Abstract
This paper reports a new method of relief activity for victims in an area affected by natural disaster, which was invented by referring to the village-to-village relay system in the Edo period (1600-1867). In the system, a patient was brought from one village to another village by villagers and was finally brought to a medical doctor living in a distant village. In our study, people participating in a regional SNS are regarded as a village and relief goods are brought from one regional SNS community to another until they arrived at a victimized area. Two practices of the village-to-village we carried out for victims of the Great East-Japan Earthquake, March 2011, are reported in details, i.e. the first attempt implemented in the next month of the Earthquake to bring relief goods from Onomich city, Hiroshima prefecture, to Morioka city, Iwate prefecture, by driving 1,500 km, and the second attempt implemented about half a year after the Earthquake to bring relief goods from Kiryu city, Gunma prefecture, to Kesen'numa city, Miyagi prefecture.
The village-to-village method was found useful in two points. First, it enables people living far away from an affected area but living in an area through which relief goods were brought, to participate in relief activities without much burden. Second, it is possible to meet victims' demand by transmitting information from a regional SNS located near the affected area to the one from which the relay starts.
It was suggested that the method made it possible to develop a route toward an affected area flexibly by changing nodes and directions of a route of relay depending on where a disaster occurs. Also, the method can make it possible for many people living along the route of relay to participate in relief activities.
