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

ROO-22

Shigeo Tatsuki, School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University,
Nishinomiya, Japan. .
email: [e-mail]

Haruo Hayashi, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University,
Kyoto, Japan
email: [e-mail]

Total-Quality-Management-Based Assessment of Kobe City's
Life Recovery Assistance Programs for Victims ofthe 1995 Kobe Earthquake
by: Tatsuki S., & Hayashi H.
(paper presented at Hazards 2000, Tokushima, Japan. May 23,2000.)

TQM(TotaI 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
operationaIize 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 fonn, 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. 1bis yielded approximately 1,600 opinion cards.
Based on their affinity, the opinion cards were later conceptually clustered into seven mutually exclusive
categories. Those were homes, human ties, built environment, preparedness, mind and body, economy, and
govenunent responses. Those seven categories turned out to be the most critical in assessing recovery of
everyday life among earthquake survivors. Among the seven categories, only homes and human ties contained
more than 400 opinion cards. This suggested that homes and hwnan ties 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, community 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 govenunent 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.

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