The local government prepare The Local Disaster Management Plan according to local circumstances and The Basic Disaster Management Plan. Earthquake disaster prevention by local government is promoted on The Local Disaster Management Plan. The current situation of earthquake disaster prevention by respective prefectural and municipal has a difference. We carried out a questionnaire survey of 748 local government, all prefectural, municipal and the 23 special wards of Tokyo. to investigate the current situation of earthquake disaster prevention leading to housing damage reduction.

The greatest problem in Japanese earthquake disaster reduction policy is that many buildings do not have earthquake-resistance ability. Firstly I propose sharing information about earthquake risks, as well as organizing trusful systems of earthwuake-resistance retrofitting in independent local areas. Secondly, I propose to carry out public financial support programs of intensive earthquake-resistance retrofitting for lower-income people. Thirdly, I propose to promote technical development and price reduction of earthquake-resistance retrofitting, I propose to adjust such economic systems as Insurances systems, loan systems, and tax exemption or reduction in order to encourage middle-and upper-income people's self efforts.

Promotion system for retrofitting of existing houses is the most urgent issue in earthquake disaster reduction measures in Japan. In recent years some prefectures and some major cities have the subsidies for seismic diagnosis and retrofItting of private houses. However, the number of subsidy users are very few as compared with these plans. The gap may occur probably because users'needs dsare not reflected to the promotion systems crrectly. The questionnaire survey was made at Fujinomiya city in Shizuoka prefecture to make an analysis of the house owners' needs of financial support system for retrofitting of existing houses. We clarified the house owners' needs and the main factors that influenced the number of users and suggested the improvement in the support system.

In the past earthquake disaster, the RC frame with masonry wall structure is proved to be seismically vulnerable to cause a number of causalities due to the collapse of the structure. This research is focusing on such structure for improving the quality of constructionin the City of Marikina, Philippines. At first, the current construction method and structural details are investigated, and the loading experirnents are carried out for estirnating the seismic capacity of current construction. Based on the experiment results, a better construction method is developed to improve their seismic capacity, and the loading experirnent is carried out again for demonstrating the effects of the improvement.

A GIS database for seismic damage risk assessment was built in and around Marikina city, a suburb bedroom town of Metropolitan Manila. Building shape polygon data were available to measure building characteristics, as a layer of topographic CAD data which was digitized on 1:10000 scaie of aero photos. Buildings were classified into two types of residence overiaying the existing land use map; high dense housing and standard one. Those residentiai zones were found to have different trends of building density and histogram of building area. The seismic resistant quaiities of the buildings were evaiuated based on such regionai characteristics. Vulnerability curves of GESI method to the buiIding groups were decided and total number of casualties in the city was estimated at about 1900 people.

In order to support safety management and emergency response in university, the integrated database of objects on hazardous materials, harmful chernicals, disaster prevention equipments, and evacuation accommodations in the seven buildings in the Suzukakedai campus of Tokyo Institute of Technology is constructed. By using the database, the GIS-based mapping system, which allows the users to retrieve, view and update the spatial objects stored in the database and to generate maps of floor plan for the buildings, is developed.

The purpose this research is to develop the city area GlS of a space-database renewal type focused on building dala which serves as basic data of the planning support system for various kinds of earthquake damage mitigation, and concretizes the city area transition. We show the concept and the construction method of the developed system first. Next, this system is combined with the fire spreading simulation model, and the validity of this system in case of an earthquake disaster is discussed. Moreover, as an analysis example which utilized the developed system, it analyzes how much each mitigation of earthquake damage in some areas will improve with building renewals in future from the viewpoint of coverage of burnt house using this model combined with this system.

The aim of this study is to establish the disaster prevention information sytem, that contributes to the earthquke disaster prevention in municipality. For this reason, the problems of the existing systems were clarified. To solve these problems, the information processing method, which will make the rapid assessment possible was proposed. The framework of disaster prevention information system which is certain to function and effective to reduce damages was established. The prototyping of the syslem based on the proposed techniques and application experiment were carried out.

The purpose of this study is to develop a method for estimating the quantity of buildings with different seismic vulnerability according to GESI method in developing countries. At first we selected a learning area with the 25m gridded IKONOS imagery data of Marikina City, Metor Manila, Philippines. Based on the cluster analysis for the distribution patterns of DNs available in the learning area, we proposed a method to categorize the grids into 7 different land cover pattern. Then we developed a procedure of field investigation using digital videocamera with GPS to identify the quantity of buildings with different seismic vulnerability. Finally, we estimated the quantity of buildings with different seismic vulnerability at the entire Marikina City area.

