Abstract
It can be said that one of the biggest problems of current disaster education in Japan is the style of communication that is one way from experts to non-experts. In other words, disaster education has been simply defined as an activity that transfers knowledge of disasters and disaster management from experts to non-experts, i.e. general public. However, some recent studies show that even though Japanese public has enough level of knowledge of disasters and disaster management, most of them do not prepare for disasters. In order to make general public understand this reality, chances of collaborative work with experts should be provided as one of the new ways of disaster education.
There are around 70 disaster education centres in Japan. These education centres provide a way of learning about disasters and disaster management for the visitors through mainly their displays and interactions with the attendants. These centres are usually managed by local fire authorities. And most of the attendees are hired by the authorities or local government etc. This means these centres are run by so-called experts; hence there must be some space for improving these centres from the above-described point of view. In this paper, it is proposed that becoming volunteers can be a way of disaster education from science communication perspective. In addition, in order to prove the feasibility of implementing volunteers in Japanese disaster education centres, an example from the UK is introduced.
