Seminars on East Japan earthquake & tsunami: impressions
Phew! Today was the last day of the 3-day symposium on the Tohoku earthquake & tsunami. We had 3 days full of very nice and interesting lectures from various eminent professors from the department of civil engineering, University of Tokyo.
Today, a team from NHK came to film, record, interview participants. I also had been suddenly invited to participate to a panel discussion, in order to trigger discussion and debate among us, the panel, but also with the audience.
I sometimes have lots to say, and because of the relative lack of organisation (last-minute preparation!) I feel I talked a bit too much, compared with others. I have also very little experience of being on stage, so it was sort of stressful, but overall very nice experience as the audience very kindly expressed their contradictory opinions in such a polite way. (OMG that sentence was awful).
But it was a really nice experience. During the lectures today, I came to think that I was so lucky to be here, now. At the beginning I wasn’t sure that doing a double-degree was such a good idea; but today, I felt so empowered by the discussion, I felt so implicated in the professors’ concerns about reconstruction and recovery of Japan, that now, I believe that this master’s course in Japan might be one of the best experiences in my life up to now. Indeed, I’m very happy ^_^//
I appreciated the variety of ideas coming out from professors’ presentations. Professor IEDA gave a fantastic closing speech to, calling for overcoming old engineering habits and proposing a simple but reasonable and efficient approach to improve response to future disasters: prevention + mitigation. Simple. Efficient (at least to me).
I loved the idea of one participant in the audience, an architecture student, who expressed concerns about one of the main points of reconstruction: compromise between the wishes of people to rebuild their community as it was, and the scientific reasoning that reconstructing as-it-was in a disaster-sticken place was clearly not, well, reasonable.
So many things were left out of the discussion, such as the crippled functioning of regulation that might have caused, or at least made worse, the situation at Fukushima nuclear power plant. I hope we will be able to tackle some of these issues some day soon. Maybe planning weekly lunch debates first, and also preparing another symposium with an enlarged group of participants.
In the meantime, my mind and body are so exhausted. Being involved in such activities can be exhilarating, but it does strain one’s energy. Off to sleep now.
