Last night (May 30th), Tokyo had a massive 8.5 magnitude earthquake. Thankfully the epicenter was 590km down, deep into the earth's mantle, and thus resulted in little surface shaking. Nonetheless, it reminds us that we live in a seismically active country and I thought this posting made to my Terrie's Take blog two weeks ago might be worth re-posting. 

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+++ When Disaster Tourism May Be Acceptable

Our travel website, www.japantravel.com, gets lots of requests from groups abroad asking questions about how to make arrangements in Japan.It's pretty obvious that there is a shortage of good English-speaking ground operators here who get the basics of what overseas travel agents want: choice and flexibility, reasonable but not necessarily rock-bottom pricing, and patience when plans change. So it's an interesting time of learning for us.

We were assisting one asian school group with lists of museums and attractions in the Hakone area when the news came through that Mount Hakone is in danger of erupting. It's understandable that the media is hyperventilating about this, given the tragic deaths of dozens of hikers on Mount Ontake in October last year. The fact is, though, that if Hakoneyama did erupt, not only do we already know to stay away from the immediate area, the eruption itself would also be "broadcast" well in
advance -- as the place is bristling with scientists and instrumentation. Predicting eruptions is certainly not infallible yet, but swarms of localized tell-tale high-frequency earthquakes gives everyone a fairly good base to work from.

Furthermore, people don't realize that despite their awesome power, volcanoes generally create a limited threat zone around them. For the smaller eruptions common in Japan, you are going to be safe from most projectiles when 2-5 kilometers from the ejection point, and with an abundance of caution, 15-20 kilometers is considered safe for habitation. The threat zone of course depends a lot on the local topography and lava flow.

A good guide to threat zones around a volcano can be found here:
https://bit.ly/1PNIXrW

[Image from www.volcanodiscovery.com, (c) Tom Pfeiffer]

So while the school group wanted to see attractions that are a relatively safe distance from Mt. Hakone, they have of course canceled their trip for that leg. No point in making parents nervous, although the students could have had an awesome experience... :-)

This got us thinking: since Japan is never going to be free of danger from natural disasters, how can we get tourists to embrace the opportunity to "experience" nature, rather than be scared by it? And so we started researching disaster tourism.

In the Tourism Dictionary, "Disaster Tourism" is defined as travel undertaken for the purpose of visiting the scene of a natural disaster, usually with a connotation of voyeurism. This definition pretty much sums up society's negative view of those who travel to see fires, floods, landslides, eruptions, and earthquakes. Considering the logistical and privacy impact that a throng of rubberneckers can have on a disaster site, we'd have to agree -- if there's been a disaster, stay away -- for the first few days at least.

However, the 2011 Tohoku disaster raises some interesting questions for us, about the disaster tourism that happened in the weeks and years after the event. Firstly, when does the presence of tourists in a disaster-hit area become desirable again, and secondly, just what comprises a tourist?

Let's take the second point first. What is a tourist? When the Tohoku disaster occurred, and on witnessing the long lines of people at Narita airport looking to flee Japan, we naturally thought that inbound foreigner travel to Japan would drop dramatically. However, several months later as we commiserated with an airline CEO, we were surprised to hear him say that business was not so bad. He pointed out that in the months after March 2011, many foreigners and overseas-based Japanese came to Japan to try to help out. In fact, the Foreign Ministry said
that by April 4, just 3 weeks later, over 1,000 rescue workers from 20 countries and regions had been dispatched to Japan. Add to those official groups the tens of thousands of volunteers (Japanese and foreign), it is pretty clear that there were probably more foreign "tourists" in Tohoku post 3/11 than there had ever been previously.

Those people all had to eat, stay somewhere, buy clothes as they got dirty clearing the devastated areas, and avail themselves of all the other services needed to support a community. So while they were there to assist recovery from a terrible tragedy, their presence also meant income for the locals. And if some of them were there from curiosity, so long as they mixed it with humanitarian actions, no one seems to have minded. Wielding a shovel and bucket is certainly a lot more socially acceptable than simple rubbernecking.

And that brings us to the first point, as to when is tourism too close to a disaster event to be undesirable? The case of Matsushima Bay is an interesting example.

A view of Matsushima Bay is here: https://bit.ly/1HkX9Xp

The bay is a magnet for tourists and thanks to its unique geography came out relatively undamaged from the tsunami. Its tourist flow did, however, suffer from fears of radiation as well as Tokyo residents' respect for people to have privacy as they pulled their lives back together again. As a result, tourism dropped 75% in the May-June period after the quake, and even a year later the numbers were still down 40%. The financial consequences were significant, causing not only hotels and tour operators to suffer, but also the "food chain" of suppliers to the hospitality industry, including local farmers, foresters, fishermen, stores, restaurants, etc.

Kyuichiro Sato, President of the Matsushima Tourism Association made the case in 2013 that tourism nonetheless played an important part in the recovery of businesses in the area and that the whole community is grateful for it. In Matsushima's case, the tourism came in two distinct waves. Firstly the volunteers who showed on March 19th (a Saturday, when people could be away from their jobs), hundreds of them, including a group of Canadians who'd hitchhiked up from Tokyo. These volunteers joined in with the local monks and started scrubbing the area free of the thick black mud covering everything. By early April, most of the mud had been removed, and work began on restoring actual commercial facilities. By the end of July, just four months after 3/11, 95% of souvenir shops, hotels, and other facilities had been rebuilt.The second wave of tourists came between Golden Week and summer. Were they there because they wanted to show support for the locals, or because they wanted to see how bad the damage had been? Does it matter? 

The fact is that without their money and traffic, the Matsushima economy would be struggling even more than it has, and the transition from devastation to business-as-usual is testimony to the benefit of tourism to a disaster-hit location.

So disaster tourism is probably desirable so long as it's handled respectfully and in a managed way. And if so, then possibly Japan should actually encourage it -- since there will always be another disaster just around the corner. Yes, it's a radical idea, but think of it as planned financial assistance to targeted areas that need it. Helper-type tourists would be looked after by a specialist travel agency, similar to how JTB manages special interest sports events. This agency would make future operations by government a lot easier by pre-training its clients, and preparing the logistics that they would need.Then separately the money-toting gawker-type tourists would only be allowed in 6-8 weeks after the event, when the local economy has recovered sufficiently to be able to actually service and earn income from them.

You have to admit, volcano tourism in particular would make for some really cool T-shirts. I can just imagine one with the vivid colors of a pyroclastic flow, stating: "I survived Mount Hakone in 2015!"