Night-time city light distribution observed by DMSP satellites has been forcused on as a prornising approach to monitor the global human activities. Since its intensity of night-time city light is larger than the upper gain limitation of DMSP visible band sensor, an urbanized area is easily saturated. This make it difficult to estimate basic information required in disaster risk assessment such as distribution of population and social infrastructures in an urbanized area. In this paper, new method to estimate original DN which can be observed if the sensor has infinite width of gain considering the distribution of observed DN was proposed. It was clarified that city light distribution developed by new method successfully reflects unduration of light intensity and population in urbanized area.

Since the revision of Basic Plan for Disaster Prevention of 1995, local govenunents have changed their municipal plan for disaster prevention and made their own disasler management manuals. However those manuals are not easy to use in the case of disaslers because there is no unified defmition among them and no useful methodology for making manuals and basically it is the text-base so cannot read these manuals in emergency. This paper shows problems of them and clearing the connection of the spatial data and Disaster Management Manual and finally proposed a methodology of making the Disaster Management Manuals using Technical Writing Method.

We propose a method to estimate amplification factor at an arbitrary point to obtain the spatial distribution of JMA seismic intensity including nonobservation sites. The amplification factor of JMA seismic intensity is estimated using the records from a high-density strong motion network. We compare the seismic intensities observed at some staions in Kanazawa city during the past earthquakes with those estimated calculated by seismic intensity at a reference station and amplifaication factor of each site. The predicted values were in good agreement with the observed ones.

This paper introduces a comprehensive earthquake disaster reduction planning process spotlighting to stakeholder involvement The planning process was developed from a case study in Marikina City, Metro-Manila, Philippines. Planning process was developed considering the following points could be accomplished; 1) Stakeholder involvement, 2) Coordination with a future developing plan, 3) Installing strategic planning framework, and 4) Comprehensiveness of contents. Marikina Comprehensive Earthquake Disaster Reduction Program (CEDR) and Action Plan was established through a collaborative work with stakeholders of Marikina City Government. Uniqueness of established plan is also introduced.

Japanese seismic intensity is determined based on the earthquake records observed by seismometers of JMA and local governments. Although instrumental seismic intensity expresses properties of the ground shaking wilh a single value, it is too simple to show the various aspects of ground molions. If the seismometer, for example, is installed near a big structure or an edge of the foundation, the response would remarkably be changed due to the vicinity effects. In this study, a collocation of a seismograph is modeled, and the influence to the maximum accelerat ion and seismic intensity are examined by using 2-dimensional FEM analysis. Especially the indices of the earthquake motion were investigated by changing effects of building and geographical conditions.

Under the potential threat of Nankai-Tonankai Earthquake, it is urgent and important for reducing resulting disasters to build up the capacities of stakeholders in the region. In order to improve their disaster mitigation and preparedness capacities, we proposed strategies and tactics for stakeholders to develop the local earthquake disaster reduction plan by themselves. The process can enhance their proactive attitude toward the disaster management issue and grow the sense of ownership. The effectiveness of the strategies and tactics was successfully demonstrated in a case study of constructing an Earthquake Disaster Reduction Plan in MarikinaCity, Philippines.

Metropolitan areas and coastal communities along the Pacific coast and the Inland Sea in Japan are under the threat of gigantic tsunamis accompanied with possible megathrust earthquakes along the Nankai Trough within 30 to 40 years. The authors propose a cooperative network for tsunami disaster management, that consists of the integrated system of real-time tsunami modeling techniques and real-time tsunami observation system. This system will be in public at "http://trust.dri.ne.jp/".

In this paper, we discuss applicability of urban improvement planning problem for prevention from fire spread for the real data. First, we show a procedure for constructing a fire spreading path ("Ensho-keiro") network from real data. Then, we show enumerating method of all disconnecting vertex sets of this network. Finally, we demonstrate that this method is useful for planning urban improvement.

In a big city, there are many commuters and temporary visitors for shopping, eating and drinking. If they encounter a great earthquake in downtown area, they are left there due to the paralysis of the traffic system. Many of them have to go back home on foot. But it's seems to be difficult for them to go home on foot smoothly, due to fire, liquefaction and traffic control on their way home. So, in this study, we focus routes of walker to go home, and analyze jam of them.

