The Event

Last week’s trip up to Iwaki on Saturday Nov 11 was a bit different. The official volunteer centre run by the council has now officially closed, although they are still keeping a core of staff who will continue to liaise with volunteer groups to get help where it’s still needed. This time though we’d been invited up with about 500 others as part of a thank-you event the volunteer centre and council had arranged for those who had volunteered since the VC first opened on March 16.

The numbers were interesting. Since March 16, 14,452 volunteers had registered with the centre. The total number of participations was 49,986 in around 8 months which meant each volunteer had volunteered an average of about 3.5 times each. There had been 6,869 individual clean-up jobs requested of which they'd been able to fulfil 6,853, so if you include weekdays and weekends, there was an average of something like 208 volunteers per day, assigned to over 28 jobs per day, for nearly 8 months.

Since the event wasn't starting till 1:30pm, we were able to leave at a much more reasonable 9am and planned to pick up 21 takeaway lunches from Hataya supermarket in Hisanohama where we’d been so well received on the last trip. Also a way to give some money back to the local businesses instead of bringing food up from Tokyo. This time Daisuke was with us. Daisuke was one of the nine THJ members who helped with the original cleanup of the supermarket back in June but he missed the reunion last week so I was looking forward to re-introducing him to the mother and grandmother. Everything had been pretty much prepared in boxes for us to take and eat on the bus heading back to Iwaki as time was running short.

Unfortunately the first chance to re-introduce him to the family came as Sean was trying to pay for the lunches. You can imagine what followed with them refusing to take any payment and us nicely telling them that we didn’t come for a free meal and really wanted to pay. I mean we wanted to help them out , not make them pay for 21 lunches! Sean could see they weren’t going to just take it off us so he thrust two 10,000 yen notes under the till and we all ran out of the shop before she could give it back. What followed was like something out of an old black and white film where they came running after us, managed to grab Sylvain and roll up the two notes into his T-Shirt, so Sean had to once again run back to the shop, put the 20,000 back under the till and then run back to the safety of the bus. Not the best time to introduce Daisuke perhaps.


It was all good natured but there was no way we weren’t going to pay. We thought we were home and dry, but they came up to the bus to wave us off smiling and looking a little embarrassed at taking the money before granny spotted her chance and threw the money back into the bus onto the stair-well as we were closing the doors. Once again Sean had to push it back into their hands, jump back on the bus and shut the doors sharp-ish. Lovely people and the lunch was well worth 1,000 yen each.

We made it back to Iwaki with a few minutes to spare and made our way to the very swish looking arts centre where the event was being held. The mood was certainly more upbeat than previous trips. The focus for this one day seemed to be on celebrating how far we’d come, instead of how far there was to go. There were other days for that, today was meant to be a thank-you and a celebration.

They opened with a couple of speeches from the head of hte organizing committe and the city mayor before showing a collage of volunteer photos set to the sounds of “I Love You Baby, Fukushima” which is a regular sing-song on the bus on the way back. I took a dodgy shaky video which I'll try to upload on YouTube at some point.

 There was then a panel discussion hosted by the main organizers of the VC with ten folks who had been heavily involved, one being the THJ main man himself, Sean Muramatsu. The others were teachers, a long-term volunteer, a surfer, a real bunch of characters. There were a few serious moments but overall the tone was of sharing good memories and stories. One guy said it was hard to describe volunteering as “fun” after the thousands of people that had lost their lives in the tsunami, but for him, looking back, the teamwork, the friendships forged, the memories made, meant that in hindsight there really were moments of “fun”. I know what he meant.

They closed with a concert by The (big-In-Japan) Gospellers. A young doo-wop five piece who could actually sing and spent as much time telling stories and chatting as they did singing. The guy singing the bass-lines sounded like Barry White but I’ve seen more meat on a butcher’s pencil. He was a skinny little bugger but couldn’t half hit those low notes.

