2nd International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction
November 27~29, 2007

Development of the Pictorial Description Methodfor Disaster Education of the General Citizens
Yoshinari Hayashi1 and Reo Kimura1
1Assistant Professor, Disaster Management Office, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

Abstract

Personal disaster experiences are important to learn instructions for future disasters. We
developed the method of converting the victims’ past experiences into the educational
materials for the development of disaster-awareness in the society. This method consists ofthe following 4 steps; 1) conducting semi-structured interviews with victims of past majordisasters, 2) reconstructing the episodes to reproduce the image of ‘damage’, ‘Victims
behavior in the process of life recovery from the disaster’, ‘Received support from thecommunity and administration’, 3) picturizing these episodes by professional Japanese styleartists, 4) making educational material combining the information about hazard and the extentof damage about the relevant disaster with the pictures of episodes.
We applied this method to the 1945 Mikawa Earthquake, Japan. This earthquake’s
magnitude was M6.8, not so big, but more than 2,300 parsons were killed and more than
20,000 houses were collapsed by this earthquake. Moreover, it was not well covered innewspapers to the other area of Japan and the entire world because the event occurred in war
time.
The many victims of this disaster still live in the past damaged area, and it is not so
difficult to get information on the examples on the damage and the recovering process fromthe interview. We have conducted 20 interviews and have produced educational materials
including 130 pictures. So we used them for panel displays at local community and highschool festival to propagate the concrete information on an earthquake disaster. With the helpof the systematic lecture and training, the drawing pictures give strong impression to theaudiences and it becomes clear that the drawing pictures based the interview are one of theeffective materials for outreach activity on earthquake disaster mitigation.
Keyword: Ethnographic Interview, Pictorial Description, Personal disaster experience,
Historical earthquake, 1945 Mikawa Earthquake*Corresponding author address: A. M. Author, Affiliation, Address, Email (10 pt Times)1. Introduction
Many people around the globe lost their lives in recurrent natural disasters. Earthquakes inparticular occur without warning. In addition to direct damages, such as collapsed buildings
caused by the shaking, there are significant damages from the secondary disasters of Tsunami
and fire. It is imperative that we prepare ourselves habitually for all damages imaginable. But
it is difficult to envisage a disaster that one has never experienced. The victims of 1995 Great
Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and 2004 Niigata-Chuetsu Earthquake remarked,”It would neverhappen to me!”
The previous researches show that there are two major factors that inhibit individual
preparation for disasters (Kimura and Hayashi, 2005). The first one is due to the fact that we
do not have enough opportunities to learn about how the disaster struck and affected thevictims and how the victims returned to their normal previous lives. The other factor is thedifficulty in which to reconstruct the details of the disaster for geographically unfamiliar
regions. Using a specific example of an earthquake disaster that took place approximately
sixty years in the local area, we developed a disaster prevention system to resolve these issues.

2. The 1945 Mikawa Earthquake
We selected the 1945 Mikawa Earthquake for our investigation. The earthquake occurred onJanuary 13, 1945 and the magnitude was 6.8. Figure 1 shows the death toll listed by cities,towns, and villages. The majority of the damages were confined to the 20km radius in Aichi
Prefecture. Yet, a total of 2,309 people died, which made the Mikawa Earthquake the sixth
deadliest in Japan in the 20th Century.

Figure1 Map of Mikawa area, Aichi Prefecture. Heights of columns are the death toll listed bycities, towns, and villages. The star is the epicentre and the rectangle is fault plane derived
by Kikuchi et al.(2003). The rectangle in right map denotes the area of left map.

Interview with the artist

Discuss about making pictures

Verification by the interviewee

Making pictures

Figure2 The schematic process of making pictures which describe a personal disaster experiences.
1: Interview with the artist. 2: Discuss about making pictures. 3: Making Pictures.
4: Verification by the interviewee.

The earthquake occurred at the wake of Japan’s defeat in the World War II, at a time when
the wartime media blackout enforced a strict regulation against reporting damages. For thisreason, many Japanese citizens remained ignorant of the earthquake and the damages it
caused (Hayashi and Kimura, 2006). Meanwhile, air raids continued at the damaged site of
the earthquake, and combined with the social chaos that ensued, much of the records anddocuments of the earthquake, including photographs had been lost.

3. Research Interviews
We conducted interviews with the earthquake victims to record their experiences of theearthquake. The interviewees were selected as not to discriminate against their occupation,sex, and age. The interviews contained questions that addressed the following three issues thatwould help them to describe the condition of damage and the process of reconstruction: 1)
personal suffering and material damage from the earthquake, 2) victim’s state ofconsciousness and sequence of action following the onset of the earthquake, 3) the amount ofsupport and relief available (which organization or person helped you). In addition, theinterviewees were asked to attribute time and place to each topic. (“When did it happen?”and “Where did it take place?”)The research began in October 2003 and completed 24 interviews by August 2007. We
interviewed each subject at least twice. The first interviews were about 2-4 hours long. A
professional artist accompanied the interviews and sketched illustrations while listening tosubjects’ experiences. During the second interviews, the subjects checked the accuracy of thewritten version of their stories. They also reviewed the illustrations that are to be used as
informational and instructional guides, and check for any disparity between their recollected
reality and what was portrayed in the illustrations. When editing was required, the errors werecorrected. We made as many revisions as needed until we had the subjects’ approval. Figure 2
shows this interview process.

