Hokkaido's Disaster Planning Gap Leaves Women Carrying the Burden

Women Hold Just 6.3% of Municipal Disaster Council Seats

Women held just 6.3% of seats on municipal disaster prevention councils in Hokkaido in 2025, the lowest share of any prefecture in Japan. At the prefectural level, women's representation stood at 18.8% in 2026. In a region preparing for earthquakes and tsunamis, those figures raise a practical concern: the people expected to feed evacuees and care for vulnerable residents have little say in planning the response.

The prefectural share is almost three times the municipal figure, yet women still occupy fewer than one in five seats at that level. Across Hokkaido's communities, decisions about evacuation centers, emergency duties and recovery are largely being made without equal participation by women.

Traditional community disaster manuals across Japan still assign cooking to women and debris removal and heavy infrastructure work to men. Survivors and researchers argue that these familiar divisions can become dangerous during an emergency, overloading some residents while limiting their access to paid recovery work.

After the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in 2011, men received daily wages for cleanup and reconstruction while women cooked, cared for children and supported older people without pay. Women consequently had fewer independent resources to rebuild their homes and lives.

As of March 17, 2026, campaigners in Hokkaido are challenging both sides of that imbalance: who does essential work when disaster strikes, and who gets a seat at the table beforehand. Their efforts range from realistic cooking drills and children's workshops to appointments on the prefectural disaster prevention council.

Their central concern is straightforward. A plan that treats feeding hundreds of people as an automatic female responsibility can exhaust the very residents on whom an evacuation center depends.

Emergency Cooking Is Heavy and Hazardous Work

Ayaka Mizuguchi, who leads the Sapporo nonprofit organization Bosai Shitakke, challenges the assumption that preparing emergency meals is light domestic work. Cooking during a disaster involves physical demands and hazards far beyond those of an ordinary home kitchen.

Preparing emergency rice for just 50 people requires approximately 9 liters of water. Workers may have to carry that water over damaged ground or up stairs in buildings where elevators no longer work. They must then handle large pots and pour boiling water while aftershocks create a risk of serious scalds.

Making 100 servings of tonjiru, a miso soup containing pork and vegetables, means lifting several kilograms of ingredients as well as heavy stock pots. The soup supplies nutrition and warmth in cold evacuation centers, but producing it safely requires strength, stamina, training and careful organization.

Mizuguchi points out that it is difficult for the same person to prepare all three meals every day. The burden becomes greater when that person must also look after children, older relatives or injured family members. Without sufficient staffing and rest, a daily necessity becomes a source of exhaustion and health risks.

Cooking for hundreds of displaced people without running water, dependable electricity or proper ventilation amounts to an industrial food service operation. Yet labeling it women's work can leave it outside the formal arrangements through which disaster labor receives pay and recognition.

That classification affects more than the kitchen. It shapes household income, the pace of recovery and the stability of communities relying on exhausted volunteers. Food preparation requires the same serious attention to staffing, safety and logistics that authorities give to debris clearance and construction.

What the 2011 Disaster Revealed About Unpaid Labor

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami exposed the economic consequences of assigning emergency work by gender. Along the Tohoku coastline, men cleared debris, built temporary housing and repaired infrastructure, often receiving daily wages through government relief programs or private contractors.

Women were expected to provide large quantities of food, clean, do laundry and care for others. These duties brought neither financial compensation nor formal recognition as emergency work, even though affected communities depended on them.

Female survivors therefore faced a second crisis alongside the destruction of homes and livelihoods. Without income from relief work, they had fewer independent resources to replace appliances, rebuild their homes or secure new housing for their families.

The gap in recovery widened over the following years. Women reported greater difficulty accessing housing reconstruction funds, programs intended to restart economic activity and mental health services. The unequal distribution of work and pay prolonged hardship for people already dealing with displacement and loss.

Cooking and caregiving also consumed time that might otherwise have been available for paid employment or arranging a household's recovery. Assigning these duties automatically to women placed essential community services in direct competition with their own financial security.

The experience exposed a weakness in disaster policy: leaving care work unpaid can slow recovery across an entire community. Families need meals and support immediately, but the people supplying them also need income, rest and the means to rebuild.

