{"id":86,"date":"2021-08-23T18:52:52","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T18:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/volunteers\/"},"modified":"2021-08-23T20:24:10","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:24:10","slug":"volunteers","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/migrated-posts\/volunteers\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I arrived at the JEN office shortly after 6pm.\u00a0 The office is located very close to Ishinomaki Station, on the second floor of a small office building that took on almost two meters of water during the tsunami, but has since been restored.\u00a0 I found about twelve staff members inside, all busily talking on cell phones or working on laptop computers, but when I announced myself they greeted me heartily.\u00a0 The orientation, I was informed, would not take place here, but at the place where the volunteers stay, in the Watanoha district.\u00a0 The van would be coming soon to take us there.\u00a0 I took a seat next to another Caucasian, who was obviously there for the same purpose.<\/div>\n
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This turned out to be Ian, a recent graduate of Bates, who had been in Japan for about a year on the JET Program, teaching English at a school in Tokushima Prefecture.\u00a0 Tokushima wasn\u2019t damaged by the quake or tsunami at all, but Ian felt the urge to come and help after seeing the images on TV.\u00a0 Also, he admitted a certain fascination with the idea of being able to witness the aftermath firsthand.\u00a0 I confessed the same fascination; one shared by almost everyone who comes to volunteer \u2013 at least on their first time.\u00a0 I wondered if this meant that there was no real difference between a gawker and a volunteer, especially in the eyes of the folks who had suffered the tsunami and were still living trying to get by with their day-to-day existences here.\u00a0 I figured I would probably find that out in the course of the ten days ahead.<\/p>\n

We were shortly joined by a third volunteer; a Chinese math teacher from Hong Kong named Lucas.\u00a0 Then one of the JEN staff told us that the van was waiting for us downstairs, so we grabbed our stuff and left.<\/p>\n

I had seen some of the road to Watanoha previously, on my visit to Ishinomaki with Hariu-san.\u00a0 Once we crossed the Kyu-Kitakami River, though, we were in new territory for me \u2013 and the devastation here appeared even worse than what I had seen around the station.\u00a0 If anything, it was on par with what Takumi had shown me in Mitsumata.\u00a0 We passed a line of \u201cbig box\u201d type stores \u2013 drug stores, pachinko parlors, and the like \u2013 that lined the east bank of the river.\u00a0 All that remained of them were their frames and enough siding, higher up on the building, to provide evidence of the kind of business it had been in better times.\u00a0 We also drove past a couple of elementary schools that now served as shelters.\u00a0 The line of portable toilets in front served as the marker.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The van pulled up to a pair of houses positioned close together by the foot of a large hill, about 3.5km from the ocean.\u00a0 The tsunami apparently stopped just short of here.\u00a0 The older of these two structures was \u201cWatanoha House,\u201d or as it had become abbreviated by the JEN staff and volunteers through constant reference \u201cWatanohaus.\u201d\u00a0 It was an old, country-style home, consisting of 7 rooms, a kitchen, and a toilet.\u00a0 Most of the rooms had tatami on the floors that had not been changed in what appeared to be a decade or so.\u00a0 The rooms were quite spacious, however, and the fact that the shoji<\/em> doors separating them were usually slid open created one big, communal gathering space for the people staying here.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While it had a certain rustic charm, this was hardly living in luxury.\u00a0 Fly paper streamers hung from the shoji<\/em> door frames between rooms, attesting the amount of insects that had spawned to consume the dead and rotting matter in the sludge left by the tsunami.\u00a0 Over the next ten days spent here I would walk into them on more than one occasion, a uniquely disgusting experience, especially when they were plastered with the carcasses of unfortunate insects.\u00a0 Despite these measures, flies pestered residents throughout their waking hours, although the JEN staff claimed that the fly population seemed to have declined since its peak in May and June.\u00a0 Mosquito-killing incense burners could be found in every room and were lit religiously in the evening, so that everything in the place \u2013 including our clothing and selves \u2013 bore a trace of the charred smell throughout the day.\u00a0 The major conveniences Watanohaus lacked were bathing facilities, a refrigerator, and enough amperage to allow the occupants to run even a vacuum cleaner and an electric fan simultaneously without throwing the main breaker.<\/p>\n

