It’s a Wednesday in January and the Sendai 3.11 Memorial Community Centre is quiet.

Not in the way that museums or doctors surgeries are, but in a way that feels intentional rather than awkward. The memorial centre sits inside the same building as Arai station on the Tozai Subway Line, which was opened in 2015 as part of Sendai City’s phenomenal efforts to encourage and support development following the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011.

The entrance to the centre is simple and unassuming. Rather than a sense of arrival or destination, it feels like a place to pause and pass through slowly, aware that its job is reflection not statement.

It’s inside this centre, as part of the CLAIR Japan Study Tour (more on that later), that I was honoured several weeks ago to hear from Midori Hanabuchi, an 83 year old woman, who now volunteers at the centre to share her experience of the impacts of the tsunami both at the time and since.

Downstairs, stylised relief maps, two dots on the wall clock marking the time of the earthquake at 14:46 (below) and a table with some leaflets are the most prominent signs of why the centre exists. Our guide tells us that ‘even now, people are scared of looking at the sea’.

It’s an atmosphere of calm and community, with rows of bench seating, musical instruments propped against the wall and a lending library in the corner with colouring pencils for children.

Walking up the staircase you pass an interactive piece called ‘Our 3.11’ which invites people to share a memory of the day and a hope for the future on tanzaku, strips of paper which dangle and flutter as you walk past.

Stepping onto the upstairs landing you’re met by a wall-sized map covered in dozens of sticky notes, the work of illustrator Junko Sato, who describes this as an ‘updating map’ which people who were displaced can use, to share memories of their community. “There used to be lots of octopus, now they are gone” reads one message (thanks Google Translate).

The second floor hosts a permanent exhibit on the wide-ranging impacts of the disaster, the progress on recovery and space for special exhibits which examine the disaster from various perspectives.

It’s inside this gallery that Midori recounts her experience of that day to the 9-person Japan Study Tour delegation. She explains in detail the damage caused to her local community, and what has happened in the years that have followed.

Having been displaced from her home, she described the thin walls of the cold and quickly constructed mobile home, and the intense feeling of isolation from her community which she was separated from. Eventually leaving her temporary accommodation 4 years after the tsunami, she noted that much of her time was spent crocheting, as she handed out her crocheted cat paw keyrings to everyone in the group.

The catastrophic damage caused by the tsunami stretched along hundreds of miles of the Pacific coast of Japan. In the Sendai area alone, 931 people were recorded as dead or missing (of an estimated total of 19,759) and more than 120,000 buildings were destroyed (of a total of more than 1 million).

The 3.11 Community Centre in Sendai is just one of dozens of similar sites. There are 75 official memorial locations, across 4 prefectures, where the memory of the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster are kept alive, plus many more local, personal and unofficial memorials. It’s an international story with intensely local memorialisation.

Sendai is proud to be known as the City of Trees, although there are’t many in leaf in January. Inside the community centre, before and after photographs are silently projected onto a plain wall. For me, the most immediately noticeable differences is the absence of trees in the post-tsunami images.

I’m struck in this room by the power of a timeline. It’s a very clear visual tool for setting out what was known and when. The similarities in design, scope and intent, between Sendai and the community timeline collated by researchers from London School of Economics in the months and years after the Grenfell Tower fire are apparent.

Earlier in the tour, we’d heard about the immense challenge of rehousing thousands of people and subsequent rebuilding of infrastructure. But how do you rebuild community and belonging?

The variety of ways in the centre for people to leave their memories, as they occur to them and in their own words, felt like an attempt for disrupted communities to persist in some sense.

The building itself reflects that. Stepping into the exhibition room, where images of destruction are confined, there is a subtle but deliberate shift below your feet. The smooth polished concrete of the station gives way to wooden boards salvaged from the gymnasium of the Arahama Elementary School. Boards that once supported school assemblies, sports days and ordinary afternoons, underpin collective memory.

That consideration of ‘the everyday’ stayed with me as we moved on through the study tour. It feels as though disaster management is woven into daily life and into architecture.

Ordinary Resilience

As the week unfolded I kept feeling that sense of everydayness. Despite the scale of the disasters they are at risk from, the Japanese approach to resilience feels…ordinary.

• Schools double as places of safety for local communities without fanfare.
• Fire extinguishers, defibrillators and hydrants are designed for ease of access and community use.
• Warnings, instructions, and cues are present everywhere, but don’t demand attention.
• Lifts in buildings contain a ‘welfare box (read: an emergency toilet) for people trapped for extended periods.
• Infrastructure is actively and openly designed with disaster in mind, rather than as an afterthought or something to be hidden.
• Red triangle stickers (which you might just make out in the photo below) on high-rise block windows, which are required by building regulations. They indicate glass which is more easily breakable to allow firefighters access if other building entrances are compromised.

This ordinariness perhaps stems from Japan’s long history of earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic activity. Disaster simply isn’t a low-probability entry on a risk register, but something which many people have personal memory of, and is ingrained into cultural memory.

In one lecture with Sendai Government, I wrote down “Safety is managed with people, not for them.”

In the coastal area of Sendai, the decision was made not to rebuild homes at all in this high-risk zone. Instead, it’s been rebuilt as a place for leisure, agriculture and commercial activity, with housing now only on higher ground. I have unanswered questions relating to why residential coastal development had been allowed prior to the 2011, given the known seismic risk, but I’ll have to explore that in slower time.

Everything runs like clockwork, but on one of the days we made an impromptu stop by a facility in Sendai designed to help foreign-born residents with navigating life, and there was a prominent display by the door with disaster prevention advice in the main languages spoken in the city.

About the Japan Study Tour

Each year the Japan Local Government Centre (London) invites senior executives in local government to Japan for a week of seminars, workshops and site visits. The objective is to exchange information on current issues relevant to local government. It truly was a brilliant experience, not just from what I learned from Japanese colleagues, but also the peer learning from UK colleagues.

The theme of the 2026 tour was Northern Ambition, which was reflected in both the location and participation, with time was split between the capital city Tokyo and Sendai City, and participants drawn from equivalent UK cities London, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle. The weather was sunny for the majority of the trip, but cold with the occasional sighting of snow!

