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概要：
Journal of Humanitarian Studies Vol. 1, 2012of the earthquakes that occur almost daily in Japan. JRCS had well prepared plans to meet its obligationsunder the existing national disaster management pla....

Journal of Humanitarian Studies Vol. 1, 2012of the earthquakes that occur almost daily in Japan. JRCS had well prepared plans to meet its obligationsunder the existing national disaster management plan and it implemented these very effectively.The Japanese Red Cross at once swung into action and within the first 24 hours, 46 medical teams had beendeployed to the affected areas. A national fundraising campaign was launched to assist the municipalities tobring cash assistance to the affected population. In the days and months which followed, nearly 900 JRCSmedical teams and more than 700 trained providers of psychosocial support were to treat nearly 90,000shocked and vulnerable survivors of Japan’s largest recorded disaster.With hundreds of thousands of people initially crammed into evacuation centres, trained psychosocialnurses helped those hit by the disaster to come to terms with the emotional impact of losing their relatives,friends and neighbours, their homes and any certainty about the future. As the operation moved from reliefinto early recovery, people were able to settle in prefabricated homes or rented apartments. Most hadfew possessions, but with the aid of donations from across the world, JRCS provided 128,000 relocatedfamilies with a set of electrical appliances. Focusing especially on the most vulnerable, special beds andvehicles have been provided to elderly care homes. Nearly 170 schools have received various kinds of newequipment, including school buses and many vehicles have been donated for social services, along withitems for school clinics and indoor play areas.As part of its longer term recovery plan, JRCS is reconstructing both permanent and temporary healthfacilities to replace devastated hospitals and clinics. The mostly prefabricated clinics which are currently inoperation are stretched beyond their capacity and permanent hospitals will take several years to complete.In terms of its support to the survivors, JRCS is focused on meeting needs in areas such as psychosocialsupport for the largely elderly population in many of the temporary housing communities, preventing themfrom sinking into isolation, inactivity and despair.On the importance of imagining the unimaginableThe disaster in Tohoku went far beyond any of the pre-disaster expectations. It caused the greatestloss of human life in a single disaster in Japan since the Second World War and posed the nation withenormous challenges regarding the way earthquake and tsunami countermeasures have been developedso far. Disaster preparedness in Japan is very impressive and among the best in the world, but the 2011earthquake and tsunami differed in size from the official pre-disaster hazard assumptions. The scope ofthe seismic movement, tsunami height and extent of the devastated area, all exceeded expected levels byfar. The reason for this could be that the assumptions were intended to be used for technical purposes,where financial limitation is an important consideration. Risk estimations based on these expectations mayeven have engendered a false sense of security in coastal protection installations to an excessive degree.It is quite possible that the evacuation of residents was delayed by this. It is also likely that much of theconfusion during the relief phase might have been avoided if the contingency planning for relief hadbeen based on risk analysis considering scenarios of higher levels, which could have been used since thefinancial limitations would be much less important. Therefore there is a need to examine multiple damagescenarios, including worst-case disasters with complex impact, such as the largest imaginable earthquakesand tsunamis.This disaster happened during daytime, but if it had struck at a different time or season, or if the tsunamihad affected a wider area, humanitarian consequences could have been vastly greater. The impact of thenuclear disaster was also limited compared to what it could have been by fortunate circumstances suchas favourable wind directions. The coast hit by the earthquake and tsunami has the highest concentrationof nuclear reactors in the world, all of which were affected by the disaster, but most backup emergency58人道研究ジャーナルVol. 1, 2012