I had chance to chat to the surfer from the panel discussion during the interval. He lived in Kooriyama, Fukushima and said he hadn’t surfed since the tsunami and was saving the rest of 2011 for volunteering. He might get back in the water in 2012 but hadn’t decided yet. We’d both surfed at Toyoma and both knew the little surf-shop on the front that had been swept away. It was good to hear the guy who owned it evacuated in time and managed to survive. Today was a time for looking forward though. He was drinking Guinness but the bar had run out of beer. I refused his kind offer of a swig of his and toasted him with my fist and a smile. Good guy, hope we both get in the water more in 2012.


The trip back was a little more subdued than usual, mainly due to there being only one beer each and no time to stop to buy more. I’m sure Sean did this on purpose to avoid us peaking too soon since we were heading back to our own THJ celebration event in Tokyo where another 20 or so would be turning up, including the woman who’s grandmother’s house we helped clean-up in Hisanohama, who I miraculously bumped into on the train in Tokyo 3 days later.

Back in Tokyo in the shadow of Phillipe Starck’s awful Asahi beer building, or as it’s known locally the Unko (Turd) building, we kicked off our own event. During my opening toast I was wishing I’d had more than just the one beer on the bus but everything seemed to go OK. I tried to convey the feeling that we were all lucky to have been part of the THJ effort and this meant anyone who had ever attended, donated to, publicised or supported THJ in any way since their first missions in April. The team have become like an extended family and I know I've made some friendships that will probably last a lifetime.

Even though we were from very different backgrounds, with different interests, there are things that we won’t forget. More than just the devastation up North, there were the people we’ve been lucky to meet up there, the characters, their stories, their hardships, their optimism. The team work, the buddy system, the mud and the sweat. The kids we met, Dirk with his balloon animals, and the smiles on the kids’ faces. The emotional goodbyes after a job and the tears of gratitude. The speeches in the bus coming home, all the songs that were sung, and the new facebook friendships forged every Sunday morning after every trip. And at last, the first signs of a slow recovery.

This was what I remember from the trips so far, and a big hats-off to Sean, Daisuke, Taki, Sylvain and all the other Team Leaders for kicking off Team HEAL Japan, keeping it going and making everyone feel welcome.

Sadly I didn’t win the 17-year old whisky bingo prize we kept after being given it by the bear of a guy who’s house we cleaned up on June 4, but fittingly it went to the lad who threw out the most tatami mats that day and probably sweated more than any of us. Who knew he was a black belt in bingo too?

 
Till next time! There's still plenty more to do.

Granny's Place

Back in Fukushima yesterday with Team Heal Japan to clear out a much older house directly opposite the whisky collector's house from 2 weeks ago. There was no way to save this wooden house so we were clearing it out so it could be knocked down. About 2pm a woman and her mother turned up who were the daughter and grandaughter of the owner. They told us that the grandmother who lived here had died some months before the tsunami but they hadn't been able to clear out the house before. There were a lot more personal items around this time and they both quietly went through the huge pile of photos, letters, documents and trophies etc finding photos of the grandaughter as a kid with her grandmother and who knows what else.

We also managed to save about three beer-barrel size barrels of miso paste from the back room which her grandmother was famous for making. We opened the first barrel to check the miso was still useable and it was fine. The fact that we'd been able to rescue her last batch brought and so many mementos brought both of them to tears.

The fourth barrel though had been knocked around and had been open for nearly four months so couldn't be saved. Miso is basically fermented soybeans and that last open barrel stunk to high heaven. Sometimes it's good to wear your mask...

Once again, met some great people and forged some hopefully lasting friendships. It's Sunday now and the grandaughter has just emailed THJ to thank us as she just couldn't believe that 26 people came up from Tokyo and beyond to help her and her mother. The clean-up effort covers many activities, sometimes you clean houses up and get them fit for living again, sometimes where the damage has been too much, you just have to clean them out and save what you can so the owners can knock them down and start again. Either way their reaction is the same and I'm really glad to have chance to be a small part of it with all these folks.

This time we made sure to take longer readings in the same places with the geiger counter. We let it settle for at least the full 160 seconds, usually more and the readings were around the 0.25 - 0.30 microSieverts per hour as opposed to about 0.15 when we left Tokyo, as expected. We ate lunch inside the local shrine building where it was back down to 0.13.

