Venue: E117, SERD Building (Ground Floor)
Time: 1600 hours
Date: 17 January 2013
About the talk:
Dr. Takashi Oda, DPMM’s visiting faculty, discusses the geographical space of evacuation and displacement following the multiple disasters caused by the Tohoku Region Pacific Coast Earthquake (magnitude 9.0) on March 11, 2011, in northeastern Japan, from his viewpoint as a geographer who has personal connections with the affected areas.
Dr. Oda grew up in Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture, an area that was affected by multiple predicaments, including the damaging effects of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the incidents of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Additionally, he spent many years in Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture, during his undergraduate and graduate programs.
Drawing on such personal experience and previous academic interests in migration, displacement, and education for children in the discipline of geography, Dr. Oda engaged in personal and academic practices to assist in the response to and recovery of the affected areas. He is, on the one hand, an insider who has strong personal ties to those affected, and on the other, a fieldworker, and hence, an outsider, who was required to document phenomena scientifically and objectively, to examine the disaster.
First, following more than 100 days of field experience in Tohoku during the first year of the recovery efforts, which began in March 2011, Dr. Oda talks about his field experience in the affected areas by looking back at the early days when he first set foot in the coastal communities hit by the tsunami. Moreover, he discusses the importance of geo-spatial information, knowledge, and geographical imaginations in crises communications as one of the lessons learned from the panic and miscommunication observed in Iwaki City and other areas around the radiation security zones.
His talk also touches on the state of evacuees in the long run, particularly that of the Fukushima natives accompanying children. Spatial analyses conducted by visualization of the phenomenon using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) describe the scale and space of migration of the evacuees of Fukushima, to show the spatial impacts of displacement and relocation.