japan: surviving a tsunami, rebuilding communications

Japan: Surviving a tsunami, rebuilding communications

Critical infrastructure dependencyPower outagesNetwork resiliencyNuclear restriction zone monitoringMass communication imperativeGlobal Internet capacity impact

東日本大震災

380 6’ 12” N1420 51’ 36” E 11 03 2011

The world’s most influential telecom and media policy, regulatory affairs, and compliance journal

Japan: Surviving a tsunami, rebuilding communications


東日本大震災

380 6’ 12” N1420 51’ 36” E 11 03 2011

Critical infrastructure assumes new importance

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December 2011 Volume 39 Issue 5

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by Stephen McClelland

The Great East Japan Earthquake that occurred at 2:46 Japan Standard Time on the afternoon of 11 March 2011 will almost certainly count as the world’s worst natural disaster to hit a major developed country in modern times. The resultant tsunami devastated many areas in the northern part of Japan – known as the Tohoku region - as it was emerging from winter. More than 15 000 people have to date been confirmed dead, but several thousand remain unaccounted for months later. Most of the fatali-ties and devastation were as a result of the tsunami gener-ated by a sub-sea earthquake on the floor of the Pacific Ocean about 40 miles from the north east coast of Japan.

Japan is well-used to earthquakes but what happened in March - a Magnitude 9 event - was unprecedented. In the last hundred years, there have been several major earth-quakes although minor ones are a frequent, almost daily, occurrence in many parts of Japan. Major earthquakes, such as the Kobe disaster of 1995, have caused significant damage in urban areas on land, but tsunami – tidal waves – have had the power to overwhelm coastal communities as well. Even so, the last comparable Japanese tsunami - in terms of devastation and loss of life - was nearly 120 years ago, in 1896. But this 19th century predecessor occurred at a time when Japan was entering the modern era, with no complex economic systems, high rise buildings, high speed trains, heavy industries, power plants or nuclear reactors at risk.

Over a century later, the 2011 tsunami was ferocious enough to become a global phenomenon with physical and economic impact: it travelled across the Pacific region, and broke off new icebergs from the polar region. Astonishingly, geophysical analyses after the tsunami suggest that the 2011 earthquake was powerful enough not only to move the north-eastern coastline of Japan’s main island of Honshu in its entirety at least 2 metres to the east, but also affect planetary rotation.1

1 Quake moves Japan closer to the US and alters earth’s spin Kenneth Chang New York Times 13 March 2011

Reconstructing economies, networks and lives

In Japan, the tsunami was undeniably a terrifying experi-ence with significant loss of life. Much of the focus is now understandably on rebuilding and reconstruction of basic infrastructure in the affected areas. But the scale of the disaster – itself under intense post-calamity scrutiny in the country – provides a narrative posing many questions in an age when developed countries are critically depen-dent on these energy, transportation and communication facilities.

There are debates, for example, on developing effective crisis communications for large numbers of distressed, dispossessed and traumatized people. There is debate, too, on the effectiveness of present countermeasures and early warning systems. And there is debate on the depen-dency modern society may be placing on science and technology when it comes to protecting itself.

Still other questions deal with high-level organizational and leadership practice: the need to ensure supply chain viability as suppliers from many industries are critically dependent on the just-in-time style practices2, and even the place, management and systemic integrity of critical infrastructure industries in modern society and, perhaps too, the social responsibilities that providers in these crit-ical industries may carry, however implicitly, especially at a time of crisis. The outcomes of these narratives may well produce changes, not least in the infrastructure industries, and set new priorities in working and living patterns.

2 For example, Japan’s Toyota factories lost 5%, or 370 000 vehicles, of their annual output, because of disruption in Miyagi Prefecture although the company says it has no plans to relocate because of earthquake fears, citing currency effects as more strategically impor-tant (from the Toyota Way in the Business Blog, 20 October 2011, The Guardian, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk)


東日本大震災

380 6’ 12” N1420 51’ 36” E 11 03 2011

Rail stations without tracks. Tracks without stations. Iron ships flung onto dry land. Wooden homes reduced to matchwood. Power,

water and communications infrastructures damaged beyond repair. Oil refineries ablaze. An inundated nuclear reactor site

unable to cool itself and threatening widespread contami-nation of radioactivity. People without towns. Most

tragic of all, towns without people.

