Ten institutions from Japan and abroad participated, including seventy people from 26 entities, eight disaster museums, a training centre, and a national emergency management agency. The conference also featured a special lecture on disaster recovery, and a unique 3D multimedia video with footage of the immediate aftermath and ongoing recovery of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.
Throughout the conference, tsunami museums and participating organizations were recognized for their role as cultural facilities and preservers of knowledge, along with their ability to promote public awareness and pass down education.
According to Mr. Fukui, whatever form museums took, including “field museums”, such as rock soil and tsunami boulders, they all served as “monuments to past tsunamis”, possessing “great power to contribute to people's knowledge of disasters and disaster risk reduction”.
Recommendations from the conference included greater inter-country collaboration, especially on information, exhibits and resources. With a number of participating museums moving to digital archives, even more opportunities were identified for cooperation.
In her report of the World Tsunami Museum Conference to the second High School Students Island Summit, which was also held in Okinawa in observation of World Tsunami Awareness Day, Ms. Ratchaneekorn Thongthip, Director of the International Tsunami Museum in Thailand told 255 students from 26 countries, “We may have been strangers yesterday, but let us stand united with you as our Ambassadors in building community resilience from today onwards.”
The first World Tsunami Museum Conference was co-organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Japan, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the UNISDR Office in Japan. Cooperation was provided by the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS), Tohoku University.
Date:
17 Nov 2017
Sources:
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction - Regional Office for Asia and Pacific (UNISDR AP)