Yasunobu Ishii
Director, Disability Program, The Nippon Foundation

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am Yasunobu Ishii, the Director of Disability Program of The Nippon Foundation. It is my honor to say a few words today, on behalf of the Foundation.

First of all, I would like to thank Mr. Fujii of Japan Disability Forum for inviting us to work together on this extremely important topic, Disability and Disaster. As a Japanese organization working on Disability, we must organize this special session. The reason is simple. We have the responsibility to share what we experienced on March 11 2011 and afterword together with our friends in the world. We also have the responsibility to disseminate lessons learnt from our experience so that our friends in the world can save their lives and reduce hardships after the disaster.

I sincerely hope that this session gives you the opportunity to start making the pragmatic plan of disaster risk reduction in every country.

Thank you very much.