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ritical infrastructure

In the earth-quake zones, life for some is returning to normal. In preparation for recon-struction, an army of diggers and trucks are still clearing the region of what commentators suggest will amount to 25 million tons of rubble. In its wake, the tsunami left a significant part of the Tohoku region without power, water, commu-nications and essential services. The true extent of the damage is still being revised. But it’s been estimated, for example, that well over one hundred thousand buildings (including 12 hospitals) were destroyed but many more damaged. According to communications service provider NTT East, the tsunami rendered inoperable around 1.5 million lines, 16 exchange buildings (with a further 12 flooded), 28 000 telephone poles, 2 700km of aerial cable, and 1 700km of underground cable. Around 90 major transmission routes were rendered unusable.

But, of course, in such circumstances, communications becomes more critical than ever. Executives at NTT East say peak communications traffic on its fixed network surged to 9 times normal immediately following the disaster, although the company says this traffic was widely dispersed across the country; mobile operator NTT

DoCoMo reports that mobile traffic may have seen 50 times normal levels as millions of people tried to contact loved ones and the disaster relief effort swung into action. In addition to onshore disruption, the earthquake managed to sever several major submarine cable systems out in the Pacific and with onshore landing stations in Japan. In turn, this potentially triggered a global communications impact because Tokyo itself is a major international communica-tions hub for East Asia and the Pacific Rim. Significant earthquake disruption was felt in Tokyo, 230 miles away from the ocean floor earthquake. Power outages meant major rail systems were shut down, stranding hundreds of thousands of people.

The estimated financial costs of the disaster will inevitably continue to rise. Excluding the impact of the nuclear power plant incident at Fukushima, predictions are for at

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least a Yen16.9 trillion (USD 200 billion) bill, most of which is related to the destruction of buildings, but with a signif-icant amount for the replacement of infrastructure. As a result, the March 2011 earthquake will almost certainly be the world’s most expensive natural disaster on record.

Putting all of this back together has been taking place in scenes of unimaginable chaos. In the days after the tsunami, recovery crews were greeted repeatedly with astonishing scenes of devastation and appalling loss of life along the coastal towns and cities and even far inland. Aerial TV footage had already revealed a gigantic wall of water inundating the city of Natori, a great fire breaking out in Kesennuma City and several major oil refineries, and Sendai’s airport experiencing a cascade of water and mud covering its runways.

In the months since the disaster, some commentators in Japan have criticized what they see as a naïve belief in the power of technology – a belief that was severely shaken by a natural event capable of overwhelming everything in its path. In fact, much of the underlying technology did work. All of Japan’s speeding bullet trains – Shinkansen – were brought safely to a standstill from speeds of up to 300km per hour by Japan Rail’s own Urgent Earthquake Detection and Alarm System (UrEDAS) that powers off the network on detection of an earthquake. More widely, building structures (especially those outside the imme-diate tsunami area) designed to be resistant to earth-quakes in most cases remained intact.

Most damage and loss of life however was caused by the power of the tsunami and its associated water damage itself3 overwhelming what proved to be inadequate protection systems. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, for example, tsunami countermeasures were designed to protect against wave heights of 5.7 metres; in fact, the inundation height at the site was probably between 14 and 15 metres. Elsewhere, the coastal system of dykes worked when the tsunami height was lower than the dyke or where elevated expressways buffered communities from the tsunami impact. But in many cases, the tsunami simply overwhelmed existing defences and tragically, in some areas, even where people thought they were safe by moving to higher ground, evacuation also proved inadequate.

