千厩

Earlier this month, I travelled up to Japan, to Ichinoseki city in Iwate prefecture to help out a friend with her volunteer work. Emiko has been working there for close to one-and-a-half years, having started off with CRASH and then moving on to the 3.11 Iwate Church Network when CRASH started downsizing and handing over their bases to local churches.

I had served at Ichinoseki base once, in mid-2011, when it was still housed at a camp up in the mountains near Murone village, and most of the work was focused on physically clearing up debris and cleaning houses. Now though, the focus of the former CRASH bases and the 3.11 Network is on community building and emotional support.

I got into Narita at about 9.30am on the 9th on a JAL flight (though the breakfast was strangely tasteless) and since I was supposed to meet Louis and Chris for lunch as well as get back my pre-paid SIM card, plus my luggage was kinda heavy, I decided to take the airport bus to Tokorozawa. Not a good idea though, as for one, I had to pay ¥3,000 for the ticket, while my rail pass would have given me a free ride on the trains as far as Ikebukuro, and two, because the bus got into a minor accident along the way, and the passengers had to wait for the next bus.

I got to Louis' place late, and after lunch and talking with them for a bit, was thinking of how to get to a Shinkansen terminal. Thing is though, I hadn't actually collected my rail pass, and I had to go to get it from one of the major stations. Unfortunately, the most convenient Shinkansen station for me, Omiya, did not issue the rail passes. So I had to travel back into Ikebukuro, and then transfer onto a Shinkansen at Ueno, which took up even more of my time. So instead of being able to meet Emiko in the afternoon, as I thought, I only got to Senmaya station at around 8pm.

After that initial rush though, things kinda slowed down. Emiko, along with a retired German missionary called Helga, were gearing up for a concert by former base managers Paul and Nina Mikaelsen. They had served for half a year in 2011 and had returned to Norway, but were back now to meet people and have the event. So the first few days, while I was trying to get used to the frigid temperatures, we went to the neighbouring towns to put up posters and stuff.

One of the places we did stop at was in Kesennuma city, which got hammered pretty bad during the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami that followed. While most of the temporary housing units were set up to accommodate people, this particular unit was meant as a kind of shopping/bar district to help some of those who lost their shops to continue with their jobs. Can't remember what it was called, but it's right next to the Kesennuma port. A lady there who kindly agreed to help us with our request to put up the concert poster told us that while it had not been too bad, very few people would choose to go there in the winter as it was cold and got dark early, so business had not been that good recently. Still, she was happy to hear that people were still volunteering to help out in some way, and she was also quite happy when we bought some of the things at her store (she ran a small grocery mart). 

A picture I took while putting up posters in Senmaya town. That's Mt. Murone, which has an observatory and a hang-gliding spot up there. It was quite windy at the spot I took this, making it almost unbearably cold despite the sun, but one thing about winter is that the air is always clear and the sky seems exceptionally blue. When it's not snowing, of course.

As a small town, Senmaya's a rather quiet place. There are two convenience stores, a Lawson and a Sunkus, along the main road running through it, and it offers relatively few tourist attractions. But it does have this historical-ish place called Sake no Kura, which is a sake warehouse that is over a hundred years old. I wandered in one day, and there were some ladies who had rented the place for a function, and one of them, who also does work as a tour guide for the place, explained some of it to me. Or at least, she tried to explain it, considering my lack of Japanese ability.

The outside of the warehouse. 

The snow and low temperatures did take some getting used to, especially since I had come up from warm, sunny Singapore. I did get some Uniqlo heat tech, which helped (I have to admit, I used to wonder if the heat tech was indeed of any use, since I didn't feel very much warmer while wearing it. I only had to not wear it once though, to realise how effective it is at keeping warmth in). 

It snowed several times while I was there, and each time, it wasn't a light dusting of white that I was used to when I was in Tokyo, but rather, a rather sizeable amount of snow, though I'm guessing other places had a lot more snowfall then where I was at. 

