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This study examined the relationship between risk perception and evacuation behavior, and the sociospatial contexts that affect evacuation. It is argued that risk perception and contextual conditions have a joint effect on evacuation. Data were collected from 3,756 evacuees in sixteen cities and towns affected by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off the Pacific coast. Using geographic information systems (GIS), data from questionnaires on risk perception and activity diary surveys on behavioral response were combined with geospatial data. The main finding was that high risk perception leads to evacuation behavior, but that the difference between immediate and delayed evacuation depends on the sociospatial context. Delayed evacuation, compared with immediate evacuation, tends to occur in the following contexts: (1) the physical context (e.g., being inland at the time of the disaster impact); (2) the household context (e.g., the need to confirm the safety of household members); and (3) the social context (e.g., the need for assistance with mobility). This study extends the literature on disaster science and cognitive-behavioral geography by considering the relationship between perception and behavior in urban spaces in emergencies. The findings are relevant to the development of disaster preparedness planning to minimize human losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As North Korea emphasized its "second mission," the reunification of the two Koreas, with its nuclear weapons, South Korea has been mobilizing all potential resources to deter North Korea's attempt. Indeed, it rapidly improved its relations with Japan as well as strengthened the U.S. extended deterrence through the "Washington Declaration" in early 2023. The United States, South Korea, and Japan even initiated their trilateral summit meeting to discuss their combined deterrence posture against North Korea. This article evaluates South Korea's current nuclear preparedness, including preemptive/preventive strikes, missile defense, and civil defense, identifies weaknesses, and analyzes whether Japan can mitigate the weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although COVID-19 has commonly been narrated as an impediment to the arts, I argue that it also offered exciting new opportunities to engage audiences with exhibitions focus on public health crises. In this article, I reflect on my experience of curating Picturing the Invisible with students at Technical University Munich (TU Munich) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized in memory of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, the exhibition was shown at the Royal Geographical Society, London (October till December 2021) during the so-called "second wave" and at TU Munich (June 2022) amid the rise of the Omicron Variant. Departing from the common tendency to narrate events as having been successfully organized despite the pandemic, this paper presents the virus as co-creating—perhaps even co-curating—the exhibition. To do so, I provide a brief overview of Picturing the Invisible, before going on to analyze the role that the virus played in calling me to organize this project (as both a researcher and as a lecturer), how it has made it logistically possible, and how it presented new opportunities to engage foreign audiences with the experience of Japan's triple disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On March 18, 2011, one of Germany's most famous children's book authors, Gudrun Pausewang (1928-2020), publicly spoke about the connection between 3/11 and her award-winning 1987 classic, Fall-Out (Die Wolke). I posit that Michaël Ferrier's texts with a 3/11 theme highlight the synchronic as well as diachronic dimensions of the Great East Japan Disaster and therefore go far beyond Pausewang's 1987 approach to think globally about nuclear energy and technological risk scenarios. While Pausewang's novel focuses on the tragic experience of a young adult who copes with the aftermath of a nuclear accident in Germany in the 1980s, Ferrier strategically reveals the complexities of knowledge and uncertainty in the wake of environmental and human catastrophe as an on-going crisis or déjà-vu of Chernobyl and Hiroshima. My analysis explores Ferrier's (re)mediation of the convolution of this crisis across various media, including documents of popular culture, by insisting on the thematic and structural connections between his texts with a 3/11 theme, Pausewang's 1987 novel, and two German adaptations of Pausewang's novel, Gregor Schnitzler's 2006 drama film, Die Wolke, as well as a Anike Hage's 2008 graphic novel. Ferrier's works unapologetically reveal elisions that have occurred in mediated disaster narratives across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: After the Great East Japan Earthquake [GEJE], approximately 70,000 Japan Ground Self Defense Force [JGSDF] personnel were deployed, risking Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. The network approach to psychopathology suggests that symptoms may cause and exacerbate each other, resulting in the emergence and maintenance of disorders, including PTSD. It is therefore important to further explore the temporal interplay between symptoms. Most studies assessing the factor structure of the Impact of Event Scale-Revised [IES-R] have used cross-sectional designs. In this study, the structure of the IES-R was re-evaluated while incorporating the temporal interplay between symptoms. Methods: Using Dynamic Time Warping [DTW] the distances between PTSD symptoms on the IES-R were modelled in 1120 JGSDF personnel. Highly correlated symptoms were clustered at the group level using Distatis three-way principal component analyses of the distance matrices. The resulting clusters were compared to the original three subscales of the IES-R using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results: The DTW analysis yielded four symptom clusters: Intrusion (five items), Hyperarousal (six items), Avoidance (six items), and Dissociation (five items). CFA yielded better fit estimates for this four-factor solution (RMSEA = 0.084, CFI = 0.918, TLI = 0.906), compared to the original three subscales of the IES-R (RMSEA = 0.103, CFI = 0.873, TLI = 0.858). Conclusions: DTW offers a new method of modelling the temporal relationships between symptoms. It yielded four IES-R symptom clusters, which may facilitate understanding of PTSD