Launch of the English Internet version of “Wagakoto: disaster prevention and reduction”

Record. Transmit. Prepare. Moved by the tragedy of lives lost in the Great East Japan Disaster of March 11, 2011, and by the suffering of those who survived, and in a spirit of learning lessons for future disasters, Kahoku Shimpo has since January 2013 engaged in a campaign to “Preserve Lives and Communities.” Kahoku Shimpo is the major newspaper corporation serving the disaster-stricken Tohoku region.

As part of this effort, in cooperation with the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard and students at Boston University and the University of Michigan, we are making available worldwide a portion of this campaign with the translation of the 38 articles in our “Wagakoto” series.

This translation project has taken place under the overall direction of Professor Andrew Gordon, former director of the Reischauer Institute, who has put great effort into creating and encouraging the use of a globally accessible digital archive of the March 11 disaster. This project unfolded over the past year with support from staff of the Reischauer Institute, together with Professor Anna Elliott on the Japanese language faculty at Boston University, and twelve students from Boston University and the University of Michigan. The students undertook the translations as volunteers.

In March 2015, a United Nations World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction will take place in Sendai. Looking toward that event, in installments posted on the 11th of each month, we will be gradually making public the translations of the Wagakoto (“Our Experience”) series at “Kahoku Shimpo Online.” We fervently hope this will help people around the world to feel “our experience” of what happened in the disaster region as their experience, thereby transmitting and spreading awareness of this tragedy and its lessons.