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.

Onahama July 30

I think we got promoted at the volunteer centre in Iwaki last week when they gave THJ a job quite a way South at Onahama about 50kms from the reactor.  We had to clean out this restaurant which was right on the water's edge and although protected by a large sea-wall and tucked up against a headland the first floor was in bits.

I'd driven around this place before looking for waves and remember the restaurant with the topless mermaid on the sign, and the big fish hanging out the front door but never ate there though.

This time there were 36 of us, a new record and we got the job done relatively easily. Word is starting to spread.

The volunteer centres will take a break next weekend for O-Bon the Japanese festival where it's believed the spirits of the ancestors return to the family home. Extra significance this year.

 Tales Mello from Rio de Janeiro on the bus home reading us his favourite part of Midsummer Night's Dream. Actually he was just (succesfully) trying to talk the flower into coming for a drink with us afterwards. Good on him though, he lives in Osaka and came to Tokyo on his summer holiday to join us for the day.

You pronounce his name with two syllables like  "Tal-es" but everyone uses the English pronounciation with one syllable of Tales. He said his father came to Japan and saw the book, "Samurai Tales" and was stoked to find there was a famous samurai called Samurai Tal-es. Sorry Dad.

Dirk, our resident Dutchman and entertainments-officer.

Thanks to Sylvain and Dirk for the photos.

The Painter

Yesterday we found out where all the squid came from that the supermarket owner told us about two weeks ago. This week we were clearing out a small complex of buildings just North of the river from the supermarket which turned out to be the seafood frying factory that lost all its squid. Before the tsunami hit, all the workers were able to escape up the hill to safety. The boss though, getting impatient as bosses tend to do, ran back down to check a few last things and had to be rescued as the wave rushed up the river. They all made it back OK, but a lesson there for bosses everywhere I think...

We were met by a woman who asked us to start first on her grandfather’s house which was the main house in the complex with an adjoining flat, then a barn and if we had time and finish off with the house she lived in. All these places were dotted around the main factory but before we could start there was a magnitude 7.3 earthquake and a tsunami warning. We could hear the emergency PA broadcasting warnings and fire engines were driving around warning of a tsunami. Combined with a high-tide we heard this could mean a possible 6 metre rise in sea level so we drove up to the evacuation area to wait it out. We returned after hearing the warning was actually for a 60cm tsunami but left the bus parked in a quick getaway spot at the bottom of the hill and all us team leaders were given whistles to get everyone out and back on the bus sharp if it looked like going pear-shaped. 30 mins later the tsunami warning was cancelled.

It was 34°C but felt much hotter in the sun. It was a big ask but we got through it much quicker than we thought and had the main house cleared just after lunch. The grandfather is now 87 and currently in hospital. He’s an avid painter and photographer though and we must have pulled more than a hundred paintings and old photos out of the back room. The woman must have been through the house and assured us she’d retrieved all the valuables she needed.

As we were starting to pile up our usual stock of mementos she was confidently saying it was OK she’d taken everything she needed and we could bin everything else. We piled them up separately for her anyway and the longer it went on, the more stuff we brought out and she slowly started to pour over the old photos, wedding albums, old paintings and old portraits that she’d either forgotten about or had no idea were in there. Dirk, my only fellow foreigner and sunburn victim on this trip, who kindly supplied a couple of these photos, did an outstanding job gently talking to her, chatting about how he still has one of the first black-and-white portraits ever taken of his great-grandfather and how nice it is to have to show his kids, and grandkids, and their kids… and just gave her plenty of space to mull things over and make up her own mind. Slowly she started gathering up some of the photos and putting them in her car.

We cleared out the barn in about 40mins and after another break did as much of the last house as we could in the final hour, about 80% of it. She was stoked we had time to get to her place, as she couldn’t have directly asked us to start on it first. Her 87-year old grandfather was in hospital so she couldn’t very well ask us to start on her house first and do his last.

As we all got back on the bus she stood alongside waving, bowing and thanking each of us, waving all the time till we drove out of sight.

On the way back we drove past the place we worked on five weeks ago and stopped off at the wrecked primary school where we’d heard the head teacher and others had written thank you messages on the second floor wall. Not a bad place to go to school, right by the beach... you’d think. The grass is starting to grow back but the overturned car is still there and further down there were lots more houses that just haven’t been started on yet… plenty more to do.

And finally, the main reason I reckon we were able to get so much done this time was we had one of the Blues Brothers on the team, although he did claim to be a dentist from Asakusa.

You couldn't write it

Last Tuesday, three days after cleaning out Granny's Place up North in Fukushima I finished work earlier than usual and took my mate up on an offer to go to a favourite place of his, Jitokko in Meguro. Not my usual area to hang out but he usually knows some good spots and I felt like a change so jumped at the chance.

It meant changing trains in Ebisu for one stop on the Yamanote line down to Meguro, just a two-minute trip. I used to ride the Yamanote line to work every day when I worked in Shinjuku but almost never after work these days. 

As we jammed ourselves into the train at Ebisu, I found myself standing next to a woman who looked sort of familiar. I thought she was looking at me as if she may have recognized me but wasn't too sure. I certainly didn't want to get arrested by staring too much and scaring her into calling the police like I was some kind of groper or stalker so there was a full minute where we were both kind of avoiding eye contact and both thinking, “no it can’t be... can it?”. Then it hit me so I leaned across and asked "Fukushima?" which was followed by a full minute of unbelievable surprise as we both realized yes, it really was. It was the grandaughter who we'd helped three days ago. 

I know coincidences happen, I know it's a small world, but to meet her, three days later, in a city of 35 million people, on a 2-minute crowded train that I don't normally ride has really got me thinking. There were more tears from her and we're hoping to meet up again with all the rest of the team soon.

When I got to my mate's new bar, there was a surprise as one of the girl's working there used to work at Mott's Bar in Shinjuku and is the girl in this picture I took over a year ago. She left Mott's a few months back and we weren't sure where she was working now, and then she turns up at my mate's new local.

Actually that second coincidence would have been much better on any other day, but after just meeting the grandaughter, it just didn't seem that unusual...

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...