as a complex dynamic system. Personnel from the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force responded to the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, putting them at increased risk of developing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In recent years, psychological research has focused increasingly on methods to map the ways in which symptoms of psychopathology cause and exacerbate each other. The Dynamic Time Warping algorithm seems to be an appropriate and useful tool to analyse the interaction between post-traumatic stress symptoms over time, especially if these are not instantaneous or linear. This can improve our understanding of psychopathology and help move towards personalized medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rachel DiNitto's book, "Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan's Triple Disaster," examines the literary responses to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster in Japan. The book analyzes various narratives that address the cultural trauma and contemporary problems resulting from the disaster. DiNitto argues that these narratives provide counter-narratives to governmental and national narratives, and also explores the connections between Fukushima fiction and atomic bomb literature as well as global nuclear fiction. While the book has some repetition and could have delved deeper into the role of nonhumans in the narratives, it is a valuable resource for researchers studying literary responses to the disaster. [Extracted from the article]

We assess the radiological impact on Vietnam from a hypothetical accident at the Fanchenggang nuclear power plant (F-NPP), 65 km from Vietnam's Mongcai city. The accident was assumed to release, among other types of radionuclides, 1E + 16 Bq 131I in 24 h. The simulation of radioactive plumes using the FLEXPART model has revealed peak concentrations of radionuclides in the air and dry and wet depositions on the ground marking the passage of radioactive plumes over the receptor sites. The northeast monsoon wind drives the peak dry depositions in winter, while the peak wet depositions are associated mainly with the high monsoon rainfall in summer. The accident impact, reflected in the frequency of plume passage over the receptor site and the resultant radiation dose to people, decreases exponentially with the distance to F-NPP. The impact on Mongcai was most severe, implying people would be advised to stay indoors during plume passage. Meanwhile, at Danang, 630 km south of F-NPP, the impact was insignificant, as plumes rarely passed through, and the maximum dose was as low as the annual dose due to exposure from naturally occurring radionuclides in soils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However, analysts and scientists are not in the position to create narratives for others but respect and tolerate the existing narratives that other share and serve as facilitators and mediators for co-creative processes that have the potential to produce new or adapted collective narratives. The two authors believe that new narratives on global change need to respect and include these universal patterns of a mutually convincing narrative but that such narratives cannot be fabricated or even pre-arranged but only be co-created together with the communities to which they are to be applied. Psychotherapy and the personal meaning of narratives While narratives in psychotherapy are personal, narratives found in myths, rituals and religion tend to be created and re-created within a community. The idea for this special issue emerged during the international conference "Narratives in Times of radical Transformation" that was conducted online from 19 to 20 November 2020. [Extracted from the article]

A cohort study of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases after the chornobyl accident: thyroid cancer in Ukraine detected during first screening. A significant excess of multiple myeloma incidence [standardized incidence rate (SIR) 1.61; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.01-2.21], thyroid cancer (SIR 4.18, 95% CI 3.76-4.59), female breast cancer (SIR1.57 CI 1.40-1.73), and all cancers combined (SIR 1.07; 95% CI 1.05-1.09) was registered (Bazyka et al. [8]). Thoughts and substantial progress of the radiation research field regarding the Fukushima nuc... The knowledge from the field of radiation epidemiology has a critical impact on cancer management, industry regulations and energy policy. Keywords: Nuclear disasters; long-term consequences of radiation exposure; emergency response EN Nuclear disasters long-term consequences of radiation exposure emergency response 561 568 8 02/28/23 20230301 NES 230301 Introduction One of the most compelling challenges in radiation epidemiology is the scientific evaluation of the long-term health consequences following nuclear radiation disasters. [Extracted from the article]

This paper offers a critical engagement with endings in relation to formulations of crisis and futures through two sites that stage an encounter with the end. The first is the permanent exhibit at Japan's National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. This site, I show, asks us to reflect on how we think about the end of civilisation as an immanent crisis to be overcome through an innovation that allows us to escape accountability for conditions in the present. As such, I argue, it ultimately encourages us to cultivate attention and accountability toward material and conceptual problems in the present. The discussion then takes the idea of cultivating attention to the present to northeast Japan. I show there how an ending inflicted on the coastal residents by the tsunami of March 2011 has made space for precisely this kind of attention and accountability to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On balance, I Black Wave i is a useful contribution to the literature on not only disasters, but also on the nature of politics and civil society in Japan. The main title of the book is ' I Black Wave i ', a term which resonates so much with us who watched the images of the tsunami as it poured over walls, roads, and fields. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the trends and challenges of Taiwanese studies in Japan, focusing on political history. The first section reviews Taiwanese studies in Japan in recent years, with a focus on political research. The second section discusses the issues to be worked on for this discipline's future, especially pertaining to the discussion on "external" and "internal" legitimacy for the postwar Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan. The third section examines ways to comprehend the changes in the ROC's status in Taiwanese politics and society after the political transformation began in the 1970s. Taiwanese studies in Japan have long emphasized revealing the characteristics of Taiwanese society and history. Although such an attitude is still quite important, this paper highlights that knowing how to value the "Chineseness" of the ROC government in Taiwan is also an important subject. Further examination of the link between international and internal politics in Taiwan will be one of the most important subjects for future Taiwanese studies in Japan on politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glazing damage reported following recent New Zealand earthquakes, i.e. the 2011 (Mw 6.2) Christchurch and 2016 (Mw 7.8) Kaikōura earthquakes, exceeded what would be expected from glazing designed or tested to council's compliance pathways, which indicates improvements are required to the existing pathways. Two series of proof-of-concept tests were conducted to induce simulated seismic actions on glazing specimens to better understand the failure mechanisms of gasket dislodgement, cracks in the glazing, and dislodgement of the glass to improve existing compliance tests and engineering design. The Series 1 tests consisted of 6 mm annealed window glass clamped in a steel frame with the load applied to the glazing with hydraulic jacks positioned in three distinct positions. The Series 2 tests consisted of a reverse cyclic loading on a commercial window located near the bottom of a direct-fixed rainscreen specimen. The test results were used to formulate a method that could predict the likelihood of seismic damage to glazing systems, improve compliance pathways, and is useful as a forensic predictive tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck Japan on 11 March 2011 leaving more than 400,000 people, including 100,000 children, homeless. These displaced children lived in temporary housing and 'temporarily' attended schools, which provided them with professional mental health support after the disaster. This paper highlights the role of disaster mental health support teams from Miyagi Prefecture through a problem reported by one of the schools – the excessive feeding of fish by children who narrowly escaped the tsunami. The support team helped schoolteachers understand the perspective of survivor guilt by facilitating a group discussion among the children and exploring their feelings about the disaster, with a focus on the guilt of leaving their pets behind. The authors demonstrate the role of mental health professionals working with schools to help children resolve negative thoughts and feelings during disaster recovery, including the often-overlooked survivor guilt caused by life-threatening events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on first year of the partnership with Routledge exists between curating and publishing. Topics include editorial team in Taiwan successfully mitigating the damage done to academia by the Covid pandemic; and witnessing more state-supporting strategic research institutes working on emerging sectors like biotechnology.

Following the damage to infrastructure systems in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, a new seismic design concept named the anti-catastrophe concept in seismic design framework was proposed for the resilience of infrastructure. It states that seismic damage to infrastructure could shift discontinuously from a normal to a severe level, which we refer to as the 'phase transition' of infrastructure damage. In this article, damage to a peripheral lifeline system involving buried pipes for water distribution and sewerage, and power distribution equipment was analysed surveying statistical damage data in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. It was observed that the damage to the peripheral lifeline systems went beyond the assumption made under the previous damage measures using a relatively lower and moderate seismic intensity at which the degree of the damage became rapidly serious, thereby representing the threshold to the phase transition of infrastructure performance. Further, preferable seismic disaster response with the reduction of the 'large uncertainty of the impact' of the phase transition of infrastructure damage was discussed. Based on the discussion, implications for the resilience of peripheral lifeline systems were derived. The anti-catastrophe concept for the seismic design was introduced and conditions for the implementation of such design concept were summarised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop disaster mitigation measures in coastal regions affected by earthquakes, it is important to consider the effects of both seismic and tsunami hazards on road structures and assess the social impacts associated with the economic loss and reduction in network functionality. In this paper, a risk- and resilience-based assessment framework is established for road networks under both seismic and tsunami hazards. In the proposed methodology, the risk and resilience are quantified by the economic loss and postdisaster functionality of road networks, respectively. Uncertainties associated with estimations of fault movement, hazard intensity and structural vulnerability are considered when estimating the failure probability using Monte Carlo simulation. Moreover, structural vulnerability against tsunamis is estimated considering the effects of ground motion-induced damage on the reduction in tsunami capacity. As an illustrative example, the road networks in two Japanese cities expected to be affected by the anticipated Nankai Trough earthquake, which would cause strong ground motions and a subsequent tsunami, are analyzed. Finally, the retrofitting prioritization for various structures is discussed based on the risk and resilience quantified as performance indicators for social impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study examining the responses of librarians to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster. Topics address include a poster created by a librarian from Fukushima, Japan that documented librarians efforts to provide reading and information services despite damages to library buildings, as well as the use of libraries as shelters.