The programme covered a broad range of aspects relating to devolution, industry-government-academia collaboration, tourism policy, and disaster preparedness.

Every single site visit and seminar was interesting and thought provoking. Not all of the content spoke directly to emergency management, but it was refreshing to learn new things, consider different perspectives and think about how resilience intersects with innovation, economic development, and place-based governance.

The itinerary was thoughtfully designed, with a rich mix of national, regional and local perspectives alongside opportunities for cultural exchange. Many of the activities highlighted a specific infrastructure, initiative or business. That focus is understandable, but I found myself thinking about the complex web of political and social dimensions which must underpin these activities.

One of many highlights was the opportunity to meet with Mayor of Sendai, and have a conversation about the different aspects that each of the UK delegates had taken from the visit.

I thought about how we might, hypothetically, run a similar tour in London for international delegates. My expectation is that we’d tell them about command structures, interoperability and coordination. By contrast, at the sites in Sendai or Tokyo, the consistent message was about creating the conditions for resilience upfront, that resilience is more than the ability to respond when something goes wrong. That’s a real lesson.

Responsibility, readiness and the reality of response

One visit in particular brought that aspect about pre-disaster decisions into much sharper focus.

Twelve kilometres outside of Sendai, on the Pacific coast, the community of Arahama was once home to eight hundred households. Miraculously, all of the students who were at Arahama Elementary School that day survived the tsunami. The school building has subsequently been preserved in its damaged state, as a memorial and museum to the impact and resilience of the community.

We were privileged to meet with Kawamura-sensei, former Principal at the school turned volunteer guide. He seems to carry the burden of his responsibility heavily and it feels like the most visceral visit of the tour, there’s an interview with the principal which goes into a bit more detail than he did with our group.

What I took from this was that some of the most important decisions were not made on the day of the tsunami, but in the years beforehand. The routine choices about training and equipment, how the school understood its role in the community.

I was reminded of the reflections of Richard Millett KC in his closing remarks to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, who said “every decision, every act, omission, interpretation, understanding, practice, policy, protocol, affects someone somewhere, someone who is unknown and unseen, but who is an adored child, a beloved sister, a respected uncle, a needed mother”. It seemed to me that Kawamura-sensei was very aware not just of his duty to the children at his school, but to their families also.

Schools in Japan all seem to play some role in functioning as emergency centres. They’re provided with equipment and supplies from local government organisations, and at Arahama the principal made a proactive decision long before the tsunami to store supplies on the third floor. Had they have been on the ground floor, like in many other schools, they would have been washed away by the water, and people stranded without essential support.

Three classrooms on the fourth floor of the school have been given over to telling the story, one contains the 1/500 scale model LOST HOMES. Across Japan, volunteer architecture students have worked with residents from villages and towns swept away by the tsunami to make faithful reproductions of what was lost and to express their condolences to places “once full of everyday lives”.

One thing which surprised me is the lack of security. The building is open to the elements yet there’s no obvious CCTV, minimal fencing, and no apparent security presence.

On the fourth floor, which became a makeshift community shelter whilst people of all ages awaited helicopter rescue, we were invited into a classroom to watch a short movie explaining about how the school became a lifeline. It wasn’t just the 91 students in school that day, but more than 200 members from the local community also fled to the school on hearing the tsunami warning.

We watched the film were seated on school chairs, which was poignant.

Other rooms are more future focused. There are small demonstrations of the types of equipment that schools have, and some information on what steps people can take to be better prepared or at least to know what to expect should they find themselves in an evacuation centre. Even simple things like the privacy screens (shown on the orange pedestal in the image below) show that further consideration has gone in to supporting people’s basic needs for shelter and dignity.

More questions than answers

It’s important to acknowledge the limits of a short visit. The locations we were taken to were curated, and despite the phenomenal efforts of translators and interpreters, discussions often partial or facing a cultural barrier.

Sadly there wasn’t enough (perhaps isn’t enough) time to discuss every facet of Japanese disaster management. Therefore, I draw these reflections lightly, and with humility.

There is much more that I could learn, but the study tour is a phenomenally useful experience. I’ve come back with more questions about how resilience is framed, and where responsibility is placed.

In the UK we tentatively ask individuals to be alert and ready. Japan’s approach seems bolder, trusting (or perhaps accepting) that the scale of their disasters mean a whole of society approach is the only answer. If resilience is something we expect of people we need decisions about resilience to include and be transparent with people.

Every street in Tokyo is packed with buildings full of restaurants, not just at ground level, but stacked several storeys high and in all directions. It can be hard to know where to start when choosing somewhere to eat.

That was my situation on Saturday. Having travelled for 15 hours, I knew I needed something special. Fuel for the days ahead. But with so many options to choose from, how do you make a good choice?

On this occasion, the answer wasn’t TripAdvisor or reviews on Google Maps, but Reddit.

The place to go in Shinjuku was apparently Ramen Tatsunoya.

After a short detour to the nearest konbini, I made my way, arriving at 9pm. It took me a few minutes to figure out the queue system. You think the British know a thing or two about queue etiquette, but the Japanese put us to shame! Scanning the line, it was a mix of locals and tourists, and according to the reviews, in bad weather they come out with umbrellas – evidence of which was seen just insider the sliding door at the front of the restaurant.

It was a queue of two halves; first get in line to use the machine inside to get a ticket, then with your ticket, wait outside again for a table to become free.

The restaurant closes at 10pm and with 20 minutes to go I was still waiting outside, in 9 degree weather, wondering if trusting Reddit had been a mistake. I was getting cold feet, both figuratively and literally. Moments later though, I was called in to the hustle and bustle of the cosy restaurant and seated at the counter.

Despite selecting the English option on the ordering machine, it felt like a chaotic Argos catalogue, a page with lots of pictures of things which didn’t seem to correspond to the selection buttons!

I ordered the ‘house special’ with an extra egg, and a beer. I wasn’t exactly sure what the special consisted of, and so I was (pleasantly) surprised when I was presented with tsukemen (dipping ramen, where noodles are served cooked but cold and you dunk them to both warm and flavour them). It’s a style of ramen that I’ve had several times before, but which seems far less popular in London.