Japan has developed many tsunami detection systems and defences. A sophisticated array of sensor systems detected the earthquake and tsunami seconds after they came into being, but the tsunami height was underesti-mated: initial predictions of 3 metres were updated within minutes of the earthquake detection.4 In fact, the actual tsunami surpassed all the predictions. Whilst some areas

3 Around 92% of fatalities in the disaster were due to drowning.4 Japan’s tsunami warning systems retreats in Nature News, 11 August 2011 http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110811/full/news.2011.477.html

saw 10, or even 15, metre wave heights impact, other specific areas probably saw far higher waves still, possibly over 40 metres. The wave force was sufficient to channel a wall of water by some 40 metres up terrain in places such as the town of Onagawa and 10km inland in others.

Revisiting communicationsAt the communications infra-structure level, many facilities, even those thought protected, were destroyed; overall damage has been essentially at least a magnitude greater than in preceding earthquakes. Much

of the communications restoration has fallen to Japan’s incumbent carrier and infrastructure provider, NTT, and in particular the regional carrier of the group which serves the tsunami-affected areas, NTT East.5

In Shichigahama, the local exchange building disap-peared from its foundations. It was found after two days of searching by recovery teams having been thrown some 500 metres inland and buried under a mass of debris. In the coastal town of Onagawa, a major two storey NTT installation was submerged in its entirety. In Tokura, most of the exchange building was simply washed into the bay. Even exchange buildings, like those in Nobiru, constructed with walls of special concrete reinforcement to withstand typhoons, were devastated; the hardened walls may have been left intact but everything else was destroyed.

In many areas, local telecommunications access for narrow- and broadband networks was simply demolished. Carrying the aerial cable for fibre and copper transmis-sion line distribution, telephone poles – often constructed from concrete over a steel reinforcement mesh – facing the tsunami were toppled and the concrete stripped from the underlying mesh frame. Elsewhere, the ground lique-fied and swallowed up telephone poles in metre-deep

5 The NTT group is Japan’s longest-established communications service provider, originally the state-owned incumbent and now privat-ized. The Japanese market and policymaking has been influenced by US and European practice in the treatment of incumbent carriers and deregulation for a competitive marketplace, and particularly by the 1984 divestiture of AT&T. As a result, policymakers have ensured the company has been subject to, firstly privatization, marketplace deregu-lation, and then to functional separation in 1999. This series of policies has seen the creation of two operating companies in the group with local franchises (NTT West and NTT East) serving particular areas of Japan, a separate long distance, inter-regional, and international gateway provider (NTT Communications), and a major mobile cellular company offering 2G and 3G services in Japan (NTT DoCoMo). Other parts of the group provide data communications services and related facilities to enterprises. The group is within the top three communica-tions carriers worldwide. Within its franchised service area, NTT East is a vertically integrated service provider. NTT West and NTT East compa-nies have deployed fibre connectivity nationwide. With fibre available to about 90% of Japanese households nationwide, Japan is in the top two countries for deployment worldwide.

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Critical infrastructure

holes, whilst the same liquefaction thrust buried manhole tunnels into the air above ground.

One aspect of the disaster was the mutual reliance of infrastructure components on each other. In terms of customer outage, peak disruption for the NTT East network reached 1.5 million circuits. A significant number of facilities however that were not destroyed by the initial tsunami event were rendered inoperable by damaged power supplies and, in the hours after the event, by the gradual draining of the automatic battery backup facilities that came on stream when the primary power sources failed. “Failure of facilities was in many cases caused by a failure of power supplies” says Takashi Ebihara, Senior Manager responsible for the core network restoration at NTT East. But within in three days of the disaster, the restoration of commercial power supplies brought many non-functional systems into operation again; support was also available from the fleet of 100 mobile power units dispatched by the company. Meanwhile, says Kei Ikeda, Senior Manager responsible for the access network resto-ration, “the hardest decision of all was deciding which central offices to save in terms of operational capability.”

The most uncertain period, points out Masahide Oka, Senior Vice President at NTT East and the executive in overall charge of the recovery operations, remained the immediate aftermath of the tsunami when management was still trying to establish basic information on company staffing and availability in the region, and the extent of the devastation.

Here, Mr Oka emphasizes, trust in the operational management and, in particular, the NTT East General Managers of the affected areas was paramount, as only they could evaluate the on-the-ground situation and respond to it in the first days after the disaster. Strategic management was channelled into evaluating the bigger picture and the widespread uncertainties with significant implications that were being revealed on an hourly basis, says Mr Oka.

