For his part, Mr. Sáez started working as a civil engineer in the municipality of Talcahuano in 2007, three years before a magnitude of 8.8 earthquake hit off the coast of south-central Chile in 2010. Despite its history of major earthquakes such as those in  1835 and 1960, the South American country was unable to fully leverage the lessons learned from these experiences. “We were not prepared. There was a tsunami here in Talcahuano,” he said. “All failed. The authorities, the community, and the schools. We started to see what our reality is.”

This experience made him realize that people become more vulnerable after a disaster, which can lead to higher risks for them in the future. “Every disaster affects your quality of life,” Mr. Sáez said. He has also come to understand that when a disaster occurs, people have a chance to learn a lesson. But if they fail to make use of this rare opportunity, disasters will continue to repeat themselves, he said.

Although there is a facility in the Chilean capital city of Santiago that provides information or support in case of disaster, it tends to only give instructions on what people should have in an emergency. In 2010, for instance, the authorities failed to issue a warning about a tsunami risk and just told people to go back to their homes, and many died as a result. “The communities are not considered in disaster risk reduction policies,” Mr. Sáez said. “We didn’t expect a tsunami even though we live near the sea. We didn’t know how to prevent, how to mitigate, and how to respond. Necessary information is not often available for communities when they need it the most.”

To address a paucity of awareness about disaster preparedness in Chile, he believes that education is essential. Rather than trying to hide negative memories about disaster, he thinks it is important to educate people about preparedness to reduce future disaster risks and not to forget about past disaster experiences. “Remembering is the first step to avoid a disaster,” Mr. Sáez said.

At the 2016 JICA training, where Mr. Sáez and Dr. Watanabe met, a Kobe-based NPO called Plus Arts presented its own bosai or disaster risk reduction initiatives. The non-profit was founded to mark the 10-year anniversary of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, with its mission to help people learn about disaster risk reduction in a fun and playful way. This approach particularly appealed to Mr. Sáez as he had sought to focus on the education of children as a key element in his disaster preparedness efforts.

He was inspired and decided to take a page from Plus Arts’s playbook. The Japanese organization employs various game-like activities, such as a board game or a water bucket relay, to help familiarize children and their parents with how to respond to disaster situations. He set out to do what Dr. Watanabe calls “translate” or apply this method to disaster education that he was conducting back home in Talcahuano.

This grant-awarded project has been able to demonstrate that playful approaches are indeed effective in “translating” bosai or disaster risk reduction values from Japan to Chile and embedding preparedness in local resident’s day-to-day lives. This unique method, which is developed by Japanese non-profit Plus Arts, for making learning about bosai values a fun experience for children and adults alike is now taking root in the city of Talcahuano. But Dr. Watanabe and Mr. Sáez do not stop there. They feel that there is still a lot more to do to spread the message of disaster preparedness.

For her part, Dr. Watanabe hopes to receive more funding so that she can interview more older people in addition to the 12 interviewees she and Mr. Sáez already had. “It would be great to have more representatives of different parts of the community and do a similar activity with them, or maybe in different parts of Chile,” she said. “I would then be able to compare across different contexts. That would be really great.”

For that purpose, she is looking to make an application for a new source of funding in 2025, which she thinks would enable her to do more ethnographic research and better understand the family kinship dynamics in Chilean families. In some of the interviews she conducted in Talcahuano, she witnessed that parents were often busy, especially among vulnerable families, and could not even afford to sit and eat together with their children or listen and ask questions about what happened that day. “Boris and other people say children can communicate lessons about disaster risk reduction to their families. But in order to understand that, we need to understand how children communicate to others in their families, what spaces they have for communicating with their parents,” Dr. Watanabe said. “I want to understand better the role of children in family communication. To go deeper into what we have done here. That would be one of my dreams.”

In addition, there is another project she is interested in; it is about impacts of aging society and depopulation on disaster risk reduction efforts in local communities. In Japan, for instance, its population has been steadily declining and people are having fewer children. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in the number of single-person households. “How do you do community-based disaster preparedness when the family looks different and when there are fewer and fewer people?” she asked herself.

This demographic challenge is not just limited to aging societies like Japan. It is an issue facing Chile as well, for the country has the lowest fertility rate in Latin America. “No one talks about depopulation as a problem because the family is so important in Chile,” she said. The issue of disaster risk reduction efforts in the face of population decline is one of the next projects she intends to work on.

For his part, Mr. Sáez hopes that some children or teachers from Talcahuano will have a chance to travel to Japan and experience firsthand how disaster preparedness activities are conducted in Japan, just as he did himself when he came to JICA training sessions back in the 2010s. “I talk about my experience. But [if they have a chance to go to Japan,] everything can be their own experience. This would be better because they would be directly inspired by being in Japan themselves,” he said.

What’s more, he has another big dream: to make Talcahuano the capital of resilience. Chile has suffered disasters, but Mr. Sáez thinks the country has not always been well-prepared. To change that, his long-term idea is to build a facility dedicated to disaster risk reduction that would serve as a place to remember, experience, learn, play, show, and teach. “This facility could be [about] testimonies of disaster survivors,” he said. “This is the message of the elderly people. Their lives here are based on resilience.”

Having worked with Dr. Watanabe and other project members on disaster risk reduction through playful approaches, Mr. Sáez has come to believe strongly in the potential of the city. “Talcahuano could become the capital of resilience,” he said. “Why not? We have the experience. We have the knowledge. We have the people.”