Aisatsu Will Save You

Typically, at my daughter’s school culture festival, there is a skit about the atomic-boming of Hiroshima and its aftermath. I remember one year the message was the importance of “aisatsu,” or greetings. One should always greet one’s neighbors, otherwise, they might not help you out when you really need it. Getting along with and being friendly to the other people in your neighborhood just might save your life.

Coming most recently from South Carolina, where everybody waves at strangers in passing cars, I’m pretty good with greetings. I say “Ohayo gozaimasu!” even to the people who ignore me. And whenever I greet my neighbors, that message from my daughter’s culture festival pops into my head.

There have been articles in the newspaper about disaster-hit communities in northeastern Japan helping each other out, and I think that’s great. But what about those who were not welcomed into the communities?

According to a report from Kyodo News, there were probably about 2,500 Chinese and Vietnamese foreign trainees in Fukushima, as well as 1500 each in Miyagi and Iwate. Some were believed to have been employed in or around the coastal areas.

From the report:

“It seems especially difficult to determine what happened to those foreigners who were working at companies in the region after entering Japan as interns, said Megumi Sakamoto, a professor doing research at Fukushima University…Sakamoto said some employers didn’t want foreign trainees mixing with Japanese in their communities, a situation that resulted in interns feeling isolated or even unsure of their exact whereabouts.

“‘It is very hard to determine the location of such foreigners affected by this kind of massive disaster,’ Sakamoto said.”

Update on the National High School Baseball Tournament

In case you were wondering, the tournament at Koshien will be held as planned. Today the team from Tohoku departed by bus for Western Japan.

Read for Japan!

So I was thinking about what I could do to help the evacuees right now, besides sending money (which I have done, and will do again) and books for the kids to read (which I will do on Tuesday). Several writer/editors are putting together e-books of Japan-related writing to raise money, and I’ve sent in a story and an essay to two different projects. I like the idea of putting together a book, but then again, I recently put together a collection of Japan-related writing, my literary journal Yomimono, so why not donate proceeds from that?

So here’s the deal. If you buy a copy of Yomimono here, I will donate every penny that I get to the Japan Red Cross.

Playing Baseball to Heal Hearts

Today Japanese high school baseball officials made a decision on whether the spring national high school baseball invitational tournament at Koshien would be held. I haven’t heard the verdict yet, but I do know that many professional sporting events have been cancelled. This is partly out of respect for the earthquake and tsunami victims, and partly to save energy, and partly because many foreign teams and individual players have left the country.

Iranian-Japanese ace pitcher Yu Darvish  spoke out in favor of postponing the start of the baseball season. Although the Japan League will begin their official games next week as originally scheduled, the Pacific League, of which Darvish’s team, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, is a part, won’t start till the end of April. Darvish was the  pitcher for his Tohoku High School team, which went to Koshien four times. Tohoku has been hard hit by last week’s tsunami.

I’m not sure if the team from that region would be able to make it to Koshien, but I can’t help thinking that a high school baseball tournament is just the thing to buck up the country right now. Wouldn’t it be inspiring to see the future of Japan out there on the field, playing their hearts out? Wouldn’t it give everyone hope? And maybe it would uplifting to watch the  teams play in another city that was once damaged by a huge earthquake and then rebuilt. My son, who is in favor of having the tournament, said that everyone would be able to see the team from Tohoku doing their best.

My husband, a former high school baseball coach, thinks it’s better not to hold it this spring. I do understand the argument against it. For many, it is unseemly to play at a time like this. Plus, it would cost  a lot of money better spent by the Red Cross or in rebuilding, and use up a lot of gas and electricity. And if the team from the stricken area can’t make it and/or isn’t able to practice, that would be unfair, wouldn’t it?

Prime Minister Kan says that Japan is in its deepest crisis since World War II. During the war,  the national high school baseball tournament at Koshien sponsored by the Asahi Shinbun was suspended. However, in 1942, The Ministry of Education decided to hold a special tournament to boost morale. It was called the “Promote the Fighting Spirit” tournament. Only 16 teams participated, instead of the usual (at that time) 23. The winning team was Tokushima Commercial High School. According to my husband, locals take no pride in that victory. “They shouldn’t have played,” he says. “It was during the war.”

Some Thoughts on Disaster and Disability

I wrote a post about the disaster for the Beacon Press blog, Beacon Broadside. You can read it here.

With Apologies

Because I am always ragging on my son’s school, I feel compelled to post that, according this morning’s newspaper, the school is offering to take in high school students from Sendai. I think this is a wonderful gesture, and I made it a point of telling my son about this.