Within hours, the scale of destruction became clear, but also the potential for major economic impact as busi-nesses dependent on ICT were ceasing to function. In Miyagi, Sendai Suisan, a major fisheries supply and marketing co-operative supporting a key part of the local economy, was finding ICT and associated logistics indis-pensable, especially as it was supplying perishable food-stuffs. With NTT’s help, the market was actually able to open the day after the tsunami, although the ICT opera-tions of the business needed relocation within the week after its management building was deemed unsafe. “NTT helped a lot to keep our business alive,” says Fumiyoshi Shimanuki, Sendai Suisan’s Chairman.

Recovery and restoration means many different activi-ties need to take place in parallel even if support facilities are compromised. In the days that followed the tsunami, NTT East was preoccupied, not merely with clearing the debris of its own damaged facilities in preparation to restore them, but in also supporting the survivors of the earthquake as they were evacuated from the affected

Severed submarine pipes

Japan saw its inland trunk communication routes severed by the earthquake. Restoration was possible within 48 hours by the rerouting to form an additional bypass – in future, major onshore trunk routes will probably consist of three separate paths. But Japan is also a major communications hub for the Pacific Rim and carries traffic for onward routing to the US, China, and South East Asia. NTT Communications – responsible for long distance and inter-regional connectivity for the group - says at least 5 major cable systems were frac-tured – several in multiple places including arms of the Japan-US, China-US, APCN-2 and PC-1 systems. Immediately after the disaster, trans-Pacific Internet capacity available

temporarily slumped to 36% of its pre-earthquake figure (see graphic).

In some cases, restoration (through emergency rerouting of traffic from the affected cables onto other systems around the Pacific), was able to ameliorate the service disruption. Overall capacity was increased to around 70% of its pre-disaster levels by this means within 6 days of the disaster. Longer term restoration however required major repairs to the damaged cable systems involving specialist ships to haul the cable systems up from the ocean floor before repairing the fractures, followed by relaying of the cables. NTT Communications reports that all the affected cables were restored by early August 2011. “The policy was that NTT as a whole tried to avoid service disruption,” says Satoru Taira, Vice President in the Crisis Management Planning Office at NTT Communications. Mr Taira, who has had previous experience with the Taiwan earthquake (which also caused a major submarine cable outage) emphasizes a four-pronged strategy by the company: the design of a disaster-proof network and rapid disaster recovery through increased decentralization and redundancy (such as the three route redundancy plan), quake proof buildings, rapid recovery of communications at regional hubs, and finally, solution services for the disaster-hit areas, particularly in supporting evacuees.

The Big Picture

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Sendai

I WAT E P R E F EC T U R E

M I YAG I P R E F EC T U R E

F U KUS H I M A P R E F EC T U R E

OnagawaIshinomakiNobiru

Kesennuma

Ofunato

Natori

Restricted nuclear area

Fukushima City

Miyako

Minami-soma

Communications and the tsunamiRecovering a network and an information economy

Imag

es: T

.Ish

ii

From top: temporary central exchanges at Nobiru, NTT building at Onagawa flooded above top floor, exchange building with typoon hardened walls devastated at Nobiru. Background images: concrete building overturned at Onagawa

Below: geiger counter reading at Soma, Fukushima

12 March11 March 13 March

Peak traffic about 9 times normal

Event occurred at 2:46pm, peak traffic time 3:03pm, 11 March, maximum 70% traffic restraint

Peak post-tsunami national network traffic to Miyagi Prefecture

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Tokyo

J A P A N

P A C I F I C O C E A N

Earthquake Epicentre

Japan-US (to US) 5 August

PC-1 (to US) 26 May

China-US (to US) 15 May

Japan-US (to US) 16 April

PC-1 (to US)

TPE (to Taiwan & Korea)

APCN-2 (to China & Korea) 18 April

APCN-2 (to Taiwan)

Unaffected

Submarine cable systems (& restoration date)

Affected

The Japanese tsunami of 11 March 2001 wreaked unprec-edented damage on major communcations infrastruc-tures, both domestically, and, in terms of international connectivity to the outside world, along the coastline of the northeastern part of the country. Infrastructures, inter-dependent on each other,

failed at the onset of the tsunami or within hours after loss of power (in the case of communications networks).The force of the tsunami was strong enough to remove concrete buildings from their foundations and sever networks rendering on-the-spot repair impossible. In a crisis, instantaneous demand

on communications networks may be extremely high but very variable, raising impor-tant questions of traffic management and service

prioritization (Data source: NTT East, NTT

Communications).

