A Resilient Society Built on Individual Initiative

A century ago, some 105,000 people lost their lives¹ in the aftermath of a direct seismic hit on Japan’s capital region, the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1, 1923. The next one—scientists put its probability at 70% during the coming 30 years² —is likely to result in an estimated 23,000 deaths³, far fewer than in 1923. And for that difference, we have to thank huge advances in making built structures more disaster resilient.

On the economic front, though, physical losses will rise rapidly, with the private sector incurring some ¥42 trillion in damage due to the concentration of capital assets in the region. This, combined with the effects of societal aging*, will cause profoundly more serious disruption of civil society, welfare-services delivery, and the economy than experienced in 1923.

With major quakes to come, we must focus measures to ensure the safety of citizens, improve quality of life and welfare during disaster recovery, and fortify support for the local economies that underpin this all.

The question arises as to what society needs to do to encourage individuals to practice disaster mitigation in the course of their daily lives. We believe one solution would be for the private sector to develop services that seamlessly incorporate proactive disaster preparedness into individuals’ routines.

Developing such services, though, necessitates appreciating at a deep level the correlations between individuals’ routine habits and their willingness to engage in proactive disaster mitigation. We therefore compiled personal resilience profiles (PRPs) for 7,000 capital-region residents (see table). The PRPs tease out data on people’s behavior and attitudes in the course of their daily lives, measuring or scoring them on 29 datapoints about basic-attributes, 74 about capacity to deal with adverse situations, and 71 about routine interests and behaviors.

We also asked survey participants what they were really doing to be proactively disaster-prepared and quantitatively analyzed the correlations between their responses and PRPs.*

A broad categorization revealed that although a mere 16 percent incorporated proactive disaster mitigation (actions that would allow them to cover their own living needs in the aftermath of a disaster) into their routines, as many as 60 percent of our subjects did nothing despite expressing interest in the concept. We labelled the first group the actively engaged segment and the second, the lightly engaged segment. A third, the unengaged segment, accounted for the remaining 24 percent of our subjects.

If the 1.01 million citizens (7 percent of the population) of the Tokyo scenario were independently prepared to evacuate when a direct-hit strikes, they would have a significant impact on society as a whole. If this assumption holds, the lightly-engaged segment’s exercising such volition commensurate to their personal circumstances will be enormously effective in enhancing overall resilience.

From the analysis results, we see that the greater people’s age, hopes for future generations, and experience with life’s hardships, the more likely they are to actively engage in proactive disaster mitigation. But since the lightly engaged segment is the norm, it’s tough to identify defining characteristics, a requirement for designing services to help embed proactive disaster mitigation into personal routines. This is where the PRPs come in. We used them to form a picture of the routine-life attributes of the lightly engaged, using cluster analysis to sub-segment them into groups with similar relevant traits (see Figure).

The sub-segment with the largest membership, A, has adapted well to a new-normal lifestyle informed by making effective use of offerings like sharing services and telework while maintaining a work-centric lifestyle. To serve this sub-segment, sharing services that provide vacant properties outside the capital region for teleworking could be rolled out through employers. Members of sub-segment A, adept at routinely taking advantage of such services, could make a smooth transition to working and living outside the capital region in the aftermath of a disaster.

Our analysis shows that people in sub-segment B enjoy diverse lifestyles, hobbies, and relationships with friends; that they are generally positive on life; and that they are very curious about things. An effective strategy for new businesses would be to reach out to this sub-segment first on the assumption that they are early adopters* of resilient-society concepts.

Making visible the elements of personal routines using ordinary-citizen, data-oriented PRPs makes it possible to develop the strategies and content of services that embed disaster mitigation into daily life. That makes such visualization a useful tool for companies, helping them identify a plethora of business opportunities, and for public organs, providing them with evidence for motivating a range of businesses and experts to get involved in the disaster-mitigation realm.

The more the public and private sectors leverage PRP datasets, the more services people will have to choose from. They’ll be able to pick and choose those that best suit their circumstances so that they’ll be ready for disaster and able to carry on their daily lives with minimal discomfort and inconvenience in its aftermath.

There is a number of ways PRPs can be put to work in the real world. They can be put to work as a communication tool in public–private–civic collaborations to create new services in the disaster-mitigation and other public-policy domains.

Examples of this kind include Yokoze-machi, Saitama’s Yoko-lab* and Amsterdam (NL)’s Amsterdam Rainproof^†, a platform for countering post-downpour water damage⁴ . But as far as we are aware, there are none that draw on data about how ordinary citizens live such as that which can be won from PRPs and their insights into the role personal initiative can play.

Meanwhile, some care is warranted when utilizing PRPs in the public-policy domain. The more diverse a population, the more diverse the design of the needed services will inevitably have to be. Thus, if the private sector’s response were only piecemeal—i.e., service providers did only the minimum they have to do—though a service might enhance the disaster resilience of a small part of the population, it wouldn’t be able to effect a change throughout a locality.

There are two things to emphasize so pitfalls can be avoided. First, a neutral and big-picture pre-analysis study by the municipality or some other public organization is essential.

Specifically, planners need to clarify which problems they want people to take disaster mitigation action for and how many they want to take them, and then identify how much in public resources the actions will free up for other uses. Analysis to this end is possible by gleaning the needed information from publicly available government data and academic papers.

Planners must then design a preliminary plan for service specifics and list potential collaborators among companies and experts capable of realizing the plan. PRPs are effective for curating content and resources like this.

Next, a mechanism for providing individual feedback to service developers and providers is desirable. The feedback should quantitatively demonstrate how much the services and actions have helped free up public resources. Society’s recognition and rewarding of these altruistic contributions will motivate individuals to engage in helpful behaviors, enhance the social value of the businesses involved, and thereby make society as a whole that much more resilient.

During the hundred years since the Great Kantō Earthquake, Japan has enhanced its ability to withstand disasters by developing and deploying ever better civil and disaster-mitigation engineering. But despite those improvements, the country is plagued by ever more, non-engineering vulnerabilities resulting from social change.

The time has come for us to do everything in our power to draw a line under this seemingly endless situation. Government, businesses, and the general citizenry—including those in non–disaster-mitigation fields—need to work together to incentivize individual, everyday actions that will improve society’s disaster resilience.