4. Pictorial Description about the disaster experiences
Today, visual materials like photographs of structure damages serve an important role ineducating the citizens about disaster reduction. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned before,
there are no remaining photographs recorded this earthquake. This is the reason we decided torecapture the event through illustrations of victims’ experiences. We performed this workwith two artists, Mr. Tomohiro Banno and Mr. Tetsuya Fujita. They graduated the mastercourse of Japanese Painting Graduate program at Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Artsand Music.
The artists created 5-12 images for each subject. In order to provide instructions for disasterprevention that “protects lives” and “protects livelihood,” the images had to follow certain
guidelines. 1) Images that appropriately portray the condition of the disaster, victims’
response to hazard, and conditions of reconstruction and relief, 2) images that portray
impressionable scenes that are clearly recollected by the interviewee, and 3) images that
portray an individual’s narrative from start (disaster) to the end (recovery).

5. Example of collected story and illustrations
Figure 3 illustrates a story by one of the interviewee. Toyo Ogasawara was 28 years old at thetime. She and her husband managed the public bathhouse “Ine No Yu” in Katahara-Cho.
Toyo and her mother-in-law kept the business running, because her husband was a soldier
fighting abroad. Few days before the Mikawa Earthquake, they experienced several minor
earthquakes. “My mother-in-law told me that ‘second floor shakes too much, and we will not
be able to evacuate outside’, and so my mother-in-law, my two children, and I began sleeping
on the first floor”. However, the strength of the shaking increased immediately, trapping theentire family under the fallen house. The two children died under the house. Since all the men

(1) My mother-in-law, my two children, and I
began sleeping on the first floor.

(2) My house collapsed immediately whenthe earthquake started. All family were shutin the fallen house.

(3) My parents who had survived theearthquake came to pick them up in a cart.

(4) I had suffered a fractured femur that took
six months to heal.

Figure3 An example of pictorial description which described a personal disaster experience. These
pictures were painted by T. Fujita.

Figure4

A dialogue with the victims using the pictorial materials. (Anjo-shi inAichi prefecture on November 2005.)

in town were summoned to service, there were only women and children, which made therescue progress difficult. Soldiers who were stationed in Katahara managed to rescue Toyoand the mother-in-law. Many houses in the neighborhood had collapsed, and many people lost
multiple members of their family like Toyo's. On that evening, Toyo’s parents who had
survived the earthquake came to pick them up in a cart. Her parents set up the funeral services
for the children. Toyo had suffered a fractured femur that took six months to heal, but she
suffered no aftereffect. Soldiers cleaned up the wreckage of houses and roads. Within weeks,
Toyo’s house was cleared away and the roads were recovered. Toyo was able to reopen her
business within half a year of her return home for the public bathhouse and equipment within
was renewed shortly before the earthquake and suffered no major damages.

6. Conclusions
We developed a method to reconstruct and record natural disasters by visually recording
personal experiences of a local disaster that struck sixty years ago. The research is stillongoing, and there are over 150 completed illustrations. The illustrations were used for a
dialogue with the victims at Anjo-shi in Aichi prefecture on November 2005 (Figure 4). In
September 2006, a Mikawa Earthquake event was held at the Anjo History Museum that
displayed a two-month exhibition of the illustrations. The images are frequently used atvarious disaster management lectures that we host for the local citizens. Furthermore, they are
published in a book from a local newspaper publisher that have sold over 10,000 copies.
There have been other exhibitions in libraries and other regional venues. These exhibitions
evoke in its audiences a sense of necessity and awareness for earthquake preparation
otherwise who have fewer accesses to the concept of earthquake disaster.

References[1] Hayashi Y. and Kimura R., “Disaster Response and Relief of the Japanese Naval Air Station in the 1945
Mikawa Earthquake”, Historical Earthquake, Vol.21, (2006), pp.223-233. (in Japanese with Englishabstruct)[2] Kikuchi M., Nakamura M. and Yoshikawa K., “Source rupture processes of the 1944 Tonankai earthquake
and the 1945 Mikawa earthquake derived from low-gain seismogram”, EarthPlanets Space, Vol. 55, (2003),
pp.159-172. (in Japanese with English abstruct)[3] Kimura R. and Hayashi Y., “Development of the Visualization Method Visualization Method, How toExtract the Survivors' Knowledge and Lessons Learned through their Experiences in Disasters”, HistoricalEarthquake, Vol.20, (2005), pp.91-104.