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THE SUNDAY GLEANER, OCTOBER 29, 2017 | ARTS & EDUCATION

Japanese school uses innovativetechniques for disaster preparedness
Glenda Anderson
Sunday Gleaner Writer

SENDAI, Japan:
TARTING THIS year, theShichigo Elementary Schoolin Sendai, located in northeastern Japan, will be looking tofully include aspects of disasterawareness in its curriculum.
It is the latest in a series ofmeasures by the school to break
down the information about
preparing for natural disasters tochildren and their families andto develop a mindset of being
able to help oneself and othersin the event of a disaster.
Similar to the integrated learning approach, which is used inS

the Jamaican school system, students across grades one to six are
introduced to different aspects ofdisaster awareness and preparation in different subject areas.
The third-largest public elementary school in Sendai, Shichigo,
has 1,089 students on roll.
When journalists hosted under
the Pacific-Caribbean Journalists’Program visited the school recently, grade one students were learning about some of the dangers
that could come with an earthquake, identifying objects that
could fall, move, or collapse.
Grade four students werelearning how rice farmers,
whose livelihood had been
wiped out by the disaster, wereable to rebuild their lives.
Through a rice-planting project
started in May, they will havehands-on experience.
“Other schools spend only
one or two hours. We complete
10 to 15 hours in a cluster andcompiled this to be used as disaster education,” vice-principal
Masaki Nakatsuji said.
This is for a total of 30 hours
annually.
He says that the information isdesigned to fit each grade level andcovers units like environmental
and integrated studies.
“Often, when we do disastereducation, it is negative. For
example, we will tell children
don’t do this or that. By creating

Request for Applications forIntermediate Service Organization
Request for Applications (RFA) from Jamaican civil society organizations to provide
organizational capacity-building support to other civil society organizations(Date of announcement: October 29, 2017)
FHI 360 is seeking applications from qualified Jamaican civil society organizations to provide capacity building, mentoring, andother forms of technical and organizational assistance to civil society organizations, using the advocacy tools of FHI 360 andother tested practices. Selected specialist organizations will work as Intermediate Service Organizations (ISOs) for the UnitedStates Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Local Partner Development (LPD) activity.
The Application process will consist of two stages:
Stage 1: Submission of Concept Papers
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applicants will be invited to submit Full Applications. Guidelines for preparation of Concept Papers can be requested by email
at LPDJamaicagrants@fhi360.org or downloaded from https://www.scsglobal.org/local-partner-development-lpd.
An Information Briefing Session will be held on November 8, 2017. Interested organizations may contact the FHI 360 LPD
Jamaica office by phone (876-616-7084) or email: rgraham@fhi360.org by November 1, 2017 for details on venue andtime for the session.
Questions and requests for clarifications will be accepted by email until 5:00 p.m. on November 6, 2017. You can send anemail to https://www.LPDJamaicagrants@fhi360.org.
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the disaster education, we try to
make the children learn how to
be safe, how to protect themselves in a disaster.”

20,000 LIVES CLAIMED
But the campaign is also topass on information directly tothe children, their families, andcommunities to ensure that thedevastation of the earthquake
and tsunami which hit the islandnation and took 20,000 lives inMarch 11, 2011, is not repeated.
Schichigo Elementary wasrecognised by Japan’s education
ministry as one of only two special schools whose focus on disaster awareness was recommended as a model for the prefecture
by Japan’s education ministry.
Although it is no longer so designated, school leaders are continuing with the focus and looking to extend it even further.
“Students now keep a bosai— (a hood made of flameresistant material) – in theirdesk at school and are so versedin the disaster drill they often do
not need to be guided by theirteachers,” Nakatsuji says.
Still, it is a model that pulls
on the community for help.
On the day of our visit, the classincluded a craft session for grade
five students who were tasked
with a project to create memorial
pieces, or ema, prayer boards usually hung at shrines for expressing
one’s hopes and prayers.
They were being supervised
by students from the Tohoku
Institute of Technology.
“These university students
were elementary and junior highschool students at the time, so theschool invited them to share theirmemories,” Nakatsuji informed.
He said that for young students especially, this information sharing is crucial as all thestudents who would have experienced the earthquake andtsunami have graduated fromthe school.
It is an approach that Kahoku

PHOTO BY FLOYD K. TAKEUCHI/WAKA PHOTOS

A Tohoku Institute of Tecnology undergraduate helps
Shichigo Elementary School students make ema tabletsout of recycled materials.
Shimpo Publishings, Shinichi
Takeda, has applauded: getting
the information to people quickly
and in a format they can find useful. Takeda heads the Disaster
Reduction and Education project
division of The Kahoku
Shimpo, which is this region’s
most influential newspaper.
“I think the initiative isextremely important to teachchildren, by making the connection between home, school, andcommunity,” he says.
Last year, the local daily set
up a disaster reduction and education project office in response
to what it sees as the paper’s
dropping the ball on whatshould have been its duty tocraft a substantive and sustained
campaign to engage the community in learning how to help
itself through a crisis or disaster.
This was confirmed by a readership study conducted after the 2011
earthquake and tsunami thatshowed a 72 per cent dissatisfaction with the usefulness of disaster
information the paper provided.
“We did not have the backbone
to save the lives of local people.

So we decided to get the information for preparation for disaster to(the community) one by one,”
Takeda says. Reports are that some
20, 000 persons lost their lives.
Too many for a developed
country, he implied.
Now, this designated office,through its team of 10 reporters
and editors, organises once-permonth group talks with thecommunity, including 15 lessons per year for students who
are trained as memory keepers.
Far from overstepping itsrole, he says that the media have
two important roles: helping
communities prepare for disasters; and transmission andenlightenment.
He believes that the media
must do whatever it can toreduce the impact of disasters.
Takeda says that the situationand the responsibility is too
immense to simply leave it togovernments to get things done.
He admits that with a budget of
J$4.4 million (4 billion yen), it is
not a profit-making venture, but
one that is worth the investment.
glenda.anderson@gleanerjm.com