tohoku relief trip

[Note: I already posted some photos and accounts on Facebook, but a lot of this is new. As explained below, we want as many people as possible to know about what we did, because we think our actions can be replicated by many others. Please feel free to share this with anyone, anywhere.]

Raleigh, Sam, and I went to Tohoku for a week to volunteer for relief efforts.

We have talked a lot about how we should tell people about our trip, and to what degree we should make our efforts public. The conclusion we came to is that we did something a lot of other people can also do, so making it as public as possible--something we wouldn't have been so eager to do otherwise--would be the best way to get others to consider what they can do to help the many people still suffering in Tohoku.

When one member of our team mentioned to a coworker that we planned to go to Tohoku, the coworker said skeptically, "What are you going to do, stand there and hand out bentos [lunches] to victims?" A lot of people seem doubtful that volunteers can go to Tohoku and have a meaningful, positive effect. They are wrong.

We saw various kinds of volunteers in action in Ishinomaki, where we spent most of our time. Some people were there from far away working earnestly, but unfortunately for organizations that seemed more interested in taking pictures of their activities than in actually carrying out effective relief. Some came and were willing to do anything, but had neglected to plan their trips well and bring the supplies necessary to avoid burdening others. Some did it right. At the risk of striking an arrogant tone, we did it right. We spent ten days carefully considering our supply needs, the relief needs of the disaster victims, what equipment would best help us do meaningful work, and how we could channel the resources of organizations (primarily the LDS Church) while remaining flexible enough to adapt as circumstances required, and then spent a lot of time buying or borrowing those supplies while arranging to set aside our affairs for a week. Raleigh and Sam coordinated with their respective law firms and wives to get time off from work and family, and got amazing support from all of those parties.

Before the trip, and then in the course of events, we learned that the two main ways we could help were (1) manual labor on behalf of disaster victims and (2) the matching of LDS resources to evacuation shelter needs.

The labor consisted of helping residents of the Watanoha community of Ishinomaki City remove debris from homes where they wished to continue living. While areas such as Kesennuma and Onagawa had large neighborhoods that were swept away completely, the Watanoha area saw most homes flooded from one to three meters high, but with many still salvageable. The damage and debris were immense, but many victims wanted to stay, so we found a role in helping them get moving toward recovery. Of course, we knew we couldn't fix even one house completely. However, we found that if we could remove the largest obstacle (other than vehicles, which for safety and strength reasons we didn't touch) to the cleanup--a car garage or shed that floated into their yard and blocked removal of smaller debris, or a waterlogged piano that they couldn't remove from the living room--they would be able to see a light at the end of tunnel and gain some momentum from our short, labor-concentrated push.

The necessity of matching resources and needs became apparent as we saw a lot of supplies in Sendai but insufficient information on up-to-the-minute shelter needs. Basically, supplies and funds were ready, but the nature of the situation required people to physically go to a shelter, find the person/people in charge, and ask them what they needed (then, further, physically go to Sendai and bring back the supplies in many cases). There were few people doing this. Since I was the only licensed driver on the team, I often made supply or shelter reconnaissance runs while Sam and Raleigh worked around the neighborhood. This meant I was sometimes deprived of the exquisite 8:00 pm sleep of the fatigued worker, but I did get chances to sing loudly in the car by myself.

Here is how the truck looked loaded before being covered with a tarp. We spent a lot of time planning what to bring by e-mail and phone--we didn't want to bring unnecessary items, but we didn't want to get to Tohoku and wish we'd brought a certain tool. The list of things I brought in the truck:

150L gasoline
60L drinking water
50m rope
30 bananas
Several loaves bread (sunflower seed, raisin, wheat, white, rye) (more
bread can be sent to Sendai for us with one day notice)
3 cans Chip Star
5 pkgs tiny cookies
2 pkgs Country Ma'am cookies
1kg indv. wrapped peanut chocolate
20 100g packs kakinotane
48 nature valley granola bar two-bar packs
3 mop-handled squeegees
5 shovels (4 square, 1 round)
1 broom
1 cordless drill
1 chainsaw3 buckets
1 3-man tent
1 50m extension cord with 4 outlets (for charging if we spend time in
a powered location)
2 pairs steel toed rain boots
1 pair steel toed sneakers100s of wet wipes (from a friend)
1 gallon grape juice
5 cans fruit
6 pairs work/cold gloves
36 rolls toilet paper
30 rags
4 lighters
1 3.5-ton hydraulic jack
1 mechanic's toolkit
3 3x5m tarps
5 bungee cords
1 3m ladder (1.5m folded in half)
2 2x3m reflective thin bedrolls
1 sleeping bag
1 container gatsby face wipes1 container alcohol hand sanitizer
25m packing tape
1 Tohoku roadmap
1 crappy lighter to outlet adapter
1 netbook pc
1 music player fm radio adapter/USB charger
1 large jar chunky peanut butter
2 medium jars strawberry jam
2kg smoked bacon410g sliced cheese
2 gas siphoning thingys (1 battery-powered, one manual)
1L chainsaw Chain oil
2L two cycle oil (for chainsaw)
25 small paper plates
40 paper cups
100m Saran wrap
1 larger container Black Black gum (caffeine)
100pcs candy for kids
30 mouth/nose masks
3 sets raingear
10 pairs packaged socks

