FLOOD03743

• County: Statewide
• Basin: Statewide
• Title: 25th Annual Celebration Hazards Research and Applications Workshop
• Date: 7/9/2000
• Floodplain - Doc Type: Educational/Technical/Reference Information

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PSOO-21

Shigeo T atsUki & Haruo Hayashi
Phone: [phone]
E-mail Address:[e-mail]

Total-Qnality-Management-BasedAssessment of Kobe City's Life Recovery
Assistance Programs for Victims of the 1995 Kobe Earthquake

TQM(Total Quality Management)-based assessment of life recovery assistance programs was
conducted four and a half years after the Kobe earthquake. The objective of the assessment was I) to extract
and sort out new policy measures and programs that need to be taken, and 2) to provide measurable indices
that would operationalize policy objectives so that levels of life recovery among various groups of Kobe
residents will be constantly and objectively monitored.

The use ofTQM tools allowed sorting out verbal data from Kobe citizens, stimulating creativity in
identifying major constructs that explain recovery of everyday life, putting complex problems of life recovery
into solvable form, and ensuring that nothing was left out when planning. The assessment process involved
utilizing three of the seven new quality control tools, namely affinity, relation, and tree. Residents from
Kobe's all nine wards and three special interest groups provided their assessment concerning life recovery
from the earthquake at grass roots workshop sessions. This yielded approximately 1,600 opinion cards.
Based on their affinity, the opinion cards were later conceptually clustered into seven mutually exclusive
categories. Those were housing, social support network,land use planning, physical and mental health, social
infrastructure and preparedness, government assistance policy, and economic and financial situation. Those
seven categories tUIned out to be the most critical in assessing recovery of everyday life among earthquake
survivors. Among the seven categories, only housing and social support network contained more than 400
opinion cards. This suggested that housing and social support network were the two most significant areas
when people evaluated recovery of everyday life from the earthquake disaster. Within each category,
individual opinion cards were further grouped into about 20 or less subcategories. Judges consisting of Kobe
city program planners, conununity development consultants, university professors and graduate students
analyzed causal relations and drew cause-effect arrows among those subcategories. Those causal relations
were then translated into a system of hierarchical tree diagram, which represented goals and their solvable
means in a multi-layer fashion. Out of tree diagram analysis, came a prioritized list of concrete actions that
would enhance life recovery process among the impacted people.

The utilization of TQM method to assess and plan life recovery programs drastically differs from
more traditional policy assessment and planning practices on the following points:
I) The TQM-based assessment allowed bottom-up integration of opinions from the impacted people. This
ensured that policy measures and programs would become more relevant to everyday feeling and practices
among the impacted people. 2) The TQM-based planning of recovery assistance programs enabled active
involvement of the impacted people in deciding policy directions. A sense of involvement is a key factor to
obtain stakeholders' acknowledgement and support of future government responses. 3) Traditional recovery
assistance program planning was "product-out-oriented" and tended to emphasize interests on the side of
program suppliers. The TQM-based recovery assistance planning is "market-in-oriented" and emphasizes
interests on the side of program consumers. As Japan enters into a pluralistic and multi-stakeholder society,
the market-in-oriented recovery policy planning will gain more public support.