Japan is a country of frequent disasters. Japan is also possibly the most prepared country, as believed by many, for all kinds of natural disasters. Lessons from previous disasters contribute to the preparedness for future disasters, and thus Japan has become one of the pioneers of Disaster Risk Resilience (DRR). Unfortunately, most of the knowledge and experience remain hidden from the world because of lack of English documents. CWS Japan has decided to bridge this gap by publishing lesson-learnt reports in English on the recent disasters, and sharing them as widely as possible all over the world. Our first report was on the Western Japan Flood of last year, where we focused on ten most important issues. We visited the affected areas several times, interviewed affected people, volunteers and stakeholders. We put a lot of effort in making the report very comprehensive, took special care that the text is very simple and concise, considering the possibility of sharing it in countries where English is not commonly spoken. A group of students of a local Art University helped with the graphics. The report is available both in printed and PDF format, and the PDF version can be downloaded from the following link:

Lessons From Mabi

(The file size is about 16 MB and is best viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader.)