2 weapons-grade crowbars

The crowbars were purchased by me at Raleigh's behest on my final trip to the home improvement store (Cainz Home). They proved to be arguably the most useful thing we had. Crowbars are amazing.

Raleigh and Sam also both brought several important items. Perhaps the greatest of these were the several salamis Sam brought.

The truck with tarp, at a rest area on the way to Sendai. The truck was impeccable. It got us around easily, had 4wd for rough patches, got well over 30 miles per gallon, and held as much as we needed at any given time. I borrowed it from a friend of a fellow parliamentary aide. It is owned by a Buddhist temple, whose leader was very happy to have it used for humanitarian service, and had no problems with it getting a little banged up in the process. I was a little nervous to be driving with 150L of gasoline directly behind me along stretches of Fukushima and Miyagi where the expressway had significant earthquake damage, but the truck ran perfectly.

At first, the three of us got around by having one person in the back, under the tarp, in the manner Raleigh is pictured here. Then the 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit on the evening of the first night we were there, and thereafter we squeezed into the very small cab so we could keep on the same page for decision-making and information sharing. This is as good a place as any to point out how lucky I was to have two very smart people to turn to for good judgment and situation assessment. That they are both lawyers was forgivable in such circumstances. I felt like our team was very well balanced, with each member bringing valuable assets.

The damage started to become apparent once we got into the areas of Ishinomaki City which are closer to the coast. Most restaurants and other businesses were shut, though a few remained in operation.

In one family's yard, Sam found a taiko drum owned by the junior high school that lies about a kilometer away toward the ocean. The family planned to give it back to the school, of course.

This cat was swept away by the tsunami, only to return three days later, despite being 16 years old! It sat blocking my path when I was hauling stuff out of their yard, and did not budge when I walked toward it in a "get out of my way, cat" way. Now I realize the cat's tsunami experience far outweighed any fear I could put into it.

Sam working to dismantle the roof of a shed. This was taken after he and Raleigh had removed all the sheet metal and outer panels to get to the skeleton. The crowbars were indispensable to get to this point. As you can see, we had to work in some precarious positions, but we were lucky enough to avoid any major falls. I nearly fell off one shed we were dismantling, but my protruding belly caught on a beam and saved me. Thanks are in order to each of my favorite ramen shops.

Here Sam chainsaws a piano in half so we can get it out of the living room window. It was a very solidly built, expensive player piano. We used crowbars to get at the insides and removed a lot of screws with the cordless drill before having to cut it in half.

The 60-year-old man at this house was not its owner--he said his older sister was. We didn't see her around. There were two cute little boys playing out front, one five and one three. They were horsing around in the wreckage, and when we started working, they followed us around, watching with great interest as we worked using our tools, the way little boys do.

In the course of working, I asked where the man was from. He said he and the boys were both from Onagawa, a coastal area to the north that was hit much harder than Ishinomaki. He said their house had been completely swept away, and that the two boys' mother had not been seen since, meaning that she was very likely killed. This hit me really hard, and I had to turn away for a minute and try to gain composure, wiping away tears as I thought about these boys that had just lost their mom but were now following us around with admiration. The man had a hard time keeping the boys out of the street and the dangerous debris as he worked to fix the house.

Once we got the piano apart and dumped the heavy piece with the exposed strings onto a pile, the older boy started to bang on them and make piano-like sounds. He quickly figured out how to bang out rough melodies of kids' songs, and asked his little brother, "What song do you want me to play for you?" I wanted to hug them both and tell them things would be okay, but I had no idea if that was true.

