Thinking Together, Working Together


September 5, 2014

Participants from both within and outside of affected areas engage in time and energy consuming cotton production in Fukushima. Photo: The People

Participants from both within and outside of affected areas engage in time and energy consuming cotton production in Fukushima. Photo: The People

Three years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan CWS continues to support local partners participation in the international conferences on disaster risk reduction, which link experience from Japan to global policy dialogue. Following is a story of a local female leader in Fukushima who recently delivered a presentation at the Sixth Asian Ministerial Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction (AMCDRR) in Bangkok.

Emiko Yoshida is president of a Civil Society Organization (CSO), called “The People,” which focuses on community development through a used clothes recycling project based in Iwaki City, the second biggest municipality in Fukushima Prefecture with a population of 330,000 in a southern coastal area. The area was heavily affected by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which devastated the nearby Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yoshida accepted the invitation to attend the conference because, she explained, “I realized that we people in Fukushima have responsibility to tell our experiences to other Asian people.”

As part of the Japan CSO Coalition for 2015 World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, of which CWS Japan is a founding member, Yoshida told conference participants about her experiences in the three years since the disaster and emphasized the importance of people working together to build community resilience. “The more time- and energy-consuming the activities are, the more solidarity they bring,” Yoshida told the group. She also emphasized that inviting people from non-affected areas as volunteers or study tour participants is a good way to foster understanding between affected and non-affected people.

In her hometown of Iwaki City, less than 50 miles from the site of the nuclear disaster, Yoshida is involved in relief activities for disaster affected people.  More than 20,000 evacuees from evacuation zone moved to Iwaki after the nuclear accident and most of them still have no clear ideas about their repatriation. Conflicts between the evacuees and the local Iwaki people have become serious as a result of the difference of their life situations as well as the amount of their compensation from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

Volunteers making dolls with organic cotton using the harvested cotton, with cotton seeds inside to be disseminated to all over Japan in solidarity for Fukushima. Photo: The People

Volunteers making dolls with organic cotton using the harvested cotton, with cotton seeds inside to be disseminated to all over Japan in solidarity for Fukushima. Photo: The People

Yoshida is involved in a community solar project, a Fukushima tour project for people from other parts of Japan and an organic cotton project in which local people and volunteers from outside Iwaki City cultivate and plant cotton seeds together. After harvesting the cotton, women in the project make fluff dolls, which they then send to citizens groups throughout Japan. The people who receive the seed-filled dolls then grow cotton in their communities and send seeds back to Fukushima.

Working together is a good way to narrow the gap between the evacuees and local citizens, Yoshida believes, and also serves to remind people in other parts of the country about Fukushima’s situation and to create a sense of solidarity among them.

In Bangkok, Yoshida met women leaders from the Philippines, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, all of whom encouraged her to share her experiences with people around the world. As a result, Yoshida now is organizing a tour to the coastal area of Fukushima for women leaders from other Asian countries who plan to participate in the March 2015 UN disaster risk reduction conference in Sendai, Japan. Yoshida will conduct a workshop for the women leaders and also take them to areas affected by the nuclear accident and to her project sites in Iwaki City.

“We don’t want to only share our agony and challenges after the nuclear accident. We also want the participants to join us thinking about how we can contribute to the reconstruction of disaster affected communities,” Yoshida said.  “I really appreciate the people who offered me this opportunity.”

In a final testament to the success of Yoshida’s presentation a woman participant from Cambodia asked Yoshida for a copy of the video on her projects and told her “We want to try similar projects in our area, too.”

CWS Japan will continue to act as the bridge between these grassroots voices and the global policy dialogue.