Japan and the Netherlands have very different physical, historical and cultural contexts but they share a vulnerability to extreme flood related events and have, in both their (relatively) recent pasts, had to recover from such events: be they the floods of 1953 in the Netherlands or the tsunami that hit Japan’s east coast in 2011. This paper describes the process and results of two workshops investigating flood reconstruction responses undertaken by students representing five disciplines at TU Delft in the Netherlands. A particular workshop method was employed to promote an interdisciplinary design process and then design responses investigated for the (very real) Japanese case were transferred to a hypothetical disaster scenario for Vlissingen, in the south of the Netherlands. The conclusions reached focused as much on the efficacy of the workshop method as the particular design proposals for both cases as well as on what was learnt via the comparison between Japanese and Dutch, contexts and reconstruction philosophies.