Disaster Recovery Law III
Writer Profile
Tadashi Okamoto
Other : Managing Partner, Ginza Partners Law OfficeKeio University alumni
Tadashi Okamoto
Other : Managing Partner, Ginza Partners Law OfficeKeio University alumni
2023/12/12
The evacuation centers on high ground were filled with the tragic voices of those who had lost their homes and jobs in an instant. "I can't pay my mortgage," "I have no money for living expenses," "How am I supposed to live from now on?" It was lawyers who, immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, listened to the voices of the victims, engaged in support activities, pointed out the limitations of existing legal systems, and called for legal reforms and new legislation. Legal professionals were not powerless in the face of a massive disaster.
At the time, I was in my eighth year as a lawyer and happened to be a bureaucrat on secondment to the Cabinet Office. Wondering if there was anything I could do, I knocked on the door of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations' headquarters for disaster control. Permitted to hold concurrent positions, the voices of victims I collected and analyzed exceeded 40,000 in one year. Based on these visualized voices, I proposed legal reforms and repeatedly witnessed the intense battles leading to their realization. Believing that someone had to fulfill the role of recording the trajectory of how laws are born and passing it on to the future, I proposed the creation of a new academic discipline, "Disaster Recovery Law." Through various connections, a course was established at Keio University the year after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Since then, new Disaster Recovery Law courses have been established at several other universities.
Nine years after my debut work "Disaster Recovery Law" and five years after the sequel "Disaster Recovery Law II," I have finally reached the third volume after many detours and diversions. Moving beyond my previous publications that chronicled the trajectory of recovery policies for the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Kumamoto Earthquake, I have written about the progress of legal system reforms to overcome recent intensifying weather disasters like the West Japan Torrential Rain and the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. I would be pleased if readers could feel the dynamic movement as infectious disease and disaster countermeasures influence each other, approaching an "all-hazards approach" aimed at "human recovery."
I regret that by giving it such a stiff title, this book and my previous ones may not be reaching the people I truly want to see them, but I feel greatly rewarded when I occasionally receive letters even from high school readers I don't know. This book is not a specialized legal text, and no prior knowledge of jurisprudence is required. It is a reproduction of the Disaster Recovery Law classroom, which has received much support since its inception. It is a work of non-fiction that records the trajectory of legal reforms and the raw voices of victims, while proposing what a recovery system should look like. I hope this book can serve as a means to pass on the wisdom for facing new crises to the next 100 years.
*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.