This home had a piano (center left), a freight truck (upper right), a forklift (lower right; one of the heaviest items on earth), and a roof from some building in it. We came in contact with the family through the wife, who saw us working on another yard a street or two over and begged us to come help remove at least the piano and roof. When we began working there, the husband came out and really dove into it. He smelled like alcohol. I don't know about their situation, of course, but putting the wife's urgency and his state together, I wouldn't be surprised if they had felt overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to cleaning, and kind of got stuck wondering what to do. As I mentioned, we were well aware that we could work for one week on one house and not finish it, but if we could come in and remove the biggest, toughest obstacle (excluding cars--too heavy and too dangerous to push out of perches since they contain gasoline), the family would get some momentum and hopefully finish things on their own.

The chainsaw was another item we were sure could only end with us either very relieved to have brought it or guffawing that we'd brought such a useless, cumbersome tool. It turned out to be the former. The man of this house related to me that he'd had a chainsaw just like ours, but it had been washed away with all his tools. He was crestfallen to have lost his tools, and by extension, a large part of his ability to remedy his own problems.

We stayed next to an ad hoc shelter called Negishi Kaikan, which was a small meeting hall. It was tiny, but housed 60-70 people, only two of whom were children. The girl pictured here was named Himawari (12), and her little sister was named Anna (9). They were lively and probably very bored with life in such cramped quarters. We gave them piggy back rides and treats from time to time. They had two pet parakeets that they kept in a shed next to the shelter and fed potato chips. We went to their home one day and helped the father, who was a fisherman, remove their soaked tatami mats. This was a job we helped with at many houses. I estimate that soaked tatami mats weigh around 300 pounds.

After we finished, we sat down in his house and listened to him talk about his experience. He was on a fishing boat when the earthquake happened. He saw strange ripples in the sea that indicated a seismic event. In the ensuing tsunami, their propellers became entangled with fishing nets, which paralyzed their boat. Eventually (after a few days) they were rescued by another fishing vessel and got to return to land and find out about their families. His wife and daughters were fine.

When we got back to our campsite, 12-year-old Himawari asked, "Did you see my house?" I said I did, and she said, "It used to be cute, but now it's not." I told her I thought it was a nice house. She then revealed plans to go shopping for new stuff and do everything in pink this time. She seemed ashamed of her house's condition but excited to fix it.

Our camp. The two temporary toilets to the right were unused by the evacuees, so we used them. If you look directly above the smaller tent, you can see the crows' nest that served as our de facto 5:30 am alarm clock. You can also see the blooming plum tree above the larger tent. The place was actually really nice; it had trees and flowers and rice fields. I will visit Ishinomaki in the future just to enjoy it properly.

One of the said piggyback rides. Anna looked on laughing, which was of course the point. On another day, Himawari and her dad left together in their car. She was dressed up and had a shiny purse. I don't know where they were going--maybe to start school--but Himawari seemed really excited to go out with her dad somewhere. Since he's a fisherman, I imagine there are times where he's not around, so spending time with her dad must be a really fun thing.

This graveyard was next to Minato Elementary School, to which we delivered supplies from the LDS Church. Seeing cars piled on graves was a surreal, sad sight, and it was even more discouraging to think about how low a priority fixing it would have to be.

Geographical surveys indicate that the land in many affected areas has sunk. This, combined with high seasonal tides, placed this road under a foot or so of salt water. Crews worked hard to raise the road bed with fill as we came through several times.

Coming back from one of my supply runs, I hit a traffic jam and found myself across from some US Army personnel. They were really friendly, and I enjoyed a handshake with the soldier that had his arm out the window. They had been in Tohoku for 3.5 weeks, so pretty much since right after the disaster hit. Great people.

One of the supply runs I made was to get 80 liters of milk and 300 eggs for Minato Elementary. I had called this order into the LDS church in Sendai just 16 or so hours earlier, and Brother Joji Suzuki had miraculously procured the items, both of which were unavailable in Sendai, from other parts of Japan. The folks running the LDS church relief efforts were extremely capable and helpful, and they gave no thought to whether the people they assisted or worked with were church members or not. They simply worked hard to help everyone.

After making a couple of supply runs for shelters in Ishinomaki, I asked the bureaucrat at Minato Elementary if he could issue us a document certifying our vehicle as an official aid vehicle exempt from expressway tolls. He hemmed and hawed, saying it would take two days to get, and explained a kafkaesque procedure for doing so. The person in charge of supplies, a scruffy guy named Endo who was missing several teeth, was standing next to me, trying to assist in my quest for certification. I got impatient (okay, pissed) at the bureaucrat and said "That's Japan's problem--people starve while bureaucrats make procedures." Endo-san then also piled on the poor official, and together we hounded him into calling City Hall and making the people there crank out a certificate immediately. We went there and picked it up, and Raleigh and Sam took this picture as I emerged victorious.

