A Study on Education Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction by Utilizing “Yokai” as Intellectual Resources

A chimeric being from Kyushu, Japan: Amabie's revival during Covid‐19

“…Japan has already given space to a broad yōkai revival, during the post-war period of rapid modernization and urban development, when the yōkai embodied a sense of nostalgia for the rural past, as in the artistic work of Shigeru Mizuki's manga series (Foster 2008: 165). Yōkai have also been co-opted in disaster education for children; for example, after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, yōkai were used as social devices to transmit disaster risk information (Takada & Kondo 2019; see also Alt 2020). Amabie has become an effective messenger of public health awareness as well as a call to recover our relationship with the environment, marked by spiritual, if not supernatural, encounters with nature -when fishermen and local officials could seize swimming or prophesizing mermaids, be warned of impending calamities and maintain a form of communication with an ecology yet to be disrupted.…”