Older Residents Face Additional Evacuation Difficulties

Research examining evacuation behavior around the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake identified vulnerabilities linked to Hokkaido's aging population. Older residents, particularly women living alone in rural areas, faced serious disadvantages during emergencies.

The studies identified homeownership status, advanced age and living alone as factors that could negatively affect intentions to evacuate and the physical ability to reach safety. Deciding to leave and being able to leave are connected but different parts of an evacuation.

Women who regularly care for children and older people bring practical knowledge of those difficulties. Their experience can help planners understand the needs of residents who require assistance, rather than leaving those needs at the edge of policy discussions.

The events behind the current debate span more than a decade:

• 2011: The Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami exposed inequalities between paid cleanup and reconstruction work and unpaid cooking and care.
• 2018: The Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake became the subject of research into evacuation behavior and the difficulties facing older residents.
• 2025: Women held 6.3% of municipal disaster prevention council seats in Hokkaido, the lowest share in Japan.
• February 2026: Yukari Kaneko attended her first Hokkaido prefectural disaster prevention council meeting.
• 2026: Women's representation on the prefectural council stood at 18.8%.

Cooking Drills Challenge Inherited Assumptions

Mizuguchi uses direct experience to change how communities think about emergency duties. During evacuation exercises, she asks neighborhood association members of different genders and ages to take part in realistic cooking drills.

Participants carry containers holding 20 liters of water over unstable ground, handle equipment designed for large quantities of food and work in dim lighting or structurally compromised kitchens. Retired construction workers and office employees discover that these tasks require skills and strength that have little to do with traditional ideas about housework.

The exercises make an overlooked workload visible. Preparing three meals a day for hundreds of evacuees requires a team of trained, physically capable adults working in shifts. Assignments need to reflect people's abilities and availability, rather than an assumption that all women should cook.

Community manuals can be difficult to challenge because they have been passed down for generations. Mizuguchi's concern is that residents take those instructions for granted, even when they place a heavily disproportionate burden on particular people during a disaster.

Under emergency conditions, an inherited division of duties can produce burnout and medical emergencies. Residents responsible for feeding everyone may themselves become unable to continue, weakening the support available to the entire shelter.

Practical drills allow participants to recognize those risks before a real evacuation. Carrying water and handling hot food makes the need for training, shared responsibility and regular rest more immediate than an abstract discussion about equality.

Two Campaigners Enter the Prefectural Council

Yukari Kaneko, 58, representative of the Kushiro civil group Team Kushiro Bosai Joshi, secured an appointment to Hokkaido's prefectural disaster prevention council during the current fiscal year, alongside Mizuguchi. Kaneko runs her own construction company and works to involve women from varied professional backgrounds in disaster awareness.

Her network includes public school teachers, cooks employed at nursing care facilities and retail workers. Those occupations bring different experiences of children, older residents, food preparation and everyday community needs into discussions usually dominated by established emergency organizations.

A prefectural government official acknowledged that few women hold leadership posts in traditional community organizations in Hokkaido's smaller municipalities. Disaster prevention councils can consequently consist almost entirely of retired men.

That recruitment pattern helps explain why adding women requires active efforts to find participants beyond the usual leadership positions. Waiting for existing organizations to change their membership leaves the same narrow group making decisions in the meantime.

Kaneko attended her first prefectural council meeting in February. She wants to participate in smaller discussions where members can examine details and where her proposals can receive closer attention.

Kaneko, the construction company owner and Team Kushiro Bosai Joshi representative, described the role she hopes to play:

I would also like to attend small meetings, where detailed discussions can be held in small groups, and send out my messages

Her appointment provides an opportunity to bring community experience into formal planning. The continuing gap between the municipal and prefectural representation figures also shows how much of that work remains at the local level, where residents organize shelters and everyday preparedness.

Children's Crafts and Games Bring More People In

Kaneko's approach to preparedness uses enjoyment and creativity to reach people who may not attend conventional disaster meetings. She draws ideas from the different members of her network, connecting emergency preparation with activities that fit ordinary life.

In workshops, elementary school children make personal safety pouches and decorate them with stickers featuring their favorite cartoon characters. Making and personalizing an item helps children form an attachment to it, turning an abstract safety instruction into something familiar that they can remember during a stressful situation.

