Women’s Group Busy Making Present for Elementary School Graduates in Ofunato, Iwate Pref. (1)

Women’s Group Busy Making Present for Elementary School Graduates in Ofunato, Iwate Pref. (1)

March 7, 2012

A group of about 20 women at a temporary housing site in Matsuzaki Town, Ofunato City, Iwate Prefecture, are busy creating cloth-coated “matsubokkuri” pine cones as a present for graduates of a local elementary school.
The Yamagishi Temporary Housing Site Ladies’ Club, so called by the women’s group, was launched in November last year. The purpose was to keep those separately living at small housing units at the site from becoming isolated by providing an opportunity for residents to have communication with each other about their matters of concern. After the start of the group, members agreed to make handicrafts, mainly cloth-made footwear and small bags, in order to seek support for their life from a broad range of people by selling their goods. Their activity at a meeting place within the housing site has been helped by Toshio Niinuma, a city-appointed support manager in charge of the housing site.
The housing site is set up at the compounds of Matsuzaki Elementary School, which became an evacuation center to accommodate residents in the region just after the disaster. Classrooms and the gym at the school returned to normal a few months later, but the playground was converted into a site for temporary housing units. “We feel very sorry to them (schoolchildren), because we have taken away their place to play in,” said Yuriko Kikuchi, the leader of the women’s group. “Therefore, we have decided to make cute matsubokkuri pine cones as a present for the 50 graduates,” said Kukuchi, a former city office worker. (The second photo from the top shows Ms. Kikuchi holding a box filled with matsubokkuri pine cones.)

-Survivor: My life saved by 5-year-old granddaughter-
One year has passed since the disaster, but sad memories linked to the tsunami waves sometimes revisit the women at the Yamagishi housing site. Soon after the strong tremor occurred, Katsuyo Kushibiki went to Matsuzaki Elementary School and a nearby kindergarten because her five grandchildren were attending there. She received the grandchildren from teachers and took four of them to their homes. But she had to stay with a fifth, a five-year-old girl, named Rui, “because her parents were immediately unable to be here to receive their daughter,” said Kushibiki, a former school teacher. Accompanied with her husband, she climbed up to a higher place above their house with Rui, People were watching big tsunami waves coming from the offing from there, but “I spread myself over Rui’s body and held her tight so that she may not see the dreadful scene.” The scene was “too horrible for a small child to see,” she said. While looking up at her grandmother, Rui asked, “Grandma. Is this place all right? The girl repeatedly asked so. Kushibiki replied “It’s OK. It’s OK.” But she had become rather anxious. “I asked my husband what to do and then, he decided to escape to an even higher place.” That decision saved the life of the three.
Midori Kikuchi, who is unrelated to Yuriko Kikuchi, has been proud of her father, who originated “wakame” seaweed farming in the 1950s for the first time in Japan. She served as leader of the women’s club in her community before the disaster. But the tsunami disaster made her and other people in her community to live “a primitive life” in the first few weeks, said Midori Kikuchi. “We, women at the evacuation center, decided who should be in charge of what kind of job,” she said. “We had a lot of jobs there to do—washing clothes, cleaning, cooking and others. We went to a nearby swamp for washing and we cooked rice with the pot,” she recalled.
Kushibiki's husband became sick due to strong stress when they were at the evacuation facility. He consulted a doctor when a traveling medical team visited the facility and he was advised to move to a hospital in an inland city for a rest. Her husband has regained some health.

Tsunami Survivor Hopes to Work as Volunteer for Others in Otsuchi, Iwate Pref. (2)

Tsunami Survivor Hopes to Work as Volunteer for Others in Otsuchi, Iwate Pref. (2)

The handicraft group has made many series of Eco Tawashi brushes, such as those of small animals, famous characters and sweets. Members look forward to having a chat about the designs and colors for the next series. ”We are very much grateful to Keiko for her support, because this work helps us very much, helps us to encourage ourselves,” Sachiko Sato said. Fukudate and Kishiko Hakamada agreed. “We are having fun with this job,” Hakamada said.

-Area around Damaged Town Office Looks Like Ghost Town-
Otsuchi was a town with a population of about 15,000 before the disaster. Over 1,600 lives were lost in the tsunami waves. Despite a lapse of one year, scars of the tsunami damage still can be seen at many places in the town, among them the completely damaged building of the town office and the piers of a collapsed railway bridge over Otsuchi River. At the deserted town office, which stands like a monument, the clock on the front of the building points the time when the tsunami hit the town, 3:16 p.m. Before the main entrance to the building was a desk to lay flowers for the victims, including the 69-year-old town mayor, Koki Kato. Dozens of damaged vehicles, including a few fire engines, had been assembled at a place which used to be a business area near the town office building.
The building was on the busiest street in the town, which was lined by a police station, a post office, a fire station, a public library and banks and other commercial establishments. The area looked like a ghost town.