But after each snowfall, the skies clear up and become the most amazing blue, and when the sun hits the snow on the ground, it sparkles. It really is quite a fantastic sight, but only if you've got on a good jacket and mittens or something.

One of the things we did get to do was to help shovel snow at a couple of the temporary housing units. Many of those who are in these units tend to be older folk, and while most of them are tough old men and women from a hardened generation, they did appreciate it when others came in to give them a hand in clearing up the roads.  The heavy snowfall meant it was covered up an hour later, but they still were glad we shovelled some snow. We also had a cafe while we were there. 

The scene just after we had the cafe and were heading back.

Marie came up on Monday morning. She had served at the base before and knew many of the people and places there, though I would like to think she came up for another reason as well. She brought a couple of the volunteers to several of the events she used to participate in, and was a major help all-around.

Another pleasant surprise was that Kohei Koyama stopped by on his trip. Kohei and his wife Linda were volunteers at Tono base who got dragooned into being staff members while I was there for three weeks in August 2011. They were travelling southward from Morioka, stopping at various volunteer bases to see where God was leading them to serve for a year. However, Linda's mom suddenly fell sick, so she had to head back to Miami. And I just realised I never really talked about my experiences at Tono base. I shall have to rectify that. 

Kohei is the guy in red. This was taken by Pastor Sasaki of the Kitakami church, who is a member of the 3.11 Network as well as a semi-itinerant pastor who takes care of a church in Kesennuma too.

 
One of the good things about serving at this particular base though, is that Emiko is a really well-known person around the area. When we were going around trying to put up posters, all we had to do was mention we were from a volunteer group and that we worked with Emiko... and the shop-owner's face would light up and they would go, "Oh Matsumoto-san! Yes we know her!" Even though she says she feels tired all the time, one of her great strengths is in building relationships with people around. She doesn't like getting photographed though. 

I also got to help out in an English conversation group that had been set up by former base managers. While the managers had already left, the ladies enjoyed the time so much that they decided to continue to meet up regularly. We got to join them for their monthly meeting, which is held in a church's meeting room.  

Paul and Nina Mikaelsen came in on the 15th, if I remember correctly, and apart from going around and seeing all the people they had met while serving there, they also got ready for their concerts. They were supposed to be doing three mini-concerts over three days, in Senmaya, the neighbouring village of Murone and then in Kesennuma, further down the highway. 

Quite a few people turned up for the first one, even though it was at 10 in the morning on a Friday. Several of them were people they had known from before, and a couple of local reporters also turned up to cover the event (it came out in the local papers the next day).  Their singing is really nice, and they showed a lot of chemistry on stage, which I guess comes about when you're a husband and wife team. While the acoustic guitar was the main instrument for both of them, Paul also used a pianika and a small taiko drum for accompaniment on several songs. They sang several English songs and one or two Norwegian ones, but it was the traditional Japanese enka that got the most reaction out of the crowd.

Paul and Nina at the first concert, held at the Senmaya Town Hall.

Here's one of their songs, 37 degrees, which they wrote by themselves, if I'm not wrong.

I helped out on that first day by making Bak Kut Teh, which many of them seemed to like. Thanks should be given of course, to Marie and Kazuma Miura, one of the base friends who had stopped by the night before. They both said it had tasted too light, so they added salt and pepper until it was nice. Unfortunately, I had run out of bak kut teh packets after that, and the logistics involved in doing food at the other concerts had seemed too difficult, so we did not cook food again for the other concerts.

We also got to work with the boys (and two girls) of the Kesennuma High School baseball club. One thing about these kids is that they were always energetic and very polite, greeting people they met along the way and stuff. Marie says this is cos they are taught to greet anyone they meet. At any rate, they helped Emiko by shoveling snow at a few temporary housing units, and then helped her buy daily necessities at a supermarket to help needy families under one of the 3.11 Network's projects (a church in Taiwan regularly sends them funds to buy food for people who really need it).

