It is a question of engaging a broader range of stakeholders in social processes (Okada 2006a, b Okada, Fang et al. Another is how to involve community stakeholders who have not been previously engaged in disaster issues. One problem is how to initiate such a participatory approach and who will be able to facilitate the whole process. Though some progress has been made to improve community disaster resilience with this approach, it has its own limitations. This is a good example of disaster risk governance in public–private-individual partnership. Realizing the limitations in the government’s capacity to provide immediate and direct support for relief and recovery after a large-scale disaster, Japan has shifted more towards increasing both the Kyojo and Jijo self-reliance roles, and to depend less on Kojo, which in the past has been the major agent to mitigate disasters.
To understand the emerging need for such a significant change in disaster planning and management in Japan, one must understand the contrasts between Kyojo (neighborhood or community self-reliance), Jijo (individual or household self-reliance), and Kojo (government assistance). Since then, the need for participatory approaches to disaster reduction at the community level has been repeatedly confirmed by a series of large-scale, natural hazard-induced disasters that have occurred across Japan-such as the 11 March 2011 Eastern Japan Earthquake disaster, the 14 and 16 April 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake disaster, and most recently the July 2018 Western Japan Heavy Rainfall Disaster, which claimed more than 220 lives and devastated many areas of western Japan ( The Asahi Shinbun, 8 July 2018). To reduce such disaster risks, each community’s coping capacity with disasters has to be strategically improved, in parallel with the importance of governments’ roles and leadership in disaster risk reduction (Okada 2016). At the core of the issue is people’s increased exposure to disaster risks. One of the lessons learned after the 1995 Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake disaster in Japan was the need to address citizen-led participatory approaches to disaster risk reduction before disasters, as well as for disaster recovery and revitalization after disasters (Okada 2010, 2016).
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