POSTCARD FROM JAPAN It takes a newsroom to educate
SENDAI, Japan: ARCH 11, 2011, is still embedded in Shinichi Takeda’s mind. It was the day when the earthquake and tsunami struck Sendai city. Five and a half years on when he speaks, it seems as if the disaster struck yesterday.
Like the tens of thousands in the Miyagi prefecture who endured physical and emotional trauma, the head of disaster risk
Mreduction, education section, Kahoku Shimpo Publishing Company, says he learnt a valuable lesson that fateful afternoon.
Their newspaper had failed to educate the population to handle disasters of this magnitude. “It is not enough and ineffective if we inform our readers about the happening at the time when a disaster strikes,” Takeda said. “We need to give our readers constant information on how to prepare and be safe.
“If there was a sustained effort to educate our readers and the wider population,” Takeda said, “the loss to human life would Second-grade students at Shichigo Elementary School drop to the floor and go into a protective posture to show what they would do during an earthquake.
have been considerably less.”
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami claimed 20,000 lives. There are 2,500 people unaccounted for, and 27 vendors of Kahoku Shimpo also died.
Takeda and his staff at Sendai’s largest daily lived through the earthquake and the resultant tsunami to ensure that the newspaper was delivered to their subscribers the next morning.
“We suffered extensive damage,” Takeda said. “The office building was inundated, ceilings had fallen, and there were cracks on the wall. Twenty seven of our news vendors and distribution staff lost their lives.” Two of the paper’s branch offices were swept away and the systems were shut down.
Two editorial staff drove 300km to a newspaper in Niigata on the western coast of Japan to plan and design the pages for the March 12 edition of the Kahoku Shimpo.
It was a logistics nightmare, and given the unprecedented scale of the disaster, the emotional price was high. Takeda, who was the chief Reporter then, stayed in the office for a month.
Post the tsunami, the newspaper set up a disaster riskreduction unit with a mandate to educate the people.
The realisation that they failed on several fronts came after Kahoku Shimpo surveyed
people living in shelters on whether the newspaper stories had helped readers to be prepared for disaster — 72 per cent said no.
The newspaper took the lead and reached out to the communities to prepare them, organising seminars in schools and companies. Around 60 organisations and 120 people are currently involved, Takeda said.
SHARING EXPERIENCES
“The workshops serve as an opportunity for people to share their experiences,” he said. These interactions, he said, give people a chance speak, and local newspapers are best suited for this role. His newspaper also organises round-table meetings with universities, corporate bodies and media organisations. These interactions are then published.
One elderly reader, he shared, managed to save his life by going to an elevated highway after recalling an article he had read in Kahoku Shimpo advising people to move to higher ground when a tsunami warning is given.
“It feels good to hear such stories,” Takeda said. “We would like to save more lives by educating people.”
Life goes on in Sendai, bustling, bubbling, and rolling under the psychedelic signage and vibrant shopping plazas. Shinichi Takeda of the Kahouku Shimbun in Sendai, Japan. Sitting in his offices, Takeda said media has a larger role to play than news dissemination, and it should be the mandate and onus of newsrooms to turn their energies to educating their readers.
“It is important to be proactive and make your readers be prepared should a disaster strike,” he said. “It is a great pain to see people lose their lives.
“I don’t want this to happen again,” Takeda said.
Shimpo Publishing is Sendai’s largest circulated daily, with their morning edition reaching 450,000 and the evening paper selling 70,000 copies.
“The disaster is not over for us,” he said.
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