurred, what unrecognized factors contributed to the high vulnerability of the exposed area that must be reconstructed, and how the tsunami risk can be reduced in each region in the future. Reconstruction safety levels 1 and 2, which include comprehensive countermeasures related to creating tsunami-resilient communities, are just one example discussed in this study. The findings and issues also noted in this study will be valuable in improving future damage assessments in other high-risk areas throughout Japan such as the Nankai trough, and other tsunami-exposed coastal areas in the world.

Mass and social media corpus analysis after the 2011 great east Japan earthquake

In this paper, we outline our analysis of mass media and social media as used for disaster management. We looked at the differences among multiple sub-corpuses to find relatively unique keywords based on chronologies, geographic locations, or media types. We are currently analyzing a massive corpus collected from Internet news sources and Twitter after the Great East Japan Earthquake.