Educational Governance Issues in Post Tsunami Responses In Kesennuma City, Japan

Yukihiko Oikawa Research Center for Education in International Understanding, Miyagi University of Education,
149 Aoba, Aramaki, Aoba-ku, Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture 980-0845, Japan
yuki812@seagreen.ocn.ne.jp

ABSTRACT

After the massive disaster of East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11th, 2011, education sectors such as schools and board of education (BOE) in tsunami-affected area faced many issues and challenges immediately and continuously. This paper describes how educational governance has been implementing the responses for recovering schools and education from the disaster of earthquake and tsunami through the cases of Kesennuma City Board of Education and schools in Kesennuma. Kesennuma City has been promoting the “Education for sustainable Development (ESD)” as a part of school and community linkages. Through documenting the examples of a few specific urgent measures of Kesennuma BOE after the disaster, the paper emphasizes that providing school lunch, arranging schools bus, providing scholarships to the affected children were some of the urgent tasks to restart the regular education process in the post disaster scenario. It is concluded that the ESD program has positive impact on strengthening the school community linkage, and the disaster risk reduction should be part of the future ESD programs.

Keywords: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), Education in emergency, Educational governance responses and Tohoku tsunami, Post disaster recovery.

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