They also helped to set up on the last of Paul and Nina's concerts in the area. Whereas the lot of us took close to half an hour to set up for the concert on Saturday night, these boys finished setting everything up in 5 minutes flat, under the guidance of their English teacher/coach and their team captain.

Kesennuma High School baseball club.

And that was about it. Emiko dropped Marie and myself off at the Kesennuma station on the way back to the base, and we left for Tokyo soon after, where I got to spend a few more days running around meeting people, and spent a night in a capsule hotel.

If you're interested in praying for the work there, here are a few things you may like to pray for:

1. Pray for Emiko as she continues to be the key person in the work there. If you know her, you'll know that while she is game for many things, she sometimes gets extremely tired, caused partly because she has to travel fairly long distances for meetings and work. 
2. Pray for the pastors of the 3.11 Network, who are continuing to minister to their own flocks as well as the people who have been affected. It is easy for volunteers, who are there for a couple of weeks or months, but these pastors are looking at years of work before the region can get back to normal.
3. Pray for Kohei and Linda too. They are thinking of moving to Tohoku for a year, and are trying to see where God wants them to go. 
4. Pray for the people that have in some way or other, come into contact with Christians, that the Christians they meet would be a good testimony for Christ, and that they will be blessed, and in turn, bless others who need help.
5. Pray for the people there, who even after two years, are still not able to return to their 'normal' lives before the tsunami. 

Ok. That's it from me. Although the weather was cold, the people were warm and friendly, and it was a great experience over all.

Ichinoseki Part 3

Took a little too long to get back to this.

Our final work day at Ichinoseki was a little different. We knew before we got down to the volunteer centre, that Onodera-san was not getting volunteers, as she had requested none on that day. So Nobu said that the first one that comes along that can fit one of our groups, we should just take it. And so we were separated from the CCC team.

We were assigned to do photo-recovery work at a nearby sports hall (I think), and we did not take our car with us this time. One of the volunteer centre staff dudes drove a few of us out in a van, and he took us through the part of Kesennuma that was hit the hardest by the tsunami, and by the fires that broke out after that. We had seen damage of course, but it still kinda cast a pall over the entire car when we were driving through it, and he was telling us his experience.

Yes, that is a container ship that was washed inland.

Photo-recovery work was a lot different from what we had experienced up to that point. We were working indoors, so it was cool. There was no construction work going on, so it was quiet. There were chairs and tables, and all we had to do was to salvage as many photographs as we could from photo albums that had been pulled out of the wreckage, dry them off, and put them in new albums.

Now, if you know what some of those albums are like, each 'page' is made of stiff paper which may be sticky, so you can plonk your photo on it. And then there's a plastic film for each page that goes on top so that it can be protected from spilled drinks and the grubby hands of people. What we had to do was to slowly peel the film off (hopefully without peeling off the picture), and then cut the picture off the 'page'.

And it seems like a relatively cushy job compared to the physical stuff we had been doing, but now I realize that finesse can be as stressful as doing hard manual labour, bending over the tables, controlling your movements so that you don't damage it any worse.

And the albums smell bad, because they were in the sea. The moment we opened it up, we got a powerful whiff of it. And we have to keep our faces near the books so that we can see what we are doing (though we kinda get used to it after about an hour or so).

And this is also where it kinda hits you a bit more, that these pictures may be the visual remnants of someone who may be dead. When we were working before, it was physical stuff, and the owners were still around, and they had friends and family who got swept away, but, you know, you're still kinda distant from those other people.

Now? You're looking at them smiling at you from the pages of a photo album which were meant to be a memoir for them, but instead, is giving you a window into the life of a total stranger who you will probably never meet.

There were photos of vacations, and houses and plants, but the ones that really struck me were those old photos of children, or a child with his mother, because they remind me of the photos my grandmother had when she was young and my dad was a kid. And these are treasures, because those are the only copies. In our digital age, where we can take thousands of photos and have backups and store it on hard drives and print out a billion copies, we forget (or don't know, perhaps) how valuable a photo was.