Being able to watch the theatre of the chef preparing the food is wonderful. The care and artistry in how they prepare plates is remarkable, the head chef wrapping noodles around his fist like ribbons before plating them in a swirl.

On the counter, small pots of complimentary beansprouts, pickled ginger and spicy beansprouts. I assumed they were toppings for the ramen, but others around me were eating them as appetisers, so I promptly joined in!

When my food arrived it was a bowl of velvety rich broth, swirled with black garlic oil and with small globules of pork fat rising from chunks of pork crackling submerged in the soup. And a separate plate of noodles, (more) bamboo shoots, slices of pork belly, crisp sheets of nori and four half-slices of soft-set egg. The waiter let me know to leave some of the broth, and they would add ‘rice porridge’ at the end, which isn’t something I’ve seen before.

I sat next to the actual king of ramen eating. He was slurping those noodles like an actual professional, and I felt like my chopstick, spoon coordination was third-rate in comparison.

Punch me in the face, this was excellent ramen!

The noodles still had some ‘bite’ to them, the broth was rich and slightly sweet, but without having that lip-sticking-together heaviness that I usually enjoy. When I’d polished off all of the noodles I requested the rice porridge, which staff added by the ladle from a plastic box on the counter, and gave it a quick blast in the microwave to warm it back up. The rice added thickness and I left feeling nourished but not stuffed.

Like many of the food places in Tokyo, you perhaps wouldn’t give this place a second glance if you had walked past. As a tourist, and from the outside, it looks like perhaps 100 other ramen restaurants in the local area, but I’d be surprised if they are serving food this good.

The moral of the story – trust in Reddit, trust in ramen.

There’s a window between Christmas and New Year where you’re bored of turkey and beige buffets, but not quite yet in the ‘New Year New Me‘ delusion. In that period, apparently now known as Twixmas (a term I refuse to endorse) it has become my tradition to seek out ramen – warm, salty and restorative after the last few weeks.

I’ve wanted to visit Tenmaru for a few months now but haven’t managed to find time, this seemed like the prefect opportunity for something comforting!

They have two branches, one just behind Oxford Circus station the other close to Finsbury Park station. Forgetting that the area would be teeming with people searching for illusive Christmas Sales bargains, I opted for the Central London location. Fortunately, it’s on a quiet stretch of Margaret Street where crowds had dispersed, and the restaurant was practically empty when we walked in. I was worried that it might be a bit soulless, but by the time we left every table had filled up and there was an energy in the restaurant.

There was a really catchy song being played as we walked in, but there was no phone coverage to be able to Shazam it, so it’s lost to that moment forever! The tables are virtually all booths, with the exception of a counter area opposite a bar which was closed.

I was drawn to Tenmaru in particular by the Cheese Mochi Potato in the appetiser section of the menu. On closer inspection it turned out to be vegan cheese, which I was a little hesitant about. I’d been expecting Little Moons filled with cheese, but what turned up were three hockey pucks of mochi (left, below), fried until the edges were crispy while still chewy inside. Biting into it revealed a centre of mild, stringy cheese. The mochi were coated in a sweet-but-salty sauce and was delicious, highly recommend.

In addition to the mochi, we ordered the Chicken Karrage (above, right), which arrived as five massive pieces of juicy chicken thigh meat with a crispy coating. They’ve been fried for perhaps a fraction too long as some bits of the coating had started to burn a little, and I have a feeling the mayonnaise was Hellman’s rather than Kewpie.

Moving on to the ramen, we ordered the Tenmaru Paitan and the special Tenmaru Lemon, which was basically the same but with the addition of five fresh slices of lemon. As the bowls arrived the waiter gave us a top tip “When the broth has gotten lemony enough for you, remove the slices to stop it tasting bitter”.

A lot of the online reviews that I read beforehand mentioned how refreshing the lemon ramen was, and I knew I had to try it for myself. One of the things that I love most about ramen is the mouthfeel of the collagen which sticks your lips together. The lemon ramen didn’t do that, because the citrus freshness cut through the slightly oily broth. Both dishes included sous-vide cooked chicken breast, a whole egg (branded with the restaurant logo, which was a fun touch), spring onion, bamboo shoots and sliced black fungus. The plain Paitan noodles also came with beansprouts. The noodles were the right level of hardness for me and absolutely hit the spot. I also wasn’t left with the heavy, busting at the seams feeling, that can sometimes happen with a pork-based broth.

Overall I was very impressed with Tenmaru. I’d have liked a touch more atmosphere in the restaurant, and perhaps a nori sheet in the ramen. I’ll almost certainly make it to the Finsbury Park branch before too long, if only to repeat the mochi and try another experimental dish, basil ramen.

What an end to 2025, Happy New Year ramen lovers!

I started my career in emergency planning twenty years ago this week. I don’t keep a diary, but I remember the exact day because it coincided with what remains the costliest tornado in UK history. On my patch!

I mentioned this in my weekly team email and thought I’d elaborate a little here.

I was a brand-new member of staff at a major acute hospital in the Midlands. The morning was spent starting to find my way around, and being shown the location of the incident coordination room. I’m glad that was included, because at 14:37 the tornado touched down and shortly afterwards word reached the Emergency Department that a major incident had been declared: the hospital should prepare to receive some of the 37 casualties.

Unlike many people in this field (at the time at least), this was exactly where I wanted to be! I hadn’t got years of expertise in a uniformed service. In fact, I never felt that was what I needed to do. I’d never put out fires, arrested people or administered more than first aid. I cared about the coordination, the systems and the space in between. I was motivated by a strong sense that there was something that needed doing, and that someone (me) should do it!

Twenty years on, I’ve still never had a job title that neatly captures what it is I really do. Over that time I’ve phased out ‘emergency planning’ from my own vocabulary, because it’s more than plans. For a while I was comfortable describing it as ‘resilience’ but I’ve found myself shifting away from that too (a little ironic, given my current role!). Lately I’ve been describing it as ‘emergency management,” which for me slightly better reflects our work: grappling with uncertainties, making decisions, and carrying the weight of responsibility when it matters most.

What’s Changed? ​

Some of the risks are new (welcome to our registers financial system collapse, food supply contamination and disinformation). Some risks have been retired (so long, Oak Processionary Moth!). Many many risks remain.

