Toshinao Kanno
Executive Director
Rikuzentakata City Council of Social Welfare

1. Introduction of Rikuzentakata City

Rikuzentakata City is a town at the southernmost tip of Iwate Prefecture, bordering Miyagi Prefecture’s Kesennuma City and the Pacific Ocean. It is home to Takata Matsubara (“pine grove”), a wide stretch of white sand covered with 70,000 blue-green pines, where the Kesen River, which has its source on Mt Goyo, runs into Hirota Bay, which opens out to the Pacific Ocean to the south. Against this backdrop lies a small, fan-shaped alluvial plain. The town’s key industries are fish farming along the coast, and mixed fruit and rice farming. At the time of the disaster, the population was around 24,000.

2. Impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake

The major earthquake and tsunami which accompanied the Great East Japan Earthquake left the entire city centre covered by a sea of rubble, truly a scene of destruction. We were engulfed by this expanse of rubble without being at all mentally prepared.

The toll of the disaster included 1,557 deaths, more than 200 people missing, and much of the town completely destroyed by the tsunami. The earthquake and tsunami combined damaged over 80% of houses in the town. Our everyday lives were ripped from us in an instant. 

3. Involvement with JDF

(1) The disaster and people with disabilities

Immediately after the disaster, JDF (Japan Disability Forum) contacted us with an offer of help, asking if there was anything they could do for people with disabilities. We told them that we did not know where and how people with disabilities were living as evacuees, so they offered to carry out a survey of the situation, which would also confirm the safety of people with disabilities. The fact that we visited and reached out to individual people with disabilities in the process of conducting the survey, as well as confirming the actual situation, was very significant and effective. 

(2) The actual state of and issues with mobility support for people with mobility challenges

Rikuzentakata City is an underpopulated area where a fall in the birthrate, ageing, and depopulation are progressing simultaneously. People with mobility challenges, such as elderly people living alone in the mountainous areas, are scattered around the city, and face many inconveniences in accessing the hospitals, supermarkets, restaurants, and so on in the city centre. When JDF offered to help people with disabilities, we replied asking for mobility support for people with mobility challenges.

The core public transport, such as trains and buses, which were important means for the residents to get around, were unable to operate because their offices had been damaged and routes had been disrupted, so the mobility support provided by JDG was very valuable under these circumstances. However, the fact that only two vehicles were available was a weak point, limiting the number of users. Operation of the mobility support initially provided by JDF was later taken over by a local NPO, and is now being run by our Council of Social Welfare as a mobility support project taking the form of vehicle transfers.

JDF’s support for people with mobility challenges also provided the impetus for social welfare transport companies and existing taxi companies to work on such initiatives for people with mobility challenges, not only leading to an increase in the overall number of vehicles being used for social welfare transport, but also developing into the introduction of community-led mobility support projects in the surrounding districts. The “Rikuzentakata City Community Public Transport Network Formation Plan” drawn up by the city government advocates for a shift from the current situation, where many of the city’s residents experience mobility challenges, to mobility support in which diverse means of transport are run in an integrated way, understanding this as a successor to and development of the support for recovery from the disaster.

4. Lessons learned from this support, and the future of recovery

The various initiatives undertaken as part of the support for recovery from the disaster overflowed with creativity and ingenuity from a foundation of goodwill. This track record has left us many lessons, in what could be called the earthquake recovery legacy. Mobility support is a textbook example of this.

Unpaid support by those providing mobility assistance, community-based mobility support run independently by small self-governing organisations, city-centre mobility support using electric cars – a wide variety of experimental initiatives are being undertaken. These in no way reject core public transport, but rather aim to coexist alongside the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) or on-demand buses which have replaced lost railway lines and the bus routes operated by the existing bus companies. 

I believe that underlying all this is the proposition put forward for this city’s community rebuilding project of “a town in which the term ‘normalization’ is not needed”, where everyone can go wherever they want, and where their desire to go somewhere is not shut down because there is no way to get there.

The vehicles used by the Council for Social Welfare for mobility support. People who need support with mobility because of their financial or physical circumstances use them in order to visit medical or welfare facilities, to go shopping, and so on.