It was only 4 hours of work, but it was a lot harder than we thought. We got a ride back to the volunteer centre, and then we headed back to base, and that was the end of our volunteer work in Ichinoseki.

We also went out to Rikuzen-Takata to do a short prayer-walk around the tree. This tree had been in a grove of 70,000 that had been a park/breakwater, but now it was the only one that remained. It gave hope and courage to the people I guess, in the '頑張れ (ganbare)' way, to just push through adversity, and they are desperately trying to save it from the seawater that had gotten into the soil. (Side note: On the way down from Tono much later, we drove past the tree again, and it looked a lot worse.)

The pine tree

On Sunday, we went to a church in Kesennuma. They did not have a sermon, but a guy shared his testimony of doing volunteer work (he had been helping out at the volunteer centre as one of the staff). It was somewhat sobering to hear that everyone in the church had lost someone they knew, but the church members were all very kind to us, and welcomed us warmly.

The CCC team left for Ichinoseki station after that, to take the train back down to Tokyo. Our team went to find a ramen shop (someone wanted to eat local ramen), and then we went to the summer festival in the town (Murone town) near the base. We had been invited by this guy who had driven all the way up to the base, so we felt that we should go.

Summer festival at Murone

It was a lot smaller than the ones I had gone to before in Tokyo, even the one in Tokorozawa, but then Murone is a pretty small town, and they were using a rather large place to stage it. It also felt a little too cold for a summer festival, as it had been cloudy and rainy all week long, so the temperature had dropped quite a bit.

We met the guy who invited us, and then we found out why he wanted to invite us; there was a log-cutting competition, and he was supposed to get people. So he signed all four of us up. I ended up squaring off against one of the local guys, and the result wasn't exactly pretty. I am not particularly strong, and I was not used to the small one-handed saw they gave me (it cut on the backstroke, whereas I'm used to a two-handed hacksaw that cuts on the forward stroke). And then I cut myself.

The aftermath. This was after the 'first-aid person' (in apostrophes because the first thing she did was to stuff cotton balls on the wound) and Marie had nursed me back to health. Incidentally, I noticed all the contestants wore work gloves after that.

But it all turned out well. We got to see fireworks that nights, and I got an iMax experience because I was lying down on the road and the sky was my screen.

Monday was our off day too, and after kinda lazing around hanging around the base, some of us took a walk around.

Ichinoseki base is located in a really beautiful area.

Near the end of our travels, Laura, who was trumping around the area with us, started to feel pain in her foot. She had tripped while walking around the base before we left for our hike, and when we got back, her foot was purple. Roberta prodded her a few times (she has some real nursing knowledge), but it seemed to only be a bruise. We found out after we got back to Tokyo that Laura had broken her toes in five places.

And that is about all. We left the base the following morning, saying goodbye to Woody, his wife, and a couple of new staff that had come by the night before, and reached Tokyo around 8.30 or 9. It was a really good trip, got to see (and help out) in some of the work there, and got to know each other better during the trip.

And now, a final word from the 'safety officer', who cut his hand sawing a log:

They always say to wear a breath mask and a helmet; I combined the two and wore a breath mask as a helmet. Remember, 安全第一！

Ichinoseki Part 2

On the 2nd day, we went to the place of a lady called Onodera in Kesennuma. She lived in a three-storey house, and the third floor was actually untouched, but the tsunami and reached up to about a foot on the second floor, and had swept away everything in the first floor. This was also when we started to notice a smell. On the first day at the garden, there was no odour, and it smelt pretty much like what one would imagine a garden would smell like. But at the area around Onodera-san's house, there was a bit of a smell. Soon however, we barely noticed that, because we had to wear breathing masks, and it took too much effort to just breathe through it.

