When the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake struck in the mid-afternoon, train services in the Tokyo metropolitan area came to a halt for hours, with many lines not running until the next day. 

The resulting chaos on the evening of March 11, 2011, left stations and roads packed with people trying to make their way home, with many on foot. 

More than 5 million commuters were stranded with no means of transportation to get home. 

While local governments and companies have since taken steps to address a recurrence, challenges remain.

During a disaster drill in mid-February, a railway employee read from a script, stumbling slightly as he held up a sheet of paper with a QR code.

“You can look up information about the facility from the QR code,” the employee said. 

International students playing the role of disaster victims immediately scanned the QR code with their smartphones.

The screen led them to a website listing temporary stay facilities for travelers and shoppers.

After entering their name, age and gender, they showed the registration screen on their smartphones at the reception of a nearby facility and were allowed inside.

TOKYO EXPECTS 4.5 MILLION TO BE STRANDED

This drill simulated an earthquake centered directly under the capital, which is expected to leave more than 4.5 million people unable to return home.

However, the registration system for temporary stay facility access is currently available only in Japanese.

“I don’t understand Japanese very well,” said a 24-year-old woman from Nepal, who has been in Japan for three months.

“If foreign visitors are struggling, I want people to use gestures to communicate with them,” she said.

A Tokyo official said, “We would like to find ways to ensure that as many people as possible can understand the information, including making the system multilingual.”

Yokohama has developed a system that allows users to search for temporary stay facilities in three languages―English, Chinese and Korean.

While staff at hotels used by foreign visitors have been informed about the system, a city official said, “The challenge is how to get foreign visitors to install and use the app after a disaster strikes.”

Fukuoka has no multilingual guidelines for stay facilities.

Meanwhile, Osaka, which will host the World Expo starting in April, has asked hotels with multilingual support to accommodate foreign visitors and is expected to secure enough accommodations to meet its target of housing 63,000 people.

“By dividing responsibilities, we would like to ease concerns among those providing accommodation as much as possible,” a city official said.

COMPANIES NEED TO LEARN TOGETHER

Companies and other organizations are also exploring ways to improve disaster response.

During the 2011 earthquake, the Advanced Valuable Communication Center (AVCC) in Tokyo, which provides consulting services to local governments, quickly opened its cafe and studio to around 300 stranded commuters, including pregnant women.

Believing that effective disaster response requires ongoing preparation, the AVCC regularly holds hands-on workshops, such as a two-day disaster preparedness camp where participants rely on emergency toilets and food.

It also holds urban scavenger hunts to locate automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and public phones.

The workshops are also open to the public, with participants sought through online posts. 

“Our goal is to give people a firsthand experience and an opportunity to learn,” the AVCC staff said.

Sapporo Breweries Ltd. in Tokyo created a manual called the “First Mission Box” to ensure that anyone in the office can respond immediately in the event of a disaster even if the designated staff for disaster response are absent.

The manual assigns specific roles, such as the “information team” and “safety inspection team,” and provides a step-by-step timeline for tasks such as creating a list of shelter occupants and announcing the locations of trash bins and restrooms over the company’s public address system.

Sapporo Breweries developed this manual after the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift in work styles, with 40 percent of its 1,000 employees currently working remotely on a rotating basis.

In the past, each floor had designated disaster response staff, but now, anyone in the office on a given day must be prepared to act.

“We are not exclusively assigned to disaster response; we handle multiple roles,” a company official said.

“We would like the government to provide not only financial support but also opportunities to share best practices and learn from each other,” he said.

Yu Hiroi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, who is well-versed in urban disaster response, said, “A major earthquake striking an urban area during the daytime of a weekday will inevitably leave many people stranded.” 

He suggested that the most effective way to prevent chaos immediately after a disaster is for companies to stagger employee departure times. 

“Since disaster response measures vary by region, central and local governments should ideally support inter-company collaboration and knowledge-sharing in normal times to help companies respond independently during disasters without relying on the government,” Hiroi added.