This wekend there is a charity flea market in Ebisu/Naka-Meguro area. Ishihara-san who is the organizer of the group of people we have joined for Tohoku volunteer work will attend. Chie and I will help her set up on Friday evening, using the car.
If you are in the area during the weekend, feel free to drop by.
Though we are on vacation our friends in Japan are not. Ichihara-san and her friends drove all the food and water we and many others have helped collect to the Tohoku area. You can find pictures and descriptions here (Japanese only).
I have also added a Tohoku Donation page where you can donate money for food and water that will go to the Tohoku area. The idea is that you should be able to follow your money from your pocket to exactly what they were used for and when.
Today Chie and I will deliver our first batch of supplies to Ishihara-san. She is arranging for trucks to go to the Tohoku area every week. Bringing food, water, and whatever other things that are needed.
She has got in contact with a small town called Kobuchihama on a peninsula in the Miyagi prefecture, which is the prefecture where Sendai is located. The peninsula lost contact with the main island of Japan for two weeks after the earthquake so they could not get food or water supplies.
We got in contact with Ishihara-san through KotoKoto. The owner of KotoKoto and Ishihara-san seems to be friends. And we made contact with Ishihara-san about 2 weeks back, knocking on her door a Saturday morning. In a very unusual way for a Japanese she opened up her home for us without knowing who we were, and we agreed to help out.
Since then we have collected food and water little by little. Water especially is hard to come by in any larger amount at one time as there is limits on how much you can buy. Usually 1-2 bottle per person. Rice that you can heat either in microwave oven or by putting the box into hot water also have limitations in some stores. So little by little we built up to this point where we will drop by Ishihara-san to deliver the supplies.
Mash-san, as you may recognize from our Radior Nation Parties and trips to San Francisco, also sent us some money that could be used for renting the trucks and for gas.
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Maybe most of you are getting tired of all the talking about earthquakes. Still I would like to try to explain why people here in Japan is talking about the Tohoku earthquake.
Not only was it the biggest earthquake that have hit Japan in modern time (9.0 in magnitude). It also resulted in the biggest crises in post-second World War era in Japan. And has had about 4 times as many after-shocks over 5 in magnitude as any of the other big earthquakes that have hit Japan earlier. The image below can give some perspective on this.
Of course most of these after-shocks we have not felt here in Tokyo. But you can imagine the people living in the Tohoku area. First they are hit by a 9.0 earthquake, followed by a tsunami. During the same day they have another 132 earthquakes of 5.0 or higher. 32 of these are 6.0 or higher and 3 are 7.0 or higher. Anyone of these would be enough to scare many people. They had 132 of them. After they had lost homes, family, friends, pets, everything.
It is quite difficult to imagine what they have experienced. And as one guy said that visited the area, we cannot tell them to fight it out. They have already done all the fighting out that you can expect from anyone. Now we have to fight for them.
I am running out of funny words to write when informing about earthquakes. We had another one that we felt here in Tokyo at 10:41 pm. It felt like a 3 on the JMA intensity scale. And it was. It was a bit closer to Tokyo again, outside of the Chiba prefecture.