Abstract
This paper presents basic methods of victim identification applied in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11, 2011. It was proved in this disaster that human identification using dental treatment records is particularly effective compared with other forensic human identification techniques including those using faces, fingerprints, palmprints, and DNA. However, a major problem at the time of the disaster was that the Japanese police agency did not have sufficient expertise in dental identification, especially in mass fatality situations. In April 2011, the authors’ group joined the victim identification team of Miyagi Prefectural Police to introduce advanced dental identification techniques with the necessary ICT support. We designed and implemented the overall workflow of dental identification in collaboration with Miyagi Dental Association. The main objective of this paper is to share the lessons learned from the disaster. We also review a recent project conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) for disaster preparedness; the project is to define a standard data set for forensic dentistry in order to achieve rapid human identification.