A quick look around revealed that the house was cluttered with supplies for the kind of work we would be doing.\u00a0 There were enough \u201csafely boots\u201d (boots with a steel toe and insole, to protect the wearer\u2019s feet from rocks, broken glass, and nails) in the entrance hall to equip a small army.\u00a0 The entrance hall also had boxes of work gloves, rubber gloves, salt candy to help ward off heat exhaustion, sunscreen, bug repellant, antiseptic sprays, and band-aids.\u00a0 I had brought all of these items with me, since the instructions I had received from the JEN Tokyo office recommended it.\u00a0 I realized what was going on here: like I eventually would too, many before me had left their supplies behind at Watanohaus after finishing their volunteer work.\u00a0 Most of us have no need for things like \u201csafety boots\u201d in our normal everyday lives, after all \u2013 much less so safety boots caked in tsunami sludge.<\/p>\n

At the house, were met another new volunteer: Atsuki, a native of Yamagata in his late twenties who now lived permanently in LA, where he was pursuing a career in music while working a day job on staff at a local college.\u00a0 Atsuki had driven directly from his family\u2019s home in Yamagata with a luxury van loaded with food and other supplies for everyone to use: we would not want for anything, apparently \u2013 except maybe for a bath.<\/p>\n

I arrived on a Tuesday, which was a day off for the volunteers.\u00a0 Most had gone to Sendai for the day, but they began to return at around 7pm.\u00a0 There was Don, a third-generation Japanese-American from LA, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, but with a youthful energy and attitude that made it hard to guess his age. \u00a0Don worked in insurance, but had taken time off to come over and help out. \u00a0Thanks to a childhood spent in Hawaii, he spoke English with an easy-going accent, as well as broken Japanese quite effectively.<\/p>\n

There was also Cat, from England via Harvard, from which she had recently graduated. Cat had been at Watanohaus the longest of any of the volunteers I met on that first evening \u2013 about three weeks by that point.\u00a0 She had been in Japan before \u2013 and was in fact Japanese on her mother\u2019s side \u2013 but did not speak the language.\u00a0 Without the benefit of understanding Japanese, she must have felt pretty isolated at times, especially when the house was crowded with Japanese volunteers.\u00a0 Whatever kept her at it in spite of this, she was an incredibly hard and persistent worker.\u00a0 Wherever we went, Cat was always the first to set work, the last to quit, and one of the most mud-caked by the end of the day.<\/p>\n

The final folks to arrive that evening were the Ishida family, \u201cOkaasan\u201d (mother) as we all took to calling her, and her two adult children, Koji and Junko.\u00a0 I got the impression that this was not their first time at Watanohaus.\u00a0 They seemed to know their way around the place very well.\u00a0 They proved to be an invaluable asset to the group: Koji ran a restaurant in Tokyo and Junko was training to be a massage therapist.\u00a0 Good food and an occasional massage to work out the kinks were a godsend after a long day of labor.<\/p>\n

This completed the group, except for one: Yamamoto Ryuji, or \u201cYama-chan\u201d as everyone seemed to call him.\u00a0 He was in Sendai on business until tomorrow, I was told.\u00a0 That business was an important one in places that had been hit by the tsunami: applying chemicals to reduce the stench left by the putrefying substances in the sludge.\u00a0 Don assured me that I would find Yama-chan to be a lot of fun.\u00a0 Cat assured me that he was crazy.<\/p>\n

Work detail<\/strong><\/p>\n

JEN works with neighborhoods in Ishinomaki city proper and the outlying communities.\u00a0 Most of the people I saw talking on cell phones in the office were probably either talking with people at the Tokyo main office or answering calls from the city\u2019s disaster response headquarters with requests for help.\u00a0 As one of many organizations doing work in the city, JEN handles much of the heavier lifting (but not the heaviest, which is the province of the Self Defense Forces, or increasingly contracted out to private salvage firms).\u00a0 They also have the transportation to take volunteers to communities further outside the city \u2013 and due to the municipal reconsolidation of a few years back, there are a lot of outlying areas.\u00a0 One of these is Higashihama, a small fishing community on the Oshika Peninsula, about 20km east (in a straight line) of Watanohaus, over roads that have been damaged by both the quake and the tsunami.<\/p>\n