-“I’d like to go to workplace on foot. This is rather good for health”-
At present, about 4,700 people live at temporary housing units at a total of 48 sites, mainly on the foot of hills, in Otsuchi Town. Hakamada lives with her husband, who is a former fisherman. Her husband is slightly sick, but he works five days a week for a few hours for a town-sponsored job to collect the rubble.
Most of the survivors have also lost their vehicles in the tsunami waves. Furudate’s case is the same. She is willing to go to work at Kirari Station on foot, however. It takes about 15 minutes to go there on foot from her housing unit, but she does not mind. “I think this is good for my health, rather than killing my time alone at my small temporary house,” she said.

Tsunami Survivor Hopes to Work as Volunteer for Others in Otsuchi, Iwate Pref. (1)

Tsunami Survivor Hopes to Work as Volunteer for Others in Otsuchi, Iwate Pref. (1)

March 6, 2012

Mieko Furudate of Otsuchi Town, Iwate Prefecture, lives alone at a temporary housing unit in the town. She meets friends of her at a different temporary housing unit once a week, but she finds herself sometimes depressed for the rest of the week, except when she is making handicrafts. That is why she has decided to work as a volunteer at a rest house for tsunami-affected people in the town. The facility, built within a complex of temporary shops set up at the compounds of a damaged elementary school, is run by a volunteer group based in Tohno, an inland city of Iwate Prefecture.

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Wide areas from northeastern Japan to eastern Japan were jolted by an earthquake with a magnitude of a staggering 9.0 at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, and 30 to 40 minutes later, the first blows of tsunami waves started hitting towns and villages on 500 kilometers of coastlines facing the Pacific and claimed a total of about 19,000 lives. The survivors of the catastrophe, notably the killer tsunami waves, enter the second year of ordeal this month. They have spent hard days and sleepless nights at evacuation facilities and small temporary housing units since the disaster. But many of them are trying hard to get back on their feet while endeavoring to keep their spirits from being dampened by the sad memories a year ago Some tsunami survivors and volunteers working to support them will be taken up in serial articles which may be found from today.

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The meeting place for affected people in Otsuchi is named “Rest House Kirari Station” and its manager, Hidetoshi Yoshida, a volunteer activist from Saga Prefecture, southwestern Japan, likes to be called the “station master” and calls his staff “conductors.” “Ms. Furudate is welcome anytime. She already can be a member of our staff,” he said. (The photo at the top shows, from left to right, Ms. Sachiko Sato, Ms. Furudate and Mr. Yoshida standing in front of Kirari Station Rest House.)
Furudate lost her husband in the tsunami waves, which hit Otsuchi Town about 40 minutes after the earthquake rocked the region. She was working at a fishery processing factory near the port when the big tremor was felt. She expected strong tsunami waves would come and immediately decided to escape to a higher place with her colleagues.
On her way to the evacuation site, which was actually a Buddhist temple, she met her husband near their house. Because he appeared to be returning to their house to pick up something, she told him, “Escape right now! Just follow us!” That was the last moment she saw her husband. His body was found a few days later.
Furudate and her friends make what they call “Eco Tawashi” detergent-free scrubbing brushes. The material for the eco-friendly brushes, wool-like acrylic yarn, is supplied by Keiko Okabe, who has been helping to support the life of the survivors in Otsuchi since last summer. Okabe, a mother of a two-year-old boy who lives in an inland city of Iwate Prefecture, visits Otsuchi once a week and picks up their products. Then a network of supporters she belongs to sells the goods at events in support for tsunami survivors or through their website on the Internet.
Okabe sometimes personally takes part in such events to sell them. The revenue is used for activities for rehabilitation in the affected regions. (The second photo from the top shows, from left to right, Ms. Furudate, Ms. Okabe, Ms. Sato and Ms. Kishiko Hakamada. The third photo shows some of their products.)

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

(ADD)

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.

