• Question: If you were the prime minister of Japan what advice would you give them to get over all of what has happened?

    Asked by higglebiggle to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 19 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: David Pyle

      David Pyle answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Japan is extraordinarily well prepared for disasters, and disaster response. Earthquake, tsunami and volcano emergency drills are practised regularly, and there is a very extensive emergency contact network in place. The tragedy for the people of the north-east coast of Honshu was that the tsunami defences were clearly not able to cope with the scale of the tsunami (presumably the earthquake was quite a bit larger than anticipated?), and once the primary defence had been breached, there was little to protect the houses from the flood surge.

      The main job of the Prime Minister will be to retain the confidence of the population in believing that everything that could have been done to minimise the risks had been done; and to ensure that all of the lessons that need to be learnt for the future are learnt and acted on.

    • Photo: Melanie Stefan

      Melanie Stefan answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      Probably something like “keep calm and carry on”, which the Japanese are actually very good at doing anyway. Not that they would listen to a prime minster who is female, foreign and under the age of 50!

    • Photo: Luna Munoz

      Luna Munoz answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      Well, I’m not a politician, but as a psychologist, I would tell everyone to try to get back to some form of normality as quickly as possible. It’s very stressful to not know what is going to happen next. They need some predictability.

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