Earticle

The purpose of this study is to overview the method and content of disaster information transmissions in Ancient Japanese. In order to deal with a disaster, a government starts with knowing the scale and situation of the damage in the disaster area. It will be unchanged in both modern and ancient. In the case, knowing how to transmit disaster information in ancient would be important in terms of understanding of disaster countermeasures by the ritsuryo state. The first chapter confirms the method of information transmission by statutes and three cases. The disaster information was transmitted promptly by 馳駅 and 逓送方式 in both cases of that the government reported to the province and that the province reported to the government. The second chapter examines the contents of information transmitted in the case of that a disaster happened in a province and considers the contents of information requested to be transmitted. As a result, this study pointed out that transmitting the damages of the people or their houses with numerical figures by the provinces was important to both the provinces and the government. It is presumed that the disaster relief system implemented by the ritsuryo state or the ideology for maintaining control of the people tabs on people by ritsuryo state was an assumption.

There is no account that directly describes the natural disaster in Balhae. But several incidents in which the Balhae’s diplomatic missions to Japan were shipwrecked have been conveyed in the Japanese historical accounts, and some of them seem to have been caused by natural disasters. In this paper, the author examines the cause of the shipwreck of the second mission led by SeoYodeok in order to make some remarks on the natural disaster in Balhae. 　SeoYodeok who accompanied Heguri no Hironari(平群廣成) sailed for Japan between June and August in the eighth year of the Tempyo(天平) era. He encountered rough waves during the voyage, and his ship sank. This incident happened between July and September under the current Gregorian calendar, and when typhoons frequently pass near the Sea of Japan. Thus he was killed by a natural disaster, a typhoon.

To respond to the ‘East Japan Tsunami’ occurred at 14:46 on March 11, 2011, the Global Institute for Japan Studies (former Center for Japanese Studies) of Korea University immediately operated the so-called ‘Earthquake Analysis Team’ from March 14, 2011, which was three days after the occurrence date of the severe earthquake. The starting point was to expect that Japan would take passive and introvert aspects in any forms after the severe damage. Since the launch, the team discovered several keywords based on the achievements made over the past five years. The keywords set for the first time included ‘disaster (accident), safety and East Asia’, which have been useful and important until now. Next, the team was interested in how to figure out the disasters/accidents of Japan from the point of view of South Korea, which reflected self-reflection of the achievements of the research team focused only on translation of the Japanese researches on disasters. On such reflection, this research focused on ‘human safety’ and ‘safe community’ putting first ‘human’ and ‘coexistence’. These are matched with the keywords of the existing symposiums including ‘lessons from the disaster’, ‘cooperation of disaster research’ and ‘coexistence from the field’ and ‘pursuit of safe community’. The counterparts of ‘safety’ in the human society should not only be ‘disasters’ or ‘accidents’. ‘War’ will also have a huge significance. Then it is only natural that ‘disaster and safety’ is related to ‘war and security’. In other words, ‘war and peace’ is in the two-sided relationship with ‘disaster and safety’. Lastly, the ‘theory of East Asian safe community’ should be established for coexistence, symbiosis and co-prosperity of the East Asian world. There should be no rooms for such goals to be intervened by any political intentions or impure thoughts. Even if the ‘theory of East Asian safe community’ has yet to be completed, it is considered not to put off the issue as a college student given that university is a member of the society.