When a strong earthquake strikes an urban area in the daytime, the railway service would be suspended. Under such situation, massive commuter would concentrate a central station and confusing such people might generate the contingency. Though there have been some studies on this matter so far, they don't target the earthquake that actually occurs. Based on the above-mentioned situation, in order to know how the commuters in Sendai Urban Area behaved to go home, we conducted a questionnaires survey for the Sanriku south earthquake to which the railway services of the JR-East were suspended. This paper shows the result of this survey and analyzes the factor behind their way of decision-making, and discusses the counter-measure of this matter.

A reconstruction process from an earthquake disaster in Turkey has aspecial characteristic point Especially, the most characteristic points are the system of support for reconstructing a person's destroyed building caued by an earthquake disaster. Also development of a new settlement area that is considered great importance to the ground condition. These have been invented by the law, system and organization for a disaster in Turkey. In addition, after the Marmara earthquake, there were some changes in the law, system and organization about a disaster. By this change, it has been expected a different correspondence to afuture disaster. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the future changes of the characteristic points for a disaster in Turkey by arranging a series of processes.

A realtime evaluation system of population exposure to seismic intensity (PEX) has been proposed. On the basis of the JMA intensities reported via prefectural seismic intensity information network, the proposed system processes site corrections and spatial interpolations to estimate intensity distribution on uniform grid cells with spacing of 500m. The derived intensity distribution is immediately overlaid with the population distribution of the concerned area to aggregate population exposed to a certain level of seismic intensity. Thus the PEX information is issued for emergency response personnel to intuitively understand the social impact in a real time manner. Numerical examples have been shown for realtime PEX evaluation in Gifu prefecture using past and hypothetical earthquake events.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the human body injury caused by collapsed buildings due to earthquake by the simulation using finite element method. Specifically, the death due to suffocation by thorax compression which was one of the typical modes of death caused by the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake was simulated using computer simulation in order to investigate the applicability of the present numerical analysis. Mostly favorable findings were obtained by the computer simulation of quasi-static problems, such as death due to suffocation. The results from the simulalion analyses of the compressed thorax behavior are very close to the results of CT scanner experiments.

In Turkey, the main housing policy for erthquake recovery is giving ex-owners permanent houses that are constructed in suburbs, which apart from damaged area by Turkish government. This study aims to examine the process for earthquake recovery and to clarify characteristics and problems focusing on social background and the sufferers' consciousness. The results are shown as follows; (1) Ex-owners claim unfairness about public support prescribed damage level. (2) The sufferers would like to live same place after earthquake but they consider safety locations. (3) They prefer three-storied condominiums to high-rise condominiums and agree housing policy on the main points. But there are a lot of problems in new towns and developed area.

This paper presents a new paradigm of Community Renaissance and Integrated Community Development after 921 earthquake in Taiwan, which is named “Integrated Disaster Reconstruction". In this paper firstly it would be taken a brief look at 22 reconstruction projects after earthquake, and then, 3 case studies will be shown by using way of ethnology.The first case study relates “Shaobantian Community", the second one relates "Qingjing Farm Community", Ren 'ai town. The last one relates to Shang'an Community in Shuili Town. Those communities are located in Nantou County and all places are damaged by the earth quake. The end of this paper the author would like to mention the character of current tendency of “Integrated Disaster Reconstruction" through brief look of outline of 22 reconstruction, and ethnography of three community's case studies.

Natural Disasters not only claim human lives, but also bring great economic losses, therefore have considerable impacts to sustainable development of developing countries. Previously there have been few analysis on the impact of natural disasters in economic terms to developing countries. This paper describes the economic loss by natural disasters in comparison with the national economy and analyzes the natural disaster characteristics in the past several decades in relation to human security parameters and macro economic variables within the perspective of sustainable development and natural disaster reduction. There exists a positive correlation between disaster characteristics and macro economic variables and human development indicators.

Nagoya metropolitan area is now facing Tokai and Tonankai earthquake problem. Now, it is needed to quickly establish the direction to improve the current disaster mitigation situation. The two essential points are to activate the seismic retrofit of buildings and to increase the regional disaster prevention power. In order to accelerate them, the consciousness of people should be immediately enlighten on disaster prevention. In Nagoya area, the researchers decided to become a homedoctor on the earthquake disaster in this region and cooperated and collaborated with other specialists and several medias such as educator, joumalist and volunteers, and general citizens. Also, the synthetic information system for disaster mitigation and the materials for education etc are developed.

