Abstract
The articles in this special issue devoted to disasters and how they were dealt with in 20th century Japan have taken up such pertinent topics as the historical development of how to define a “disaster” and roles played by such entities as the police, firefighters, the military, technological experts and the public at large, in trying to prevent them. While this research has attempted to offer new possibilities for the field of historical science, let the reader be warned against interpreting these efforts merely as a narrative regarding ways in which the Japanese people were mobilized and controlled from above under the direction of central government authorities. While all of the authors have aimed primarily at creating basic approaches to a history of disaster and its prevention, the latter was dealt with in the sense of “soft” policy-making related mainly to the aspect of calls to human action.
It would be presumptuous for us to announce that this issue now marks the firm establishment of a new field of disaster and disaster prevention history. Without a clear understanding about how and what kind of disasters occurred in the past, the study of the response to them cannot be begun in earnest. Thus, we should promote research on disasters of the past from the standpoint that the history of disaster prevention is an integral part of their history.
Now is the time to begin accumulating and sharing a database consisting of information on when, where and how disasters have occurred. Thoroughly reading metropolitan and provincial histories compiled by local authorities will no doubt lead to clues about disasters that we still know nothing about. Then there are histories of river basins compiled by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, providing us with a region-by-region framework for studying the history of flood and landslide disasters.
It goes without saying that given the far-reaching scope and effects of disasters, studying them requires close cooperation and coordination among scholars in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. At present, joint research efforts involving specialists in the humanities and their counterparts in the natural sciences, in particular, are few and far between, despite the fact that the ability of historians to find, read and interpret documents of past eras should be crucial to engineers and geologists studying the origins of particular disasters. On the other hand, the technological knowledge possessed by physical scientists will no doubt broaden and enrich the historian’s purview of the historical record.