The 2011 Tohoku Tsunami caused severe damage to many coastal defenses along the Japanese coastline, including areas where two adjacent upright sea dikes of different heights met. There are many places along the coastline where structures of different heights and shapes meet due to the various design codes. In this study, the authors aim to examine the tsunami flow around such dikes by conducting three-dimensional hydraulic experiments in a tsunami wave basin and numerical simulations using the fluid dynamics model OpenFOAM. Twelve experimental cases were tested by changing the waveforms, and also by keeping the height of one side of the dike model constant while adjusting the dimensions of the other side. The results show that the difference in height between the structures significantly influences the volume of overtopping over the relatively lower dike and the inundation depth and velocity behind the dikes. Furthermore, different characteristics of inundation patterns are observed between the inundation depth and velocity. Hence, this study illustrates the necessity to re-assess the effectiveness of such structures against tsunami events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I analyse landscape photography produced in the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011. The aim of the essay is to unpack the profound impact the disaster has hct 3ad, and is having, and how this can be observed in the type of photographic practices that since emerged in Japan. As I will argue, one of the greatest transformations can be seen in the way artists and photographers subvert the material integrity of the image itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the concentration, composition, and distribution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in sediments from the Matsushima Bay area (Miyagi Prefecture, Japan) in 2013—an area that experienced significant destruction in the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunamis of March 2011—using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Their PAH concentration and composition were compared with those of sediment samples collected in Tokyo Bay, which had not suffered similar impacts from the tsunamis. The PAH composition in the sediment collected in the Matsushima Bay area was dominated by phenanthrene, fluoranthene, and pyrene. These data suggest that the PAHs in the sediment are a result of combustion, and that oil pollution is now a negligible source of these pollutants in this area. The lowest total PAH concentration (84 μg/kg dry) was found in the outer area of the bay near Miyato-jima Island, an area permitting high-volume inflow and outflow from the open sea. The highest concentration (15,548 μg/kg dry) was at a former fishing harbor, located in the innermost area of the bay. The large difference in PAH concentrations between sites in Matsushima Bay may be attributable to particle redeposition after sediment disturbance by the tsunamis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a worker at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station gives his eyewitness account of what happened there on March 11, 2011, in the immediate wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station’s reactor cores to melt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A near-field tsunami inundation forecast method (NearTIF) for the Pacific coast of Central America is developed and tested on the basis of the 1992 Nicaragua tsunami earthquake case. The appropriate source model of the 1992 Nicaragua earthquake, estimated using the W-phase inversion with a depth dependent rigidity curve from a previous study, is used as a reference model to test the proposed NearTIF method. The tsunami inundation along the Pacific coast of Nicaragua is computed from the reference model of the 1992 Nicaragua earthquake. The tsunami inundation obtained using the NearTIF method matches the tsunami inundations computed from the reference model. The tsunami heights and the tsunami inundation of the 1992 Nicaragua tsunami surveyed by a previous study are roughly matched by the tsunami inundations obtained using the NearTIF method in this study. Although the computational time for the tsunami inundation from the reference source model is about 95 min, the computational time plus the database search time for the NearTIF method is approximately 2–4 min. The method presented in this study can be used as a near-real time tsunami inundation forecast method for the Pacific coast of Central America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The viral dissemination of fake news threatens news organizations in Indonesia, with many social media users exhibiting a decrease in their trust of traditional media, as well as limited digital literacy. To investigate fake news during natural disasters, this mixed-methods study examines information patterns and journalistic practices of three news organizations during the 2018 Palu earthquake and tsunami. First, online observations of disaster-related fake news cases on social media provide insights into how fake news was handled by three types of news media. The results show that when fake news concerned factual scientific evidence, news organizations unanimously used the government statements to debunk disinformation. In contrast, political or religious fake news had long lifecycles of polarized debates between pro-government groups and opponents. Using the Hierarchy-of Influences Model, in-depth interviews showed that individual-level journalistic professionalism mattered when tackling fake news reports, with some local practices differing from Western journalism approaches. At the routine level, news professionals treated the government as the authority to debunk controversial, high-risk fake news by presenting news only after official clarifications, while independent media tended to present balanced reports with diverse views. Additionally, interviewees revealed that organizational policies in relation to media types greatly influenced the handling of fake news practices in Indonesian newsrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recovery after major disaster poses a unique set of challenges for the older population, including disruption of medical care for pre-existing conditions, functional limitations that impede recovery, and social isolation following involuntary resettlement. In this review, we summarise the lessons about disaster resilience that have been learned (so far) from a unique ongoing field study based in a community that was affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In the Iwanuma Study, baseline information about the health status and living conditions of older residents was collected seven months before the disaster. A follow-up survey was conducted 2.5 years after the disaster, allowing us investigate the risk and protective factors for a range of disaster-related health sequelae, including mental illness and cognitive disability. A consistent finding to emerge from our studies is the critical role of social connections (the 'social capital' of a community) in protecting against the deleterious after-effects of psychological trauma and involuntary resettlement following the disaster. In contrast to the emphasis on investing in material infrastructure to prepare for disasters, a review of our studies suggests that repairing (or at least preserving) the social fabric of people's lives is a crucial ingredient in