This analysis clarified the characteristics of the habitat community in Disaster Recovery Public Housings in Hyogo. Those who living in a same apartment would create the new community which is defferent from previous one. Their environment (housing structure, housing type, location, neiborhood characteristics,...etc.) have changes fundamentally after Hanshin-Awaji Great Earthquake. This analysis showed the relationship between the group sense which residents living in a same apartment have and the environmental elements around them by the principle component analysis and the analysis of varlance mainly.

Through the analysis of the data from the social rondam surveys, this study clarifies the patterns of victims' behaviors, which were changed at the points of 10, 100, and 1000 hours after the event occurred. 50% of the victims were sure that “the diffcult life would continue for the time being "and" they had the whole picture of the damage at that time" 10 hours after the event. 50% of the victims were sure that " they were completely safe, " “the" victims thought that "they were not disaster victims any more" after 1000 hours.

The current study aimed to develop and test models of life recovery, Based on reviews of preceding studies in Japan and US, the current paper constructed and compared eight different models of life recovery. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to the data obtained by the 2003 Hyogo Prefecture Survey on disaster survivors (N=1203). A final SEM model provided causal chains of recovery promoting factors, recovery process and recovery outcome. Its research and practice implications were discussed.

In 1999, the seven element model of life recovery from the Kobe Earthquake was founded as are result of grass root stakeholder involvement workshop. This research have three steps:1) Finging a new life recovery model with the workshop in 2003, and compare to 1999's seven element model:2)Constructing research frame from workshop result:3)Examine about causally of survivors Long-term recovery with General Linear Model analyses. As a result, 12 components effect on survivor's long-term recovery process.

The authors investigated the housing consultation services in the recent damaging earthquakes,and found that the crowded consultation centers had difficulty in providing relief information for disaster victims. Hearing survey for architects was conducted to obtain expert knowledge for possibility to repair damaged dwellings in relation to damage levels. Based on these results, the information system was developed to support consultation service. While a disaster victim in public shelter can make a request for an appointment through the network in advance, consultation service manager can access the database and set up schedule for consultation and prepare the related documents. Officers of some municipal offices evaluated the system as useful with further improvement.

A growing interest has centered on disaster ethnography as a basic research material for analyzing disaster management process. However, standardized procedure for analyzing disaster ethnography has not been established. In this paper, we regarded disaster management process as a series of dilemmatic decision-making between two conflicting alternatives. This formulation could make disaster ethnography more standardized. A clear perspective was also gained regarding how to utilize ethnographic description of disaster management process for developing a disaster management education procedure.

This research is about the observed influences by local community in Kobe City after Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Local community indicates the residents life and has a deep relation with them as a basic unit of the city. In this study the parameters that influence the relationship between community activity and the residential environment of local community has been studied.The local community characteristics that indicate residential environment are analyzed through census data (1990-2000). Currently the local communities are shifting toward disaster prevention and welface as their main activity in Kobe city. As a result, it has been found that as the relationship between community activity and residential environment is in a more satisfactory way, the community activities are more successful as well.

The Earthquake struck Northern Miyagi in July of 2003 was only a regional earthquake, even though it caused high number of casualties ad extensive damage to facilities. Hospitals had been damaged too; especially the National Health Insurance Hospital of Kashimadai-machi and the Public Fukaya Hospital in Northern Miyagi suffered big damage, forced the patients to be evacuated to safe place. This study that tried to grasp the actual circumstance in damage mitigation and emergency response on the basis of an interview process to these two hospitals, was aimed at clarifying the unique seismic protection measures for mitigating the seismic hazard risks posed to hospilals in the fututure earthquake.

The present paper addresses the communication process of rescue-related requests from residents to disaster-related organizations in order to enhance the efficiency of search and rescue activities shortly after an earthquake. On the background of promptly developing information technologies, even mobile phone has taken traffic jam of communication system during recent earthquakes. We forcus on rescue-related imformation from residents and analyze the emergency call and walk-in requests, which residents came to the disaster-related organization with presence and ask for rescue, based on records during the eartbquake in Kobe, Japan. Characteristics of these process from residents are obtained.

We are exposed to various kinds of Multi-hazards due to natural disasters, terrorist attacks and epidemic's outbreak. In any of these crises, national and local governments have to implement emergency response and management effectively. Since Hanshin Awaji Greate Earthquake, GIS was recognized as powerful tool for disaster reduction and many GIS systems have been introduced by local governments. These systems are tools for estimating damage, and GIS is not still used well post-event consequence for management In this paper, we introduced as a Combat GIS comprehensive emergency management system based on GIS. CombatGIS makes use of Enterprise GIS as information infrastructure for local government This paper shows a stragegy to implement Combat GIS.

