Differences in the Approach to School Disaster Education between Japan and the UK

In order to build a resilient society, it is necessary to implement the integrated disaster management in each community. Appropriate knowledge and skills are necessary to implement disaster management individually. Hence chances of disaster education should be given for community members. Each community has schools and most children can go to schools. Thus, improving school disaster education is effective to spread the appropriate knowledge of disaster management. Some of the countries which have many natural hazards such as Japan and US usually do separated disaster education. For instance disaster education includes only education for natural hazards in Japan. Traffic safety education and anticrime education are not included in disaster education. On the other hand, British disaster education is different from this approach. Their approach to disaster education is holistic approach. It includes all type of hazards, thus it should be called not disaster education but risk education or safety education. In this paper, a comparison between Japan and UK on school disaster education is introduced. It is based on results from the series of seminars in the UK in 2007. This paper focuses on the difference in the approach to school disaster education.