25 Years on: Kobe quake experience helping nations prepare for disasters

January 16, 2020

Kobe--Lessons learned from the deadly Great Hanshin Earthquake in western Japan are helping people in Indonesia and Nepal better prepare for natural disasters.

In Indonesia, a project to help improve local communities' capability to cope with disasters was carried out in 2009-2010.

The project was aimed at sharing the idea of forming voluntary citizen groups to prepare for and cope with disasters, a movement promoted in Kobe, which was hit hard by the Jan. 17, 1995, quake, as well as related know-how.

People from Kobe, including Kuniaki Takenaka, a firefighter, and Hirokazu Nagata, chief director of nonprofit organization Plus Arts, engaged in work to form such groups in a model area in Indonesia.

Local residents made fire pumps and fire cisterns, and formed some 10 groups.

Training programs based on the Kobe quake lessons have also been carried out overseas.

In 2017, a training project was launched in Nepal, which was hit hard by a massive earthquake in 2015, as a grassroots project of the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

The project was aimed at teaching children knowledge about disasters and how to cope with them through club activities.

At 10 schools in five cities near Kathmandu, Nepal's capital, Nagata and teachers led activities such as creating a picture-story show to teach children how to escape in case of fire.

The story was digitized to enable it to be printed out.

Nagata also assisted in efforts to establish a training center to hold seminars for civil servants.

Taiki Orii, 23-year-old graduate student at Kobe University working at Plus Arts as an intern, has visited Nepal with Nagata to help check how their activities were going.

In order to make sure that overseas disaster prevention activities take root, "it's important to have a perspective that fits with local people, rather than providing everything new in Japan," Orii said.