Rikuzen Takata, a few misgivings

I'll confess I had some misgivings about the situation over the past week.   Some are oganizational, some are ethical and some are interpersonal.

In terms of organization and efficiency it is difficult for the volunteer centre to get a balance.  They want volunteers. Volunteers bring assistance, keep the Sanriku in the public mind, give local people encouragement and stimulate the economy.  At the same time they feel a heavy responsibility for the safety of the volunteers.  When people get injured it is "painful to our heart" as one volunteer survivor put it.  A couple of times we were told to finish at 2pm.  When the work day is supposed to go from 10-3, losing an hour is frustrating.   With an extra hour we probably could have got the electric pole out of the rice field near the school...  But efficiency doesn't appear to be the main priority.   Starting and ending times could be staggered to ensure that groups were not kept in a holding cell at the volunteer centre.  One day or arrival time was set later, but the finishing time remained the same.  It's a long way to come from Tokyo to be told that you can only work a few hours.  Even when we insisted we could keep working... it was "the rule".   Perhaps there is a feeling that it's better to have volunteers coming up for longer - which gives psychological support - rather than than rushing to get things physically returned to "normal".

At the level of the group there were organisational issues as well.  Being at / graduating from a prestigious university doesn't necessarily equip a person with the skills to oversee people doing physical tasks, or  knowing which equipment suits a task, or even how to do the work.  The vast majority of people in the group were from Tokyo.  The country-urban divide was stark.  Most people had no experience with shovels, picks,  and crowbars and didn't have any basic sense of how to use them effectively.  In general the foreigners - aside from my classmates there were foreigners from Burma and Uganda - did know how to use tools.  When everyone is picking their own little pile and not working as a team it's very much less efficient. If the tools are inappropriate the work load can be amplified markedly....and at times it was. A pick and a shovel are different tools....  The lack of experience with tools extended to lack of outdoor physical experience.  Complaints about it being too hot (at not a whole lot over 30) and insistence that the group takes ten minute breaks every half hour were exasperating. People are coddled in artificial heating and cooling all year. There was no risk of heat stroke.. it seemed so lame to be complaining  about minor discomfort when you're working with people who have lost so much....

Two of the days that we worked I felt ethically challenged.  When working for individuals, whether on not they were present, there was a sense that we were doing something to make someone's situation better.  The days we worked for the company I wondered whether we were the ultimate "scab" labour.  After our day of work in the factory, one of the managers drove up.  He was saying that the company was facing bankruptcy and that they had fired all their workers and a few had been rehired as low paid part time workers.  We were scab labour.  On one hand I was disgusted, on the other hand I tried to justify it with the rationale that if they can get back on their feet they can rehire their workers..... It  had to go through the volunteer centre so it should be ethical... but it's hard to believe it.  It's repugnant to think we were up there taking jobs.   I am unsure of the situation, but I hope they do recover and do rehire....

Interpersonal is trickier to explain.  Maybe because many of the group were young, maybe they are a more straightforward generation, maybe more selfish.... maybe I am just an over-sensitive  foreigner....   I found the empathy levels of the group I went with pretty low.  (not my wonderful class mates and not all of the rest).  The man whose field we weeded offered the group tomatoes from his vegie patch.  He did have lots of tomatoes.... but he didn't have much else - he was living in a lean to shack where his house used to be. Patrick, my American classmate and I shook our heads in disbelief as people plucked them in volume at will.  Taking some is fine, but taking lots......

When an old man says don't worry about moving the rocks because they are too heavy for us to move, what he means is not "please don't move them" rather "I don't want to cause you trouble by asking you to move them".  I assured him we (at least my burly classmates rather than me) could move them if he wanted, and he was really happy, particularly with the resetting of memorial stones.  My classmate did the same with the electricity poles, and finally after almost 7 months they are gone from his land. Had they taken him at face value, the poles would still be there. The man (though the week it always was a man) who asks for the grass to be cut almost certainly wants the weeds taken out from the roots. It was bemusing that the foreigners seemed better able to read the intentions than many of the Japanese... I guess because we had more "common sense" for manual labour and understood that grass chopped off at ground level will be back in a few days time.

At an interpersonal level at times I wondered about how some of the volunteers perceived local people.  My Japanese isn't good enough to be attuned to nuances well, but people pitied the couple whose vege patch we were fixing up. They were living in a lean to shack constructed where their house had been. They had no running water and no electricity - buckets out to catch rain.  It seemed hard for people to understand that they would choose to live in the path of the tsunami in such a state of privation - simple, old, stubborn people.  It seemed paternalistic and lacking respect for their decision making.  I imagine surviving a tsunami would be enough to make someone  have a clear idea of their priorities. Living there with a garden to tend to was preferable to living in temporary emergency accommodation.  Where they were, they were rebuilding their lives. They could see where the high ground was and would be able to escape.  Recognising people as survivors who can make decisions, rather than seeing them as victims to be pitied, seems like a basic first step in helping people get back on their feet...

In general (though there are definitely exceptions) Japanese culture is not very comfortable with conspicuous displays of emotion. "Ganbatte" - keep perserving / do your best. has become the signature expression of the past 7 months.  Ganbatte Nippon, Ganbatte Tohoku, Ganbatte Iwate, Ganbatte Ganbatte Ganbatte.  It ranks alongside "genki dashite"- keep your spirits up    in the useless cliche.  How can you possibly tell a person who has lost their home and family members to cheer up....    There were much more appropriate slogans "soba ni, moto ni, tachiagarimashoo"   - "standing with you, and beside you"  and "lets join our hearts and minds".  One of the group members told me the old man who grabbed my hands (in the gentle but imploring way that old Japanese ladies sometimes do) and asked me to come back  to the Sanriku was an ero-oji (a dirty old man). It's hard for me to understand why he (the group member) couldn't see his(the old man's) pain  or empathise with him....

The urban-rural divide also comes through with language.  It's a regional thing - among older people in particular there are strong regional dialects that at their extreme can be almost untintelligible. But that really is extreme.  If I can get the gist of what someone is saying with my substandard Japanese, a Japanese person should be able to manage.  It doesn't matter if you can't catch every word.  Complaining that you can't understand local people is just rude and shows little interest in wanting to understand. But as I said... I'm a grumpy foreigner.

Misgivings aside it was worth going.  We made a difference to the people we were in contact with, and that's the driving motivation for going.  A bonus is that my class mates Lilian, Patrick and Ruben are super: hard working, good fun, good hearted.  This is their webpage.  http://www.311relief.com/  Even though the organization we went up with could be a bit better organised, and prepare people better, it's great that they facilitate people going up to help.  Help is needed and though things are not always done the way I would do them, part of being constructive there is letting local people make the decisions about how they want things done.

I'll be back there again, perhaps volunteering will be finished before I have the chance to go again, but it's a beautiful part of Japan and I'd like to go back there on holiday, help the econony and see the progress being made.