Tsuneyuki Abe

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.

The Effect of Disaster Damage on the Occurrence of Crime: A Survey of Residents of Four Prefectures Affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake

After a large-scale natural disaster, affected areas are prone to suffering the three factors in routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, American Sociological Review 44:588–608, 1979) that encourage the occurrence of crime: the existence of likely offenders and of suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians. Thus, crime may be considered more likely to occur the greater the scale of disaster damage and the longer the delay in disaster recovery. In order to clarify the relationship between disaster damage and crime, this study conducted an online survey of participants (n = 2800) sampled from residents of prefectures which suffered significant damage in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011—namely, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, and Ibaraki—and asked about the scale of damage caused by the earthquake (e.g., whether or not there were victims or evacuations), delays in recovery from the disaster (i.e., number of blackout days), and whether or not crimes occurred after the quake (namely, bicycle and motorbike theft, automobile theft, gasoline theft, house burglary, violence and injuries, opportunistic swindling). We conducted logistic regression analysis using the occurrence of crimes as dependent variables and earthquake damage and other factors as independent variables; significant independent variables were confirmed for all models except that which took automobile theft as a dependent variable, and from the results we found that bicycle and motorbike theft, gasoline theft, house burglary, violence and injuries, and opportunistic swindling were more likely to occur the greater the earthquake damage and that in particular the likelihood of bicycle and motorbike theft occurring is influenced by any delay in recovery from earthquake damage. In order to prevent crime occurring in the wake of large-scale natural disasters, we should therefore seek to speed up disaster recovery, by however small a degree.