Asia is the most disaster-prone continent. The 2012 data on natural disasters in 28 Asian countries, released by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Belgian-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters on December 11th, 2012 showed that, from 1950 to 2011, nine out of ten people affected by disasters globally were in Asia; that of the top five disasters that created the most damage in 2012, three were in China; that China led the list of most disasters in 2012; and, that China was the only “multi-hazard”-prone country. Similarly, the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake was the greatest known earthquake ever to have hit Japan and one of the five strongest ever recorded earthquakes in the world since 1900.

Subsequently, the Center for Rebuilding Sustainable Communities after Disasters at the University of Massachusetts Boston organized a conference in November 2012 to survey the best practices in post-disaster rebuilding efforts in China and Japan.

This edited book consists of selected papers from the proceedings of that event and previously invited contributions from leading scholars in post-disaster rebuilding in China, Japan and Namibia.