But the context that we work in has shifted, and not always for the better.

It’s brilliant that talk about cascading risks is more commonplace. One of my biggest achievements is our work on Anytown which started in 2014, a project which has taken me around the world as I share our innovative approach to interdependencies. Although UK audiences were the least receptive to that at first.

There’s a growing awareness and understanding that communities should be active participants in planning, not just recipients of response.

And there’s a building recognition of the specific emotional labour of our work. Time spent planning for mass fatalities, or habitat destruction, or incurable diseases takes its own kind of specific toll (we don’t always have easy work anecdotes for parties). Add to that the additional weight of response and that emergency mangers often don’t get to ‘go home’ at the end of a response. We’re also asked to identify and resolve lessons while still recovering ourselves. But I see a some shifts towards a profession which cares about its people, which is important.

But we’re increasingly expected to do more with no more (and often with less). There’s a weariness that can come from facing the same problems without the resources or time to solve them.

The playing field and players have changed. But our systems, techniques and sustainable funding need to catch up.

Why Emergency Management Matters

In times of crisis you often see the absolute best in people.

I have an unwavering belief that’s never left me: this work matters. When things go wrong, individuals and communities need our support. They need confidence that someone is thinking about and supporting them with the unimaginable, even if they never know who.

And the fantastic people that I’ve worked with and learned from. Colleagues and friends who bring compassion, perspective, and authenticity. People who show up for others, and for each other.

Emergency management doesn’t often shout for acknowledgment, but it’s a part of a societal safety net to help people when they need it.

Moments That Stay With Me

There’s really too many to mention, but a couple of moments join the Birmingham Tornado as being formative.

Swine Flu. The 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Grenfell.

Each taught me different things, about systems and their limits, about public and political expectation, and about occupying the space between people and power. And in the latter case, Grenfell taught me much more about myself.

I carry a complicated sense of guilt about not being more directly involved in the COVID response. I saw (and still see) what it took out of colleagues. The hours, the pressure, that invisible always-there-ness. I also saw what happens when systems are stretched too thin.

What Comes Next​

In 2023 I started to talk about the idea that emergency management is dead. Not because our work is done, but because I don’t think the old ways of working can step up to the modern challenges.

We need something different.

An approach that isn’t obsessed with control, but grounded in care.

One that sees communities not as risks to manage, but as partners with insight and capacity.

One that recognises the complex emotional reality of crisis, not just operational timelines.

One that takes seriously the people at the end of our plans.

There are signs of hope. The UK Resilience Action Plan and the Trailblazer LRFs evidence the beginning of this shift a shift toward more local ownership and a greater emphasis on inclusion and accountability. And I feel deeply privileged to be involved in that work.

Still Committed

I’m not one for loud celebrations, but 20 years feels worth acknowledging.

That tornado was a baptism by wind! I didn’t have a map of the building, or detailed knowledge of crisis response, but knew that what mattered was coordination, care, and calm.

20 years of learning, unlearning, adapting, and sometimes simply enduring. Meeting those moments, not with certainty, but with purpose, understanding and humility.

20 years of seeing the very best of what systems, and more importantly people, can do.

If you’ve been part of that journey, a sincere thank you. If you’re just beginning yours, I hope we are building something better for you to inherit.

Two decades on, when things start to spiral, it’s emergency managers that help hold us together.

In August, I posted on X (let’s leave that conversation for another time) a provocative comment, questioning whether recovery exists:

— mtthwhgn  (@mtthwhgn) August 21, 2024

My feeling is that emergency management currently approaches the post-disaster phase too simplistically. Reality is that this is often a complex, iterative process, without a defined (or definable?) end. This post is a companion to a podcast episode I was invited to join recently. This is the fourth episode of the JBA Climate Resilience podcast and focused on the post-incident period. In preparation for the recording, I was thinking about alternative ways to view the recovery process.

In Japan, there’s an artform known as kintsugi. This involves repairing broken pottery with a mixture of lacquer and gold powder. Rather than hiding the damage, kintsugi celebrates it – emphasising both the transformation and repair. Instead of cracks and scars being something which diminishes, the ‘flaws’ are made visible; an obvious, glistening sign of change, growth and memory.

Would it be possible to view the process of recovering from disaster in a similar way? Drawing something beautiful from the damage instead of a rush to return to a pre-disaster condition.

When does recovery end?

The six stages integrated emergency management cycle suggests that a recovery stage exists, and I don’t dispute that there is ‘before disaster’ and there is ‘after disaster’. But, reducing the complexity of this process to ‘recovery’ might hold us back doing it better.

The UK Government’s guidance explains that recovery is the “process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating a community following an emergency”. They note that this phase ‘continues until the needs of those affected have been met’.

That sounds logical, but if you pull at that thread it begins to unravel.

Modern societies are grappling with challenges on a day-to-day basis. Food insecurity, fuel poverty, discrimination, inadequate housing, ageing infrastructure, cost of living crisis. People can find themselves ‘in need’ daily and in many complex ways. But the definition of recovery seems to mean to me that it can’t be completed until all of those systemic and chronic issues are addressed.

In the podcast, my fellow guest Evie Whatling said “measuring the success of recovery is hard because when does it end?”

Looking at recovery differently

The post incident language is biased towards the optimistic.

Phrases like bouncing forward, returning to normality or (*shudder*) ‘new normality’ are jarring. If you’ve lost your home to wildfire, a flood swept away the business that brings you your livelihood, or a friend or family member lost their life, there is no ‘going back’ or ‘normality’. Those phrases minimise our understanding of the harms experienced.

In an emergency, responders are often obvious; marked out by their flashing blue lights or hi-visibility jackets. If we can have responders, then perhaps we need to consider who the ‘recoverers’ are.

Perhaps recoverers might include functions such as:

• loss adjustors from insurance companies,
• teams involved in cleaning up and mending damage,
• healthcare staff who provide ongoing physical and wellbeing services,
• the finance staff who have to reallocate budgets from existing plans, and of course
• local community groups, organisations, leaders who hold communities together and their constituent members.

These recoverers are far less distinct. There’s no sirens. No protective equipment. Perhaps some can be identified by their sharp suits or clipboards, but often, they’ll look like everyone else.

