The national earthquake and national volcanic eruption prediction programs of Japan started in 1965 and 1974, respectively, based on the recommendation of the Geodesy Council. As a result, observations of seismic and volcanic activity have been enhanced and our understanding of the mechanisms of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions has made significant advances. However, these research results did not fully contribute to mitigating the damage caused by the 1995 Kobe earthquake or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. In order to make further contributions to disaster mitigation, we recognize the importance of research to apply the scientific understanding of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in collaboration with researchers in related research fields. The Earthquake and Volcano Hazards Observation and Research Program (2014–2018) was thus started on the basis of a recommendation of the Council for Science and Technology.

In this Program, research in the area of forecasting the hazards of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions has become one of the main pillars of research. Disaster information and knowledge of the disaster process, which involve the interaction of hazards and natural and social vulnerability, have been investigated in cooperation with earth scientists, engineers, and social scientists. On the basis of our results, research on literacy for disaster resilience was selected as one of the main pillars of research in the Second Observation and Research Program of Earthquake and Volcano Hazards (2019–2023), because a better understanding of and immediate information about disasters are important for disaster mitigation.

This special issue, which aims to disseminate the results of almost five years of research activities on literacy for disaster resilience in that Program, includes 15 papers and survey reports from multidisciplinary fields of study. The collection begins with Kimura and Ikeda’s important paper discussing the conceptual structure of the knowledge and abilities necessary to build disaster resilience capacities by analyzing school and community-based efforts, followed by a variety of empirical studies that are loosely categorized into two groups.

The first group of papers concerns the understanding of disaster processes and mechanisms themselves as a factor inducing disaster prevention and mitigation. First, Ebina and Sugawara, and Sugimori attempt to learn lessons from the pre-modern earthquake disasters based on past picture maps and scrolled records, respectively, followed by Ohkura’s interesting paper that points to problems in the Aso Volcano disaster mitigation system by analyzing the 2021 phreatic eruption process. Next, utilizing information and communication technology to support effective evacuation, Inoguchi, and Shiozaki and Hashimoto develop a disaster management toolkit and the tsunami drill program, respectively. The following two papers of Takubo et al. discuss behavioral mechanisms in a disaster period based on their simulation experiments from a cognitive science perspective.

The second group investigates methods of enhancing people’s literacy for disaster resilience, paying special attention to the interaction between science and civil society, led by Sawada and Sato, and Muroi, both discussing the disaster risk reduction efforts of small and medium-sized enterprises and of community-based organizations, respectively, in anticipation of the Nankai Trough earthquake and tsunami. Next, Kimura and Aikawa propose an education program to enhance the disaster awareness of high school students who have never experienced disasters. Further, four papers deal with the issue of people’s access to scientific knowledge focusing on the roles of university institutes, including case studies of so-called open science initiatives, by Yamori, Nakamichi, and Sakamoto and Nakamichi, and finally, ... [View PDF for the rest of the abstract]

In this study, we analyzed the disaster management education programs implemented by organizations included in the Disaster Management Education Challenge Plan, a program established to support disaster management education efforts in Japan. We examined the changes in these programs and identified the current state and issues in the promotion of disaster education in Japan by classifying the contents. The study methodology involved creating data sets of the program reports submitted from fiscal year (FY) 2004 to FY2021 by organizations admitted to the Disaster Management Education Challenge Plan, and evaluating them on scales of “fundamental skills of disaster management” and “factors regarding implementing the programs.” Analysis of the former found that there were few programs aimed at acquiring a scientific understanding of disasters as natural phenomena or learning about measures to prevent damage at normal times. Cluster analysis yielded eight clusters, based on which we discussed and proposed ways to implement the programs in order to improve the “fundamental skills of disaster management.” Similarly, analysis of the latter identified issues with regard to program logistics, such as securing financial resources and cultivating future successors. Cluster analysis yielded five clusters, based on which we discussed and proposed ways to effectively implement the programs.

This research collects and interprets historical information about topography from old maps and pictures, and constructs a method to reconstruct past topography on 3D graphics. Furthermore, from the restored historical topography, we will elucidate how the historical changes in the topography are related to today’s disaster situation, and visualize the disaster risk in the target area. We hope that the results of this research will contribute to the cultivation of disaster prevention awareness and the improvement of disaster prevention literacy.