Her group also distributes digital material that teaches disaster prevention through interactive tablet games. People can use it during a commute or a break, rather than having to attend a meeting at a fixed time.

These activities give parents, educators, caregivers and business owners ways to participate outside traditional civil defense organizations and fire departments. They also reach working women who cannot attend daytime meetings dominated by retired men.

The community activities and council appointments address different parts of the same problem. Workshops and games widen participation, while council membership gives campaigners a route to influence formal policy. Both matter when the people affected by emergency plans are more varied than the organizations that usually write them.

Listening Beyond the People Who Hold Seats

Mutsuko Tendo, professor emeritus at Miyagi Gakuin Women's University, has studied gender and disaster for decades. She argues for an approach to policy that begins with the experiences of vulnerable people, including those who have little access to official meetings.

Tendo challenges the tendency in disaster affected communities to normalize and praise the stoic endurance of hardship. People who appear to be coping may have urgent needs that they cannot easily explain to an authority figure.

Tendo described dignity and support for vulnerable residents as central to disaster policy:

If we aim for lives with dignity, it is crucial to adopt an inclusive approach that stands by the most vulnerable

Women caring for children alone, older people with limited mobility and people with disabilities who need assistance can face disproportionate burdens. Evacuation centers and temporary housing also present problems that survivors may find difficult or dangerous to disclose, including sex crimes and domestic violence.

Overcrowded shelters, poorly monitored temporary housing and prolonged responsibility for cooking and caring for extended families can leave people with needs that standard emergency arrangements overlook. Listening requires more than assuming that everyone in a shelter faces the same circumstances.

Tendo also stresses that women have different experiences and needs. Increasing their numbers on councils is part of the response, but deeper cultural change and direct contact with isolated survivors are necessary to reach those who lack the connections or resources to attend public meetings.

Tendo urged authorities to extend that listening beyond council membership:

I hope the authorities will also listen carefully to the voices of people who are not represented in disaster prevention councils

Turning Representation Into Practical Protection

Hokkaido's debate connects council membership with decisions that become urgent in a shelter: who carries water, who prepares food, who gets rest and who receives payment. Changing those arrangements requires more than appointing a small number of women to otherwise unchanged institutions.

The reforms described by campaigners involve rewriting emergency protocols, retraining local leaders and recognizing large scale cooking as essential infrastructure work. Preparing 100 servings of hot soup while aftershocks continue requires resources, safety equipment, fair rotation and attention to hazard pay, just as other demanding emergency jobs do.

Fair rotation among all adults physically able to do the work would spread the burden. Recognition and compensation would also address the economic disadvantage experienced by women who supplied unpaid services after the 2011 disaster.

The issue reaches beyond Hokkaido. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters around the world, communities face greater pressure to use people's skills effectively and avoid exhausting particular groups. Unequal physical and financial burdens can weaken a community's ability to cope and lengthen recovery.

Mizuguchi's drills, Kaneko's community activities and Tendo's research point toward changes in both daily practice and formal decision making. Hokkaido's low representation figures show the continuing strength of traditional leadership structures, even as campaigners gain access to the prefectural council.

As of March 17, 2026, no timetable was given for broader changes to council membership or community disaster manuals. The choices made in Hokkaido in the coming years could influence emergency management standards elsewhere in Japan. Their practical test will be whether residents receive safer, fairer support when the next major earthquake strikes.

Key Points

• Women held 6.3% of municipal disaster prevention council seats in Hokkaido in 2025, the lowest share in Japan, and 18.8% of prefectural seats in 2026.
• After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, paid cleanup work and unpaid cooking and care contributed to unequal recovery for men and women.
• Emergency rice for 50 people requires about 9 liters of water; preparing 100 servings of tonjiru involves heavy ingredients, large pots and scald risks.
• Research into the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi Earthquake identified evacuation difficulties affecting older residents, particularly women living alone in rural areas.
• Ayaka Mizuguchi and Yukari Kaneko are bringing practical experience and wider community participation into disaster planning.
• Mutsuko Tendo urges authorities to listen to vulnerable residents, including people who have no representation on disaster prevention councils.