Most responders (and I’d suggest a lot of recoverers) are not ‘of the place’ an incident happens. As a result, local knowledge about the place, how it’s communities function and what they need is limited, certainly initially. Generalisations and assumptions made might address some of the need for a short period, but are unlikely to meet the wide spectrum of need that inevitably exists.

I mentioned in the podcast, the brilliant work of Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill. Their project ‘Children of Katrina’ explored how children cope after disaster. They found three post-disaster trajectories which could inform the support people might need.

• A declining trajectory – where life is marked by ongoing shocks, setbacks, and instability.
• A finding-equilibrium trajectory – where access to resources and support (before and post disaster) can halt decline.
• And a fluctuating trajectory – where misalignment of interventions results in an unstable progression.

This could be one way of thinking in more detail about the recovery process. Another is found in the work of Hugh Deeming who proposed an additional ‘stabilisation’ phase as a transition between response and recovery. A definition of stabilisation is proposed as ‘the exercise of interim control following an incident in order to increase public safety, and to mitigate the risk of secondary impacts occurring’.

The definition is perhaps less explicitly connected to engaging directly with communities but I think that’s where kintsugi comes in…

Kintsugi and recovery

Like recovery, kintsugi process is slow, mindful, multi-stage process:

• The human impulse to fix the broken pot is strong. However, the first stage of the kintsugi practice invites you to notice the brokenness.
• Glue (or traditionally tree sap) is applied to reconnect the broken pieces. This evokes the bonds and relationships formed in communities during adversity and healing.
• Whilst the glue is wet, the pieces are held in place using tape. It takes time for the glue to set, which is perhaps equivalent to the proposed stabilisation phase, where subsequent activities can’t proceed until some equilibrium has been found.
• Next, excess glue might be removed using a file, smoothing away that which is no longer required. In my mind, this is similar to the steps of refining the often quite blunt initial responses, with something which better meets needs.
• And finally, gold powder is used to highlight the cracks and repair. Respecting the damage.

Perhaps if there’s one thing to take away from this, it’d be to acknowledge that ‘recovery’ is more nuanced that we sometimes assume. Spending more time considering it’s complexity could help recoverers to provide more effective post incident support.

You can take a listen to the episode here:

For approximately 19 of the 20 years I’ve been in the resilience and emergency management profession, I’ve taken part in discussions which revolve around two common questions – what is resilience and what should we be doing to improve it.

This is a story about an activity I ran today on that. Skip to the session outputs if you want, but I have tried to outline my thought process and reflections too.

Why are we here?

After a merger of two teams working on broadly similar areas (but specifically very different activities) some months ago, this subject raised it’s hand again. Sometimes that was in a very obvious way, like a ‘virtual hand’ being raised Microsoft teams, and somebody in the team would explicitly question ‘what’s the purpose of doing this’ or ‘what are we working towards’. Other times it’s been more unspoken, and there has been a question hanging in the air that everyone is itching to ask but nobody has quite made it that far.

In an effort to move forward and work on alignment of the two former teams, the leadership team decided it would be helpful to invite everyone (approx 30 people) together for an afternoon to work through what our vision should be, start to develop our mission statement and consider the range of responsibilities that we have collectively and individually.

Each of the leaders took an element of the afternoon, and I volunteered for the ‘mission’ session.

My overarching objective was to try and bring some creativity and energy to a subject many of us have considered previously. I also identified some sub objectives, that this session needed to be interactive, needed to provide an opportunity for people to work together and needed to be an activity that provided a level playing field and avoided the more senior people dominating the discussion.

On the Future Leaders Scheme, we used Lego to construct ‘the leader we wanted to be’. There were varying qualities of construction, but two aspects which were very interesting were the different approaches that different people had, and the level of thought and interpretation that people had put into their creations.

A (sad) lack of any significant quantity of Lego immediately scuppered this plan, so I considered how else we might be able to create a similar set of conditions and some other options before finally settling on a ‘magnetic poetry’ activity….you know, the kind of thing that you find on a refrigerator, like this:

I don’t know everyone on the team to the same degree, but of the people that I do know there can sometimes be some cynicism about ‘off the wall’ ideas. I knew that if I was going to go down this route I would need something in my back pocket to say ‘this isn’t just some wacky idea, there is some evidence to using poetry in the context’.

A recent blog from Sam Illingworth at London School of Economics was one of the first articles I found. In it, Sam states that “the integration of poetry as a pedagogical tool offers a unique way to enhance learning experiences…poetry can transform approaches, deepening understanding and engagement” which sounded promising.

The post links to a couple of articles, so I had a quick scan of them too to pick up some further evidence that this was a legitimate activity in case challenged.

• Camille Cronin and Caroline Hawthorne in the 2019 edition of ‘Nurse Education Today’ examined the use of poetry in healthcare education as a reflective tool. They found it provided an “opportunity to express emotions and experiences more freely”.
• Sam and colleague Kirsten Jack wrote for the journal Arts & Health in 2023 that, poetry enabled “alternative perspectives” to emerge, “challenging previously held assumptions”, but that the use of this tool also created empathy and facilitates “social bonding, feelings of universality, and mutual understanding between group members as they find common ground in poetic expressions”.

In the blog, Sam also provides 5 tips for adding poetry to the pedagogical toolbox (poetry as a medium, make it accessible, focus on process, create a safe space, be vulnerable).

I then found the excellent work by Clare Morgan in 2010’s book What Poetry Brings To Business, which sets out some factors which I found really helpful for developing this session with the team, and drew on some of them in the feedback, which I’ll get to a bit later.

• A poem is multidimensional which develops our ability to detect different modes of meaning and to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty.
• A poem doesn’t offer closure – this teaches us to handle non-resolution.
• A poem isn’t based in a logical deductive mode and so we learn to make associative connections.
• Poems can show the ordinary as extraordinary which encourages us to question givens and makes us more aware of complexity.
• A poem is almost infinitely interpretable and can help us to consider the views of others, to recognise that ‘meaning’ is unstable and to examine and revise our current insights and perceptions.
• A poem operates at different levels of accessibility which could enable us to detect weak as well as strong signals and to seek less obvious linkages.
• A poem is full of coexistent complements and contradictions which could develop our ability to time judgements carefully and be aware that binary thinking is not enough.
• By drawing attention to human needs and motivations poetry could help us to make decisions in a more comprehensive context and address ethical issues.
• By exploring emotional complexity poems could help us develop the ability to offer wholeness of response.