disaster resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phantom Limb Company's performance, Falling Out, examines the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. The University of Utah will present the work in 2020, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the University's multidisciplinary presenter, sustainability office and an interdisciplinary faculty research centre. Timothy Morton states '...there is no "away" after the end of the world. It would make more sense to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited'. Writing about Falling Out will serve as a record of the work's impact on the co-authors, and help grapple with our task of guardianship of the toxic world we have created for a future we cannot predict. Under the headings 1) Nature, 2) Body and 3) Time we consider ways that the work designs many bodies' coexistence with the toxic substances humans have created. In Nature, we introduce risk through questions of natural hazard resilience and representation. In Body, we use Mel Y. Chen's work on animacies and environmental justice scholarship on Fukushima to describe the entanglement of the puppet, human, human projected and garbage bag bodies in the work. In Time, we conclude with Amitav Ghosh's ideas of the uncanny to consider the cascading effects of the moment that strain in Earth's crust reached the critical breaking point and the weight of the entire ocean propelled to land with the tsunami to the moment in an imagined future when the impacts of this fallout will no longer be felt. We consider how expanding our sense of time to include the millennia of geologic processes may make hope possible. On these time scales, all is renewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, a massive tsunami caused serious damage to coastal dikes. Local scour at the ground behind these dikes reportedly causes dike failures. It is important to reveal the scour process to establish methods for effective scour countermeasures. Herein, we focus on geogrids. To verify this proposal and examine its design, flume-model experiments were performed for non-liquefied and liquefied grounds behind coastal dikes. The results showed that the scour amount and area were reduced drastically when geogrids were present. Geogrids on the sand-bed surface changed the direction of overflow water. Thus, a scour hole developed away from a coastal dike model. Furthermore, geogrids exerted a scour-reduction effect even during liquefaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After recent large earthquakes, field investigations confirmed that several bridges were severely damaged and collapsed not only due to the earthquake, as an independent hazard, but also to the subsequent tsunami, landslide or fault displacement. In addition, long-term material deterioration might have an important impact on seismic damage to bridges. Therefore, it is important to study both independent and interacting hazards and their effects on the reliability and risk of bridges and bridge networks. Although earthquake is still a dominant hazard to bridges in many earthquake-prone countries, a life-cycle reliability and risk approach has to consider both independent and interrelated hazards causing bridge failure. Such an approach is presented in this paper. In addition, issues related to life-cycle analysis, design, risk, resilience and management of bridges under earthquake and other hazards are discussed. Finally, the concepts and methods presented are illustrated on both single bridges and bridge networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a natural experiment related to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the present work empirically analyzes the relationship between historical events and current attitude and determines whether regions that suffered severely during the Japanese invasion in World War II expressed small concern during the earthquake. After controlling for geographical distance, bilateral trade, and political characteristics, a negative relationship is found between the duration of invasion and number of related deaths in the invaded regions and their governments' efforts in assisting Japan after the earthquake. Further analysis shows that political similarity to Japan helped in assisting them after the earthquake, but this effect was reduced for regions that sustained many deaths during the Japanese invasion. In addition, a mediation effect test shows that the help extended by Japan to several countries after the war through the Japanese official development assistance did not positively influence the amount of aid provided by such regions to Japan after the earthquake. These studies provide new evidence of the long-lasting influence of war. However, no robust evidence is found about the relationship between death rate and war memory. Therefore, even large countries cannot tolerate serious suffering during painful historical events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a polarimetric scattering investigation was performed by using hybrid polarimetric (HP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to determine the optimum HP feature for urban damage assessment related to the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami disaster on 11 March 2011. To minimize the effect of uncertainty on the feature selection techniques, quantitative analysis of HP features derived from Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS)/Phase Array type L-band SAR (PALSAR) data was conducted. First, preliminary selection was performed based on the Jeffries–Matusita (JM) distance, which was applied to evaluate the separability between damaged and undamaged areas. Second, random forest (RF) was implemented to improve the reliability and determine the most relevant feature based on importance score analysis. Accordingly, comparative analysis was performed and compared with quad polarimetric (QP) SAR data in terms of urban damage levels. The experimental results demonstrate that the circular polarization ratio is the most informative feature for the identification of urban damage and can be used to discriminate different damage levels, even in areas with large polarization orientation angle (POA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale disasters and catastrophic events typically result in a significant shortage of critical resources, posing a great challenge to allocating limited resources among different affected areas to improve the quality of emergency logistics operations. This article pays attention to the performance of resource allocation, which includes three metrics: efficiency, effectiveness, and equity, respectively corresponding to economic cost, service quality, and fairness. In particular, the effectiveness metric considers human suffering by depicting it as deprivation cost, an economic valuation measurement that has been recently proposed and the equity metric concerns about the service equality at the end of planning horizon. A nonlinear integer model is first proposed and then an equivalent dynamic programming model is developed to avoid the nonlinear terms created by the introduction of the deprivation cost. The dynamic programming method can solve small-scale problems to optimality but meets difficulty when solving medium- and large-scale problems, due to the curse of dimensionality. Therefore, an approximate dynamic programming algorithm, called the rollout algorithm, is proposed to overcome this computational difficulty. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is theoretically analyzed. Furthermore, a modified version of the rollout algorithm is presented, with its computational complexity analyzed. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed algorithms, and the experimental results demonstrate that the initially proposed rollout algorithm yields optimal or near-optimal solutions within a reasonable amount of time. In addition, the impacts of some important parameters are investigated and managerial insights are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BHTA is part of a European series of atlases mapping historic towns at consistent and comparable scales, based on a principal map at 1:2500, with additional maps showing the towns' built-up areas and buildings at key points in their topographic development. I 24 Pairs i including the Gough Map paired with the first one-inch Ordnance Survey map of Kent, maps of the Oxus and Tigris from the I Book of Curiosities i , a Rawlinson copperplate and accompanying map of the Caribbean, and Lewis' map of Narnia; Notable highlights were a collection of maps and diagrams of Stonehenge produced by WH Goodwin between 1867 and 1887; the first state of Charles Price's double hemisphere world map of c. 1712; an early estate map of Bryanston (1620), and three maps by Thomas Langdon from 1613 showing land in Hampshire once owned by Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The Map Curators' Group (MCG) is the Special Interest Group for librarians, map historians, map collectors, map archivists and anyone who is interested in maps. An introductory "map and atlas skills" section is followed by clear, easy-to-read reference maps presented with locator maps, fact boxes and flags, descriptive text, detailed map keys and photos, and carefully selected focus country studies. [Extracted from the article]

The effects of the tragedy at Japan’s Fukushima power plant will continue to reverberate over the upcoming weeks, months, and years. And, as the writers in this symposium explain, the consequences of the disaster go beyond Japan—like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Fukushima will reshape nuclear agendas and policies in countries around the world. In this Global Forum, leading experts reflect on the current and future implications of Fukushima for their own countries—the United States, the European Union, and South Korea. Mark Cooper (2011) writes from the United States; Caroline Jorant (2011) from the European Union; and Soon Heung Chang from South Korea. In August, this forum will continue as a Roundtable at www.thebulletin.org. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The effects of the tragedy at Japan’s Fukushima power plant will continue to reverberate over the upcoming weeks, months, and years. And, as the writers in this symposium explain, the consequences of the disaster go beyond Japan—like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, Fukushima will reshape nuclear agendas and policies in countries around the world. In this Global Forum, leading experts reflect on the current and future implications of Fukushima for their own countries—the United States, the European Union, and South Korea. Mark Cooper (2011) writes from the United States; Caroline Jorant from the European Union; and Soon Heung Chang (2011) from South Korea. In August, this forum will continue as a Roundtable at www.thebulletin.org. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquakes, Japan has entered into a new phase of cultural production where discourses on risks, dangers, and calamities mobilize varieties of individuals and institutions for the purpose of maintaining the nation's safety and security. In this phase, masculinity plays a salient role, leading to a series of discourses and practices that have to do with manhood and nationhood. Drawing on insights from Masculinity Studies, Disaster Studies, and Cultural Studies, this article examines the workings of masculinity in post-disaster Japanese culture by analyzing 'national resilience', a leading national initiative that demands a sweeping transformation of the nation. Calling for the revitalization of the nation, national resilience also insists on the need to re-strengthen men and manhood, providing a gendered vision of national security in post-disaster Japan. Unlike other, more politicized sites of controversies on nation and nationhood, i.e. constitutional revision, Yasukuni Shrine, and comfort women, national resilience is a yet-to-be marked domain of contestation where the public concern with safety frequently overrides and obscures its political intentions and implications. Yet, national resilience constitutes a potent site of politics, where discourses about men, the military, nation, and empire are repeatedly mobilized to promote the revitalization of Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to estimate how and what kinds of tsunamis are generated near shorelines in the Japan Sea, using earthquake tsunami sources proposed by the Japanese government. Tsunami propagation based on these sources was first simulated based on the linear Boussinesq theory for Miho Bay, where a historical tsunami inundated the shoreline. The results indicate that tsunami sources not only near the bay but also farther from the bay could generate significant tsunami fluctuations. Thus, the amplification of the latter tsunamis was examined using Fourier analysis. Tsunami waveforms in the bay periodically fluctuate with large amplitudes after the first wave. The Fourier analysis specified these periods to be 13–16 min, consistent with the estimated resonance periods of the bay. Therefore, it can be concluded that one of the factors responsible for the amplification of tsunamis in Miho Bay is the bay-scale resonance. To investigate why resonance occurs during tsunamis, a relationship between the tsunami source geometry and the generated tsunami was examined. This analysis indicates that specific tsunami sources located in critical areas could enhance the resonance in Miho Bay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 great Japan Tohoku earthquake is not only the most devastating but also, one of the best recorded earthquakes in the history of seismology. A thorough study of strong motion characteristics of this earthquake is conducted using 20 well established ground motion parameters (GMPs). The behaviour of these parameters with fault distance and average shear wave velocity is examined and attenuation relationships are developed using the 1172 surface level strong motion records. In addition, all GMPs are categorized on a statistical basis using principal component analysis, which is further used to rate the damage potential of ground motion records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, using reports collected from survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami in 2011, considers the following questions: Where is the boundary that separates the world of the dead and that of the living? What happens in an indeterminate state between death and life? How do we deal with it? Then, as a result, what is brought to us? These questions arise as we ruminate on what death means in the modern world. The author argues that reunion with the dead may sometimes bring about profound healing, which allows us to access the wholeness that includes both the living and the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami, run-up