The great earthquake in 1855 caused extensive damage to Edo, where the shogunate was located and more than one million people lived. The picture scroll on the subject of this earthquake, Edo Ohjishin no Zu, has been conventionally understood as depicting the general situation in Edo before and after the earthquake. However, an examination of related historical documents reveals that the scroll depicts the specific situation in the area between the Saiwaibashi-mon Gate and the Shiba Residence of the Satsuma Domain up to three months after the earthquake. The depiction of the damage and people’s behavior corresponds well with the descriptions in the historical documents. Edo Ohjishin no Zu shows the damage caused by the earthquake and fire, and the restoration process based on the facts, indicating that restoration progressed to some extent in the town areas during the three months after the earthquake. The premise that made this possible was the experience in dealing with fires that had accumulated in Edo, where fires were common. Although it was the first time for the machi-kaisho offices to provide relief in the wake of an earthquake, they quickly responded to the complex disaster involving fire by drawing on their past experience. Edo Ohjishin no Zu is a historical material that describes the sequence of events from the occurrence of the earthquake to the restoration process and can be used as a reference for disaster response even today.

At Aso volcano, phreatic and phreatomagmatic eruptions have repeatedly caused volcanic disasters with fatalities near the crater. While it is important to conduct research on eruption forecasting for reducing the risk to tourists and climbers of this volcano, it is also important to improve disaster prevention literacy regarding the volcanic eruptions. To improve disaster prevention literacy, it is important to elucidate the mechanisms of volcanic disasters based on case studies. In this study, the author chronologically summarizes the incident of the phreatic eruption that occurred in 2021 at Aso volcano. Although the Japan Meteorological Agency issued volcanic activity information sequentially as the volcanic activity increased, this information did not lead to prompt and effective closure of mountain trails. There was also a problem with the collection of volcanic information by climbers. It became clear that information on volcanic activity was not used effectively by either those regulating the mountain trails or those using them. Efforts should be made to resolve these issues in the future.

In recent years, disasters have become more frequent and more severe in Japan. To ensure their safety, it is essential to ensure that all impacted individuals evacuate. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, the formulation of district evacuation plans and the My-Timeline have been promoted, and their importance has been recognized. In addition, information and communication technology (ICT) has rapidly developed in recent years and is being integrated into the field of disaster management. In this context, digital transformation (DX) has become essential. Given the need to enhance disaster preparedness, via DX, this study designs and develops a digital support tool using ICT to support the formulation of evacuation plans and enhance capacity building for disaster prevention among individual users. In particular, it develops functions that allow users to easily formulate a plan based on their pre-registration information and familiarize them with hazard risks. It also helps them envision the potential damage they will incur and learn the impact of their personal attribute information on their choice of evacuation action when formulating an evacuation plan. These functions were implemented as a cloud service and evaluated by users. The evaluation confirmed that the tool contributed to raising users’ awareness.

This study aims to consider the effects and problems of a tsunami evacuation drill support system that visualizes dynamic tsunami data and evacuees’ locations. The system was developed and operated during a tsunami evacuation drill experiment. The location information application transmits evacuees’ locations in real time using the GPS and network functions of a multi-function terminal. The web application visualizes tsunami data and evacuees’ locations with animation on a web map using WebGIS. By operating the system in the tsunami evacuation experiment, the study could immediately evaluate the evacuation drills through real-time visualization of the evacuees’ actions. Feedback, including the results and evaluations of the evacuation drills, was provided to the participants. Before receiving feedback, 50% of the participants positively evaluated the drill results. However, 42.1% of the participants changed their evaluation to negative after receiving feedback. Additionally, by emphasizing the speed of action during evacuation as one of the important factors for quick evacuation, the system helped to alter participants’ disaster prevention awareness.

