Beginning with individual-level issues in disaster mitigation, one issue is that 64.3% of victims in the
Great East Japan Earthquake were over 60 years old,
and 45.5% were over 70 years old. This result is similar
to other recent disasters, in which most of the victims
were elderly persons (Ushiyama et al., 2012).
Another issue is that before the Great East Japan
Earthquake, there were high expectations placed on
community-level support under emergency conditions,
particularly on local volunteer firefighters.
However, 253 volunteer firefighters died while trying
to evacuate others. One surviving volunteer firefighter
said that “they knew precisely that the tsunami was
coming, but they couldn’t bring themselves to evacuate
while others remained behind” (CeMI, 2011).
These poignant words illustrate the limitations of kyojo,
the Japanese principle of mutual assistance. Although
tremendous efforts put into community-level
disaster management and relating achievements have
been seen, the huge damage motivated us to shift attention
from community-level approaches to individual-
level ones, such as the tsunami evacuation principle
of tsunami tendenko. The Great East Japan
Earthquake led to a significant renewal of interest in
the concept of tsunami tendenko, the importance of an
“each for themselves” attitude toward escaping tsunami
on the one hand, but the complexity of actually
implementing such strategies for tsunami evacuation
on the other (Yamori, 2012).