Upon request, IRIDeS screens the 3D documentary film “The Great Tsunami in Japan: reflecting on the 2011 disaster” (80min/25min, Japanese/English). The film was created by NHK Media Technology and supervised by IRIDeS Director and Professor Fumihiko Imamura, to pass on memories and experiences of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The film won an AIS Lumiere Japan Award (award category: Documentary) in 2014.   IRIDeS is equipped with the largest 3D screen among Japanese rese...

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The IRIDeS Public Relations Office features a special issue of photographs and a video of disaster areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We will continue to introduce how affected areas are today, occasionally from here on. In late April, 2016, we visited Rikuzentakata City, Iwate Prefecture, and Kesennumua City and Minamisanriku Town, Miyagi Prefecture, all of which were heavily affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Engineering works to reconstruct these plac...

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Last December, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution to recognize November 5 as World Tsunami Awareness Day. The Japanese government took initiative of its adoption, in tribute to the episode of “Inamura-no-Hi”: On November 5, 1854 (of old calendar) during the Edo period, a great tsunami occurred after the Ansei Nankai earthquake. They say that Goryo Hamaguchi, a businessman of present-day Hirokawa Town in Wakayama Prefecture, realized the real danger of the tsunami and set fire ...

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After the urgent field survey from April 15, Professor Shinji Toda, together with other researchers, went to Kumamoto again to continue their research from April 22 to 25. As a result, a normal faulting rupture was also discovered in the Futagawa fault zone, and it indicates that an oblique slip occurred deep underground but a strike-slip fault and a normal fault running parallel approximately two kilometers apart on the earth’s surface were identified.   According to the survey...

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Responding to the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake, Tohoku Block DMAT has been carrying out medical assistance in the areas affected by the disaster. Assistant Professor Hiroyuki Sasaki of IRIDeS went to the site as a member of Tohoku University Hospital DMAT (disaster medical assistance team) which is one of the teams in Tohoku Block DMAT, and took part in activities from April 17 – 19. DMAT is a team of medical professionals, consisting of doctors, nurses and logistics experts who have gone throu...

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