In decision making related to protective action against hazard risk, scrutinization of hazard-related information seems favorable for accurate risk evaluation. It is, however, unknown how such a risk-scrutiny attitude is related to sensitivity in risk perception or the difference in the types of information (e.g., sensory vs. numerical). Furthermore, how these attitudes are related to evacuation-prone individual factors, which may inform the psychological mechanisms of these attitudes, remains unknown. To address these questions, we conducted an online experiment (n = 1,200) using evacuation decision-making task with 40 earthquake scenarios where tsunami risks were manipulated using sensory or numerical information. Factor analysis identified risk-sensitive attitude, risk-scrutiny attitude, and sensitivity to sensory (vs. numerical) information. Risk-sensitive attitude was positively related to a evacuation-prone trait, that is emotion regulation, while risk-scrutiny attitude was negatively related to another evacuation-prone trait, leadership. The results demonstrated the independence of risk-scrutiny attitude from risk-sensitive attitude, as well as their independence from information types. Importantly, our results supported the notion that the suppression of optimistic bias is critical for risk-sensitive attitude and that the motivation to resolve the cognitive dissonance may underlie the risk-scrutiny attitude and delayed protective response. The current results have implications for psychological theories of protective decision making and development of disaster communication and education systems for tsunami and potentially other types of disasters.

Videos are commonly used in disaster prevention education or communication. Some consider behavioral recommendations to have more motivating content than hazard mechanisms; these, however, have not been empirically tested. Perception of hazard risk is mediated by risk-sensitive and risk-scrutiny attitudes, but which attitude the videos influence has not been examined. In Experiment 1, we created sets of videos for two types of content and relevant control videos, and their effects on four motivation measures of the self-oriented model (i.e., self-relevance, attention, self-efficacy, and behavioral intention) were examined in the online survey. In Experiment 2, we compared the intervention effects of disaster prevention and control videos on the pre-post change of two types of attitudes using a scenario-based tsunami evacuation decision-making task. Consequently, disaster-prevention videos (vs. control videos) facilitated the four motivation measures irrespective of the content type and increased the risk-sensitive attitude during the evacuation decision-making from the tsunami. The revealed facilitatory effect of the videos on motivational and risk-sensitive aspects of evacuation response appears to be congruent with previously advocated advantages of videos or films. The current finding offers insights into the process and mechanism of the effect of disaster prevention videos, providing a robust empirical basis for promoting their use in disaster prevention education.

In industrial clusters that are affected by earthquakes and tsunamis, advance countermeasures are necessary to ensure the continuity of business operations of companies. This article presents the results of a questionnaire survey of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Amagasaki City, Hyogo Prefecture, to determine the current status of disaster countermeasures, and a questionnaire survey of residents’ awareness of risks and their current countermeasures.

Disaster resilience is an interdisciplinary area of study. Collaboration between humanities and sciences is important to approach issues in this area. However, science and engineering consider disaster resilience as minimizing the scientifically estimated damage induced by natural hazards. In contrast, disaster resilience studies in the social sciences tend to focus on societal vulnerability. The views between the two disciplines can lead to inconsistency or contradiction. This paper discussed this issue. To do so, the author uses the case study focusing on the effects of predictions on Nankai Trough Earthquake countermeasures in Kochi City, Japan. First, this study revealed that not only the revision of hazard prediction but the historical background of land use development affected the large-scale earthquake damage estimation in Kochi City. Second, the upward revision of hazard prediction resulted in strengthening of community disaster management. However, it also accelerated residential relocation associated with class disparities. As a result, ironically, marginalized social groups were unevenly located in predicted tsunami inundation areas. However, such issues are not considered in the existing disaster resilience scheme and policy. Based on this analysis, it is argued that communicating scientific knowledge on hazards to society alone is not enough. Considering the local context, the perspective of literacy for disaster resilience from downstream’ is also important.

In this study, the authors propose a disaster management drill program for high school students. The program is designed to develop, among high school students, “the awareness that disasters affect themselves,” instead of being “someone else’s problem.” The program was developed in accordance with the ADDIE model of instructional design theory. Sayo High School in Sayo Town, Hyogo Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the flood in 2009, was selected as the program target. Since this school’s disaster management activities had primarily translated into a passive disaster management drill wherein students moved to an evacuation site according to the instructions of the teachers, we set two goals: “knowing past disasters and the current situation, and understanding the risks at the time of disaster” and “knowing the problems that occur at the time of disaster and understanding what action you should take.” In order to arouse interest among high school students, the authors incorporated drones for evacuation drills and gaming teaching materials for disaster management awareness into the program. We designed and implemented a program that ended in the morning, and compared the level of achievement on 21 learning objectives before and after the program. The results revealed a statistically significant rise in all of the 21 objectives. In addition, the results of factor analysis show that the program enabled the students to develop a sense of awareness that disasters affect everyone, understand the risks their communities would face during disasters, such as earthquakes and floods, and realize what they should do to manage this risk.

