The Graduate School of Safety Science and Research Center
for Social Safety Science, Kansai University

Admission Policy
As 120 years anniversary of Kansai University, new challenge program forestablishment of safety and secure society began in 2010.

We aim to advance thestudies on Safety Sciences and to foster the researchers who contribute to develop thesaid studies and make proposals through interdisciplinary studies on disasterprevention and reduction, in order to build a safer, more secure and disaster-resilient
society. Therefore, we want to accept graduates of various academic fields of cultural,social, and natural sciences who are eager to work the said studies from many domestic
and overseas university and graduate schools, not speak of our Faculty of Safety Science.
We also accept applicants who work now at many public and private sectors and have awill to study. Recurrent programs for the professions are provided as well. Japanesestudies on disaster prevention and reduction are in the forefront in the world. Overseas
applicants are willingly accepted.

Research Staffs and Research Field
We have 25 Professors in the field of Natural Science as well as Social Science. Naturaldisasters and accidents have various characteristics, therefore we have to analyze
systematically with collaboration of scientists, engineers and practitioners.
In 2011, the east Japan earthquake disaster occurred. This was the typical compounddisasters with earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant failure. Some of our staffs
joined the reconnaissance team for the disaster such as:

(1) Field survey on tsunami disasters and how to construct tuff tsunami breakwater(2) Recovery and reconstruction process of damaged society and community(3) Analyze the process of accident of The first Fukushima nuclear power plantMoreover, we contribute to disaster reduction of National Crisis such as Tokyo
Metropolitan earthquake and Nankai trough earthquake. As a committee member inCentral Disaster Prevention Council, Japanese Government, we have done some efforts
to establish the revised regulation laws. Some activities have been done in theinternational field survey on natural disasters such as 2009 Chill tsunami and 2012
Hurricane Sandy. In the former case, we have collaborated with JICA to promote theimprovement of countermeasures in Chili and in the latter case we visited FEMA tolearn about the disaster lessons. The results of field survey were used to improve thecountermeasures in our country.

Some Examples of Important Results and Their Effects
After coming back from field survey on Hurricane Sandy in the USA, we recommended
some new policies to MLIT (Ministry of Lifeline, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism)
and timeline will be facilitated to control flooding until this March in the 109 first classriver systems in Japan. One of our staffs has been a Technical Committee Member, The
Central Disaster Prevention Council since 2000 so that the recommendation of thecommittee has so strong power to do decision making of the Cabinet. For example, thedamage estimation and some effective countermeasures were proposed in the cases of

Official Technical Report on Fukushima

Disaster Lessons Learned byNo.1 Nuclear Power Plant Accident (2014)

Hurricane Sandy (2013, 2014)

Tokyo Metropolitan earthquake (M7.3) and Nankai trough earthquake (M9). Disaster
resilient strategy was also revised in accordance with the recommendation.

Research Goal
Study on disaster management is very practical. At the moment of disaster occurrence,
the leading role is damaged people. Therefore, how to reduce damage is the mostimportant goal of disaster research. Most academic institute activities are independent
from damage reduction in the society. The results of disaster research have to bepractical on damage reduction. This is the most important disaster lesson in 1995 Kobe
earthquake. We usually promote our studies on emergency management to getsustainable and resilient society.