Replication Data for: Aldrich, Daniel P. and Sawada, Yasuyuki. 2015. The physical and social determinants of mortality in the 3.11 tsunami. Social Science and Medicine

The human consequences of the 3.11 tsunami were not distributed equally across the municipalities of the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. Instead, the mortality rate from the massive waves varied tremendously from zero to ten percent of the local residential population. What accounts for this variation remains a critical question for researchers and policy makers alike. This paper uses a new, sui generis data set including all villages, towns, and cities on the Pacific Ocean side of the Tohoku region to untangle the factors connected to mortality during the disaster. With data on demographic, geophysical, infrastructure, social capital, and political conditions for 133 municipalities, we find that tsunami height, stocks of social capital, and level of political support for the long-ruling LDP strongly influenced mortality rates. Given the high probability of future large scale catastrophes, these findings have important policy implications for disaster mitigation policies in Japan and abroad. This dataset includes measures for the proportion of dead/missing from inundated area, tsunami height (meters), area of the municipality (square km), sea wall height (meters), coast line length, length of paved roads, population density (people/sq km), pre-tsunami mortality rate, percentage of population in fishing/farming, percentage single-person households, crimes per resident, LDP support in 2009 LH election, merged locality (0/1), new locality created through merger (0/1), and fire fighting expenditure for more than 120 coastal localities in the Tohoku region affected by the 11 March 2011 tsunami.