Issues and Legal Affairs on Support for People with Special Needs in Emergency through Participant Observation to Establishment of the Ordinance in Kobe City

Abstract

This study aims to clarify issues concerning how local government could develop legal system for individual evacuation support by community for weak people with special needs in emergency such as elderly, disabled, patients, pregnant women, young children and so on. Several arguments are pointed out to promote the measures for both emergency evacuation guidance support and providing daily support in shelters after evacuation including nursing-care service to people with special needs in the case of disaster or serious accident. In this paper the process of lawmaker proposal ordinance for the community evacuation support established in municipal assembly of Kobe city is described through our observation study. We focused how it could mitigate obstacles on existing personal information protection policy and difficulties on continuous management of local assistance system adopted in community level.