Locations and routes shown are approximate

and for illustration purposes only

Num

ber

of b

roke

n ci

rcui

ts

12 March11 March 13 March 14 March

1.5 million circuits (385 exchanges)Optical

A/I

Communications circuit disruption due to power outages post-tsunami

Affected coastline expanded on opposite

page

Sendai

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areas. “One of the strengths of NTT as a group,” says Mr Ebihara, “has been that the group companies have been able to help NTT East in the recovery period, and NTT East has a presence in all the affected areas.”

Nearly 4000 public payphones were deployed around the region offering free telephony services, and 12 thousand existing payphones were also switched to free services. Some 400 fixed Internet connections, 204 wireless access locations and 277 WiFi locations were made available on a free of charge basis. Meanwhile, ingenious techniques were being used to bring up the networks themselves particularly in areas where they had been severed. Tempo-rary fibre optic lines were strung across rivers or on rail bridges, says Mr Ikeda, where main transmission conduits had failed. NTT’s own proprietary technology for tunnel-ling was used to provide new conduit paths underneath rivers ready for fibre optic deployment.

Lessons learnedThis disaster has stimulated an intense analysis on systemic failures across the system and a focus on management and technology lessons for the future. In fact, each natural disaster in the past 50 years has enabled NTT to configure a

rational response to improve its network. For NTT East, a major civil engineering programme to reposition critical communications centres on much higher ground has already begun.

Given the civil engineering required, this will be a lengthy task. The first phase of a two phase programme designed to provide complete restoration was completed by summer 2011; a second phase to focus on building relocation, additional transmission route bypass construc-tion, and further improvements in backup power systems (particularly in the replacement of battery systems in

critical facilities with generators) is scheduled for comple-tion in early 2012.

Key central offices in major cities such as Tokyo have battery, generator and on-site mobile generator backup separately to guard against outages. NTT East managers say that critical transmission lines, where possible, will be buried either underground or on a sub-fluvial basis. However, it is likely that most local access transmission facilities will remain aerial: a full network burial would be prohibitively expensive and not necessarily robust. The likely total cost of the full restoration programme has been estimated in the region of Yen 80 billion (around USD1 billion).

In the main, services have been either fully or nearly fully restored in the affected areas on a pro tem basis in many cases within a 50-day time horizon from the disaster. In the Miyagi area, around the regional capital of Sendai, the disaster damaged 153 communication buildings and disrupted 490 000 lines, principally in the Ishinomaki area to the north of the capital. By 30 March, only 23 damaged buildings and 22 000 disrupted lines remained, and one month later, this had become only 2 damaged buildings and 250 damaged lines mainly on small islands off the coast.

Resiliency

For Natsuo Minamikawa, the NTT East General Manager responsible for Miyagi Prefecture6 and overseeing the area communications rebuild, the biggest challenges rest on quality of service: “it is key: we are trying to build a resilient network.” He continues: “The first lesson we learned is how to deal with the power outage [of the affected network facilities]. This time the power outage was caused by the tsunami, but in other disasters, it could

6 Japan is administratively divided for local government purposes into Prefectures and the conurbations of Tokyo and Osaka. The Tohoku region (which saw most earthquake and tsunami damage) has six of these Prefectures: Miyagi, Iwate, Fukushima, Aomori, Akita, and Yamagata.

