BEYOND Tomorrow Public Forum at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction

My name is Masahiro Kikuchi, and I am from Rikuzentakata city in Iwate prefecture. Rikuzentakata was one of the hardest-hit areas in the Great East Japan Earthquake. The tsunami left the city in ruins and claimed the lives of roughly 1,800 victims. My parents included. Now, my family consists of my sister, grandmother, and me. The unnatural quietness of my home still unsettles me to this day. I think back fondly to — even envy —  the days when I found my parents annoying. My sadness can be found everywhere. Looking around my hometown, I just see completely new landscapes; there is not even a hint of the hometown I used to know. Even during high school reunions, I am not able to fully enjoy my time, as my heart is bursting with sorrow, seeing the empty chairs of friends I will never see again. When I was living with just my grandmother after the disaster, the only thing I could think of was a vague goal of “moving forward.” I knew that my sadness was not going to lead to anything, and I kept telling myself, “You have to do something about this.” Most of all, I knew that I needed to figure out how to be independent, as my parents had passed away. Despite what I tell myself, though, the reality was that my grandmother was supporting me all along. I was only in high school. It was unrealistic for me to think that I could be entirely independent at that age. To this day, I am getting support from many others. But as those first few days passed, I found more and more reasons for me to take that step forward. One of these reasons was BEYOND Tomorrow. After having experienced the disaster, all I wanted to do was to delve into the recovery of the disaster areas and become involved in disaster prevention in the future. Since joining BEYOND Tomorrow, I have been able to fulfill this dream every day. The things I have gained from BEYOND Tomorrow’s programs are countless. With this organization, I have been able to move forward so far that when I look back, I can barely see myself four years ago. One of the steps I took with BEYOND Tomorrow was to visit the Philippines last year. In 2013, the Philippines was devastated by a hurricane. Until then, whenever I heard about disasters in the world, they felt foreign and detached from the world I lived in. Even though I had experienced my own disaster and suffered through so much pain, when it came to matters outside of my own country, I turned a blind eye to them. What I know is limited. It is my personal experience with the Great East Japanese Earthquake, and in particular, in my hometown. Accordingly, I felt that I wasn’t qualified to have an opinion about things other than those topics. But when I saw the devastation in the Philippines, I realized that I was wrong. What had happened in my hometown was happening right there in the Philippines. What I strongly believe now is to “Never repeat the misery.” And now I am able to apply this belief to beyond the Tohoku region, and to the world. Of course, I cannot achieve this goal by myself. But as long as there are others who share this belief with me, I know we are firmly moving towards achieving it. In closing, I would like to share with you what I feel is most important to me at this point, four years after the disaster. I once heard a disaster prevention expert speak. In the speech, this expert said, “Japan’s disaster prevention programs are very advanced, and despite the scale of the earthquake and tsunami, the amount of destruction was limited, and many people were saved. So, in fact, this earthquake and tsunami highlighted a success in Japan’s disaster prevention program.” This was true, I told myself. But I also lost both of my parents and many friends. I can’t speak for how things compare on a global scale, but for me, personally, I know that I lost some of the most important people in my life to this disaster, and as such, I cannot say that this was a success in any way, and I don’t want to call it a success. My dream is to save every life there is to save. And I want to keep aspiring to this ideal. We must continue to put our efforts into disaster prevention until we can truly say that we have succeeded in saving every life. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind that I am not special. Just because I am a disaster victim does not mean that I should be treated differently, and I don’t want to be, either. I believe that I do have an important perspective as someone who experienced the disaster first-hand. There are ideas and opinions I may have because I grew up in Rikuzentakata and lost my parents to the tsunami. But I am just another victim of the disaster, and that does not make me more of an expert than anyone else. Disaster victims continue to be in the spotlight, but I hope to stay humble and stay true to myself. With today’s session, I urge us to all reconsider disaster prevention from step one. Only then can we take another step closer to the future that we all dream to achieve.