Local residents are considered to play the main role in their own evacuation in the event of a tsunami. However, evacuation drills are almost always organized by local governments or disaster preparedness experts. This has led to a lack of flexibility on the part of local residents and the government concerning the roles that each should play to prevent disasters. To resolve this problem, we developed a tsunami evacuation drill smartphone application called “Nigetore”, which was developed with the help of local residents. In this study, we demonstrated ways to use “Nigetore” and found that it not only helped residents resolve issues with group evacuation drills, but also helped them obtain information about shelters, evacuation routes, and transportation and was helpful for people with difficulties in moving. The diverse functionality of the application has two implications. First, local residents could organize their own evacuation drills instead of relying on local government to do so for them, which helped solve the problem of inflexible roles. Second, “Nigetore” presents residents with the open-ended problem of how to evacuate with telling them the correct response, so they had to develop their own ability to decide the best way to evacuate.

The study analyzed data from a random social survey conducted by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Kobe Broadcasting Station. The survey was implemented in November 2019, 25 years after the Great Hanshin-Awaji (Kobe) Earthquake that occurred on January 17, 1995. The respondents of the survey were residents influenced by the earthquake disaster during the elementary or junior high school days. The purpose of the study is to examine the influence of the earthquake disaster on their psychological status and growth in the 25 years. The study investigates the relationships between demographics, relocation, career choice, self-disclosure of the experience of disaster, psychological change, intention to tell the next generation about their experience. The main results indicated that most residents reframed their experience of earthquake disaster as a positive experience. And, 60% of residents thought the meaning of their experience was losing and indicated the importance of telling the next generation about their experience.

Japan Self-Defense Force operated its disaster relief duty cooperate with 8 prefectural governments and 38 cities and towns of western Japan for saving lives and recovery of damages caused by torrential rain from July 5 to 8 in 2018 (the July 2018 torrential rainfall). This paper tries to consider how local governments and SDFs were cooperate with for disaster relief in the case of the July 2018 torrential rainfall with mail-based questionnaire for 46 local governments which cooperate with SDF in the rainfall and with interview with Japan Gland Self-Defense Force Middle Army. According to results of these studies, local governments held certain relationship and cooperation with SDF under normal circumstances and these relationship and cooperation for disaster relief are improving compared with disaster relief cooperation for the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and for the Great East Japan Earthquake. However, some technical questions: maintaining base for operation, confusion of field level coordination and internal adjustment at local governments etc. are still remain. Additionally, the result of mail-based questionnaire suggests that limitation of the space at local government buildings may become a barrier against developing cooperation between them.

This paper aims to clarify the usefulness and limitations of disaster prevention information sharing infrastructure system built for sending alerts, for subsequent verification. As a case study, we analyzed data on disaster prevention weather information and evacuation advisory transmitted during the heavy rain of Typhoon No. 19 in 2019. As a result of analysis, the temporal transition and spatial distribution of disaster prevention information were quantitatively clarified. As a result of the analysis, we quantitatively showed the temporal transition and the spatial distribution of the number of municipalities that transmitted disaster prevention information. It was shown that the analysis method used can verify the effect of measures related to evacuation information.

Through an analysis of recent studies, this study demonstrates that the provision of multi-lingual information has been the primary measure in the disaster prevention policy in a multicultural society regardless of the event of a natural disaster, ever since the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake in 1995. Moreover, this study outlines that the strategy of providing multi-lingual information is highly challenging to perform effectively in actual situations despite the public entities engaging in developing the framework of providing information in various languages at the time of the disaster.

This study introduces cases in which various networking frames among foreign people community make a significant impact on their evacuation behavior based on the results of a survey on foreign residents. Moreover, multi-lingual information has a positive impact by nurturing a sense of security in disaster victims. However, there are limitations in providing multi-lingual information in three aspects: the information capabilities of quickness, concreteness, and distribution. Although these limitations can be resolved through prospective technology innovation, they should be also considered as the limitations of public help.