of the tsunami along rivers expanded the damaged area into more inland areas far from the coast. High water level in rivers was kept for more than several times of the wave period in the 2011 event, while more simple periodical oscillations of the water level superposed on the tidal motion was observed in the 2010 Chile Tsunami event. The difference of behaviors of tsunami in rivers was discussed with related to the magnitude of tsunami and river mouth morphology through two numerical experiments in this paper. In the first numerical experiments, the run-up of historical tsunamis was simulated along Kitakami River. It was found that the discharge of tsunami flow across the river mouth was proportional to third power of water depth if overflow of the sand spit occurred, and that caused unbalance of water volume coming into and going out from the river channel. Through the second numerical experiment with simple model bathymetry and sinusoidal waves, it was found that discharge during both tsunami run-up and run-down across river mouths is reduced by sand spits at the river mouths and the reduction effect is more significant during flow rushing into the rivers than that during return flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-disaster tourism is often perceived as a form of Dark Tourism associated with death, loss and destruction. In Japan, the term Dark Tourism has gained prominence following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. This paper focuses on a community-led approach to post-disaster tourism development, initiated in the coastal area of Minamisanriku and labelled by the locals Blue Tourism. From its inception Blue Tourism incorporated non-dark activities which concentrated on the beauty of nature, social and environmental sustainability and the development of an enriched tourist experience. Its co-creational ethos helped transform some of the negative narratives of loss associated with Dark Tourism into positive accounts of communal renewal and hope. The paper highlights the limitations of Dark Tourism to post-disaster recovery and contributes new insights to the community-based tourism literature. We argue that Blue Tourism is not a type of Dark Tourism but a form of resilience which builds around local place-based practices and traditional community knowledge. Consequently, it is capable of achieving sustainable disaster recovery and tourist satisfaction simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study will take two cases from East Asia to illustrate how visual archive/archiving has become or potentially becomes new space where image, heterogeneous temporalities and ideas of the common may lead to a redefinition or at least reconsideration of the binaries between public and private, between image and visual, between past and future. In contrast to historical archives, such visual archives not only aim for documentation and conservation but also become the sites of creating agencies and provoking critical reflections on the idea of the public. The first case is “Center for Remembering 3.11”1 initiated by Sendai Mediatheque (SMT), where civic participation and the archiving of the post-311 Tohoku Earthquake images of the disaster-ridden region were solicited and made into an online archive. The second case is Multitude.asia, a digital archive initiated by Taiwanese activist and scholar Huang Sun-quan, who works in collaboration with students, artists, and researchers from Mainland China and Taiwan in sorting, interviewing, and editing videos and texts about alternative cultural activities and space in Asia. While discussions on the archive and the public discourse are predominated by theories from Europe and the US, the current study intends to contextualize the concepts of “the public” (gōng/ōyake), “the private” (sī/watakushi), and “the common” (gòng/ kyō) in Chinese and Japanese languages in the discourse of archive in cultural specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two huge earthquakes struck Kumamoto, Japan, in April 2016, forcing residents to evacuate. Few studies have reported early-phase disease and injury trends among evacuees following major inland earthquakes. We evaluated the trends among evacuees who visited a medical clinic in a shelter located at the epicenter of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes. The clinic opened on April 15, the day after the foreshock, and closed 3 weeks later. We reviewed medical charts related to 929 outpatient visits and conducted descriptive analyses. The evacuees experienced mild injuries and common diseases. The types of diseases changed weekly. Elderly people needed medical support for longer than other age groups. Future earthquakes may be inevitable, but establishing arrangements for medical needs or making precautions for infectious diseases in shelters could reduce the effects of earthquake-related health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, coastal forests dissipated the energy of the tsunami and trapped flotsam. Although studies have shown how trees dissipate flow energy and are damaged in the process, the factors determining the trapping of flotsam by lines of trees or their capacity to do so have not been quantitatively examined. Quantitative evaluation of these factors may lead to tree-based strategies for suppressing the secondary damage caused by tsunami flotsam. To increase the ability of trees to mitigate damage, their physical limitations need to be identified. Field surveys revealed that integrated clusters of flotsam were caught by trees even if individual floating objects were smaller than the distance between the trees. Hydraulic experiments revealed relations between physical factors and the capture of flotsam. From these relations, we derived a simple formula for evaluating the trapping capacity of lines of trees. The estimates from our model were consistent with the actual results of the 2011 tsunami in Tagajo city, Miyagi prefecture, where trees did not topple under the forces applied by trapped flotsam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami, many improvements have been made in both hard and soft solutions for tsunami mitigation. After the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami, a posttsunami survey was conducted along the coast in Miyagi Prefecture, which was one of the most tsunami-affected sites because rapid acceleration of the tsunami currents broke and washed away the trees, resulting in extensive damage to inland houses. In contrast, some of the houses located inland and away from vegetation with a dropping step survived. This shows a possibility that a step combined with the vegetation offers greater tsunami energy reduction by providing additional resistance. Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate the energy reduction through a compound defense system (vegetation and a backward-facing step). Vegetation with a step (VS) showed greater energy reduction compared to that of only vegetation without a step (OV) due to additional loss by collision with the bed surface. However, the relative energy reduction in OV remained almost constant with the increase in the initial Froude number (F0, where the Froude number is obtained from a model without vegetation in a flume), whereas the relative energy reduction in VS showed a decreasing trend with increasing F0 because the energy reduction due to collision decreases with increase in water depth or F0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tsunami fission generates short waves at the front face of tsunami and these short waves may expand the inundation area, increase the hydrodynamic forces exerted on structures, and amplify the damage to coastal communities. It is therefore important to understand to what extent the tsunami fission generates such short wave components under variable conditions for development of better tsunami disaster mitigation strategies and plannings. This study carried out numerical experiments to describe under which conditions the tsunami fission occurs in a bay. The experiments indicated that the amplification of the nearshore tsunami height induced by the narrowing bay geometry and the bay-scale resonance enhance the tsunami fission. Based on the computations, a parametric diagram for the occurrence of tsunami fission was proposed in terms of the tsunami properties, the effect of bay geometry and the bay resonance. The developed diagram was applied to Sendai, Ryori, Yoshihama, and Toni Bays, which were affected by the 2011 Tohoku Tsunami. The proposed diagram consistently explained the occurrence of tsunami fission in Sendai Bay and in Ryori Bay as observed in the video footage. The diagram also suggested that the tsunami fission would have occurred in Yoshihama Bay. A high-resolution numerical computation was performed to simulate the tsunami deformation in the Yoshihama Bay and Toni Bay based on a nonlinear dispersive wave model. The result supported the validity of the diagram in describing the generation of tsunami fission in Yoshihama Bay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The Great East Japan Earthquake and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster occurred on 11 March 2011. We investigated the incidence of SGA (small for gestational age) in the Fukushima Prefecture in newborns delivered by women who were pregnant at the time of the disasters and identified any risk factors for SGA.Methods: Subjects were women who were pregnant at the time of the disasters. Questionnaires were sent to the women who lived in the Hamadori area (seaside and near to the nuclear power plant) at the time of the disasters as well as to a control group of women who lived outside the Hamadori area. The incidence of SGA was compared. Logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the risk factors for SGA.Results: In total, 325(5.6%) women had infants with SGA. Neither area nor the trimester of pregnancy at the time of the disasters influenced the incidence of SGA. Pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH) was higher in the SGA group. PIH was found to be an independent risk factor for SGA.Conclusion: We found no evidence that the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster increased the incidence of SGA in the Fukushima Prefecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the emergence of post-disaster ‘voluntours’ following Japan's 2011 disasters. An overwhelming, yet haphazard volunteer response to previous disasters spurred extensive collaboration between the state, relief organizations, and would-be volunteers in the wake of 3.11. However, when mapped onto to the massive devastation of the 3.11 disasters, this collaboration almost immediately turned many post-disaster volunteers into ‘voluntourists’, a problematic category commonly associated with visitors from the Global North volunteering for social and environmental causes while on holiday in the Global South. Japan's post-disaster voluntours demonstrate how uncoordinated and potentially risky volunteers have been channelled into a carefully-controlled and long-term response that satisfies people's desire to help disaster victims, while ultimately encouraging tourism (sansvolunteering) as the most desirable form of disaster recovery assistance. This shift toward voluntourism potentially undermines post-disaster volunteering and threatens to trap parts of Tōhoku, like other disaster sites, in a position of permanently ‘post-disaster’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a numerical study on seismic collapse capacity of high-rise concrete-filled steel tubular moment resisting frames (CFT-MRFs) under extreme ground motions that are beyond the design levels. The ground motions characterised as flat velocity spectral shape were selected to neglect record-to-record uncertainty induced by the changing of the natural periods of structures. A simple numerical approach was developed using fibre element with stiffness and strength degradation accounted in stress–strain models. Then, incremental dynamic analyses with various parameters were performed to evaluate the P-Delta and degradation effects on local and global collapse mechanisms. Results have shown that a drift concentration at the lower stories triggered the side-sway collapse mode that was dominated by the post-buckling strength degradation of CFT columns. The height of drift concentration indicates the range where the collapse mechanism was formed, and a drift concentration factor was proposed to estimate the extent of drift concentration. Last, a factor indicating the safety margin under collapse was computed based on the probability of earthquake occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Residences located within 20 km of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were evacuated shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The levels of airborne and surface fungi were measured in six houses in the evacuation zone in August 2012 and February 2013. Airborne fungal levels in all of the houses in the summer were higher than the environmental standard levels for residential houses published in Architectural Institute of Japan (>1000 colony-forming units [CFU]/m3). In two houses whose residents rarely returned to visit, fungal levels were extremely high (>52,000 CFU/m3). Although fungal levels in the winter were much lower than those in the summer, they were still higher than environmental standard levels in several houses. Indoor fungal levels were significantly inversely related to the frequency with which residents returned, but they were not correlated with the air exchange rates, temperature, humidity, or radiation levels. Cladosporium spp. and Penicillium spp. were detected in every house. Aspergillus section Circumdati (Aspergillus ochraceus group) was also detected in several houses. These fungi produced ochratoxin A and ochratoxin B, which have nephrotoxic and carcinogenic potential. The present study suggests that further monitoring of fungal levels is necessary in houses in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone, and that some houses may require fungal disinfection. Implications: The results suggest that residents' health could be at risk owing to the high levels of airborne fungi and toxic fungi Aspergillus section Circumdati. Therefore, monitoring and decontamination/disinfection of fungi are strongly recommended before residents are allowed to return permanently to their homes. In addition, returning to home with a certain frequency and adequate ventilation are necessary during similar situations, e.g., when residents cannot stay in their homes for a long period, because fungal levels in houses in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant evacuation zone were inversely correlated with the frequency with which residents returned to visit their houses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]