This paper reports on an attempt to introduce “open science” into the field of seismology to improve disaster literacy in seismology and related fields. The term “open science” has a variety of meanings, but the core idea is of diverse stakeholders “doing science collaboratively.” This study reports on four pieces of action research to improve seismology-related disaster literacy through the idea of “open science,” which focuses on “doing science collaboratively” with the active participation of citizens (non-experts) and researchers (experts). In particular, this study focuses on the “citizen science” perspective because disaster literacy, first and foremost, refers to the disaster literacy of the general public. Specifically, we improved earthquake literacy by operating the Abuyama Earthquake Observatory Science Museum; promoting citizen-participatory earthquake and tsunami evacuation drills by developing and implementing Nige-tore, a smartphone app to support tsunami evacuation drills; promoting the Minna de Honkoku project to decipher historical materials related to natural disasters through citizen involvement; and conducting a trial “open/citizen science”-oriented seismologic-data observation program, the Manten Project, for inland earthquake research.

Sakurajima Volcano Observatory, with a history exceeding 60 years, is recognized by researchers in Japan and overseas for conducting frontier research centering on Sakurajima, the most active volcano in Japan. It is owned by Kyoto University and represents the university in the surrounding communities. This paper reviews the open-door events, which have been conducted yearly for the last ten years as a part of a university-wide effort by Kyoto University. They make use of the facilities at Sakurajima Volcano Observatory, which aims to enhance the understanding of volcanoes among the general public in collaboration with geo-guides as “boundary workers.”

The sudden eruption and tragedy of Mt. Ontake in 2014, a volcano located in central Japan, showed the fact that the volcanic eruption is the event with uncertainty, and it is important to let citizen to be aware of such uncertainty. To find measures to raise citizen’s disaster awareness, this study focuses on the risk communication between citizens and volcano observatories, which are attached to universities. It examines the role of observatories, focusing on the activities of the Sakurajima Volcano Research Center, which monitors Mt. Sakurajima, one of the most active volcanoes in Japan, and suggests the necessity of human resource development that is able to connect citizen and science.

After the eruption of Mt. Ontakesan Volcano in 2014, Ontakesan Volcano Laboratory, Nagoya University was established in 2017 to keep and develop the face-to-face relationship between the local community and volcano experts. In 2018, the Ontakesan Volcano Meister System also started to undertake activities for volcanic disaster management and promotion of the regional economy. Additionally, two visitor centers opened in Kiso Town (at the foot of Mt. Ontakesan) and Otaki Village (at the entrance of the trail to the summit) in 2022. We compared these activities in the Ontakesan area with other volcanic areas (Usuzan, Bandaisan, Hakoneyama, Fujisan, Asosan, Unzendake, and Sakurajima) from the perspective of literacy enhancement on volcanic disaster management. We made an interview survey of the organizations/facilities responsible for volcanic disaster prevention education in these volcano areas to evaluate the activity of the Ontakesan Voclano Meisters. We considered common and specific issues among them to clarify the characteristics of literacy enhancement for volcanic disaster reduction in the Ontakesan area. In all the organizations that we surveyed, there is a common emphasis on the education for children to transfer disaster memories to the next generation and to raise their awareness of disaster prevention. Though the Ontakesan Volcano Meisters have less interaction with the local residents than other areas, they exceed in the enlightenment for climbers and have made efforts to raise the safety awareness of climbers on site since their establishment.

