Learning from natural disasters is predominantly regarded as beneficial: Individuals and governments learn to cope and thereby reduce damage and loss of life in future disasters. We argue against this standard narrative and point to two principal ways in which learning from past disasters can have detrimental consequences: First, investment in protective infrastructures may not only stimulate settlement in hazardprone areas but also foster a false impression of security, which can prevent individuals from fleeing to safe places when hazard strikes. Second, if disaster events in the past did not have catastrophic consequences, affected individuals do not take future events sufficiently seriously. As a consequence, learning from disasters is a double-edged sword that can prevent large scale damage and human loss most of the time but results in the worst case scenario when a disaster occurs at an unexpected scale and public preparedness measures fail. We demonstrate the devastating impact of misplaced trust in public preparedness measures and misleading lessons drawn from past experience for the case of the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. Our paper contributes to the literatures on 'negative learning' and 'hazard maladaptation' by demonstrating that a lack of past experience with tsunami mortality in a municipality substantively increases mortality in the Tohoku tsunami.
3Man has three ways of learning. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.Attributed to Confucius, cited in Lee and Jones (2004, p. vii)
IntroductionThe 2011 Tohoku tsunami that affected the entire East Coast of Honshu, Japan's main island, raised two questions: Why did so many people die during the event despiteJapan's experience with tsunamis that should have resulted in sufficient disaster preparedness to avoid most of the deaths? Why did the Tohoku mortality vary widely between municipalities? The first question attracted much more attention in the media and among social scientists studying the social causes of disaster vulnerability than the second question. We develop an integrated answer to both questions arguing that local governments and affected citizens believed too much in infrastructural protectiontsunami walls and shelters -with the consequence that large parts of the affected population stayed close to the shore watching the incoming tsunami rather than fleeing inland or seeking to reach higher grounds.Our article contributes to the growing literature on 'learning from disaster'. Many social scientists believe that natural disasters offer a window of opportunity for individuals and policy makers to learn and better adapt to natural hazards (Birkmann et al., 2010). view is that at worst the lessons of disasters are ignored while at best learning from