Day One<\/span> (July 27), Higashihama:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next morning we headed out to Higashihama on a bus chartered by a group of employees of Mitsui & Co., Ltd.\u00a0 Mitsui had partnered with JEN to regularly send groups to work in Ishinomaki, although they didn\u2019t stay at Watanohaus with the individual volunteers, but commuted via charter bus from a hotel in Sendai.<\/p>\n

The main industry in Higashihama was cultivating the oysters that Miyagi is famous for.\u00a0 This is labor-intensive work, especially at first.\u00a0 Oysters apparently release their eggs into the water in August.\u00a0 The trick it to lower something into the water onto which as many eggs as possible will adhere and develop into oysters.\u00a0 Scallop shells imported from Hokkaido and Aomori Prefectures are used for this purpose, because the rough texture of the outside is the ideal surface to catch the eggs.\u00a0 By drilling a hole into the center of each shell, they can be strung like beads on long strands of wire, and then lowered into the ocean.\u00a0 Each strand consists of 37 flat half-shells (the bottom shell of the oyster), and 37 curved, or top shells, with spacers between them.\u00a0 Our job involved cleaning the shells of mud and sludge, and them stringing them onto the wires \u2013 the holes had already been drilled in them.\u00a0 A mountain of shells had somehow been rescued from the tsunami, but were so caked in the omnipresent sludge that even separating them was tough work.<\/p>\n

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Under normal circumstances, this work would be done be the residents of Higashihama, working in family units, with each family making its own shell strings, placing them in the ocean, and eventually harvesting the oysters for sale.\u00a0 The tsunami had taken so many lives from the community that these separate family businesses now had to band together to get the work done \u2013 and even then there were not enough hands available to do the work.\u00a0 That was where the volunteers came in.<\/p>\n

The process was easy enough to learn, and JEN volunteers had been doing it on-and-off for the past few weeks by the time I arrived.\u00a0 Sometimes they worked alongside the women of the village at stringing the shells; other times, like this first day for me, we worked alone.\u00a0 Today, we divided into two groups: half of us washing the shells and separating the flat ones from the rounded ones, the other half stringing these onto the wires.\u00a0 The work was not complex, but in the bright sunlight by the sea, it was tiring nonetheless.\u00a0 I realized half the way through the morning that I had forgotten to apply sunscreen.\u00a0 I would be burnt to a crisp for certain by the end of the day.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While we broke for lunch \u2013 consisting of convenience-store fare that we had purchased the night before \u2013 one of the men of the village came over to talk with us.\u00a0 He and some others had been working on a boat engine a short distance away.\u00a0 He greeted us in the same way that Takumi had greeted the volunteer from Kobe the day before: \u201cthanks for your help.\u201d\u00a0 He told us about the tsunami, which had risen as high as seven meters in Higashihama.\u00a0 He himself had only escaped the wave by climbing the hill behind the harbor, where a small Shinto shrine stands.\u00a0 He was stranded there for two days, because the harbor and most of the village had been reduced to a salt marsh.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ground here dropped about two meters due to the quake,\u201d he told us, \u201cyou\u2019ll see it when the tide comes in this afternoon \u2013 the concrete area gets covered in sea water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, later on we saw just that.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the harbor landing area at a bit past noon, during our break:<\/p>\n

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And here it is just before we quit work for the day:<\/p>\n

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The man looked at his watch and decided it was time for him to get back to work.\u00a0 He bid us farewell.\u00a0 \u201cThanks again.\u00a0 Really, if it wasn\u2019t for the volunteers, I doubt we\u2019d be able to make it at all.\u00a0 The prefectural and town governments are all overwhelmed as it is, and who knows when or even if the central government will get around to doing something about this mess.\u00a0 If we make it through this year in Higashihama, it\u2019s because of the volunteers.\u201d<\/p>\n

I certainly hope they make it.\u00a0 But even with the volunteers\u2019 help, the future is anything but bright for folks in communities like this.\u00a0 An entire village will try to make a living \u2013 somehow \u2013 on what will probably be less than half of the total harvest of oysters it had managed in years past.<\/p>\n

