Japan’s Infrastructure Resilience Policy and Its Implication to Energy and Local Governance

Japan is prone to different disasters and the country has learnt from the past disaster impacts. There are three major phases of disaster risk reduction (DRR): 1.0 (after Ise-wan typhoon of 1959), 2.0 (after the Great Hanshin Awaji earthquake), and 3.0 (after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami). The impact of East Japan Earthquake on resilient infrastructure policy was analyzed, the importance of resilient infrastructure increased as a specific national resilience plan taking infrastructure resilience as the primary aim, while top-down official leadership policy has changed to the cooperation of official, public, private, and resident sector, and the local model to develop resilient infrastructure based local condition has turned to the new focus of the national resilient infrastructure policy. Besides, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster indicated that energy resilience became one of the most important sectors in developing resilient infrastructure, and the new distributed power system based on development of renewable energy in local level has been considered as the measure to enhance the energy resilience.