The HQ team was assigned to work on the second floor, and our work involved mostly sweeping up the dust and mud that had gotten settled on the floor. It sounds pretty simple, except for three facts:

1. There were kind of wooden support beams about two centimetres above the floor. Fortunately, the beams were spaced far apart enough to squeeze the dustpan in, but it was hard to clean the area directly under the beams.
2. The dust was the very fine kind, and there was construction work going on outside.
   
3. Some of the mud was caked. Hard. I'll get to that part in a bit.

So what happened was that after one round of sweeping (which was a lot harder than it sounds), we would look back on the swept places, and realize that there was still a lot of dust on the floor. And we would sweep again, and find out again that there was still dust on the floor. And we would be unable to reach the dust under the beams. And we had to breathe through breath masks for safety, which got pretty unbearable after about 5 minutes.

It did get very bearable at about 10:30 though, because that was when Onodera-san made an appearance, carrying a massive amount of drinks and snacks with her for us. Like Sato-san the day before, she was very grateful to us for coming, and her lack of a furnished living room did not detract one bit from her hospitality. We all very happily took a break from our work to get a bit of rest, and to talk with her.

Both Mrs. Onodera and her husband were ok after the tsunami, but their house was damaged, and she now stayed up in Aomori prefecture at an evacuation centre, but came down to Kesennuma 3-4 times a week to check on her house and clean it up. She felt fortunate because her house was salvageable, while most of the other houses nearby were totally wrecked.

We continued cleaning up the place, and by lunch time, one of the rooms on the top floor looked reasonably clear of dust. The kitchen though, was a completely different matter. Although Laura had been working hard scrubbing the floor and sweeping up dust, there was still a lot of work to be done. We did break for lunch though, and that's when we saw the scourge that is flies. Lots and lots of flies. You couldn't hold your sandwich still for a moment, for flies would start landing on them almost immediately. They were everywhere, they got in your food, they got in the car, and worse still, they refused to get out. And flies are notoriously difficult to kill.

After having to contend with flies, we got back to cleaning, and continued sweeping and scrubbing away at the dirt on the floor, till it was time for us to leave. Victor, leader of the CCC team, gave a small tract about Christianity to Onodera-san, and she mentioned that she had gone to a Catholic kindergarten, and actually still remembered some of the hymns and prayers from that time.

HQ-Ichinoseki Team 3, CCC Team B, and Mrs. Onodera (Orange shirt, centre)

Oh, and that day, a reporter from the Nikkei Shimbun, Kishida-san followed us around to get materiel for an article she was writing about foreign volunteers serving in Japan. If you're interested, the link to the article about CRASH by her is here.

The following day, we went back to the Kesennuma Volunteer Centre to get our job assignments. And once again, Nobu-san (the translator for the CCC team) suggested we pray that we would get an assignment that would allow us to stick together as a big group. The day before, we had asked God that we would get a job that would let us go as a big group of 15 people, and we were blessed to meet Onodera-san. On this day, we prayed, and once again, God gave us a job that required 15 people, at the very same location, Onodera-san's house.

Kesennuma Volunteer Centre

It was a great blessing of course; not only were we able to stay as a group, we would also be able to meet Onodera-san again, and we also knew what tools would work better for us. So this time, instead of taking huge shovels and wheelbarrows, we searched for small brushes and screwdrivers to help clean the nooks and crannies, and to help chip away mud.

Onodera-san was quite happy to see us again, as she was used to us, and we knew what we had to do, so we got back to work again. We also had two other volunteers with us, Nakagawa-san from Shiga prefecture, and Okubo-san from Tokyo. Both of them had come up on their own to do some volunteer work, and were joining us for the day.

We had to start sweeping and dusting up all over because the dust had returned, and had pretty much covered up all the area already. Laura and myself continued working in the kitchen chipping away at the caked mud with screwdrivers and crowbars, while Roberta swept outside and Marie cleaned up some cupboards outside. We pretty much remained engrossed in our work, though we did stop for a break at about 1030, and took a longer rest at lunch.