At 3:30 we called it quits and dragged our sun-burnt, salt-caked selves onto the bus.\u00a0 Later that evening, Atsuki drove us in his van to \u201cFutago-no-y\u016b,\u201d a hot spring bath located at a highway service area about 30 minutes drive from Watanohaus.\u00a0 After a long day in the hot sun, the bath felt great.\u00a0 We picked up food for tomorrow and plenty of beer for the night on our way home, and returned to a feast prepared for us by Koji.<\/p>\n

At midnight, it was lights out.\u00a0 Despite the flies and the fact that I had only a thin, woven mat to sleep on (I could have used one of the many sleeping bags left at the house, but it was so hot that I didn\u2019t even consider doing so), I slept better than I can remember doing in a long time.<\/p>\n

Day Two<\/span> (July 28), Aikawa:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The assignment for today was to head out to a small village in Aikawa \u2013 a bit further away on the Oshika Peninsula than Higashihama \u2013 and begin cleaning sludge and mud out of a stream that feeds into the ocean.\u00a0 This work was important for the local industry, which was cultivating wakame<\/em> seaweed, a staple of Japanese cuisine.\u00a0 The mud and sludge had been deposited in the stream when the tsunami sent a torrent of water blasting up it in the opposite direction of the normal current. \u00a0This stuff contained heavy oil and other pollutants that would continue to leach into the bay as long as it remained in the stream, thus ruining the seaweed.\u00a0 Our job was to bag up as much of the stuff as we could and haul it up and out of the riverbed to a big pile of sludge-filled bags deposited by earlier crews of volunteers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This was heavy work, using shovels and pick axes.\u00a0 As we dug into the mud, we found more than just sand, mud, and rocks \u2013 although there was plenty of that, too.\u00a0 Bits of insulation material were everywhere, suggesting the remnants of a house.\u00a0 Soon we began to find even bigger chunks of it: pieces of lumber, sections of beams, even an electric cord that had once been attached to the ceiling light fixture of someone\u2019s living room.\u00a0 Every so often, other signs of domestic life surfaced:\u00a0 I dug two waterlogged dictionaries and a high school math textbook out of the sediment, before uncovering the same kind of New Year\u2019s card file that Takumi had found the other day. We set this aside with the other personal effects, all of which would eventually end up at a local lost-and-found facility.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We dug on, bagging dirt as we did, but with the amount of house parts, books, and other signs of domestic life we were finding, it felt more like an archeological dig than a clean-up project.\u00a0 I think it was either Don or Atsuki who put the growing sense of uneasiness I was feeling into words as we shoveled: \u201cGod, I sure hope there isn\u2019t a body under here.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a hot and humid day, just like the day before, so our JEN supervisor, Endo-san, made us take frequent breaks to rehydrate.\u00a0 I took advantage of these times to walk around and observe what the tsunami had done to this village.\u00a0 The wave must have been enormous.\u00a0 The local elementary school, a three-story building standing about 200 meters inland and maybe 10 meters high than the shore, showed signs of damage up to the top floor.<\/p>\n

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The village lay in a narrow valley, at the bottom of which ran the stream we were working to clear.\u00a0 Endo-san told me that this geography acted to amplify the height of the wave as it came ashore.\u00a0 The tsunami followed the course of the stream upward, reaching about 3km inland in spite of the rise in height of the land from the shore as one moved upstream.<\/p>\n

This torrent not only carried mud and sludge, but also debris from the buildings further down stream.\u00a0 Much like the case with the roads in Ishinomaki, here too the torrent deposited much of the debris to the sides \u2013 with the exception of the stuff that ended up buried in the mud left with the water pulled back.<\/p>\n

For the most part, it was difficult to tell what most of the rubble had been prior to being pulverized.\u00a0 Every so often, though, something recognizable would catch the eye.<\/p>\n

