As I listened to testimony to the 9/11 Commission this week in New York, I began to wonder what will come out of these emotionally charged exchanges.

Did the Japanese government hold an inquiry after the bomb dropped on Hiroshima to explore how prepared emergency services were for the devastation? Was mass-casualty triage handled effectively? Was there an evacuation plan in place? Probably not; it was a matter of survival and burying the dead.

Sept. 11th has some similarities to Hiroshima. Both were devastations the world had never seen before. One was the beginning of a new type of war on our homeland, and the other ended a war in a now peaceful homeland.

Japan is much more prepared for major disasters -- natural or manmade -- than it was 60 years ago. The country has been hit with weapons of mass destruction, earthquakes, typhoons and tsunamis. It has a volcano (Mt. Fuji) within sight of one the most crowded cities in the world.

When we lived in Tokyo, we quickly learned our neighborhood's evacuation route. Park areas marked by international signs provided sites for families to gather in the event of a disaster, and trained citizens would direct citizens in evacuations.

Each neighborhood in Tokyo has a citizen corps that holds regular meetings for briefings on recent crimes in the area, to review fire safety and to discuss guidelines in the event of a disaster. Since Tokyo was destroyed several times by fire, to cause a fire in your home brings great shame because it endangers your fellow citizens. Even foreigners (gaijins) receive literature with lots of easy-to-understand pictures explaining the rules of living in Tokyo.

What does this have to do with the 9/11 Commission? What will come out of these meetings? Someone to blame? Who could have dreamed of dealing with that kind of catastrophe? The radios didn't work -- how could anything have worked in such a disaster? As for the long-standing rivalry between fire and police in New York City, does anyone honestly think the police would not have tried to communicate with the fire, or vice versa, if they could have?

But now that we know the unthinkable can happen, there are lessons to be learned. We're all learning to "think like terrorists" and plan and prepare for such scenarios.

Now, we have Community Emergency Response Teams modeled after the concept in Japan. The Department of Homeland Security recently announced a "Fire Corps" initiative, to enlist volunteers from our communities to assist fire department personnel with administrative duties, perform non-suppression and outreach efforts, and encourage fire safety and prevention -- another positive step. So is the National Incident Management System, unifying command principles and protocols across fire, police, EMS sectors and support from state and federal agencies.

We need to learn from the 9/11 Commission testimony -- not blame. Emergency responders across the United States and North America are getting the message. Right or wrong, the United States and the world changed that day. We still have a lot of work to do, but we are getting there.

Janet Wilmoth, Editor