Resilience, Reconsidered in Japan
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.