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We took lunch at a point far enough upstream that there were no signs of rubble or sludge.\u00a0 This must have been a beautiful place prior to March 11 \u2013 here it still was.\u00a0 After a bit of camaraderie \u2013 including a watermelon-splitting contest (think pi\u00f1ata, only with a watermelon on the ground) \u2013 we went back to work.\u00a0 The afternoon heat was even less forgiving, though, so by 3pm Endo-san called it a day.\u00a0 We hauled the last of our sludge sacks to the ever-growing pile, got on the bus, and headed home.<\/p>\n

In all, it felt like we had barely made a dent in the little patch of mud had been working on.\u00a0 Endo-san told me that local residents and future dispatches of JEN volunteers would eventually take care of it.\u00a0 True, perhaps, but this was just one small piece of wreckage.\u00a0 The road back contained plenty of scenes of ruin that apparently had yet to be touched.<\/p>\n

Day Three<\/span> (July 29), Watanoha:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next morning we got a later start than usual.\u00a0 Today, we\u2019d be working right in the neighborhood, cleaning out the rain ducts along a section of road in Watanoha, further south (and closer to the ocean) than the area in which Watanohaus stood.<\/p>\n

I should probably explain what a \u201crain duct\u201d is.\u00a0 If you\u2019ve ever been to a Japanese city, there\u2019s a very good chance you have walked right on top of one, whether you noted the fact or not.\u00a0 Called sok\u014d <\/em>in Japanese, these trenches function as storm drains.\u00a0 Instead of laying sewer pipes underneath the road and placing large openings at intervals on the side of the road that allow rain water to empty into them, the Japanese approach is to construct fairly shallow concrete gutters on either side of the road.\u00a0 There are covered with rectangular concrete slabs that have a small indentation at one end, so that when a line of them is put in place on top of a rain duct there are small holes every 50cm or so through which rainwater drains into the duct below.\u00a0 The roads are constructed to be slightly higher in the middle than at the sides, so that the water will run off into these gutters.\u00a0 This makes it possible to keep the street clear of standing water, while at the same time maximizing the usable road surface \u2013 important considerations in a country where it rains a lot and<\/em> space is at a premium.<\/p>\n

But they only work if they are clear of obstruction.\u00a0 Fortunately, the design also allows for fairly easy maintenance: all you need to do is remove the slabs, and you have immediate access to the gutter below.\u00a0 The slabs are heavy, but there\u2019s a fairly simple tool for lifting them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When we did, we found that the gutters below on this section of road were packed solid with sludge, called hedoro<\/em> or odei<\/em> in Japanese.\u00a0 This stuff is a mixture of what the tsunami brought ashore from the bottom of the sea, plus whatever it then picked up along the way to its final point of deposit.\u00a0 The stuff we had to shovel out had the consistency of hard clay, after lying in these ducts for over four months.\u00a0 Even though the ducts in his part of town were only a bit over a foot deep, that was still a lot of heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The consistency alone would have been bad enough, but the hedoro<\/em> we encountered on this stretch of road contained a lot of debris that made it hard to get a shovel blade into it.\u00a0 Broken glass was common enough, but there were also miscellaneous pieces of metal, like those pictured below, which prevented easy shoveling.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These were probably from some sort of factory closer to the coast, and must have washed into the duct at points where the slabs were missing or got carried off by the tsunami.\u00a0 Sometimes, the size of the stuff we pulled out of these ducts was astounding.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a steel beam, roughly five feet in length.\u00a0 How the hell this got into the gutter is hard to figure.\u00a0 In addition to these items, we also pulled packs of cigarettes, a hot plate, an electric drill, and lots of other everyday items out of the sludge.\u00a0 Don told me of a volunteer he had heard about who once found a roll of ten-thousand yen bills in a gutter like this, totaling three million yen (roughly $38,000).\u00a0 JEN turned it over to municipal authorities, but with no name or address attached, it is highly unlikely that the rightful owner will be found.\u00a0 The rumor is that money like this will end up going to fund reconstruction projects in Ishinomaki.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>After about three hours of work, we had cleared our assigned section of ducts, brushed them out, and replaced the slabs on top of them.\u00a0 Throughout the job, we had the help of Ueshima-san, whose house stood along the section of road we were working.\u00a0 He had called the city to see if they could clear the rain ducts on his road, since it was flooding every time it rained; they turned the project over to JEN.<\/p>\n

