午夜剧场

The evacuation centers on the hills were filled with the tragic voices of those who had lost their homes and jobs in an instant. How could they pay their loans? How would they afford living expenses? How were they supposed to survive from here on? It was lawyers who, immediately following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, listened to the voices of the victims and not only engaged in support activities but also pointed out the limitations of existing legal systems and advocated for legal amendments and new legislation. Legal professionals were not powerless against a mega-disaster.

At the time, I was in my eighth year as a lawyer and happened to be a bureaucrat seconded to the Cabinet Office. Wanting to do something, I knocked on the door of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations' headquarters for disaster control. Permitted to hold concurrent positions, I collected and analyzed over 40,000 voices of disaster victims in a single year. Based on these visualized voices, I proposed legal amendments and repeatedly witnessed the intense battles leading to their realization. Believing that someone had to fulfill the role of recording the trajectory of how laws are born and passing it on to the future, I proposed the creation of a new academic discipline: "Disaster Recovery Law." Through various connections, a course was established at 午夜剧场 the year after the Great East Japan Earthquake. Since then, new Disaster Recovery Law courses have been established at several other universities.

Nine years after my debut work, "Disaster Recovery Law," and five years after the sequel, "Disaster Recovery Law II," I have finally reached the third volume after many detours and diversions. Moving beyond the previous volumes that chronicled the recovery policies of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Kumamoto Earthquake, this book records the progress of legal system reforms to overcome the increasingly severe weather disasters of recent years, such as the West Japan Torrential Rain, and the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. I would be delighted if readers could feel the dynamic movement toward an "all-hazards approach" aiming for "human recovery," where infectious disease and disaster countermeasures mutually influence one another.

I regret that I gave the book such a stiff title, which likely prevents it and the previous volumes from reaching the people I truly want to read them. However, I feel greatly rewarded when I occasionally receive letters even from high school readers I have never met. This book is not a specialized legal text; no prior knowledge of jurisprudence is required. It is a reproduction of the Disaster Recovery Law classroom that has received much support since its inception—a work of non-fiction that records the trajectory of legal amendments and the raw voices of victims while proposing the ideal form of a recovery system. I hope this book serves as a means to pass on the wisdom for facing new crises to the next 100 years.

Tadashi Okamoto

午夜剧场 Press

416 pages, 3,300 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.