Throughout the city, personal possessions, such as children’s toys, still litter the landscape in Ishinomaki. Photo: Damon Perry/CWS
It’s more than four months since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami struck the northeast cost of Japan, claiming thousands of lives and making thousands more homeless. More than 15,000 have been confirmed dead, and 7,000 more remain unaccounted for. In the hardest-hit prefectures of Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi, almost 200,000 people have been evacuated from their homes.
These people are still struggling to rebuild their lives whilst grieving for loved ones killed by the devastating waves of the tsunami. Yet for the most part, their story has fallen out of the mainstream media’s spotlight. It is to this struggle that ACT Alliance member CWS, through its Japanese partner organizations on the ground, has put its shoulder to the wheel.
In the last week of June, CWS re-visited the disaster-affected area, along with the representatives of three donor organizations, ACT members Lutheran World Relief, Week of Compassion and Norwegian Church Aid. We visited two of the hardest-hit prefectures, Iwate and Miyagi, seeing for ourselves the scale of the devastation wrought by the tsunami.
In Ishinomaki city, Miyagi prefecture, primary CWS partner, Peace Boat – a Japanese NGO based in Tokyo – has been working with local authorities and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces since mid-March, providing hot meals to evacuees, distributing relief items and clearing mud and debris from homes, schools and businesses.
Pointing to a map of the city, Peace Boat President, Takashi Yamamoto, says during Golden Week – the first week in May, a public holiday – Peace Boat volunteers cleaned more than 100 houses and almost 6,000 feet of sewers. The locals’ gratitude for Peace Boat’s efforts is apparent in the many letters it receives. “The reason that Ishinomaki is now able to be making moves towards recovery is thanks to the great energy that was given to us by the volunteers helping with the clean up,” said one resident. “We just cannot express enough of our thanks.”
But of the thousands of houses that were not destroyed, many have not yet been cleaned. A lot of work remains to be done to remove the black sludge and repair the damage to make them inhabitable again. And the rehabilitation effort is being hampered by a lack of volunteers. Yamamoto, or “Junior” as he’s affectionately known, says that since Golden Week, the number of volunteers has declined by half, to an average of 250 per week.
There has been great progress in cleaning the debris in the affected areas. Huge piles of scrap line the roads, sorted into different types of materials. Many roads have been cleared, allowing a return to normal traffic flows.
But across vast swathes of the cityscape – not just in Ishinomaki – there are countless ruins of houses and factories, and fields of wrecked, abandoned cars, sometimes stacked in heaps. We see the personal effects of families scattered all around, still covered in the mud brought by the intrusion of seawater.
We stop in one place where a lone building is surrounded by large open space. Where people’s houses once stood, only concrete foundations remain. Walking past a small Mickey Mouse soft toy, head down in the mud, Junior points to a hill in the background. “There was a nursery up there,” he says. “When the news of the tsunami first broke, the teachers drove the children down here to take them back to their homes. But as you can see, the tsunami devastated this place. All but one teacher and five children – the ones who stayed behind – survived. It was a tragic mistake.”
Peace Boat has mobilized almost 3,000 volunteers from Japan and abroad in Ishinomaki, who have contributed more than 25,000 working days to the relief effort. It is committed to continue its operations in the tsunami-affected areas for another two years. A steady flow of volunteers is needed not only for mud clearance and food distribution, but also for the informal role they play in providing psychosocial support to the survivors.
In communities where everyone has experienced tragic loss, people are disinclined to share their grief with neighbors. But the presence of volunteers from outside the community often provides the opportunity for people to open up and share stories of loss, which, for many, is a necessary part of the process of grieving.
The need for psychosocial support is expected to increase as more survivors move from evacuation centers to temporary shelters. Evacuation centers, such as the one we visited in Seiryoin Temple in Kesennuma City, provided more than a roof over the heads of the evacuees. They also served as hubs for communities to organize themselves and provide much needed emotional support to those taking refuge there. As people move into temporary, pre-fabricated housing, these communities are being broken apart and, as a result, the psychosocial support that they provided is effectively dissolving.
The Japanese government plans to build 80,000 temporary shelters. These plans are already suffering from delays and setbacks. There is a lack of suitable land to build them on, and contractors to do the work. We saw some shelters built just next to huge mounds of debris. Others have been built in car parks and school playgrounds. Some are located far from shops, a problem since most people in the affected areas lost their cars as well as their homes. Evacuees are especially reluctant to move into temporary shelters, since once they do they lose entitlement to food and other relief goods provided by the government.
The temporary shelters have an expected lifespan of two years. The future beyond this is uncertain for many, especially the elderly, who are not eligible for loans from the government to rebuild their houses. The future is likewise uncertain for many in the towns and cities in the affected areas who were self-employed in the fishing industry, which, as we saw in Kesennuma and Rikuzentakata cities, has been decimated. Since the self-employed are not entitled to government compensation, they and their families are likely to struggle to make ends meet and afford to find suitable long term housing.
For many survivors, the informal psychosocial support provided by Peace Boat volunteers is enough to help ease their suffering, but for others more professional support is required. Such support is being provided by another of CWS’s partners, Nippon International Cooperation for Community Development. Funded by CWS, NICCO is operating mobile psychological care clinics with psychotherapists in Natori and Rikuzentakata cities, and providing relaxation events at local community halls and temporary shelters, where it expects a growing demand as more people are moved from evacuation centers. NICCO plans additional programs, using music and sport, specifically targeting children. “By involving school staff and parents in these programs,” says NICCO’s Masateru Higashida, “children can be provided with a safe environment to express their feelings and come to terms with their loss.”
NICCO, like Peace Boat, plans to carry on its work in the disaster-affected areas of Japan for several years to come. CWS is likewise dedicated to continuing its support of the rehabilitation effort in Japan though its partners, who are best positioned to understand and help meet the survivors’ needs. For this reason, it is important to emphasize that the needs in the disaster-affected area are substantial and require a long term approach.
All three donor representatives that visited Japan in late June expressed how clearly these needs were apparent. They also expressed how impressed they were with CWS’s partner organizations. Summarizing the sentiments of the group, Trevor Knoblich of Lutheran World Relief said, “For us it’s been really interesting. It was well worth coming to learn how overwhelming the situation really is and what the needs are on the ground. It’s also been good to see the relationship CWS has with its partners.”