From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2011 10:31 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: AAS Disasters in Asia #478 changes to panel
> H-ASIA
> March 27, 2011
>
>
> Changes to AAS Panel 478, Disasters in Asia: Societal and Governmental
> Responses and Responsibilities, April 2, 2011
> ***********************************************************************
> From: Christopher Hood <HoodCP@cardiff.ac.uk>
>
>
> Panel 478: Disasters in Asia: Societal and Governmental Responses and
> Responsibilities
>
> Saturday 2 April 13:45-15:45
> Room 305A
>
>
> Disasters generate intense discussions of a culture's ultimate values and
> priorities. Regardless of whether natural phenomena or human actions
> trigger a catastrophe, it is societal and state responses that largely
> determine how devastating the disaster is. This panel considers, from a
> variety of disciplinary backgrounds, how three modern Asian societies have
> prepared for, responded to, remembered, and politicized major disasters.
> In addition to examining links between modernization campaigns and a
> decline in state attention to relieving disaster victims in Japan and
> China, it offers case studies of how societies in contemporary Japan and
> Indonesia have sought to moderate the impact of disasters by promoting
> community resilience, and identifying and preparing assistance for
> vulnerable populations.
>
> Brown's paper looks at the unsuccessful policies of government in Niigata
> prefecture (Japan) which led to flooding in 1926 and questions whether
> this was in part due to the way in which the country had modernized.
> Edgerton-Tarpley is concerned with the 1938 Yellow River Flood in China,
> providing an analysis of the newspaper coverage of the disaster and its
> politicization. Hood considers how documentaries, books and movies
> continue to shape society's memories of the world's worst single plane
> crash which happened in Japan in 1985. Haase's paper looks at the way the
> administrative system in Indonesia adapted to respond to the Great
> Sumatran Earthquake and Tsunami of 2004.
>
> Unfortunately Tatsuki Shigeo is unable to present his paper on Stakeholder
> Collaboration for Evacuation and Sheltering Assistance Planning for
> Persons with Special Needs in Time of Disaster as he has gone to the areas
> hit by the recent tsunami in Japan to see what is happening. Instead of
> Tatsuki's paper each of the panellists will speak for a few minutes on the
> recent quakes and tsunami in Japan in relation to their own research.
>
> More details about each paper are below.
>
> We hope see you at our panel.
>
> Regards,
>
> Christopher Hood
> Cardiff Japanese Studies Centre
> Cardiff University
> --
>
> The Great Tochio Flood of 1926: Limits to Modernization in Flood
> Amelioration
> Philip Brown, The Ohio State University
>
> In regard to flood amelioration, Japan's economic transformation with its
> new productive capacities, materials and machines had made its mark on
> riparian civil engineering by the 1920s. Japan boasted notable projects
> like the Iwabuchi project in Tokyo (1916), and the Okozu Diversionary
> channel, East Asia's largest civil engineering project (1922). However
> much pride Japan took in such engineering accomplishments, and however
> much they conveyed impressions of a government able to marshal funds for
> large-scale projects to protect lives and property, these were the
> exceptional. Far more typical were provincial and local efforts to manage
> flood risk largely on their own.
>
> To analyze more typical efforts at flood reduction, this paper explores
> the unsuccessful local (prefecture, town and village) efforts in the area
> of Tochio, Niigata Prefecture, a town through which flow tributaries of
> Japan's longest river, the Shinano. On July 28, 1926, its efforts to
> prevent flooding came to naught: Dikes were breached on four of Tochio's
> six rivers in 170 places; they were destroyed completely at 42 places; 72
> died, 15 were reported missing and 2479 homes flooded.
>
> The paper explores 1) the options open to communities like Tochio to
> address flood hazard, and 2) the degree to which local efforts failed
> reflected the impact of industrial modernization. At the heart of the
> analysis lies the question of the degree to which such communities were
> left largely on their own, robbed by the Meiji government of even that
> regional assistance a daimyo domain often provided.
