Japan Experience

Day 6: Assembly meetings continue all day for delegates as they pursue their Agenda and make a number of key appointments. Along with the General Secretary of the Church of South India Mr Philips and his wife Anil we are to be taken by the Executive Secretary for Ecumenical Ministries up to Sendai to see effects of the March 2011 Tsunami and the relief work being carried out by UCCJ in that area. Travel again by Shinkansen bullet train super efficient as always. Nothing can prepare you for the sight of the disaster which came to these towns and villages. Even though it is now 18 months down the line and Japanese efficiency means that all is being restored to some semblance of order the sheer awfulness of what happened is all around you. By now cars  lorries, boats childrens toys etc and everything else by way of debris is stacked in lines, for cars sometimes 3 or 4 cars high, or debris has been sorted into loads of catergories, timber, paper, plastic, soil, metal and huge piles are sifted and sorted and much going off to recycling plants. Machinery works 24 hrs a day in this gigantic task .Empitness speaks volumes, like at a primary school which when you peer into the severely damaged building you see text books sitting on desks and fire revaged metalwork is twisted in the windows. One window now looks as if it has some modern version of a cross in the middle of it. To walk where 7 metres of water had crushed 4,000 people to death in Ishinomaki is a humbling and shocking experience all at the same time. We stood as a group in shocked silence, as images shown on TV last year flashed through our minds. Overnight in Sendai city.

Day 7: Main feature this morning is to visit the Emergency Disaster Centre in Sendai. UCCJ have set up three such centres from where co-ordination of volunteer teams takes place. Work has now moved on, in the passage of time from clearing from the underneath of homes stinking mud and picking sea pebbles out of rice fields so that they could be cultivated again, to helping to restore and make liveable again, damaged homes. Still, in the Sendai region alone, 20,000 people remain  in temporary accomodation and across the whole of the effected area 300,000 altogerther are living in government provided accomodation. A target for clearing temporary homes away has been set by the Japanese government of Spring 2012 this date has already been extended by one year. It is still felt that this is unworkable as not enought housing is available for people to move into in areas where they can find work. Many people are forbidden by new laws to returning to land they once owned, which has now been taken by the authortities after decuision s have been m,ade not to allow rebuilding.