Japan prepares for its next natural disaster
Its new agency has plenty to do before a catastrophe strikes.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Evacuees rest in a shelter in Uki, Kumamoto prefecture, on July 29, after an earthquake struck south-western Japan.
PHOTO: AFP
The Economist
Among the countries most prone to natural disasters, Japan has a habit of spawning new bureaucracies. Yet despite in recent years launching agencies for digital technology and for children and families, its governments have consistently batted away a more obvious idea: to set up a disaster agency. That changed on Nov 2.
At the new body’s launch, Goshi Hosono, its freshly appointed minister, stood before a backdrop with a colourful logo resembling the character for “prevent” in bosai, or disaster prevention. He vowed to make Japan “the world’s most disaster-prepared nation”, ready for calamities “on the scale of a national crisis”.