Ueshima-san told me that the water reached almost two meters here.\u00a0 His house had been heavily damaged, but he was determined to stay here.\u00a0 As we spoke, I could here the sounds of a buzz saw and hammers pounding inside his house, attesting to his determination.\u00a0 Still, this is an area that may end up being ruled off-limits for residential use in the future \u2013 the ruling on that will be up to the prefectural and central governments, and is not expected anytime soon.\u00a0\u00a0 I wondered what would happen if the authorities decide that people have to leave this part of Watanoha.\u00a0 Across the street stood a row of public housing projects.\u00a0 The first and second floors were obviously damaged and empty, but people were living on the third and above.\u00a0 Here and there crews seemed to be at work repairing the lower floors.\u00a0 I hoped this meant that the verdict would be in favor of allowing people to stay, but Ueshima-san said this alone was no reason to be overly optimistic: different bureaucracies have different agendas.\u00a0 On the one hand, the city is desperately trying to get people to leave the evacuation shelters, but finding it hard to convince them to move into temporary housing far away from their neighborhoods.\u00a0 Restoring these apartments will at least give their original residents a place to leave the shelters for.\u00a0 What happened months or years down the road after they moved back in, however, was another matter for another bureaucracy to decide.<\/p>\n

Ueshima-san wasn\u2019t the only \u201clocal\u201d we came into contact with while working in the area, although he was the only one who worked along side of us.\u00a0 Others, mostly women from the housing project, came over to give us things to eat and drink.\u00a0 One gave us a big plastic bag bursting with convenience store bread and sandwiches \u2013 more than the whole crew could possibly eat.\u00a0 Later on, as we cleared ducts on a different street a few blocks away, another woman came by on a bicycle to give us each a fresh tenugui<\/em> towel to wipe our sweat away with.\u00a0 Yamanaka-san, our JEN supervisor for the day, told me that this was common.\u00a0 In most cases, the stuff we received was stuff that these women themselves had received from the city as disaster relief rations.\u00a0 It was more than they could use.\u00a0 As if to prove his point, at that moment a large truck pulled up and unloaded a stack of boxes in front of one of the apartment building to a group of waiting residents.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Be that as it may, we were surprised and touched by these gestures.\u00a0 \u201cYou\u2019re working really hard!\u00a0 Thanks a lot!\u201d\u00a0 Even if they had suspected us of coming in part to gawk at their misfortune, they didn\u2019t seem to hold it against us.<\/p>\n

By quitting time we had cleared the rain ducts on two separate sections of road, producing over 150 bags of sludge in the process, which we piled by the sides of the road for eventual collection by the city.\u00a0 Still, just like with the work we had done in the stream the day before, it felt like we had barely made a dent in the work remaining to be done: we had cleared a mere 75 meters or so of rain duct; in Watanoha alone there are probably over a hundred kilometers of such gutters.\u00a0 In all of Ishinomaki, or the affected areas in Miyagi?\u00a0 Who could even say?<\/p>\n

A few days later, when I was walking around the city, I saw a poster that I wish I had had a camera to take a picture of.\u00a0 It was a small announcement for a \u201cVolunteer Counseling Center.\u201d\u00a0 According the text, volunteers had a tendency to start to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the destruction and of the work that always remained to be done, no matter how long or hard one worked in the city.\u00a0 This was especially true of volunteers who knew the city well prior to the tsunami.\u00a0 The poster gave a number for volunteers who were feeling depressed to call.\u00a0 I could see how things could come to that.\u00a0 I had to admire the staff of JEN; guys like Endo and Yamanaka were \u201clocals,\u201d after all.<\/p>\n