After lunch, I went back up to the kitchen to resume my chipping work. I had been using a screwdriver to scratch away at some mud that had been stuck on the linoleum on the kitchen floor, and had been doing so for more than an hour. That's when Marie came in with a wet cloth, and pretty much cleared more mud away in 5 minutes than I had chipped away in 1-and-a-half hours.

Yup. I felt like one.

But thanks to Marie's bright idea, we did manage to clean up the kitchen, so much so that Onodera-san said it looked "pika-pika" (bright and sparkly, has nothing to do with Pikachu) by the time we were done and had to leave. As she had not requested help from the volunteer centre the next day (our last work day), we agreed to stay in touch even after we had gone back to Tokyo, and she invited us to come and visit when her place was spruced up again and ready to receive guests.

When we got back to the base, we heard a bit more good news, because Woody, the base manager, had cleared his Japanese license test on the first try.

So that's it for the second and third work day. We had an earthquake somewhere one night then, and it wasn't too bad for the base building, but it does rattle a lot, which kinda makes it sound worse than it actually is. I'll continue on in the next post about our last day of work and our off days.

Ichinoseki Part 1

Just over a week ago, I was traveling up to Ichinoseki base with 6 other members of the HQ staff. The main purpose of this was to be for HQ people to be able to see what the bases were doing, and to help out there for a bit.

Oh, and about two weeks before, I was appointed the group leader. How about that.

So on the 26th of July, 7 of us set out from HQ; Laura, P-chan, Keith and Cece, Ramona, Marie, and myself. I had kinda studied the route beforehand, but it was good that Laura knew the area well, and could get to the Gaikan without any help. We got up to Ichinoseki pretty easy, and took a long but scenic route around the city and out to the base.

We did have to stop a couple of times along the way though, because our GPS went slightly wonky on us, and once, it was because there was a huge crack on the road up to the camp. Some of us got out a couple of times to check about and stuff, and because of all the forest around us and the mist, I half expected a dinosaur to jump us like in Jurassic Park.

Come on, wouldn't you expect to see dinosaurs here too?

We got to the camp at about three, and met the staff members and CCC team when they got back in from volunteer work. We got to go to a nearby sento that night, as the heaters in the camp's bath were off.

The next day we went to Rikuzen-Takata to do work. It was raining pretty heavily when we were getting the assignment at the volunteer centre, and we definitely saw lightning. And driving over to the place, we kinda got a bit lost. But by the time we reached the worksite, the rain had stopped completely, and the sun was out. Victor, the leader of the CCC team, told us much later that he and the others had been praying for the rain to stop.

The day's work was to help to pull weeds and clear up a garden. It was a rather large garden, and it was sprawled across a hillside, so some parts of it were on pretty steep gradients. It was kinda the first time I had to do gardening work, but after a while, I got used to the work. At about 2 in the afternoon, the owner, and 80+year old lady named Sato came to visit us. She was a tough old lady, walking over the hill behind the garden, and carrying a whole bunch of energy drinks and snacks for us.

We found out that she lost her daughter-in-law during the tsunami, and that she was now living in a evacuation centre. She was really grateful to us for coming out to help her, especially since so many of us came from overseas, and this, as well as her hospitality to us, would be a recurring theme during our time there.

At about that time, it started to rain pretty heavily, and Victor was saying that God did answer prayers because He gave us just enough time for us to do our work. One of the CCC vans sent Sato-san back to her place (she had actually wanted to walk back in the rain without an umbrella, but we managed to convince her to take a lift from us), and then we headed back home.

Ok, I realize that to write about the whole trip in one post is gonna be too long, so I'm gonna break it up into several posts, which I will try to do as soon as possible. I guess I should have done it during the trip itself, but everytime I got through the day and cleared out the supply requests, I was too sleepy to think straight, hence the recap now, when I'm already on my next assignment in Tono base. So, hopefully, I don't forget too much of the trip.