Single-person Drill for Tsunami Evacuation and Disaster Education

This paper described negative attitudes toward tsunami risk reduction seen among community residents due to the reappraisal of tsunami predictions by Japanese government agencies after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. These negative attitudes can be simply summarized into three types: overly optimistic, overly pessimistic, and overly dependent. To cope with these issues, this paper introduced a new approach called “single-person drill” which specifically emphasized personal individual behaviors. The single-person drill is specifically proposed to alleviate these attitudes, for example by shifting tsunami risk reduction from the community level to the individual level. In addition, school children have participated in the drill by actually supporting the evacuees, disaster education thus was improved concurrently with intergenerational risk communication. Activities of both tsunami evacuation and disaster education are expected to make contributes to tsunami risk reduction.