2019.11.14
Yume Nakagawa, a second-year master's student at the Graduate School of Media and Governance, received the Presentation Award at the 38th Annual Conference of the Japan Society for Natural Disaster Science, held on September 21. She gave a presentation titled "A Study on the Evacuation Behavior of Kamaishi Elementary School Children during the Great East Japan Earthquake" (by Yume Nakagawa, Masatoshi Tamamura, and Seiko Oki).
The Japan Society for Natural Disaster Science was established with the aim of contributing to disaster prevention and mitigation, as well as promoting the advancement and development of research in natural disaster science. Its main activities include conducting surveys and research on natural disasters and disaster prevention/mitigation systems, disseminating knowledge of natural disaster science, and fostering and coordinating researchers and engineers in related fields.
In her conference presentation, Ms. Nakagawa analyzed and discussed essays written by children from Kamaishi Elementary School, who had no prior experience with tsunami disasters, to find clues about their decision-making and tsunami evacuation behavior during the Great East Japan Earthquake. Using essays from children that described their actions from the earthquake's onset until their evacuation, she compared network diagrams based on the extraction of frequently used words and the attributes of their evacuation behavior.
Ms. Nakagawa received the Presentation Award in recognition of her work, which included focusing on essays written by the children within one year of the disaster and analyzing their evacuation behavior by classifying it into four quadrants.
Comment from Yume Nakagawa
I am very honored to receive this Presentation Award. I am conducting my research while living in Kamaishi City, Iwate Prefecture, as a "Regional Development Researcher" under a partnership agreement between Keio SFC and Kamaishi City. At the time of the earthquake, approximately 3,000 elementary and junior high school students in Kamaishi City evacuated, and the survival rate was 99.8%. I hope to connect what I have learned from Kamaishi through my research to other regions and contribute to the development of disaster preparedness education in schools. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone in my laboratory for their guidance and to the people of Kamaishi City for their daily support.
Source: General Affairs Section, Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) Office