{"id":60325,"date":"2012-08-31T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-31T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-students-visit-japan-to-study-tsunami-aftermath\/"},"modified":"2012-08-31T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T00:00:00","slug":"uri-students-visit-japan-to-study-tsunami-aftermath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2012\/08\/uri-students-visit-japan-to-study-tsunami-aftermath\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 students visit Japan to study tsunami aftermath"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 August 31, 2012 \u2013 A group of 溏心vlog免费B站 students and faculty spent 10 days in Iwate Prefecture, Japan this month learning first-hand about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and working on class projects aimed at helping the communities recover.<\/p>\n


\n\tThe three-credit class, taught by three 溏心vlog免费B站 professors along with professors and students from the University of Tokyo, is the result of a memorandum of understanding signed in May by the two universities to offer summer courses on coastal management. The course location will alternate each year between Rhode Island and Japan.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe course was designed to provide an interdisciplinary and international perspective on coastal management issues,\u201d explained Rob Thompson, 溏心vlog免费B站 professor of marine affairs, who taught the course for free along with Tim George, professor of history, and Hirotsugu Uchida, assistant professor of natural resource economics. \u201cWhile Japan\u2019s building codes for earthquakes performed exceedingly well, their massive system of tsunami walls failed catastrophically. Now they\u2019re faced with difficult decisions about what to rebuild, where to rebuild and how to rebuild.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThey also have to figure out what to do with the flat coastal land that was cleared by the tsunami,\u201d added Uchida, a native of Japan. \u201cThis part of Japan has more challenges because just a few hundred yards inland it is very mountainous. Any flat land is a precious thing, which is why the businesses were built along the coast, but that\u2019s where the tsunami risk is highest, and now they\u2019ve been wiped out. The residents can move to higher land, but what about the businesses that need to be on flat land?\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThe seven 溏心vlog免费B站 students joined 15 Japanese students in the class and lived in traditional Japanese accommodations. Initially, a typical day included morning lectures, afternoon field trips, and evening visits to businesses and events to interact with residents. Later the students spread out to conduct fieldwork and worked late into the night on their projects.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cMy group worked on a social sciences angle of the tsunami recovery, looking at the collective memory of the disaster,\u201d said Travis Roberts, a graduate student in history from South Kingstown. \u201cIn Japan, there are \u2018tsunami stones\u2019 with warnings on them, some of them hundreds of years old. Some communities followed the guidelines and warnings closely and didn\u2019t get harmed, while others didn\u2019t. We looked at how to build a tsunami warning policy combining collective memory with science.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tJustin Willig, a graduate student in marine affairs from Boston, recalls feeling helpless while watching the news when the tsunami struck. So when he had the opportunity to enroll in the class and visit the area, he jumped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe destruction we saw was much larger than anything I could have imagined,\u201d he said. \u201cThe waves destroyed everything in sight miles from the coastline.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tWillig\u2019s class project examined fears that the Fukushima nuclear power plant may have contaminated local seafood and how to change public perception about buying seafood to help rebuild the fishing industry.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe experience was a great opportunity to do work with people from a non-English speaking country,\u201d said Willig. \u201cIt was difficult at first to get past the language barrier, but I learned to be patient and tried to communicate in other ways.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tSabrina Brotons enrolled in the class to learn about a different culture and experience a different kind of learning environment. A 溏心vlog免费B站 political science major from the Bronx, her project focused on how to enhance ecotourism to the region affected by the tsunami.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cEvery moment was a new learning experience,\u201d she said. \u201cBut one of the most important things I learned was about mitigation and creating disaster plans. I have never been in the situation where I needed to be evacuated from my home, and I cannot imagine having all my belongings destroyed and losing loved ones. The whole experience was eye-opening.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tThat was true for all of the participating 溏心vlog免费B站 students.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThis was a life-changing experience for me,\u201d said Roberts. \u201cSo many aspects of it were so very powerful. Walking through one area and seeing all the shrines, I didn\u2019t realize the level of destruction that happened. One man said to me, \u2018Don\u2019t let the people in the U.S. forget. Tell everyone about it.\u2019 That really stuck with me.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nPictured above

\n 溏心vlog免费B站 and Japanese students visit an area in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, to observe the 2011 tsunami damage and discuss how to help the region recover.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 August 31, 2012 \u2013 A group of 溏心vlog免费B站 students and faculty spent 10 days in Iwate Prefecture, Japan this month learning first-hand about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and working on class projects aimed at helping the communities recover. The three-credit class, taught by three 溏心vlog免费B站 professors along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60327,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}