This study was conducted to elaborate on the factors contributing to indirect deaths due to earthquakes between 1995 and 2016 in Japan and to identify their prevalence by focusing on life and health changes. A content analysis was conducted to determine the factors using documents provided by the local government. From the 472 indirect death cases, 12 categories and 137 detailed factors were identified. From the 13 cases related to suicide, six categories and 15 detailed factors were extracted. Among the categories, intense disaster-related work was ranked highest, followed by damage to jobs and property and family changes. For the other 459 non-suicide related causes of death, 12 categories and 122 detailed factors were extracted. The most prevalent categories were related to delay or interruption of treatment due to hospital shutdowns, followed by changes in living conditions. In detailed factor of living conditions, cold or hot environments—which are due to being washed away by tsunamis, weather, drafty shelters, the number of evacuees, damaged infrastructure, and a lack of clothes—were found in 60 cases. In conclusion, maintenance of medical services, promotion of a safe environment, and identification and intervention of high-risk people based on these factors are imperative. Developing assessment tools based on these factors for future research is essential to estimate the size of high-risk populations, assist in the distribution of limited resources, and respond quickly to survivors in disasters.

This study examines the effect of the recognition of various disaster scenarios on the disaster management behavior of people. It analyzes the data (n = 1,900) of the social surveys, conducted by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) in seven districts of Japan (Hokkaido/Tohoku, Kanto, Chubu, Kinki, Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu). The study indicates that the experience of victims, recognition of earthquake occurrence in the region and of earthquake hazard maps, as well as the factors, “life threatening,” “difficulties in daily life,” and “induced disasters,” in the disaster scenarios are related to their disaster management behavior. The greater their recognition of “life threatening” and “difficulties in daily life,” the more people will adopt disaster management behaviors. This study suggests that, added to the experience of victims and the recognition of the occurrence of earthquakes and of hazard maps, the image of the damage through specific disaster scenarios affects people’s disaster management behavior. On the other hand, it has become apparent that creating images of “induced disasters” that are caused by earthquakes, with their unclear association, may lead to psychological confusion.

The Nankai Trough Earthquake, which is estimated to have a 70%–80% probability of occurring within the next 30 years, necessitates considering various scenarios due to the extensive seismic source region and call for advancing disaster preparedness measures. Assessing direct damage caused by earthquakes is considered particularly challenging compared to assessing human and physical damage due to its intricate composition. However, the existing research in model analysis aimed at real-time estimation has yielded results, namely, the ability to promptly calculate direct damage from earthquakes using seismic motion and stock quantities as inputs. This study aimed to leverage the research outcomes of real-time estimation to approximate the direct damage costs that would be caused by the Nankai Trough Earthquake. Three hazard assessment cases were selected, based on damage estimations to be attempted. The results indicated that a damage estimation approach based on a common foundation dataset and model analysis considering different occurrence scenarios is more suitable for evaluating results and assessing the importance of mitigation measures than conventional scenario-based damage estimations.

Disaster is the occurrence or sequence of occurrences that endangers and disrupts people’s lives and livelihoods due to natural and/or non-natural as well as human elements, including fatalities, property loss, environmental harm, and psychological effects. In addition to concentrating on the victims’ safety and their own safety, the search and rescue (SAR) team plays a significant part in this evacuation operation. Based on these issues, this study examined how to use a drone equipped with electronic equipment to search for victims on the ground to speed up the evacuation process at natural disaster sites, assisting the evacuation process and enhancing the safety of the SAR team. The drone carries a near-infrared camera and GPS. The images captured by the camera provide the parameters for classifying victims using deep learning. The system has been implemented by sampling data from human poses resembling the position of the victims’ bodies from natural disasters. From the experimental results, the system can detect objects with high accuracy, that is, 99% in both static and dynamic conditions. The best model results were obtained at a height of 2 meters with a low error percentage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the positive and negative impacts of relocating the new national capital (IKN) to East Kalimantan on ecotourism resilience, in the context of scientific literature and international news. This research integrated the systematic literature review (SLR) and qualitative textual analysis (QTA) methods to validate each other’s results. The QTA results could support or challenge the SLR results to answer research questions. The results showed that the relocation of IKN was a great opportunity for ecotourism resilience, positive transmigration, government and community collective action, and stronger stakeholder collaboration. In contrast, IKN relocation could also be a real threat to ecotourism resilience due to natural disasters, government capitalism, negative transmigration, deforestation, environmental degradation, and marginalization of local communities.