With an initial circulation of 8.03 million copies and a total of 330 pages per book, “TOKYO BOSAI” is one of the largest publication projects in the history of Japan’s government publicity materials. Distributing this book to all households in Tokyo with the goal of transforming public awareness on the subject of disaster prevention was a massive challenge.
If residents continue to think that disaster prevention is a mundane topic that can be safely ignored, it will be difficult for important information to be communicated to them. This is why our goal for this project was to add an entertaining touch to disaster prevention.

Our design of the book for this project was quite literally aimed at “readers of all generations.” Therefore, it was essential for us to incorporate design elements that possess entertainment value for all generations in a simple manner without any bias towards a specific target age group.

First of all, we made use of yellow and black stripes typically used at construction sites as the main set of visual cues for this project. In order to ensure that the book is easy to find in case of emergency and that it is unique to Tokyo, we based our key icons for urban disaster prevention on a color scheme that is widely recognized as one that denotes the presence of hazards. By limiting the number of printed colors in this way, the book can stand out from its surroundings.

To achieve our aim of fostering a disaster prevention movement that transcends generations, we incorporated the use of various design elements in the pages of the book.
Our design of “BOSAI-KUN (BOSAI = Prevention),” a character who uses a helmet to protect himself, was inspired by his potential appeal to young children. We also created character animations along the edges of the pages in the style of a flipbook.

During the editing process, we used the illustrations of Yuta Okamura, an artist familiar to teenagers, to simulate the experience of a disaster and allow readers to have fun while having a sense of what a disaster might feel like in reality. We also drew inspiration from our “OLIVE Handbook for Protecting your Life” and redesigned some of its illustrations before featuring them across 40 pages of “TOKYO BOSAI.”
In addition, we included manga drawings by Kaiji Kawaguchi, an artist who is highly popular with middle-aged readers, at the end of the book to depict the scenes of a disaster with extraordinary realism. The use of UD fonts in line with our emphasis on universal design makes the pages of the book easily readable even for the elderly.

By harnessing a variety of design techniques to offer entertainment that satisfies readers of all generations, we have successfully developed an unprecedented form of disaster prevention communication through “TOKYO BOSAI.”