Panel 478: Disasters in Asia: Societal and Governmental Responses and Responsibilities

Saturday 2 April 13:45-15:45
Room 305A

Disasters generate intense discussions of a culture's
ultimate values and priorities. Regardless of whether
natural phenomena or human actions trigger a
catastrophe, it is societal and state responses that
largely determine how devastating the disaster is. This
panel considers, from a variety of disciplinary
backgrounds, how three modern Asian societies have
prepared for, responded to, remembered, and politicized
major disasters. In addition to examining links
between modernization campaigns and a decline in state
attention to relieving disaster victims in Japan and
China, it offers case studies of how societies in
contemporary Japan and Indonesia have sought to
moderate the impact of disasters by promoting community
resilience, and identifying and preparing assistance
for vulnerable populations.

Brown's paper looks at the unsuccessful policies of
government in Niigata prefecture (Japan) which led to
flooding in 1926 and questions whether this was in part
due to the way in which the country had modernized.
Edgerton-Tarpley is concerned with the 1938 Yellow
River Flood in China, providing an analysis of the
newspaper coverage of the disaster and its
politicization. Hood considers how documentaries, books
and movies continue to shape society's memories of the
world's worst single plane crash which happened in
Japan in 1985. Haase's paper looks at the way the
administrative system in Indonesia adapted to respond
to the Great Sumatran Earthquake and Tsunami of 2004.

Unfortunately Tatsuki Shigeo is unable to present his
paper on Stakeholder Collaboration for Evacuation and
Sheltering Assistance Planning for Persons with Special
Needs in Time of Disaster as he has gone to the areas
hit by the recent tsunami in Japan to see what is
happening. Instead of Tatsuki's paper each of the
panellists will speak for a few minutes on the recent
quakes and tsunami in Japan in relation to their own
research.

More details about each paper are below.

We hope see you at our panel.

Regards,

Christopher Hood

--

The Great Tochio Flood of 1926: Limits to
Modernization in Flood Amelioration
Philip Brown, The Ohio State University

In regard to flood amelioration, Japan's economic
transformation with its new productive capacities,
materials and machines had made its mark on riparian
civil engineering by the 1920s. Japan boasted notable
projects like the Iwabuchi project in Tokyo (1916), and
the Okozu Diversionary channel, East Asia's largest
civil engineering project (1922). However much pride
Japan took in such engineering accomplishments, and
however much they conveyed impressions of a government
able to marshal funds for large-scale projects to
protect lives and property, these were the exceptional.
Far more typical were provincial and local efforts to
manage flood risk largely on their own.

To analyze more typical efforts at flood reduction,
this paper explores the unsuccessful local (prefecture,
town and village) efforts in the area of Tochio,
Niigata Prefecture, a town through which flow
tributaries of Japan's longest river, the Shinano. On
July 28, 1926, its efforts to prevent flooding came to
naught: Dikes were breached on four of Tochio's six
rivers in 170 places; they were destroyed completely at
42 places; 72 died, 15 were reported missing and 2479
homes flooded.

The paper explores 1) the options open to communities
like Tochio to address flood hazard, and 2) the degree
to which local efforts failed reflected the impact of
industrial modernization. At the heart of the analysis
lies the question of the degree to which such
communities were left largely on their own, robbed by
the Meiji government of even that regional assistance a
daimyo domain often provided.

A Necessary Sacrifice? The Politicization of Disaster
in Chinese Media Coverage of the Yellow River Flood of
1938
Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, San Diego State University

China's Yellow River flood of 1938 was a self-inflicted
catastrophe of epic proportions. Faced with the
inexorable advance of Japanese armies across China, in
June 1938 Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese military
command decided to breach the southern dike of the
Yellow River in a desperate attempt to buy time by
'using water in place of soldiers' against the
invaders. The strategic breach soon widened into a
5000-foot-wide break, which caused the Yellow River to
undergo a major change in course and led to massive
flooding in three provinces. The flood failed to stop
the Japanese advance, but it created close to four
million refugees and killed as many as 900,000 people.

Aware of the radical impact of its actions, the
Guomindang government during the war did not admit
responsibility for unleashing the flood, but instead
blamed Japanese warplanes for causing the breach.
After the war, the campaign to draw meaning from the
disaster and repair the breach exacerbated tensions
between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communists.

This paper analyzes Chinese media coverage of the 1938
flood and its aftermath. By comparing how national,
local, pro-Guomindang and pro-Communist newspapers in
China responded to the flood itself and the postwar
struggle over plugging the breach, it offers a snapshot
of Chinese attitudes towards calamity during a time of
war, and provides a vivid case study of the
politicization of disaster in modern China.

Social Memory of Japan's Titanic: Emotion, History,
Conspiracy and the JL123 Crash
Christopher Hood, Cardiff University

On 12 August 1985 Japan Air Lines flight JL123 crashed
in mountains north-west of Tokyo. 32 minutes earlier an
explosion had blown off much of its rear stabilizer and
all hydraulics had been lost. By the time that search
and rescue teams reached the site some 15 hours later,
all but 4 of the 524 passengers and crew were dead.
Over the following days the media covered the news of
events from the crash site and Fujioka, where families
tried to identify loved ones. Notes written by some of
those on board which were found highlighted the torment
of the conditions inside the plane. Every year the
media continues to report on the anniversary events
held in the village where the plane crashed.

In the years that followed the official investigation
there have been numerous books, documentaries, novels
and films that have discussed the crash. This paper
argues that it is these outputs, rather than the
official investigation's own report, which are likely
to mould how society continues to remember the events
of 1985. In particular the paper will focus upon the
two novels and their dramatizations in looking at the
way in which the story of what happened in 1985 may
have shifted over the 25 years which have passed since
the crash. The paper argues that JL123 is becoming
Japan's equivalent of the Titanic sinking - a story
rife with emotion, coincidences, and conspiracies - and
one which all Japanese will have some knowledge of in
years to come.

Evolution in Administrative Systems: Exploring
Indonesia's Response to the Great Sumatran Earthquake
and Tsunami
Thomas W. Haase, American University of Beirut

Conventional wisdom suggests that policy-makers can
moderate disaster consequences by promoting community
resilience. While the manner in which resilience is
facilitated and maintained is not fully understood,
systems that possess the capacity to adapt to
conditions of uncertainty have been described as
resilient. A system's capacity to adapt, or modify the
structure of its activities, is related to many
factors, including its social-technical characteristics
and the availability of actionable information. Social
capital, defined as the benefits derived from the
relationships among the actors in a system, also seems
to influence a system's adaptive capacity.

This paper investigates adaption within the
administrative system that operated in Indonesia after
the Great Sumatran Earthquake and Tsunami. To identify
response organizations and interactions exchanged
between organizations, a content analysis was conducted
on newspaper articles and situation reports published
between 26 December 2004 and 17 January 2005. This data
was then transformed into a series of twenty-two
relational matrices, which were examined using the
network analysis software. Basic social network
measures were generated for each of the twenty-two
relational matrices to identify whether the system
underwent structural change.

This analysis generated findings that may indicate that
the system underwent adaptation. First, the system
experienced structural change two weeks after the
tsunami. Second, in terms of social capital, some
organizations shifted from interactions that could be
classified as bonding to interactions that could be
classified as bridging.