Fellowship<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong>Although you could easily get overwhelmed by the amount of work that remained to be done if you chose to dwell upon it, for me so far, volunteering had its rewards.\u00a0 One of these was the gratitude that people in the communities we worked always showed us.\u00a0 I did not expect it, nor would I have been dismayed if people just ignored us, as some did.\u00a0 For the most part, though, when local residents pass a group of volunteers hard at work, they greet them with at least a \u201cgokuro-sama desu<\/em>\u201d: \u201cthanks for your help.\u201d\u00a0 And this in spite of the fact that volunteers are by no means a rare sight in Ishinomaki.\u00a0 On any given day that we were out in the streets of the city, we would see members of other organizations heading to other locations to do pretty much the same kinds of things we were doing with JEN.\u00a0 (Other groups, like Peace Boat Japan, had their volunteers wear brightly colored mesh vests with the group\u2019s name on the back.\u00a0 JEN was no frills, but with the humidity what it was, I was happy not to have to wear any more clothing than I had on already.)\u00a0 Similarly, it seems like you can\u2019t travel on the roads of the city without finding yourself behind a pickup, van, or dump truck with out-of-prefecture plates.\u00a0 These are just anecdotal evidence of the amount of people who are here to contribute their labor power on a daily basis.\u00a0 The citizens of the city seem to take it in stride.<\/p>\n

An even greater reward, though, was the sense of fellowship and solidarity that I felt with my fellow volunteers during these first few days.\u00a0 It would not be wrong to say that it grew over time, but it might be a bit misleading; to say that it \u201cgrew,\u201d after all, implies that the feeling wasn\u2019t really there from the start.\u00a0 Even before my first day on the job at Higashihama, though, I already felt perfectly at home with the group I had joined.\u00a0 The beers and conversation the first night helped foster this, of course, but I doubt I would have felt the same sense of belonging after sharing a few beers and conversation with any other random group of strangers.\u00a0 What brought us together was a sense of common purpose, as well as a feeling of sharing in the experience of it together.<\/p>\n

In some respects this shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise.\u00a0 Take a bunch of people with nothing necessarily in common and put them together, and it will take them some time to figured out who that have common points of interest with, or if they even want to bother trying to figure that out.\u00a0 But volunteers aren\u2019t like that; the reason for their gathering in the first place is the common point of interest.\u00a0 That first evening we talked a little bit about what we did in our \u201cnormal\u201d lives, but not much.\u00a0 Mostly, we talked about the tsunami, and listened to those who had been on the job awhile already tell us about what they had seen and done.\u00a0\u00a0 In some cases, this was a conversation carried on in a mix of languages, since the folks involved didn\u2019t share a complete fluency in either of their native tongues.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t seem to matter much.\u00a0 Nor did it matter when someone joined the group; there was no sense of a hierarchy, based on experience, seniority, or any other criteria.\u00a0 Everyone got along, and was willing to share whatever they had, and to buy more than they needed to bring back to Watanohaus, so that communal cache of food, drink, and supplies would always be full enough for everyone.<\/p>\n

This might have something to do with the kind of mutual aid and altruism that Rebecca Solnit observes in the aftermath of disaster.\u00a0 In a certain sense, the condition of being a volunteer, especially in the aftermath of a disaster, is very much like the emergency situations that Solnit examines: it represents a similar kind of suspension of our normal conditions of life that people in the midst of a disaster or emergency face.\u00a0 The difference, of course, is that the volunteer can leave and thus return to their normal situation whenever they want, but when I talked to JEN staff like Endo and Yamanaka about it, they couldn\u2019t recall any volunteers who left early because they couldn\u2019t hack it.\u00a0 If anything, they saw the opposite: people came back again and again, to the point that there were unexpected scenes of reunion at the house.<\/p>\n

Whether this kind of mutual aid took place in the shelters I couldn\u2019t say, but I had not expected to find it among people who were not actually victims of any disaster.<\/p>\n

After finishing the day\u2019s work of cleaning out rain ducts, I left the group at Watanohaus for a business hotel in the center of the city.\u00a0 Tomorrow I would attend the funeral for Takumi\u2019s family, so I figured a good night\u2019s sleep and a shower in the morning, before putting on my suit and catching a cab, would be much easier to manage at a hotel than at Watanohaus.\u00a0 It was a momentary return to normalcy, but I found that I wasn\u2019t really looking forward to going back just yet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I arrived at the JEN office shortly after 6pm.\u00a0 The office is located very close to Ishinomaki Station, on the second floor of a small office building that took on almost two meters of water during the tsunami, but has since been restored.\u00a0 I found about twelve staff members inside, all busily talking on cell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"parent":694,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions\/739"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/jbaylis3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}