In the meantime, we had found out that my advocate, Endo-san, had lost his home and everything he owned, except his mobile phone, in the tsunami. He told us--in the presence of the said bureaucrat, to whom we had shown an increase of love and befriended--that he felt bad for living in the shelter and eating the food there, but all he could do to earn his keep was work to make sure the other evacuees got supplies. I felt pretty small in his presence, and if I had met him on the street under normal circumstances, I am afraid I wouldn't have been able to see his greatness. His righteous indignation toward red tape destroyed any justification for following silly procedures.

Raleigh cuts his chainsawing teeth. One might wonder why we were cutting trees; a lot of them had collapsed brick walls leaning against them, or just needed to be removed to expedite cleaning, so the owners asked to have them cut. Obviously, the difference in effort and time between chainsawing a tree down and cutting it with a hand saw is significant.

Teamwork. It's what's for dinner.

Sam sat down for a very short break while he and I waited for Raleigh. "What was Raleigh doing?", you ask? He was extricating us from a home with three very happy lady customers that wanted to feed us (sushi, we think). Our rule was not to take anything from anyone. We probably offended a couple people, but we felt really strongly that taking food or drink was inappropriate.

Rows of houses meant giant rows of debris waiting for a yet-to-be determined pickup by the city.

The lady who arranged a lot of work for us as the de facto leader of the Negishi shelter, Koza-san, asked us to help at her house after we'd finished all the other work for others that she could muster. Her place was on the very edge of where the tsunami hit, meaning a great deal of trash, plant material, and other debris got plunked down in her yard. While most areas we worked had been searched for bodies, she told us this area had not. We didn't find any, or really go out of our way to look. Koza-san had four cats, one of which is in the center-left of the photo and named Ichigo Daifuku, for his/her resemblance to the eponymous Japanese confection.

This house had drifted into one lane of traffic on a major road.

It's hard to see here, but Raleigh was perched in a very precarious position, trying to crowbar boards and dismantle this tangle of wreckage that rested against a house and on top of a truck.

Sam working on the left, Raleigh working on the right. notice the truck wedged on the left between two homes. How it got there was the subject of spirited theorizing by relief workers and victims alike. We removed large structures and debris entanglements to uncover both the truck at left and car at right.

The owner of the house at far right, Abe-san, with Sam and Raleigh. We spent an entire day on his house and the one to its left, owned by a man named Matsumoto-san. We felt closer to Abe-san than perhaps any other person we helped. He lived alone and had no family, and talked about moving to a landlocked prefecture like Gunma. His neighbor and good friend, Matsumoto-san, tried to talk him out of it. We could hear a sadness in Matsumoto-san's voice as he tried to keep his friend from leaving. Their heavily accented conversation in Tohoku dialect was pretty poignant to hear.

Abe-san and Matsumoto-san got us to break our food/drink rule, mainly because Abe-san went and got yakisoba especially for all of us. We knew it was time to just take it and enjoy it when he showed up with food in hand and made it known he'd be really mad if we didn't partake.

Sam, Abe-san, me, and Dave. Dave had planned to come up with us originally, but then contracted a nasty illness that delayed his arrival. He came on Wednesday and stayed until Saturday. Unlike us, he came alone and stayed by himself in the tent. I really admire his determination to get to Tohoku and help people despite being very busy with a new job and just getting over a sickness.

The pants I am wearing are silly, I know. But they are the pants worn by construction professionals in Japan. I found that when I showed up to a shelter wearing these clothes and a helmet and asked about their needs, the people in charge could see from my gear and filthiness that I was serious and working hard. That gained their trust quickly and helped us to work efficiently.

My obligatory commemorative photo on the last day. A week without showering or changing clothes had me feeling very manly and itchy.

The team.

On the morning of April 7, as I drove through Tokyo on the way to Sendai, I saw a beautiful sunrise. My feelings at the time were admittedly cheesy and sentimental. I love Japan. The Japanese nation and its people have treated me so well, and have provided me with many of the things I cherish in life. I am unabashedly proud to have done something for Japan during its greatest crisis. As I drove through Tokyo on the way home, I saw the sun setting and took the above picture. It was a nice bookend to the sunrise.

Below are some videos of the wreckage. They give some idea of how widespread it was. We could have gotten a lot more video, but we tried not to film things when people were around. Like the photos, they were all taken on my iPhone, so quality is low.

strong wind

the kanenohama/negishi neighborhood

ishinomaki port 2

ishinomaki port 1

coming off the bridge into ishinomaki port

road damage on bridge

port next to water

destroyed paper mill and freight terminal

wreckage near port

more wreckage

more wreckage