Japan set to mark fourth year of quake tsunami

TOKYO – Japan will again remember bitter memories of death and destruction on the fourth anniversary of the Great East Japan earthquake on March 11, as it prepares to host the 3rd United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) from March 14 to 18 in Sendai-shin.

The conference’s host city in Miyagi prefecture was one of the hardest hit areas in eastern Japan by the killer tsunami that followed the magnitude 9 earthquake in 2011.

Resigned to its fate living under the shadow of various natural disasters, Japan is keen on gathering the world’s leaders on DRR to revisit the 10-year-old Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), which was drawn up and adopted at the 2005 UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Hyogo prefecture.

Japan hopes to revise the framework to provide an improved DRR action plan for countries.

The 2005 conference was held in Kobe, then still rebuilding from the destruction of the Jan. 17, 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people and inflicted damage worth trillions of yen.

Japan is an enthusiastic host to people wanting a peek into revived cities and municipalities of past disasters, and Kobe is generous with the lessons it has learned in rebuilding and reconstruction as it advocates the improvement of other countries’ DRR and management policies to better survive disasters.

An undisputed global economic superpower, Japan is proof that being a disaster-prone country is no barrier to progress.

While Japan is small in terms of land area and not much blessed with natural resources, it had risen to become an economic powerhouse starting in the 1960s barely two decades after enduring the atomic bomb in World War II.

The government, through its Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), is currently host to a delegation of 16 foreign journalists from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru and Fiji for two weeks.

The conference aims to show the hard road to reconstruction of Kobe City and Osaka and other cities and municipalities in Japan’s Kansai region devastated by the January 1995 earthquake, and the plodding efforts to revive Sendai and other areas in Tohoku leveled by the March 2011 earthquake and killer tsunami, made worse by a meltdown in a nuclear plant in Fukushima.

“It’s an occasion for the people and the governments (of other countries) to understand why disaster preparation is so important,” Norihito Yonebayashi, division director for disaster management of JICA’s Global Environment Department-Water Resources and Disaster Management Group, told foreign journalists.

Japan wants other countries to improve their disaster preparedness, Norihito said, adding this should be a global effort since disaster can cross borders and affect countries separated by thousands of miles.

He cited the Chile earthquake in 1960 and subsequent tsunami, whose waves crossed the ocean to Japan’s Sanriku coast, inflicting damage on a fishing village.

During the Great Flood of Thailand in 2011, he said Japan was also affected because 451 Japanese companies had to close shop.