Recovery Support System and Operation for Individual Household in Recent Earthquake Disasters in Japan

Efficient recovery assistance for individual households is one of the inevitable issues in management after a disaster. Discussion on how the assistance should be provided to them, however, has been put aside whereas amount or contents of it have been disputed every time a disaster happens. Public support system in a time of disaster in Japan is very complicated because many laws are related to recovery support and each law covers just a part of total recovery needs of affected household. It is difficult to see whole picture of the system for affected households. Therefore, households must have many interactions with various sections in charge of particular assistance service to know the contents of each assistance and requirements to receive it to decide combination of supports they use. It is crucial for efficient recovery assistance operation to manage those customer relations since considerable part of troubles in individual recovery came from failure in each interactions caused by lack of common understanding on each recovery process between them. In this paper, I want to introduce how support system in Japan is fragmented, a case of Anamizu town which adopted a customer-oriented framework of information management system for their assistance operation after Mar. 2007 Noto peninsula earthquake and what was learned from the case.