The Supermarket

There was an unofficial smaller THJ trip up to Iwaki, Fukushima again last Saturday. This time there were six of us but we were joined by the same movie actor who came with us about 3 weeks ago, Ken Matsuyama and another Ken, his mate Ken Miyake who is part of a pretty famous boy-band over here called V6. They were both certainly very safe from being pestered by me for an autograph. I thought the new Ken was the actor’s little brother till someone explained to me who he was. Fair play to them though, no prancing around, they got stuck right in like everyone else. With their driver there was ten of us.

This time we were just up the road from the whisky collector’s house the week before. It was pissing down with rain in the morning so we’d been assigned a job indoors, clearing out a small family-owned supermarket that had been trashed. It was the only supermarket around for miles and had been in business for 100 years. We were only 200 metres round the bend from last week but around here, very little was left and there was a lot of fire damage.

The mother and grandmother who ran the place told us a bus had exploded just up the road during the earthquake which set off a fire that raged through the area before the tsunami hit. As the waters receded the grandmother said there were hundreds of Isaki (Gruntfish) flapping around in the debris as well as loads of squid from a nearby processing plant. She said the stench was unbearable for the first month or two and they were finding squid wedged in everywhere.

Since it was a pretty big job we’d been hooked up with another team of six guys from Shizuoka, South-West of Tokyo. Most of the job was pretty standard stuff but after hosing down the floor inside things were getting really slippery underfoot. At one point I saw the youngest member of our crew break-dancing and thought he must have been trying to audition for the boy-band but he was actually just trying to stay upright on the slippery floor.

There was also this one big overturned refrigerated food display rack that just would not move. All 18 of us trying to slide it forward, left, back, right and forward again but absolutely nothing was happening, it was like the thing was nailed to the floor. We tried pulling it with ropes like a big tug-of-war, but one of the ropes snapped. We tried a couple of crowbars under it to try and shuffle it forward with no luck, we managed to roll it over 90° but that didn’t help either. We finally got it moving by counting everyone in and with a big grunt picked the thing straight up and ran it over to the corner. Grocery shopping will never be the same again.

When we were done we chatted some more with the mother and grandmother who insisted we take a carton of soft drinks and some thank-you food home with us. An interesting choice of pizza and donuts, but hey, after sweating and struggling with that overgrown bloody fridge, I’d have eaten anything!

Then, just after 3pm, photos were done and we were counting out the tools back into the van and getting ready to leave. I noticed about five or six small groups of between five and ten people in funeral dress. They had gathered at different spots in the rubble within a few hundred metres of us. The earthquake happened at 2:46pm and the tsunami would have taken 10-30 mins to reach the worst affected areas. They’d come to pay their respects at the exact time the tsunami hit on March 11. A sobering thought to go with our pizza and donuts on the drive home.

Thanks to Sylvain for most of these photos...

Geiger Counters & Barium Meals

Last week, one of the THJ guys, Murooka-san, brought along a handheld geiger counter up to Fukushima. There’s a 6-8 week waiting list for them in Japan these days but it had finally arrived. In Tokyo before we left it was reading around 0.15 microSieverts/hour, which seems to be around average. It’s hard to find data on the web that isn’t provided by the nuclear companies but according to Wikipedia, the average individual background radiation dose is 0.23μSv/h (0.00023mSv/h); 0.17μSv/h for Australians and 0.34μSv/h for Americans. (scroll down to the bit about hourly dose examples here)

 Up at the volunteer centre in Iwaki City which is about 50 kms from the reactor, it was reading about 0.25 microSieverts/hour. When we got to the cleanup location a bit further North just under 40kms from the reactor and where people are still living, it read between 0.25 and 0.42, and peaked at 0.57 microSieverts/hour as the rain came down. We'll check again this weekend but basically, what we saw agreed with the official readings available online.

To extrapolate the per-hour readings to per-year values, you’d think just multiply the hourly reading by 24, then multiply by 365, but sometimes the figure is adjusted down because people spend a lot of time indoors sleeping etc where the levels are lower than outdoors. Some say the max recommended level is 1 milliSievert per year, some say it’s 5 milliSieverts per year, others say it’s up to 20. Either way, looking at our worst case exposure, the max we saw of 0.57 microSieverts/hour works out to an annual dose of 5 milliSieverts per year. That’s a full year of standing outside, 24 hours a day, less than 40kms from the plant. Since we’re only up there for 7-hours once a week or so, we got much, much less.

