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A UMNS Report
By Linda Bloom*
April 26, 2011
Volunteers from the Emmaus Center in Sendai, Japan, clear debris from
around an abandoned car in Ishinomaki. A UMNS photo courtesy of the
Rev. Claudia Genung-Yamamoto, NCCJ.
View in Photo Gallery
A month after the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern
Japan, the neighborhood around Eiko Church in Ishinomaki remained mired
in mud.
Still, there were signs of progress in one of the coastal cities
hardest hit on March 11 by the tsunami, even as occasional aftershocks
shook the ground.
Running water had been restored a few days earlier. The church, part
of the United Church of Christ in Japan, had just reopened its
kindergarten, although some of the 50 children enrolled there had not
returned. The church itself still bore watermarks from the floodwaters.
Volunteers sent by the Emmaus Center in Sendai, where Japanese
Christians have organized relief efforts, were shoveling mud — thickened
with pulp from a nearby paper factory — out of homes. One group tried
to clear a path to remove an abandoned car stuck between two houses —
one of many such cars littering the streets.
The Rev. Minoru Kobuna, pastor of Eiko Church, led a small delegation
of Christians from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan through the
neighborhood. A stench of mud, trash and seawater penetrated the air,
and he suggested the visitors might want to wear masks to cover their
noses and mouths, as many locals did.
Christians from Japan and Asian neighbors already have sent money,
prayers and support for earthquake survivors in the Tōhoku region, says
the Rev. Claudia Genung-Yamamoto, a Tokyo-based United Methodist
missionary who accompanied the group. Churches in Taiwan also sent
much-needed bicycles, which allow volunteers to reach areas near the
ocean.
Now, after the delegation’s visit during the week of April 11, members are considering next steps.
A May 5-7 conference in Seoul, South Korea, on aid to Japan will
include representatives of church partners from around the world.
Melissa Crutchfield, the executive in charge of international relief for
the United Methodist Committee on Relief, will attend on behalf of her agency.
Survivors face uncertainty
The National Police Agency of Japan has confirmed 14,238 deaths from
the March 11 disaster, mostly by drowning. More than 5,000 were injured,
and 12,228 are listed as missing.
But the survivors, including some 150,000 living in evacuation sites across the country, continue to deal with uncertainty.
The fear of radiation contamination continues since Japanese
authorities raised the crisis level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
plant to Level 7, putting it on par with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Some people cannot return to their homes. Farming, fishing and other
industries have been crippled.
The Revs. Minoru Kobuna (center) and Claudia Genung-Yamamoto view damage from the earthquake and tsunami
in Ishinomaki. A UMNS photo courtesy of the Rev. Claudia
Genung-Yamamoto, NCCJ.
View in Photo Gallery
The needs of basic relief assistance — hot meals, sanitation and
medical and psychosocial care — “still remain as a big issue,” said
Takeshi Komino, head of emergencies for Church World Service Asia
Pacific. A CWS team recently returned from another assessment tour of
the earthquake region.
Because of the impact of the damage to both the infrastructure and
the people, supplemental relief efforts by nongovernmental aid groups
remain crucial, he said.
Trauma from the disaster can resurface quickly. “During our team's
interviews, we also came across a survivor who seemed to be really
outgoing at the beginning, but suddenly started to weep for the dead,
indicating how she could not save them at the time of tsunami,” Komino
wrote on April 23. “We are facing tens of thousands of such people who
need careful attention.”
Residents are trying to do what they can, as the CWS team learned
from 60-year-old Misato Taira at the disaster volunteer center in the
Otomo section of Rikuzentakata, another town nearly washed away by the
tsunami.
Taira, a former construction worker, helps transport relief goods by
truck for one of the CWS relief partners. He and his family — mother,
wife and son — are living in one of the tents set up near the houses
that still stand in his neighborhood. He is not sure what the future
holds for them or their two dogs, since he has heard that pets are not
allowed in temporary housing locations.
Response by church partners
CWS Asia Pacific has signed a partnership agreement with the National
Christian Council in Japan for emergency response, recovery and other
humanitarian initiatives, and an office has been established in the
council’s compound in Tokyo.
The council, along with the United Church of Christ in Japan and
Korean Christian Council in Japan, already supports the church-directed
relief work that has made the Emmaus Center in Sendai a hub of activity.
Every Thursday night, 70 to 80 representatives of churches in the
area gather to pray and discuss activities of the newly formed Sendai
Alliance of Churches for Relief Work.
“None of us are experts (on relief work), but we have gathered
volunteers and have been reaching out to the community,” Rev. Jeffrey
Mensendiek, a United Church of Christ missionary, told the visiting
delegation of Asian church partners. Mensendiek serves as director of
the youth center at Emmaus.
For example, as the cherry blossoms bloomed April 18, the center
started its fifth week of hosting and coordinating volunteers from all
over Japan, Mensendiek reported in his regular email update.
Workers clear debris from the damaged port at Rikuzentakata.
A UMNS photo by Takeshi Komino, CWS-Asia/Pacific.
View in Photo Gallery
“Each morning we have a meeting at 8:30 a.m. before sending the
volunteers out on their bicycles heading for Shichigo,” he wrote.
“Today, we only had 35 bicycles for about 45 people. Each day new people
join us. There is tremendous energy in the air. Young people are at the
center of the planning and organizing.”
For the Emmaus Center — started 60 years ago by missionaries of the
Evangelical and Reformed Church and supported for 30 years by the
Methodist Church — their participation is a product of the years of
commitment to serving young people in Sendai, he added.
“I want our churches in the U.S. to know that the seeds we planted in
faith have taken root in so many young people in this country,”
Mensendiek wrote. “God is alive in each of them, whether they know it or
not. And we are blessed to be a sign of hope to the world.”
Signs of hope
In Ishinomaki, another sign of hope is that worship never stopped at
Eiko Church, even though one of the 21 congregants was lost in the
tsunami and only three people came the first Sunday after the disaster.
Gradually, people have returned to the neighborhood, cleaning up what is
left of their homes.
Genung-Yamamoto said she felt “an incredible sadness” as she thought about the lives lost in towns such as Ishinomaki.
However, on Easter Sunday, she told her congregation at West Tokyo
Union Church that she was inspired by the signs of hope she saw amid the
devastation, including a “cross of comfort” erected at the site of a
church washed away by the tsunami.
“I saw groups of Christians working together,” she said. “Theological
differences are not an issue now as everyone pulls together. It is
spring, and new life and new hope come. Out of the mud will come new
growth.”
Donations to the UMCOR’s relief efforts for Japan can be made here.
*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at http://twitter.com/umcscribe.
News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
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