A communications recovery plan: NTT East executives discuss strategies. Left to right Masahide Oka, Natsuo Minamikawa, Takashi Ebihara, Kei Ikeda, Naoki Shibutani (Images: T.Ishii)

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be caused by anything. [In the event] the protection we prepared was probably not enough. The second lesson is that this is the first time an entire field office building has been disabled, although, of course, in the past, there have been instances of cable and line breaks. We need to learn from this disaster how to quickly restore facilities after significant damage. The third lesson is how to rebuild the network of the entire area so new advanced services can be deployed.”

In the next prefecture to the south, Fukushima, significant improvements have also been made. Here the disaster damaged 39 facilities and disrupted 110 000 lines. By 30 April this had reduced to 3 buildings and 10 000 disrupted lines, but these were mostly in the nuclear restriction zone. The zone continues to pose a challenge for reconstruction of services given the need to minimize exposure to radiation for those working in the region most seriously affected, around the Fukushima Daiichi plant (a second facility, Fukushima Daini, has also threat-ened radiation contamination and been ring-fenced with evacuation although from a smaller area).

The nuclear restriction zone still requires advanced mobile and broadband facilities, however, to service the reactor decommissioning work, in particular for monitoring conditions inside the plant, and to enable the decommis-sioning personnel to communicate with each other and the outside world.

There are several challenges in re-engineering infrastruc-ture more generally here. Fukushima is the third largest Prefecture in Japan with a wide variety of terrain from remote mountainous areas to an extensive coastline. The prefecture itself experiences extremes of climate and, apart from the tsunami and nuclear reactor challenges, also had to contend with storm and snow damage this year, says Naoki Shibutani, General Manager for NTT East at Fukushima.

One large scale implication is for network architecture itself. NTT supports the traditional copper network that supplies PSTN and ADSL services as well as the fibre based NGN. But in the event, NTT executives say that the point-to-point star configuration of the established PSTN was, if anything, more reliable than the newer NGN which saw major transmission routes – including backup facilities – severed. As with common practice in the past in terms of learning from previous disasters, NTT East is investi-gating improvements to its network architecture and design. Resiliency is one factor. The future may well lie in increasing tailoring of new networks to the applications and communities they serve, and providing specific needs through making the network as flexible as possible, says Mr Shibutani, himself one of the NGN network architects. “NTT East may well look towards network approaches that are more diverse and flexible,” says Mr Oka.

There are wider implications for critical infrastructures also, in particular in terms of inter-dependency. As the power supply challenges indicate, one infrastructure will need another infrastructure, says Mr Shibutani: “One of the serious problems is, for example, lack of water supply for drinking, washing and sanitation. [In the disaster] we were out of water and out of energy, and this is an area where we are not so well prepared. After all, we are specialists in network provision, not water and power infrastructures.” In turn, this will mean that co-operation with providers of other infrastructures is indispensable when this scale of disaster strikes.

Understanding behaviourGetting communications right is key, and perhaps even more important is getting the right sort of communica-tions made available to the people who need them. Human behaviour remains an important (but potentially unpredictable) factor in crisis management everywhere. It has special relevance when national disasters affect millions. Communications usage habits are extremely significant in this, as service providers acknowledge.

For users inside the disaster zone, surveys carried out by NTT indicated that the vast majority of people thought that mobile communications were indispensable and nearly 10% of those surveyed did use their mobiles to make voice calls – a far higher percentage than those who wanted to send emails from their mobiles. Intriguingly, for those outside the disaster zone and not directly affected by the disaster, mobiles were still important communica-tion tools. In Japan, mobile data services include both SMS and mobile email which is extremely popular.

Other attitudes were unearthed in the surveys. There were, for example, some usage of the emergency message boards and lines throughout the country but perhaps the most surprising finding was the preference for FM/community radio to keep in contact for those in the disaster-affected areas; more people said they considered TV to be an indispensable medium over radio, but in practice some seven times more people actually used radio as a medium than TV. Curiously, PC-based email services generally remained of low usage. Mr Oka suggests that communications patterns and habits may vary according to the situation, and “providers such as NTT must work alongside these community networks and behaviours to ensure resiliency and effectiveness in the future.”