 On the way home, I started thinking about my annual health check. Unusually for the rest of the world, in Japan most company health-checks include a barium meal, probably because stomach cancer is the most common cancer in Japan. The readings I found online for a barium meal varied from 2 milliSieverts on the NHS site to a whopping 15 milliSieverts on a private page written by what could have been the dubiously named Dr.Geoff Pain. Not knowing who to believe, again, I checked with the Medical Centre where I had my annual checkup only a few weeks ago. The nurse there was very helpful but had no idea and disappeared for 10 minutes to look up how many milliSieverts was in one dose.

She came back looking shocked saying it was actually between 10 and 20 milliSieverts (10,000 and 20,000 microSieverts) in one hit!  Dr Pain was right on the money. Whether it was 10 or 20 varied depending on your body type and how long your body took to get rid of it.

Although one big concentrated hit of radiation is not the same as prolonged exposure at a much lower level, depending on what Fukushima reading you took, and depending on how your body handles it, one medical checkup packed the equivalent punch of standing outside, 24 hours a day, less than 40kms from the nuclear plant, for between 2 to 10 YEARS!! And I’ve had four of the buggers!


They’re not even that reliable. A friend of mine had a barium meal in February 2010 and got the all-clear. He was then diagnosed with stomach cancer three months later and had to have ¾ of his stomach removed. Luckily he’s over it now and fitter than me these days.

Stomach camera option for me next year!

Hisanohama

Back up to Iwaki last weekend with Team Heal Japan this time clearing out smashed up houses near Hisanohama. One of the owners was a big bear of a bloke, someone you'd be glad to have on your side in a pub-fight. 

He was telling me his family was originally from a village just up above on the hillside. He'd always loved the ocean as a kid so saved all his money and finally moved his family down the hill, into his dream house by the beach about 9 years ago. Now he's going to have to rebuild back up on top and his insurance probably won't cover it. He still loves the ocean though, despite everything... just can't live next to it any more.

We found a couple of unopened bottles of whisky in the rubble. One was a supermarket cheapy but the other was a 17-year old Nikka, a surprisingly fine drop. He made us take them both home and waved us off jumping up and down like a 5-year old kid with tears in his eyes. I'd say we're even.

I think I've mentioned before how similar Fukushima and Iwaki is to S. Wales. Same size towns, similar countryside, same cold winters, (NOT the same hot summers) same grey/green/blue sea, ex-coal-mining community... till the government closed all the mines down in the 60s. And on top of all that, I couldn't help think of Aberavon looking at this.

THJ with the owner; middle row camouflage jacket. Whisky bottles: bottom left.

THJ

Joined the Team Heal Japan guys yesterday on a trip back up to Iwaki in Fukushima, this time on clean-up duty. We didn’t know where we’d actually be needed till we’d reported to the Iwaki volunteer centre where we were given a clean-up job up in Yotsukura, another favourite weekend surfing spot in days gone by.

Apparently the number of volunteers has dropped off significantly since the Golden Week holidays in early May so it seemed a good time to hook up with these guys. Iwaki is about 3 hours from Tokyo. I used to regularly bolt up here early on a Saturday morning for a one-day surf-trip so why not to do the same thing now.

This was the pile we had to clear and it took 10 guys, one day to do about 80% of it.

It’s not just as simple as shoveling it all into a wheelbarrow and trucking it off, everything has to be separated into burnable, non-burnable, wood, metal, stone, soil etc. They won't let you dispose of it at the proper sites if it’s all mixed up. There’s also so much debris that no-one’s sure exactly where it’s going to go.

 

The latest figures reckon that 280,000 homes have been damaged in addition to those destroyed, but they are far from finished counting yet. It took ten of us a full day to shift and sort this pile of rubble and that was with the owner chipping in so I’ll let you figure out how many months or more likely years it's going to take and how many people are needed to get through everything.