>
>
> A Necessary Sacrifice? The Politicization of Disaster in Chinese Media
> Coverage of the Yellow River Flood of 1938
> Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, San Diego State University
>
> China's Yellow River flood of 1938 was a self-inflicted catastrophe of
> epic proportions. Faced with the inexorable advance of Japanese armies
> across China, in June 1938 Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese military
> command decided to breach the southern dike of the Yellow River in a
> desperate attempt to buy time by using water in place of soldiers
> against the invaders. The strategic breach soon widened into a
> 5000-foot-wide break, which caused the Yellow River to undergo a major
> change in course and led to massive flooding in three provinces. The flood
> failed to stop the Japanese advance, but it created close to four million
> refugees and killed as many as 900,000 people.
>
> Aware of the radical impact of its actions, the Guomindang government
> during the war did not admit responsibility for unleashing the flood, but
> instead blamed Japanese warplanes for causing the breach. After the war,
> the campaign to draw meaning from the disaster and repair the breach
> exacerbated tensions between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communists.
>
> This paper analyzes Chinese media coverage of the 1938 flood and its
> aftermath. By comparing how national, local, pro-Guomindang and
> pro-Communist newspapers in China responded to the flood itself and the
> postwar struggle over plugging the breach, it offers a snapshot of Chinese
> attitudes towards calamity during a time of war, and provides a vivid case
> study of the politicization of disaster in modern China.
>
>
> Social Memory of Japan's Titanic: Emotion, History, Conspiracy and the
> JL123 Crash
> Christopher Hood, Cardiff University
>
> On 12 August 1985 Japan Air Lines flight JL123 crashed in mountains
> north-west of Tokyo. 32 minutes earlier an explosion had blown off much of
> its rear stabilizer and all hydraulics had been lost. By the time that
> search and rescue teams reached the site some 15 hours later, all but 4 of
> the 524 passengers and crew were dead. Over the following days the media
> covered the news of events from the crash site and Fujioka, where families
> tried to identify loved ones. Notes written by some of those on board
> which were found highlighted the torment of the conditions inside the
> plane. Every year the media continues to report on the anniversary events
> held in the village where the plane crashed.
>
> In the years that followed the official investigation there have been
> numerous books, documentaries, novels and films that have discussed the
> crash. This paper argues that it is these outputs, rather than the
> official investigation's own report, which are likely to mould how society
> continues to remember the events of 1985. In particular the paper will
> focus upon the two novels and their dramatizations in looking at the way
> in which the story of what happened in 1985 may have shifted over the 25
> years which have passed since the crash. The paper argues that JL123 is
> becoming Japan???s equivalent of the Titanic sinking a story rife with
> emotion, coincidences, and conspiracies and one which all Japanese will
> have some knowledge of in years to come.
>
>
> Evolution in Administrative Systems: Exploring Indonesia's Response to the
> Great Sumatran Earthquake and Tsunami
> Thomas W. Haase, American University of Beirut
>
> Conventional wisdom suggests that policy-makers can moderate disaster
> consequences by promoting community resilience. While the manner in which
> resilience is facilitated and maintained is not fully understood, systems
> that possess the capacity to adapt to conditions of uncertainty have been
> described as resilient. A system's capacity to adapt, or modify the
> structure of its activities, is related to many factors, including its
> social-technical characteristics and the availability of actionable
> information. Social capital, defined as the benefits derived from the
> relationships among the actors in a system, also seems to influence a
> system's adaptive capacity.
>
> This paper investigates adaption within the administrative system that
> operated in Indonesia after the Great Sumatran Earthquake and Tsunami. To
> identify response organizations and interactions exchanged between
> organizations, a content analysis was conducted on newspaper articles and
> situation reports published between 26 December 2004 and 17 January 2005.
> This data was then transformed into a series of twenty-two relational
> matrices, which were examined using the network analysis software. Basic
> social network measures were generated for each of the twenty-two
> relational matrices to identify whether the system underwent structural
> change.
>
> This analysis generated findings that may indicate that the system
> underwent adaptation. First, the system experienced structural change two
> weeks after the tsunami. Second, in terms of social capital, some
> organizations shifted from interactions that could be classified as
> bonding to interactions that could be classified as bridging.
>
>
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