Messaging

Following the Kobe earthquake of 1995, NTT intro-duced specially configured network-based applications – collectively called the Disaster Emergency Message Dial 171 service suite – which enables phone access to emergency messaging. A companion web service – Web

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Time for organizational DNA?

As part of its own identity, NTT East has attempted to embody its corporate values and this need for evolution in what it calls Tsunagu DNA [Connecting DNA], essentially a short-form description of what the company stands for. Tsunagu DNA refers to a connection with customers and particularly employees using organizational knowledge, capability, and attitude: reaching perhaps an almost emotional engagement. Masahide Oka says “As a carrier, connectivity is the main mission of this company…we are trying to pass the idea of Tsunagu DNA down through the company.” Other managers agree. “The brand [of Tsunagu DNA],” says Takashi Ebihara, “means NTT East will connect anyone, anywhere at any time.” But the Tsunagu DNA attitude in a time of crisis seems to reduce corporate

operations often involving complex and troubling demands to very deep and core values that managers can clearly depict and use to engage a sense of overriding mission.

Tsunagu DNA may be a brand, but branding in this case seems to go well beyond ‘normal’ mission statements, helpful straplines or catchy marketing messages that many organizations use – and often use superficially without thinking. In Fukushima, for example, a major part of Naoki Shibutani’s task, he says, has been the support of morale of the reconstruction workers in difficult conditions. Working in the face of enormous challenges has significant implications for organizational management practice and even the rights given and taken, expected and implied, between employer and employee. He continues: “Sometimes the hardship [here] is indeed very hard, and our staff may worry about their personal conditions, so it is important we improve attitudes and atmosphere. There are hundreds of very brave people who have sacrificed their family life [by working away from home] and these people are much admired,” points out Mr Shibutani.

But, he says, it comes back to the Tsunagu DNA concept and values – connecting with teams and transferring the skillsets to others. Fundamental management challenges remain however at all levels. He continues: “When the field workers retire – we lose about a hundred workers annually – we lose their ‘DNA’, because only 30 workers are inbound to replace them, and these new workers will require extensive training. Outsourcing is also a concern because we do not manage these workers directly and perhaps we effectively may have started to lose our own skills.” Mr Ebihara agrees that senior management have been rethinking the outsourcing strategies the group has pursued in recent years for operational efficiencies: “Top management now believe that holding these skillsets will make the company run more reliably.”

171 – provides a message board system. NTT East plan to release a major enhancement to these systems in 2012 which will be accessible from a variety of platforms. But the human touch may be everything, says Mr Ikeda.

In Iwate Prefecture, NTT East staff, at one point before the network was fully restored, were on their own initiative collecting handwritten messages from survivors in evacu-ation centres and passing them on to their loved ones via the 171 system itself. This ad hoc idea was extremely popular and was quickly extended to the entire Prefecture by the NTT East General Manager. Mr Ikeda suggests that service providers have learnt an important lesson: “this showed us that our mission is not merely transmitting data but making an emotional bond between people.”

WiFi futures?

Apart from the network architecture considerations to maximize reliability, it seemed mobile communications – perhaps, predictably – was vital in the immediate post-tsunami timeframe. But the NTT East experience also suggests that WiFi networks offering flexibility and fast service set-up may be particularly useful in the future in

supporting affected populations. The company is looking to establish dormant WiFi networks at convenience stores7 and other community gathering points that can be activated in emergencies to offer smartphone and tablet access. It seems likely that such stores will effec-tively become “information stations” with free, specially-configured voice payphones to enable services ranging from evacuation orders, safety confirmations, traffic information, disaster information and radio broadcasts to be mediated to the general public. Subscriber devices, too, may be enhanced with sophisticated power-saving capabilities and “blackout-ready” adaptors alongside many different kinds of local charging systems to circum-vent major outages.

For the restoration of mobile base stations that suffered from severed backhaul in the affected areas, NTT DoCoMo and NTT East utilized a variety of methods to restore service including point-to-point microwave and satellite links with mobile base station facilities. In some cases, now and in the future, mobile facilities will also be restored by so-called large zone schemes that enable

7 NTT has announced that this programme will first be rolled out across all 27 wards of Tokyo.

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single high elevation base stations to temporarily provide service coverage if groups of low elevation base stations are incapacitated.

