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1 The Birth of ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’

Raising public awareness of disasters is one of the main pillars of disaster reduction policy in Japan. Various educational materials, primarily targeting children, have been developed in Japan. Not many were targeted for adults. Those existing materials were mainly “Do’s and Don’ts Preaching Style” and were not fully appreciated by adults, were not accepted as their own affair, and therefore were said to be not effective in making the adults to take action. Therefore, for the sake of inducing spontaneous preventive action by adults, the author, and his colleagues developed a new program (Sashida et al. 2012), the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae (the Day before the Disaster) Project.’ The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ interviews people who have been seriously affected by a major disaster, by posing the question ‘What would you do if you were back the day before the disaster?’, and edits the most impressive personal short stories which give clues for future preventive action. The interviews cover a wide variety of adults who experienced disasters, from housewives to small business owners and large enterprise employees. A wide variety of disasters are covered. These stories are compiled and have been used for disaster awareness seminars and have proven effective, since the real stories make participants feel that it may happen to them. The methodology of this project is published on the Cabinet Office Disaster Management website (2022) and is voluntarily applied by various communities.

As of April 2022, 872 episodes are collected and made available through the Cabinet Office Ichi-Nichi-Mae website.

2 Procedures for Collecting ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ Stories

The following section describes the standard procedures for the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’. The main aim of this project is to make as many people as possible have empathy for the people affected by disasters, make them feel that they may experience a similar disaster, and urge them to take spontaneous preventive action. Therefore, extracting various personal stories arising from different standpoints in facing the disaster is important. Accordingly, we have designed a methodology to meet this purpose and have tried many tips to edit the impressive stories.

Editing Personal Stories

Seven steps are required to extract personal stories. 1. Identifying suitable interviewers. 2. Identifying storytellers among the affected people. 3. Group Interview. 4. Extract impressive personal stories. 5. Edit the personal stories. 6. Add a headline to each story. 7. Selection by disaster reduction expert.

Identifying Interviewers

Anyone who is serious about promoting the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ is qualified to be an interviewer. The number of interviewers for a disaster case should be more than one. This is to have plural standpoints in the later editing process and to avoid delusion in understanding the story. Volunteers from the mass media, governmental services, civil societies, and the general public were briefed on the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ methodology and have served as successful interviewers.

Identifying Storytellers

Identify a few to several (5 to 6) storytellers per one disaster. Find a contact person in the disaster-affected area and ask him/her to bring his/her neighbors or friends who have experienced the same disaster. Asking the local school PTA or community center to assist in gathering several may be a good way. The storytellers can be varied; company employees, small business owners, local construction engineers, and community center participants may be asked to join. If the storytellers are acquaintances with each other, it will help to activate lively discussions. However, this is not mandatory since it is often the case that the survivors of the same disaster are eager to discuss their stories even at their first meeting. One important tip to make the storytelling meaningful is to include some who were responders, firefighters, or relief volunteers, so that they may add a responder’s point of view.

There are so many survivors who wish to share their experiences and lessons from the disaster they faced. Many of them sincerely wish that their fellows do not suffer as they did. However, there are few opportunities for them, who are usually regarded as laymen, to tell their stories. On the other hand, many citizens seldom have a chance to listen to live experiences of a disaster, which can be eye-openers for them. The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ makes an ideal opportunity to link the two.

Group Interview

Ask 2 to 6 storytellers in the locality who experienced the same or similar disaster to come and tell their disaster experience for about 2 h. The interviewers will ask them to tell their experiences in chronological order and ask them how they felt. Interviews should be conducted in a relaxed manner, in places like community centers, cafes or local schools. The interviewers are recommended to bring news photographs and articles of the disaster as a hint to bring back the live memories of the storytellers. Serve tea and cookies to make people relax, and don’t forget a voice recorder. The storytellers would not be previously notified of the questions that they are going to be asked to avoid burdening them and to let them speak freely out of their memories at the interview. This is to avoid their stories to be didactic. The interviewer should provide a relaxing atmosphere and should never wear uniforms.

The interviewers will ask, how was their everyday life, how the disaster changed their life, how do they feel after the disaster, and ‘What would you do if you were back the day before the disaster?’ By taking advantage of group interviews, let the remarks of one storyteller provoke another’s recollection and bring a lively discussion on their experience. Be careful not to interrupt when a storyteller is speaking.

Extract Impressive Personal Stories

When the storytelling session is over, the interviewers shall bring together their memos taken during the session, and pick up keywords and the essence of stories that will attract people’s ears. Interviewers should try to understand the wishes of the storytellers so that others do not make the same mistakes and pick up failure stories that will generate sympathy and also messages that the storytellers wish to convey. Interviewers should carefully remember the tone of the storytellers in identifying these essences of stories. The interviewers may pick up the points which they themselves felt sympathy for. However, it should be noted that stories, which do not fit with disaster risk reduction should be avoided. The interviewers may think of the headlines to be added to each story at this stage. This will ease the workload at a later stage.

Edit the Personal Stories

By supplementing the notes taken by the voice recorders, the keywords and essence identified above shall be edited as short stories. The short stories should be edited to 200–600 words long, leaving the flavor of the speaker’s tone and dialects. The storytellers are not professional speakers. Therefore, their talks might be fragmented and may not be in chronological order. By editing their talks into short stories, their message becomes alive.

Add a Headline and Small Illustration to Each Short Story

Add a suitable headline to each short story. This headline serves the purpose of attracting the readers to be interested in the short story; therefore, it should not be too descriptive but rather should aim at drawing curiosity. The heart of the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ is how to attract people to read others’ experiences. Therefore, attention should be paid to making the headline of each short story attractive while using plain words so that even children can also easily pick up what the story wants to convey. Add a small illustration or a photo that represents the essence of the story as an eye-catcher.

Selection by Disaster Reduction Expert

The significance of the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ comes from the fact that it opened the door to all citizens to contribute to disaster risk reduction. Anyone who has experienced a disaster can become a resource person. Anyone who is willing to listen to disaster experiences can be the interviewer. However, this requires some careful editing and selection process to maintain the quality of the collected material, which are posted and made public through the Japanese Government Cabinet Office Disaster Management Website.

Important Points for Quality Control

The following are important points to be noted for quality control in the interview, editing, and selection process.

Do not interview with prejudgments. Do not guide the storytelling by the interest of the interviewer. Do not add stories in the editing process, even if it may make the story attractive. Do not add moralistic or didactic stories. Make clear that erroneous action taken by the storyteller can be clearly recognized as such. Even if the erroneous action led to good results by luck, make sure that it is clearly understood that such cases are very rare. When the edited stories are finalized, they are sent to the storytellers for their approval and then posted on the Cabinet Office Disaster Management Website. Through these cautious procedures, the numerous experiences and lessons learnt by various citizens are widely shared.

3 Workshops Using the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ Stories

The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ stories can be used as materials for disaster reduction seminars and also as food for thought to induce discussions at workshops. Table 1 shows a model for conducting a workshop.

Table 1 Model of workshop using ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’
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4 Tips to Enlarge Participation

The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ can be applied to a wide variety of disaster risk reduction activities. The aforementioned workshop is just one example. Stories can be used as short articles in community papers and township circulars. They can be used as texts for schools and adult education centers. The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ has flexibility, and users may innovate good ways for an application to their disaster reduction activities.

The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ started in 2005. In the initial years, the interviewing and editing were borne only by the author group. Starting from 2009, in order to enlarge this project, advocates in local governments and mass media were welcomed to join the interviewing and editing. Hence, we have transformed the ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ into a universal methodology where any advocate can join.

Since Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project does not require any special equipment nor sophisticated engineering technique, the author is introducing this methodology in numerous JICA training courses in disaster risk reduction and encouraging other countries to try this for public awareness and inheritance of disaster lessons in respective countries.

5 Application to Landslide Awareness at Communities

Starting in 2014, the “community disaster management plan” was newly introduced as a voluntary plan in Japan to encourage citizens’ positive participation in disaster reduction activities. It is based on the revision of the Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act in 2013. The “community” referred to in this plan is flexible. It may be a condominium with residents of 100 households, it may be a suburban neighborhood with 30 families. If the members of that “community” agree on their voluntary disaster reduction action plan for themselves, they can ask the municipality they belong, to reflect their plan in the municipal disaster management plan. Then the community’s voluntary action is authorized. The aim of this revision of the Act is to encourage as many “communities” to identify and recognize the risks they face, discuss possible action points and agree on their plan. Therefore, how to let the members of the community notice the potential hazard they face is the key. The ‘Ichi-Nichi-Mae Project’ episodes of their municipality or nearby were found to be good materials to make the community members imagine the possibility of disasters.

Landslides are common in most communities in Japan. The effect of the reading experience of negative (Fig. 1) and positive (Fig. 2) episodes of landslides was compared, and a significant difference was found (Kitagawa et al. 2021). Hence, the Cabinet Office is encouraging the use of Ichi-Nichi-Mae in various locations.

Fig. 1
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Example of negative experience of landslide disaster

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Fig. 2
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Example of positive reaction experience against landslide

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