Preparing for the session

Having convinced myself there was a sound evidence base, I set about planning the session.

I had 30 minutes allotted in the afternoon’s agenda, and knew around 25 people would be attending. So that everyone would get chance to contribute I worked out the best group size would be 3-4 people.

Using an online ‘word cloud’ tool, I drew out the 50 most common words from each of two documents which various team members currently use to guide our way. I then asked ChatGPT to suggest another 50 words and then used a bit of judgement to add some additional words (including some that I thought might generate some additional discussion), bringing the total to 163 words. It looked something like this.

As well as my snazzy tablecloth, you’ll see that 36 words are highlighted in yellow. These were the words that the leadership team had used when talking about this session and I thought that might be useful to track them, so highlighted them.

I then spent about an hour or so carefully cutting each of the words out and creating 8 packets, for each of the groups to have. I debated whether different groups should have different words, but decided that it would be more interesting if everyone had the same options to see how different their products were.  After a period of time my kitchen looked like this…

Although each of the groups had the same set of words, I did give them slightly different steers and asked them to hold in their minds the idea of a theme running through their poems. I had drawn these themes from a quick look through the sessions on values and responsibilities which I knew were also being planned. In total we ended up using six of the themes:

• Community
• Assurance
• Partnership
• Our Power
• Our Approach
• Consistency

Creating Poetry

I opened the session with a quick introduction and run through of the rules. I had tried to lightly script this, but at the time it felt like it was too much instruction and people just needed to get on and play – so I adjusted my remarks on the fly to set out the bare minimum. I drew back to Sam Illingworth’s blog and tried to reinforce that there were no right answers and the important thing was to have a go rather than worry about the ‘perfect’ poem.

I then went around to each group to pass on some additional information, outline the rules and check their understanding:

• Create as many mission statements as you can in the 20 minutes we have
• You must use at least one yellow word in each statement
• You can re-use words – so if you have already used a word in your first statement, but want to use it again that’s fine
• You have permission to create a funny or silly statement (because I know what you’re like), but you can only do this once!
• Assume alterative forms of the provided words are included (e.g. communicating, communicated, communicates)
• Connecting words are free, use as many as you like, but remember that poetry isn’t prose

I was delighted that people got stuck straight in.

Seeing the different approaches that groups took to the task was fascinating in itself. Some groups were really structured, turning all the tiles around the same direction, sorting out the yellow ones, categorising them and grouping them. Others embraced the chaos of a mixed up pile, taking a more intuitive approach.

I think some groups took a little while to figure out how they would approach it.

After 20 minutes had elapsed I drew the group back together. I first asked if there were any words they had been provided with which had stood out, in particular words they had chosen to discount. I was surprised that only one word was challenged by an individual as I had definitely tried to include some to provoke that consideration. A useful personal lesson perhaps in assumptions about what and how other people think.

What was produced?

None of this is formal organisational policy at this stage, merely the product of a workshop session, which will need to be refined and calibrated against other things. However, there were a couple of things which stood out to me which I share for interest.

The group which was thinking about the theme of ‘assurance’ created a whirly poem which spirals and changes direction halfway through. Perhaps a sub-conscious comment on the convoluted process of assurance?

The group prompted to consider the theme of consistency were the first to grab some blu-tac and start to put words onto a page, filling in blanks and adjusting the words that had been provided to fit their purpose. Perhaps a genuine suggestion, but I suspect that this suggestion from the group considering ‘our power’ was their wildcard!   And the final example, which I think is great, is that the group asked to think about ‘our approach’ came up with an acrostic-style creation. 

Final reflections

The setting for the activity (and the whole afternoon) was excellent – a dance studio in a railway arch! I think getting out of the normal work environment was also a big factor in us thinking about things in a different way.

There is more work to be done to make sense and consolidate what we produced today; in part that non-resolution is linked with Clare Morgan’s observation that, in themselves, poems don’t offer closure and are the starting point for thinking more deeply.

However, I think it was a useful session. It got people talking and creating, I think it revealed a lot about how meaning is subjective (both in the sense that you and I might interpret a word or phrase differently, but also the observation that how words work when used in a ‘community’ sense might be very different to using it to talk about ‘consistency’). It was also an excellent way to see which leaders naturally emerge within small groups, different problem solving approaches and to generate discussion on sharing perspectives.

If you’d be interested in my complete list of words then let me know and I’d be happy to send them to you. Best to reach me via @mtthwhgn.

Finally, as I reflect on this session today, I’m also drawn back to previous thoughts I’ve had about zines. In particular, I wonder whether they are/could be a useful mechanism for creating information in new, decentralised and more inclusive ways. It’s not something for now, but if that sounds interesting let me know and I’ll put a bit more time towards thinking about it!

A week ago my team organised an event which walked participants through an extreme heat scenario. It had taken around 6 months of planning and become known to us as Exercise Helios.

At the very start of the process a new colleague with little previous experience of the UK emergency management structures asked a very sensible question…

“why do we give scenario events like this names?”

I had to admit that I wasn’t really sure. I suspect that it has to do with the origins of the profession having military and uniformed service roots, but I can’t say with certainty that there aren’t other reasons.

Despite their initial opposition to a name, over time my colleague started to called it ‘Exercise Helios’. In the final weeks before the event, I started to notice senior staff in the organisation enquiring about ‘Operation Helios’, a term which was reflected in the media coverage. Those two aspects got me thinking about the theme for this post – the terms that we use, how we use them, and how other people might interpret that – the role of professional language. In reflecting on the language of emergency management I also wonder whether language might actually be the purest essence of resilience?

Side note: please can somebody commission a semantic review of the civil protection lexcion?!

What’s in a name?

As in other fields, the landscape of emergency management is a thicket of technical terminology. We’re as guilty as the next field in developing our own professional language and applying it inconsistently.

