Tokyo. The capital city of Japan. It’s the country of kimonos, sushi and temples. Beautiful landscapes, huge cities and fresh powder snow. Japan has a lot to offer. Unfortunately, the country needs to deal with many natural disasters from time-to-time. This includes typhoons, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and vulcanic eruptions. A famous example is the deadly tsunami in 2011. Because of these natural disasters, there is more and more focus on risk management.
We travelled to Tokyo in October. We had many conversations with safety professionals and shared information about ‘evacuation policies in The Netherlands’ in order to learn from each other. Besides that, we had the possibility to give ‘evacuation training sessions’ to hospitals and participated on the Riscon show. We also learned a lot about the Japanese culture, which was beneficial during our trip.
In this travel report you can read all the details about our time in Japan.
Evacuation training – Japanese hospitals
Many Japanese hospitals organise three fire drills per year. In most of these situations, the fire wardens use blankets and beds to evacuate the bedridden patients. It is not so common to use evacuation sheets, evacuation chair or evacuation sledges. However, this will soon change. On October 5th, we visited Chiba Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, not far from Tokyo. During this visit, we gave evacuation training to hospital staff and the fire wardens. We also learned them how to evacuatie patients by using an S-CAPEPOD or S-CAPEPLUS.
The day after, we travelled to Doaikai hospital in Tokyo. They were looking for an evacuation alternative and were seeking to use assigned equipment to do the job.
In the video below you can see a short recap of the evacuation training at Chiba Hospital:
The Riscon show
On October 11, 12 and 13 we had a booth . This is a tradeshow for safety professionals and number one in Japan. The goal was to make the Japanese familiar with evacuation sheet S-CAPEPOD and evacuation mattress S-CAPEPLUS. More than 70.000 visitors travelled to the Tokyo Big Sight to spot the latest trends and developments in the safety industry. There was a lot of awareness for the upcoming Olympics in 2020. Japanese security managers are already preparing a lot for this event. Together with Ikue, Rika & Mie from Ingenuity, Bob and Piet were giving product demonstrations for the visitors.
One more thing
It is not something that you experience every day – seeing your face on the Japanese television. On Wednesday, October 11, Piet, Bob, Ikue & evacuation mattress S-CAPEPLUS were featured on the evening news of NHK, the Japanese BBC.
Watch the video:
Collaboration with Ingenuity
We started a cooperation with Ingenuity Inc, a company based in Tokyo. Ingenuity will work as sole distributor for the Japan area. Before closing our collaboration deal, we wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same line by setting strategic goals. Our goal for this collaboration is: ‘To leave no one behind during an emergency evacuation’.
With the range of evacuation equipment that is now available in Japan, we hope to make a difference when disaster strikes.
It’s always a great pleasure to be able to support our distributors at such events and we would like to thank the whole team at Ingenuity for their dedicated work in promoting our evacuation equipment in Japan. In case you have any questions about the evacuation equipment, Mrs. Fujita and her team will be absolutely happy to assist you.
Bob Hezemans demonstrate S-CAPEPOD evacuatiedoek in Chiba Ziekenhuis in Tokio, Japan