On the day of the tsunami the husband was in work about 30 minutes away and his wife was in the house on her own. They're the couple in the middle of the top picture. She said she couldn't hear any emergency announcements across the town's emergency PA system so when the TV reported a tsunami of 6 metres was headed their way, no-one in their street really believed it. After a strong earthquake they usually got a 20cm or 30 cm or 50 cm tsunami warning so even though this earthquake had been a belter, the word on the street was that the TV must have meant 60cms, no-one could believe it was really going to be 6 metres.

The wave rushed into the house and she was soon up to her shoulders in water in the middle of her living room. With the water rushing through the house she was pinned to the back wall and couldn’t move forward far enough to reach the stairs and the safety of the second floor, she just had to cover up and wait and hope the waters didn’t get any higher. She had no idea how long it went on for but the next morning she was black and blue with bruises from all the debris banging up against her while she was in the water.

One of her neighbours from across the road wasn’t so lucky and died, his body was found ten days later. His next-door-neighbour was washed across the road and into her front yard where he managed to scramble up a maple tree and cling on. he now calls it the Tree of Life. They are now living with their daughter about 20 minutes away, he still has his part-time job so they hope to rebuild the house soon. There were a few tears from the pair of them as they shared their story and thanked everyone for coming, but overall, they just couldn't stop smiling.

Anyway, hats off to Sean Muramatsu and the Team Heal Japan guys, they seem to really have it sorted and will be doing regular trips up here for the foreseeable future. If you're in Japan, click on the Team Heal Japan link, or find them on facebook, get in touch and come and join us. Hopefully we can get lots more folks along. There'll be a PayPal link on the website soon for donations to keep these trips going.

Tohoku: More Before

 I've been watching this home video quite a lot lately. I put it together after a surf-trip from Tokyo to Tohoku, Northern Japan in September 2004, four months before I moved up here. In fact, this trip played a big part in me making the move up here from Sydney.

Looking back, the choice of the first track, the cheery tone, the opening shot, all seem very inappropriate now, but it is what it is. After all, this was over 6 years ago when no-one had any idea what was coming. 

A lot of memories. Every surfer I met whether it was in Ibaraki, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi or Aomori was pleased to see me, there was no locals-only attitude, everyone was really mellow and just stoked. The waves weren't perfect, but man they were fun. It reminded me of why I got into surfing in the first place. Some more stills to follow at some point.

Fukushima: BEFORE

Just got back from work in Tokyo. The train was just as crowded on the way home as usual, the supermarket had shut early to save power and it's a public holiday on Monday... for those lucky enough to still have jobs and workplaces to go to.

Japan has raised the alert level from 4 to 5, which puts Fukushima on a par with not only Three-Mile-Island, but also a 1957 reactor fire at Windscale in the UK.

I know the coastline up there well from irregular surf-trips since 2004. On the train home tonight I couldn't help thinking about the people I've met up there and further North, some areas which are now famous only for black rivers overflowing and sweeping all before them. Hard to believe they're the same places looking at the news footage.

I might get round to putting up some more "before" pics another time, but wanted to put up these couple tonight to show what this area was really like. The first one above was taken in 2004 at Kumagawa (Bear River) a few miles South of the Fukushima-1 plant which you can see just beyond the red and white chimneys in the distance. A classic wave on it's day (obviously not this day) but not widely known. I'd normally hesitate to mention the exact location but after what's happened, I doubt there'll be a stampede of blow-in surfers crowding the line-up.

I was up there last September, handed over about $150 for some FCS fins to a cool local surfshop owner just up the road having packed in a rush and left mine back in Tokyo. I moaned at the time, but would be happy to give that guy much more now.

It's also hard not to think about the guys who are in the middle of all this trying to bring it under control. They've been called the Fukushima-50 cos it sounds good in the Press but there's more than 100 of them I think. We'll find out all in good time I suppose , but you've got to take your hat of to these guys.

 The one above was taken at sunrise in 2007 at Kidogawa, a beach about 3 miles South of the Fukushima-2 plant. You could camp on the beach with no hassles from anyone, spark up a small fire for cooking, then build it up for some hippy-TV-viewing, then clean up in the morning at the public hot-spring baths just across the river.

Changed forever...