The world of emergency management is full of terminology that serves that purpose. In a UK context for instance, there are various terms which refer to a multi agency meeting; it could be a Strategic Coordinating Group, a Recovery Coordinating Group, a Mass Fatality Coordination Group or many other things. In this case, the use of jargon which might not be explicitly understood outside a fairly narrow profession is helpful. It clearly expresses what is being referred to and avoids the misunderstanding of a more vague description.

In those cases, training is really important because it socialises and reinforces the meaning that those terms have, and ensures a shared approach and understanding. Many years ago I completed a MIMMS course and over the course of 3 days had used and explained ‘METHANE‘ so many times that it was almost unconscious.

Clear and effective communication is the cornerstone of a successful emergency response. In a 2013 review of persistent lessons identified from emergencies, Dr Kevin Pollock found that of 32 events reviewed, ineffective communications was a key contributing factor in the common causes of failure.

Precision is important and the ability to convey critical information clearly and concisely to multiple stakeholders is paramount. Yet the ever increasing labyrinth of jargon, acronyms and terminology can bamboozle, and that’s before considering other types of communication.

A colleague recently shared an article about a recent military exercise, which is liberal in it’s use of abbreviations. I’m not suggesting that everything has to be written for a general public audience, nor that you can’t make some assumptions about what your audience knows. But one sentence in the article reads ‘As SMEs in CQB, K Coy was invited to act as the assaulting force for the serials’ which requires a reasonably high level of domain knowledge to parse.

Ever evolving language of Emergency Management

Where both parties understand each other, professional language serves as a shortcut, but what about where there isn’t an agreed understanding of a term?

Who is a victim? Where is a community? Who are stakeholders? What does it mean to have recovered? These are hotly debated matters with many intersecting interpretations. How we understand language varies based on geography, the cultural norms and our own experiences.

General understanding of the term ‘casualty’ might be a person who has sustained an injury. But in the maritime sector a vessel in distress can also be known as a casualty. Knowing that is really important to avoid searching for a missing person who is actually a boat!

Things become more challenging for new entrants to the field, or where we are trying to work with other sectors who don’t have the same shared language. It can be alienating in both directions to listen to people saying things you don’t understand.

There is a possibility that the use of jargon, unexplained acronyms and convoluted speech is some kind of power play. I don’t think most people intentionally set out to make things hard to understand, but we have to be aware of the possibility of power dynamics.

I wrote recently that ‘emergency planning is dead‘. Perhaps one of the reasons that we need to think differently about emergency management is that how we speak about emergency management has got us to this point. To engage wider we need to adjust the language we use to make it more inclusive, accessible and relatable. It’s partly why I’m not a huge fan of grab bag initiatives, the language of which seems tone deaf to the pressures many people face on a daily basis.

We should also check and confirm understanding. I’ve been on internal courses which espouse the importance of active listening. The trainer will tell you that ‘nodding indicates that you are engaged and attentive’. But to the person doing the communicating, that nod signals agreement or comprehension to the speaker. I remember one occasion in a meeting with an eloquent Government colleague who kept referring to people as ‘recalcitrant’. I nodded along in absolute agreement but googling the definition on my phone under the table! (Recalcitrant: having an obstinately uncooperative attitude towards authority, which incidentally has turned out to be one of my favourite words!).

The best advice that I have been given relating to this this came from a member of a community group. They challenged me after a meeting and said “just be real”. It’s feedback which I took to heart and have tried to reflect on since, making my own communication style more accessible and trying to cut through some of the opacity that language can create.

Language: the purest form of resilience

Language provides access to information, employment, and education. Language builds cohesion and increases access to social and economic resources. Language helps individuals and communities understand and help each other. And language helps us tell stories and share experiences.

Those are all aspects of ‘resilience’ and in the course of writing this I feel like I’ve inadvertently stumbled upon something I hadn’t realised before; that language might be the purest form of resilience.

Your favourite jargon?

I invite you to share your favourite emergency management term? A phrase that in any other context would be hard to understand correctly, or perhaps just one that entertains you.

In itself, the professional language of emergency management isn’t good or bad. It has it’s uses and limitations. We shouldn’t remove jargon, but we should think just as critically about how we communicate as what we communicate.

The image at the top of this post is taken from ‘Words Are All We Have’ by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who’s works often referenced the resilience and defiance of individuals.

This is the third of five ramen blogs from my recent adventures in Japan and this time coming at you from Kyoto.

Kyoto is one of Japan’s oldest cities, chosen in 794 as the seat of the emperor, where they ruled from for eleven centuries until 1869. The Gion district originated to provide entertainment for travellers and visitors and became the most well-known geisha (or the local term geiko) district in all of Japan.

However, centuries of history and the refined elegance of the geisha are spared from Ramen Miyako. This place is lively, edgy and loud and I loved it!

This restaurant was the selection of a friend, who had found it online after the original place that we wanted to visit was closed. Sometimes those by-the-seat-of-your-pants choices can be terrible, but sometimes they really come up with the goods.

We arrived separately and as I was running slightly late the starters had already been ordered for me by the time I arrived. Something is thrilling about a blind date with an appetiser no knowing what might arrive. I was delighted when a feast of edamame, chicken karaage, pork gyoza and fried rice was placed on the table. Each table also had a seemingly bottomless kettle of sweetened cold tea.

Three of us chose the standout item on the menu, the chasu pork belly, which looked almost barbequed and had a rich roasted flavour. You can’t quite make it out from the photo, but there were small globules of fat floating in the broth. That could put me off, but they melted instantly in your mouth and added wonderful smoothness. The fourth bowl was a spicy veggie ramen (to which a side of pork was added!). If I had one note, it would be that there could have been a whole egg and that they had been perhaps a little too generous with the fistful of spring onion on top of the bowl.

In the rush to get to the restaurant we hadn’t realised that it was cash only, so luckily one of our group was able to cover it for everyone. If you find yourself wandering around Gion, then take a wander into Ramen Miyako, and if you get to the bottom of why there are loads of post-it notes on the walls let me know!

I’ve made this resolution before, and haven’t always delivered on it, but again in 2024, I want to get back into posting blogs more regularly. So I guess I can make a start with the next #RamenResolution instalment!

