Stories of plucky kids win prize

Lessons delivered by kids about bearing up in the face of an awesome disaster nearly 100 years ago count every bit as much today, says University of Hong Kong historian Janet Borland, now honored for collating their stories.

She has won the Grace Abbott Book Prize, awarded annually by the international Society for the History of Children and Youth for the best book published in English on the history of the young.

She wrote Earthquake Children: Building Resilience from the Ruins of Tokyo, about the importance of children in helping society to recover from the Great Kanto earthquake.

The 7.9-magnitude quake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama area on September 1, 1923, with more than 140,000 deaths.

The assistant professor at HKU's department of Japanese studies and the first scholar of Japan to win the prize, Borland recounts how children were in makeshift schools within four weeks of the temblor and writing essays and drawing pictures about their experiences.

"Children and their creations were valued and used as harbingers of hope," Borland says. Now she hopes her book can help highlight the important role children have played - and can play - as agents of disaster preparedness.