In this post, I’d like to introduce two articles about support for people with disabilities. In addition to the article about people with dementia that you see below, I’d also like to recommend “Media show Kumamoto was woefully ill-prepared for disabled evacuees” by Michael Gillan Peckitt, the author of an e-book about his life as disabled foreigner in Japan:
In this article, Mr. Peckitt argues that officials in Kumamoto should have paid better attention to the lessons learned from the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 regarding emergency care for disabled people.
My own university, Kumamoto Gakuen University, accepted disable evacuees. I need to ask, though, to find out if that was part of the original plan or if the decision to do so was made after the quakes hit and other centers were found to be ill-prepared. As I wrote before, the International Center was not intended to be an evacuation site for foreign residents but became one as a response to conditions after the quakes. It’s hard to foresee everything but Mr. Peckitt’s argument that the preparation should have been better makes sense to me.
– Kirk
