自然災害に対する社会的危機管理システム(<特集>リスクマネジメント)

抄録

In this paper, a way of social risk management towards natural disasters is considered by referring the East Japan Great Earthquake happened on 11 March, 2011. Whenever we have a serious disaster including natural one in this country, lack of leadership of the government and the prime minister is heavily criticized by domestic as well as overseas medias. However, there is no idea of leadership, a typical Western idea, in Japanese tradition. Leadership is actually not necessary for risk management. The most important factors for recovery from natural disaster are stability of the stricken society and the people's strong unity, which is one of features in Japanese society as well. Our purpose here is to investigate a risk management system built in the normal administrative one in which Japanese way of life, consciousness and ideas are utilized to the maximum. Since decentralization of authority is supposed as a prerequisite in this idea, autonomous decentralized system is strongly recommended as administrative one. It is impossible to know the best performance of risk management by autonomous decentralized administrative system because the system is always changing. Therefore, it is neither possible to strictly measure efficiency nor to compare with other systems. If however, the damage of a disaster is recognized to be less than those of the past ones by many people, the risk management system may be evaluated to have worked effectively.