Far East: Lessons from Japan’s Tsunami Response

The Asahi Shimbun

On the morning of July 31, residents across Japan woke to a piercing emergency alarm on their phones. Rush hour trains in Tokyo halted to an almost complete stop, all fishing boats in Nagoya sailed out to escape the threat as alerts sounded loud in every municipality’s speakers, telling residents to evacuate. The threat was a tsunami, not in one particular region of Japan, but in all prefectures facing the Pacific, from the northernmost Hokkaido prefecture to the southernmost Okinawa prefecture. People were being told to stay away from the shorelines and to move to higher ground. In major population centers like Tokyo and Osaka, such tsunami alarms are almost unheard of since both cities lie deep in their respective bays. This time, however, things were different. Just minutes prior, one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history occurred in the remote Kamchatka region of far east Russia, some 1,200 km away from Japan’s Hokkaido. The magnitude 8.8 earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached nearly every Pacific shoreline, from French Polynesia and New Zealand to the west coast of the United States.

As soon as the quake struck, alarms sounded across Japan, prompting a mass evacuation of residents along the coastline. With the waves arriving hours later and causing minimal damage in Japan, is there still a lesson to be learned from how the Japanese respond to an impending crisis? In an era of accelerating climate change, where disasters appear increasingly imminent, is Japan demonstrating to the world how to live with such threats—and how should the rest of the world respond?

Alerts is a Necessity—Not an Add-On

There is a powerful and tragic case study on this lesson. The Myanmar Earthquake has caused massive casualties and economic damage, not just in Myanmar but to Thailand, where the emergency alerts were never heard of. As people fled out on the street, having no idea what happened, massive traffic congestion occurred, causing the evacuation to be delayed by hours on end.

A simple evacuation order and alert, in this case, will prevail. The Japanese systems of emergency alerts are accurate on an almost block-to-block basis and are sent within seconds of the disaster unfolding or being predicted. This allows time for the residents in the area affected to evacuate to safety, just in time before an actual disaster happens.

Japan learned this lesson the hard way in its magnitude 9.0 earthquake in 2011. Back then, the emergency alert systems were not as sharp as now, and people relied on television broadcasts to receive news. Even then, many Japanese media outlets cut all of their programs short and display the message, TSUNAMI! EVACUATE! with flashing banners to encourage people to get to high ground as soon as possible. The message, as it appears now, has not been received by many, resulting in the catastrophic number of casualties.

The built-in emergency alerts in most smartphones today have solved the massive gap in information between the meteorology agency and the people in the way of the disaster. In addition, just in case some people are not reachable by smartphones, the elderly, for example, a massive system of loudspeakers installed in almost every area in Japan should do the trick. Today, visitors of Tokyo can experience the testing of those speakers on a daily basis with the daily broadcast of 5 pm melodies, aimed not only to test the speakers in case of emergency but to encourage children playing outside their homes to return home at the crack of dusk.

This daily test of the emergency alert systems not only reflects Japan’s commitment to providing accessibility to everyone when it comes to safety but also its continuous improvement of the accuracy of the alert systems themselves. The alerts must be accurate and timely, allowing for safe evacuation for everyone in the affected areas.

Knowing an Idea of What To Do is Better Than Not Knowing At All

Ask a random Japanese person in the streets of Osaka what they should do in the case of a tsunami, and most of them will say one thing in common: move to high ground and avoid being close to the shoreline. If you ask them further about what to do after getting there, only a handful of them will know what to do next. This is not a fault in their knowledge; it’s just that they know what is to be done firsthand when disaster strikes and simply, that is all they need to know.

Not knowing anything to do and waiting for the instructions from the local government could prove destructive and dangerous, as many would just sit and wait until the instructions on where and how to evacuate are given. This thought is not only applicable in the case of a tsunami but also covers almost every disaster you can think of: earthquakes, wildfires, flash floods, or even volcanic eruptions.

Knowing too much, on the other hand, will cause the public to overdo their part in the evacuation, causing widespread misinformation and panic, which is the last thing anyone wants in a natural disaster. Remaining calm and following a common, basic precaution widely known by everyone encourages faster evacuation and ultimately, safety for all. The common knowledge of the Japanese people of what to do when a disaster happens starts from their early education, where school children are being told what basic things to do and to know when it comes to evacuating. The country’s geographic location might play a crucial part in this story as Japan sits directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a region where seismic activities occur on almost a daily basis. Earthquakes and tsunamis are, therefore, not a unique sighting for them; they will be putting to use that basic knowledge for much of their lives.

Last month, when the Co-May tropical storm made landfall on Shanghai, China, only a handful of individuals really knew what to do in such a situation, causing widespread and impromptu evacuation of over 280,000 people, facilitated by the local Shanghai government and causing the city immense economic damage.

Should only the world learn what the Japanese have learned after centuries of destruction, we may catch a glimpse into how to live on a planet that sees rising global temperatures and daily occurrences of catastrophic weather events, which seems to be imminent for us, as of now.