For anyone who hasn’t been following along, a resolution that I made in 2016 was to eat more noodles, and I’ve been blogging about all of the places I’ve tried ever since. I gave up issuing ratings to the places a little while ago because food, like music, is so subjective and just because I like it doesn’t mean that you automatically will (but it’s ramen, so really what is there to dislike?!).

Some people have called Tori Soba Zagin Honten “ramen heaven’ and they were not overstating things. This is up there with some of the best noodles that I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying.

Many of the recommendations for places that I ate in Jpan came from Tiktok, but this particular recommendation for Tori Soba Zagin Honten in Osaka was from a friend, who described it as a “must-visit” location.

It was a little off the beaten path in a business district so took a little while to find the unassuming restaurant; in hindsight, we could probably have planned the day better to end up nearer the location instead of making a special trip from our accommodation around 30 minutes away. However, I think it meant we found at least one additional Eki Stamp (cute ink stamps at most train stations and tourist locations that collectors can add to books to chart their travels).

I’m not usually a massive fan of soba noodles in the UK, I find them a bit sour. So whilst I trusted the recommendation, I also was managing my expectations a little.

There was a short queue when we arrived, but we placed our order using the vending machine (see previous post for details) and took a seat on the small bench outside. After less than 10 minutes we were ushered inside perhaps one of the most serene restaurants I’ve set foot inside, it was like taking a breath. It was virtually silent, with most diners eating alone, and hushed conversations in the open kitchen.

There is only one variety of ramen on offer, chicken paitan, so menu selection was easy (although they do lots of other non-ramen dishes). We added the beef sushi and the chicken karaage.

Already creamy chicken soup is blended with a hand mixer which aerates it, making it smoother, and lighter in colour and leaving a frothy head. As well as fairly common additions of soft-boiled egg, beansprouts and onions there is a giant slice of pork and a thicker slice of chicken, and the whole bowl is loaded with fried burdock root which adds a crunch (at least if you eat it quickly before it soaks up the broth).

I really like seeing ramen prepared before your eyes – watching the precision and ritual that Japanese chefs take in adding all of the elements and ensuring it’s presented properly is captivating. Because the restaurant was so quiet it felt like even more of my focus was on watching the ceremony.

The chicken was wonderful – with salt and pepper added to taste. The beef sushi was incredibly good, although I hadn’t quite mastered the swish and flick to wrap the extra-long slice of beef around the rice in the way other customers did.

And then the main event. Ramen heaven. The broth was sublime, the blender adding air bubbles like a nitro-infused cocktail or a Guinness before it has settled, which made it taste lighter but still with the collagen stickiness that makes ramen incredible. The burdock root was earthy and added a nice texture, and the egg was cooked to perfection.

Please, if you are in Osaka, visit Tori Soba Zagin Honten. If ratings were still a thing this would be a 10 out of 10! You will absolutely not regret it. And the best part is the price, a bowl of some of the best ramen I’ve tasted cost the equivalent of £7.

Planning a trip in 2023 means spending a lot of time on TikTok looking at the suggestions and recommendations from other travellers. Ahead of my trip to Japan in October, my algorithm was about 80% Japan travel tips and I had amassed a long list of places that I wanted to check out, mostly interesting food places in the main cities I’d be visiting; Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.

Another tip from TikTok was rather than having everything planned out in fine detail, to create a Google Map of the pinned locations of cool places, so you can see which locations are nearby and go with the flow a little more.

@miss_veraa I honestly think this is the most practical way to plan a trip #travelplanning #howtoplanatrip #traveltips ♬ Yacht Club – MusicBox

Here’s my map of places that I thought looked interesting, green icons are the ones which we visited over 16 days, and blue dots are places that I sadly didn’t get the opportunity to check out this time.

One of the places that I had no hesitation adding to the map was Oreryu Shio Ramen, purely to try the garlic butter cheese ramen. I’ll say that again: garlic butter cheese ramen. It’s a chain store, but each location seems to offer something slightly different, so we decided to go to what was described as the ‘main store’ in Shibuya, just a 10-minute walk from the famous intersection. Here’s the video that whetted my appetite for this.

@tinainmelb still not over this garlic butter cheese ramen #oreryushioramen #ramen #japan #japantravel #japanfood #japanramen #tokyo #tokyoeats #tokyofood #shinjuku ♬ I Got It – thuy

Lots of things are different in Japan, and that includes how you order at a lot of restaurants. Oreryu Shio Ramen is one of probably hundreds of restaurants in Toko where instead of ordering at the table, you order at a vending machine. It took a moment to figure out the sequence of steps – insert money, make your selection, collect the ticket and then hand tickets to the server – requesting any customisations at that stage. We were warned that the garlic butter ramen was spicy, and when places warn you something is spicy it’s usually a good idea to listen, but we decided to go ahead anyway.

Our order consisted of two garlic cheese butter ramen with chicken karaage topping (bottom, below), shrimp wonton ramen (top right) and pork ramen (top left), and four of us shared a plate of shiso gyoza (not pictured because they disappeared too quickly!), everything washed down with an orange soda.

The food arrived quickly, far quicker than it has ever arrived in the UK. The Japanese people know that ramen is not a food to be lingered over, they’re in and out before the broth has had time to cool.

The chicken karaage was top-notch. Seasoned incredibly well and somehow still crispy despite being half submerged in the broth. The garlic butter was a great addition, thickening the broth and adding a lovely smooth texture. If I’m honest, I’m not sure what the cheese added, as it was quite mild and I couldn’t really taste it in the mix of other flavours. There were lots of pots of interesting-looking things on the table to add and customise the food, but I wasn’t feeling brave enough to try those on day one of the trip! It turns out that the spiciness was more a pungency from the intense garlic than a chilli type of heat.

Overall, I really liked the vibe of the restaurant and a particular highlight was when I somehow managed to spill water over two friends. In terms of the food, it was very well priced but I did feel that something was missing from the ramen – the noodles were the right hardness for me (firm) and the broth was flavourful, but after a while, everything just tasted of garlic (which I suppose being two days off Halloween was appropriate!).

If you’re in Shibuya and looking for a solid 7 out of 10 mean, then Oreryu Shio Ramen is worth adding to your map!