Cross Media Database(XMDB) is a research support infonnation infrastructure(RSII) developed for researchers who belong to various fields related to disaster reduction. The ultimate purpose of system is to catalog, locate, and retrieve a wide range of research-support information that is involved in one of 12 different types. XMDB also provides detailed information about resources by storing metadata and digital files. The metadata formats used in XMDB conform to various intemational standards allowing information to be shared in metadata cataloging system. This will provide a level of integration and interoperability of various research-related information, and will allow for the growth of the system over time to support multi-disciplinary professionals and other stakeholders.

The investment planning after the disaster have a significant impact on the economic and finance situatuion in the affected area over the long term.This paper provides the interactive economic loss estimation model which are composed of three factors, that is, infrasstructure needs, extinguishment of property and decrease in population,based on the strategic planning. We could verity conformance with time series economic data(GRP) after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Disaster. We tried to apply this model to the Tokai Earthquake under the three defferent scenarios, the strategic planning suitable for each senario was examined.

This paper aims to clarify the problems to build better support systems for the survivers of earthquake disaster,based on the following two analyses. First, the authors outline the problems and challenges of the disaster relief activities following the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. Seondly, the authors analyze the case of the operations of the Disaster Relief Volunteer Center in the event of the July 2003 Northern Miyagi Earthquake. Thea authors conclude that the cooperative activities between two sectors, i.e. the council for social welfare and NPOs active in disasters, are required for well-managed operations of disaster relief activities.

This paper attemps to establish an economic model that explains the relationship between disasters and economic development. Historical data shows a tendency in which the economic development decreases the annual average damages of disasters in the early stage of development, but increases in the later stage. We call this tendency as U-curve phenomena and it was theoretically proven in this paper, by introducing the concept of mitigation elasticity of income. The primary conclusion is that the U-cureve phenomena implies that the strategy for disaster reduction should be asymmetric the between the early and the last stage of the development.

Earthquake disaster mitigation and preparedness are rapidly increasing concerns in Japan, particularly, in the Tokai region where a large earthquake is expected to occur within the next few decades. This paper discusses a participatory approach as a method to increase community participation using the case study area of Nishibiwajima-town in Aichi Prefecture. Important implications for disaster risk management are derived and discussed based on a network development model of participants sharing roles in the prosess of enhancing disaster preparedness on a community level.

Considering immense damage by great earthquake, community based preparedness for reconstruction is useful. From this point of view, we designed community-training method grounded on preparedness discussion for urban reconstruction. This series of trainings has 4 purposes - (1) promoting a damage image, (2) thinking choice set and prefer ness for housing recovery, (3) thinking community welfare function on recovery process, (4) motivating community-based disaster prevention activity. This paper reports a series of trainings held in Nukui-district (Nerima ward, Tokyo) on Jul. -Nov. 2003.

Reinforcement of practical disaster response ability for local government personnel of disaster prevention divisions has been a significant issue. As the solution for it, role-playing simulation exercises of disaster management have been attracted. However several demerits of the method are reported. We have developed a disaster simulation exercise system for improving existing methods. This paper introduces features and functions of the system. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the system on training of disaster simulation exercises is examined for local government personnel of disaster prevention divisions.

This paper verifies the effectiveness of Damage Assessment Training System which was designed for disaster responders in local government to contribute to expedite the work involved in building damage assessment for issuing the Victim Certificate. The training is conducted by repetitive judgment using both photographs of damaged buildings and damage pattern charts for assessment, which provide visual illustrations by schematics of building damage patterns. The system is made sure from the respects of time and accuracy. The applicability of the damage pattern charts and the effectiveness of training are also confirmed through the operations by non-expert of building structure.

We focused on a method for constructing the reality of individual disaster experience based on the information available in different resource types such as text data from interviews, photographs, events records, and narratives. At first, we interviewed one victim to clear the character of experiences. It was shown that his talk always referred some multimedia resources, such as document, image, event etc, and that there were relationships between each of the resources. Next, we inputted them to Cross-Media Database and revealed resources' network by their relationships as a new multimedia disaster ethnography method. In the end, an application of participatory Web based system was shown for systematic understanding of disaster processes using resources from individual disaster experiences.