March 2011 disaster unfolds quest by activists for better style of support for survivors (2)

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The evacuees to Fukuoka include many fatherless families of mothers and small children only. This reflects the difficulties of finding jobs for fathers in the unfamiliar places to which they have to evacuate. “Because we had to take care of these evacuees, we had to explore a support style with which we can meet their needs even more carefully,” Iida said.
So far, about 150 families have used services provided by his group, and a third of them have actually evacuated to Fukuoka.
Imamura’s group is pinning hopes on the possibility of small, community-based businesses as a model for a sustainable style of life in the future. These businesses will be feasible only if 500,000 to one million yen of profit can be reaped a year, among them small-scale poultry farming and timber and charcoal production from forest thinning, he said.
If these test projects turn out to be feasible, “we’d like to propose them to people in the affected areas and help secure jobs for their future life,” Imamura said. The bottom line is how to support the affected people in rehabilitating their life and to this end, how to secure stable employment for them, he said.
Support for the evacuees from the affected regions is seen to be carried out mainly by local government entities. But Iida’s cloud-style organization is aimed at combining public-sector organizations, private businesses in various sectors, volunteer groups and individual volunteers to each other in an effective manner. “Whoever does whatever can be done for the affected people. This is our policy,” he said.
His group organizes a “café” for young mothers who have evacuated to Fukuoka basically once a month, providing an opportunity for them to talk to each other about their matters of concern.
One of the member groups within the citizens’ network is involved in an activity for cleaning 200,000 pieces of damaged pictures collected from among the rubble by volunteers in a tsunami-hit area in Miyagi Prefecture.
The restored pictures will be displayed at community centers and other public facilities and then returned to owners.
The picture cleaning project is joined by many individual volunteers and supported by networks of volunteer groups, and these groups are linked to each other once again in different projects and through different networks.
The number of volunteers actually working in the affected areas, individual or not, is said to have decreased to 10 pct of about 170,000 just after the disaster. But networks of volunteer groups, if carefully managed, are expected to increase in the years ahead, at a time when Japanese are struggling for ways to cooperate in overcoming Japan's ordeal after the unprecedented disaster.