But there are wider lessons in the face of such an extreme disaster, too. Japan may already be looking at funda-mental changes in how it prepares for major crises. Some may simply be too large. “In my personal opinion, perfect preparation for this scale of disaster is not possible even without the Fukushima nuclear problem,” says Mr Oka, “but we at NTT have learnt a lot from past disasters and in the case of each these disasters, there were new recom-mendations and procedures (such as the 171 service) that were implemented to prevent recurrence of the same problems.”

Future scenarios and new mindsetsNTT East, says Mr Oka, has also conducted an annual exercise with the Japanese Self Defense Force (the Japa-nese military) to anticipate operational requirements and challenges in the event of a (hypothetical) major earth-quake in central Tokyo. The scenario considers widespread disruption and impassable roads and railways and so relies extensively on helicopter-borne operations. It also empha-sizes the fast-set up of temporary communications for general use, power supply support, as well as advanced communications facilities such as satellite communications and broadband-mediated disaster monitoring facilities to enable accurate evaluation of the disaster.

In terms of Japanese society, detection and response may also be key. One strand, says Dr Mikio Ishiwatari, Senior Advisor at the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA), is to ensure that the available technology is further developed to its maximum capability to offer adequate warning. But says Dr Ishiwatari, there are key issues that need to be confronted and probably a need to “put people at the centre of the system”. He argues people themselves need to utilize the warning informa-tion for evacuation and they should also understand that the technology itself has limitations, particularly when it comes to critical parameters such as the determination of wave heights and the adequacy of coastal defences to counter them.

JICA’s Dr Ishiwatari says that in turn the protection systems should change in focus from being engineering-orientated to human-orientated, from supply-driven to demand-driven, and from structure-based responses to those based rather on a fundamental integration with the community.

These are big issues. But how organizations – particu-larly information and communication entities - configure themselves and their crisis responses in the face of ex-treme demand and disruption will be highly significant. In some sense, this reconfiguration may parallel itself with

this sense of community involvement. But in doing this it also poses challenges of how organizations especially in a deregulated, and perhaps fragmented, marketplace will actually provide a coherent and critical infrastructure on a national basis. Countering such extreme demands may imply an organizational size, capability, and deep but relatively permanent expertise is needed.

Flexible regulation?If the precise nature of a deregulated marketplace and organizational management are two factors in extreme situations, the role of policymaking is clearly another one. Exactly what policies are needed – and how flexible and even pro-competitive they should be in a dynamic environment is open to question. Certainly, the disaster experience seems to suggest that the competitive drive for new networks and services may well need to be balanced with perceptions of what is required in the national interest.

For Mr Oka, the question also suggests an analysis of future markets and competitors which might be quite different to those of the past: “Our competitors in Japan - or globally - are now actually over-the-top players [as opposed to other carriers] like Google and Apple.” He continues: “In a competitive market, each competitor necessarily has a priority for each client set. But in emer-gency situations, we need to start discussing priorities – and this probably needs the involvement of government and policymaking. In my personal opinion, infrastructure planning should be looking at the safety of Japan, and based on that societal priority as well. In the telecom-munications field, this kind of disaster may well provide a new structure or new roles in terms of collaboration. We need to be discussing what roles the industry will take on after this crisis.”

It is not a unique challenge, he points out. He suggests cyber-security has comparable multi-faceted dimensions. “Japanese industry has already been attacked by hackers, but if people think that NTT can handle this challenge all by itself, [they should understand] it is impossible. We need collaboration between players to protect people, but there are [cultural differences] between carriers and Internet players – Internet does not have the same sense of traditional management as carrier networks.”

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and interview responses of the staff of the Japan International

Co-operation Agency (JICA), NTT Communications, NTT East Tokyo, Miyagi and Fukushima offices, NTT DoCoMo, Sendai

Suisan, the civic centre of the town of Onagawa, and Toshinari and Eko Ishii of the CWell Institute.

International Institute of Communications

http://www.iicom.org

japan: surviving a tsunami, rebuilding communications

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