Teaching Compassion in a Time of Crisis

Yesterday, the first day back at school after the week-end’s disaster, the third graders at my daughter’s school decided to gather pencils and notebooks and things for the children who had to evacuate their homes in northern Japan. The teachers discussed the earthquake with the kids, and they are making further plans to help out on a wider scale. My daughter brought a box of pencils to school today to donate.

My husband, who is a high school teacher at a school for the disabled, led his students in a moment of silence to honor the thousands of victims of the tsunami.

I asked my son what he did at school in relation to the quake.

“My teacher talked about it a little,” he said, “but we had to practice for graduation.”

According to my son, there was no further initiative to help the students deal with whatever anxiety or concerns they may have regarding the quake. Nor did I hear of any efforts to comfort or help the survivors, or remember the lives that were washed away. I found this incredible, especially since at every event open to parents, the principal talks about how the school is helping the students to develop kind, caring hearts. Can they really be so busy practicing for graduation, that they can’t spare an hour, or even fifteen minutes, or even a moment of silence?

Again today, nothing.

But then I was thinking about how, after school on Friday, I turned on the news and watched the approaching wave over and over – the houses washing away, the people scrambling desperately up the hills, the cars swirling in the water.  I could hardly tear my eyes away. I wanted my daughter to bear witness because these are her people. This is her country. And at almost twelve, having toured the Peace Museum in Hiroshima and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., having been deeply moved by these horrible events, I felt she was old enough to deal with tsunami footage.

Maybe I was wrong to make her watch it for so long. To make her wallow in tragedy.

At seven o’clock, she tried to find her favorite cartoon, “Doraemon,” on television, but every station was broadcasting tsunami and earthquake updates. She was disappointed, and I became irritated with her.  Was she really so spoiled and lacking in feeling?

She didn’t see any disaster scenes all day Saturday or Sunday. We made crepes together. It was a normal and fun activity. Usually, her weekend diary is about baking or cooking or maybe shopping. When I asked to check her homework, she showed me what she’d written Saturday evening.

She’d written about watching the news with me. She wrote about the earthquake and the big wave and the fires and houses that floated away. She wrote about how scared it made her feel. 

Maybe she’d had enough.

After the Earthquake

On Friday afternoon, I was checking Facebook updates when one of my FB friends in Osaka posted that he’d just experienced a big earthquake. I felt nothing here, in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku. Some others in Tokyo and farther north posted about the tremors as well – the biggest earthquake they’d ever experienced!

An hour or so later, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, the principal came out to my car. I thought he was just coming over to say “hello,” but there was a look of urgency about him. “Hurry home,” he told me. “There’s a tsunami warning!”

“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “I heard about the earthquake, but…”

“Houses have been washed away,” my daughter’s teacher told me.

I know that tsunamis travel far. Even after the recent earthquake in Chile, a tsunami warning was issued here, but at that time the wave was only a foot or two high. Still I was a litte bit concerned because we live near the river, and to get home, I usually drive along a riverside road that tends to flood during typhoons. So even if the wave was only a meter high, we might get stuck in water.

I picked up my son and took him to baseball practice as usual. Meanwhile, sirens sounded along the river, warning people away from the water. It was sunny here. The sky was blue. It seemed like a day where nothing bad could happen anywhere, yet when I turned on the television I saw what had occurred in Tokyo and its environs. Buildings swayed. In a tony department store, a chandelier swung precariously, while workers huddled against the wall, and a foreign couple embraced, perhaps expecting the worst. Fissures snaked through Yokohama. The famous tourist attraction Tokyo Tower bent at the top. Everywhere, books fell from shelves, dishes crashed to the floor, smoke from fires bloomed across the city.

Amazingly, although the earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Japan, Tokyo and Yokohama appear to be largely intact. Fewer than 30 people died from the earthquakes Friday afternoon.

However, shortly after the earth shook,  waves swallowed towns all across the northwest coast. The images have been breathtaking. Heart-breaking. Speech-stealing. Houses carried away like paper boats. Real boats smashed into houses. A ferry on top of a two-story building. Rescue workers carrying the corpses of some of the hundreds who drowned. Lives and livelihoods wiped out with one great lick of a wave. Now, entire towns are nothing but piles of debris. Thousands of people are camped out in school gymnasiums. Some people are still waiting on roofs, while the snow swirls around then.

Here in Tokushima, the tsunami could be measured in inches. It was nothing. It’s over. We’re safe. 

But for others, the loss is immeasurable. I grieve for them.