The physical and social determinants of mortality in the 3.11 tsunami

The human consequences of the 3.11 tsunami were not distributed equally across the municipalities of the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Instead, the mortality rate from the massive waves varied tremendously from zero to ten percent of the local residential population. What accounts for this va...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social science & medicine (1982) Vol. 124; pp. 66 - 75
Main Authors: Aldrich, Daniel P., Sawada, Yasuyuki
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England Pergamon Press Inc 01.01.2015
Subjects:
Body Height
Cities
Cultural Capital
Determinants
Disasters
Emergency preparedness
Humans
Infrastructure
Japan
Japan - epidemiology
Mitigation
Mortality
Mortality Rates
Municipalities
Natural Disasters
Pacific Ocean
Policy Making
Political conditions
Political support
Public policy
Regions
Social Capital
Social factors
Tsunamis
Villages
Japan
Tsunami
Natural disasters
Mortality
Social capital
ISSN:0277-9536, 1873-5347, 1873-5347
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The human consequences of the 3.11 tsunami were not distributed equally across the municipalities of the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Instead, the mortality rate from the massive waves varied tremendously from zero to ten percent of the local residential population. What accounts for this variation remains a critical question for researchers and policy makers alike. This paper uses a new, sui generis data set including all villages, towns, and cities on the Pacific Ocean side of the Tohoku region to untangle the factors connected to mortality during the disaster. With data on demographic, geophysical, infrastructure, social capital, and political conditions for 133 municipalities, we find that tsunami height, stocks of social capital, and level of political support for the long-ruling LDP strongly influenced mortality rates. Given the high probability of future large scale catastrophes, these findings have important policy implications for disaster mitigation policies in Japan and abroad.
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ISSN:0277-9536
1873-5347
1873-5347
DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.025