Community-mediated individual disaster preparedness practices: A case study in Kochi, Japan

Abstract

Self help has become an increasingly influential factor in disaster risk reduction due to the inherent uncertainty that comes with natural hazards. Despite a lack of public support in emergency situations, citizens' low commitment to self help has remained unaffected, and, consequently, both experts and the government have made efforts to encourage citizens to take action. Although the government- and expert-oriented efforts, and unidirectional communication in general, have been criticized as the deficit model approach, because they do not necessarily make behavioral changes, these methods still remain as the ones that are primarily used. This study introduces a community's tsunami disaster preparedness as an alternative to the deficit model. We focus on the community's practice of preparing boxes for individual emergency relief (the “individual box”), which were stored in a common storage facility on higher ground and managed by the community. We discuss this in the context of activity theory: self help is understood not only by the relationship between the government/expert (subject) and citizens (object), but also that between the individual box and the community. We showed through interviews and field work that this practice facilitates a high participation rate in preparing emergency relief and rapid evacuation. Moreover, cooperative communal practices had the added benefit of engaging individuals in the broader social system. Although this study focuses on small communities, this method can be applied to larger communities by regarding it as a practical application of activity theory and as a new alternative that encourages individual practice.