Ride out fake earthquakes
Japan’s disaster theme parks offer vital lessons on survival.
SOMEHOW, it’s not surprising that the country that gave us Godzilla and elevated fake food to a fine art hasalsofoundawaytomake earthquake preparedness entertaining.
Guided by the philosophy that experience is the best teacher, Japan wants its citizens to know what it will feel like when the ground under their feet starts to heave – and how to protect themselves. So cities across the country have constructed disaster education centres that combine themepark-style simulations with sober lessons in survival.
Many of the more than 60 centres feature large shake tables where visitors can ride out fake quakes as powerful as the real thing. In some centres, visitors navigate life-size dioramas of crushed cars and teetering power poles while being quizzed on the best response to dangerous situations. Typhoons, floods and fires get hands-on treatment as well.
Some civic leaders in Seattle, Washington, have long wanted to import the concept to quake-prone Western Washington, where many residents have only a vague understanding of the risks and tend to shrug off the nagging knowledge that they really ought to put together an emergency kit one of these days.
“We thought something like this in Seattle might help light a fire under people and government,” said Bill Stafford.
Now retired, Stafford was director of the Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle a decade ago when he visited a disaster learning centre in southern Japan and was stunned to see a line of kids and parents stretching across the parking lot.
Stafford assumed the adults were dragging their kids to an educational outing, but it turned out to be the other way around.
“Every year, every student in the schools has to visit – and they bring their parents,” Stafford said.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee visited Kobe’s Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in 2015 and came away with one image seared into his memory: a vertical banner, several stories tall, that marks the height of past tsunamis and the expected size of a future tsunami from Japan’s infamous Nankai Subduction Zone.
With a similar quake and tsunami looming on the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Washington coast, Inslee said he left convinced that one of the best ways to save lives is to educate coastal residents about where – and how – to evacuate before a wall of water slams into the shore.
“You stand there and see a wave 20m high in the atrium of that building, and you look at the devastation to the community,” Inslee said. “It’s mind-bending – the forces involved in a tsunami.”
Lessons from the past
Like many of Japan’s disaster parks and centres, Kobe’s relies on video to immerse visitors in the experience of an earthquake and its aftermath.
The tour starts with a film that chillingly recreates scenes from the 1995 quake that devastated the city, toppling elevated roadways and killing more than 6,000 people. Visitors exit the theatre into a nightmarish model of an urban block with buildings tilting on their foundations and fires flaring in the distance.
Volunteer docent Nanami Yoshimoto lived through the quake, but lost family and friends. At first, just watching the film at the museum was so traumatic it gave her a headache. But like many older Japanese people, she feels a responsibility to keep the memories alive and share lessons learned.
“We can’t escape from quakes in Japan,” she said. “Have to hand it down ... to the next generation.”
But there’s nothing fatalistic in the centres’ messages. The emphasis is on personal responsibility and action: how to make your way safely through wreckage, how to find the closest shelter.
“If you have no knowledge about what to expect (from an earthquake), once it occurs people will panic,” said Kenji Hode, chief of the Ikebukuro Life Safety Learning Centre, one of three operated by the Tokyo Fire Department. “If people experience a realistic disaster here, then they will be equipped with knowledge about how to handle the situation.”
About 70,000 people visit his centre every year, Hode said. Most are school kids, but many companies send their employees – including foreigners who may not be aware that Japan is one of the