March 2011 disaster unfolds quest by activists for better style of support for survivors (1)

Feb. 20, 2012

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

The catastrophe of March 11, 2011, notably the earthquake-triggered tsunami waves and the ensuing nuclear plant accident, represented not only the beginning of ordeal for survivors but also the start of struggle by civic activists to better their style of support for disaster-hit people across Japan.
The devastating earthquake and the killer tsunami waves as well as the radioactive leakage accident are believed to have caused a population shift of almost a million from northeastern and eastern Japan to the rest of Japan.
At least 3,000 to 4,000 people have evacuated from the affected regions and neighboring areas to Fukuoka Prefecture, the most populous region in Kyushu, southwestern Japan, according to Shinichi Iida, a Fukuoka City-based NPO activist. About 70 percent of the evacuees have come from the greater Tokyo area. This reflects fears of radioactive contamination following the explosion of three of the six reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s No.1 Fukushima nuclear power station, whose cooling water system was damaged by the tsunami waves.
“We must be aware that the whole of Japan has become a disaster area,” said Iida, 35, a native of Tokyo. He represents the Fukuoka Citizens’ Network established as a nonprofit organization after the disaster to support the evacuees and other affected people. The network loosely links NPO groups and other interested organizations for support to disaster-hit people who need help. Efforts to support the affected people should be carried out in a comprehensive manner in a long-term perspective, Iida said in a recent interview.
Support activities by Iida’s group are divided into outward, direct jobs in disaster areas and inward jobs, such as counseling, mental care and nursery service for evacuee families. The number of member entities involved in these jobs has increased to about 70 from eight at the start, said Iida, who himself works as a business consultant and a food education adviser.
Kazuhiko Imamura, an NPO activity leader in Fukuoka, also believes that support for the disaster areas must be continued in the long run.
He inaugurated local supporters’ conference and helped organize workshops and various other events from just after the disaster. But he now focuses on a longer-term approach for finding an effective means of supporting the livelihood of the affected people. “We have to question ourselves if our life has been truly sustainable” following the latest disaster, he said. What is questioned now is the way of life in unaffected areas, not in affected areas, Imamura said.
Imamura, 53, a veterinary surgeon, questioned, “Whether can we, those who consume massive amounts of electricity, truly support people suffering from radioactive contamination in the areas around the Fukushima nuclear plant?“
The natural disaster claimed approximately 19,000 lives and, combined with the nuclear plant accident, dislocated hundreds of thousands of people mainly in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan.
Iida and his staff are busy sorting out life-related goods donated by supporters every time before supplying them to the evacuees in Fukuoka. Iida’s NPO group stores used refrigerators and other contributed big products in a warehouse, but small items, mainly those for kids, are piled up at a corner in his office.
The donated items are provided on a first-come-first-served basis free of charge to evacuees. So far, thousands of pieces of goods have been provided to 50 families. “The donated items we see here in today are limited, but we have lots of items in this office before putting them up on our web album” for supply to the evacuees, he said.

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Temples, shrines trying harder to spread happiness in post-quake Japan

Jan. 30, 2012

Temples, shrines trying harder to spread happiness in post-quake Japan

Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines are trying to make themselves more attractive to people and better serve their life in the first post-quake year this year in Japan.
At Kushida Shrine in Fukuoka, the biggest city in Kyushu, southwestern Japan, priests were busy last week decorating buildings in the premises toward the “mamemaki” bean-scattering party．
Major religious events in February include rituals linked to the “setsubun” season-dividing day, notably the mamemaki party in which celebrities and those chosen from among ordinary people throw soybeans in bags to worshipers while shouting “Good luck in, devils out.” The setsubun day, usually around the third day of February, heralds the beginning of spring in Japan.
As one of the setsubun decorations, the papier‐mâché　mask of the “otafuku” funny, moon-faced woman was established in front of the main gate to Kushida Shrine. Worshipers had to stoop to pass through the mouth of the woman’s mask, but many of them looked delighted, because it is believed that the otafuku, as a symbol of well-being, promises people good health and happiness for the year.
The devastating earthquake and the killer tsunami waves on March 11, 2011, claimed about 18,000 lives and dislocated hundreds of thousands of people mainly in the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan. But the disaster has also changed Japanese people’s view of life, reminding them of the importance of ties that bind families, friends and community people. The setsubun day comes at a time when many temples and shrines across the country are performing their rites more actively than ever to help cheer up people’s hearts.
Fears which spread among many people after the frightening disaster have largely come to subside, but as Japanese feel that something has changed in their life after the calamity, the series of relatively overlooked seasonal religious rites is expected to be an important opportunity for people to rethink about their life.

Season's Greetings from a Classical Japanese Poem Lover

Dec. 23, 2011

Season's Greetings from a classical Japanese poem lover with photos of the four seasons of Japanese children (from the top):

a little girl and her grandma at "Hinamatsuri" doll festival in Kaisei Town, Kanagawa Prefecture

a girl at flower carpet festival in Ginza, Tokyo

children dancing for a flea market attraction in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture

young girls writing hopes on wishing cards at "Tanabata" festival in Hiratsuka, Kanagawa Prefecture

a boy and a baby watching goats at county fair in Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture

a little girl and a mother at Yokohama Museum of Art Square in Yokohama

girls playing on Meganebashi bridge in Akizuki of Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture

little girls at "Hagoita" fair at Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo