TOKYO —

From April 19 to April 21, 10 British and Australian expats will cycle approximately 330 kilometers from Tokyo to Minamisoma in Fukushima Prefecture, hoping to raise 1 million yen for the Save Minamisoma Project.

The project was set up by a group of expats in the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and makes fortnightly trips to Minamisoma with donations of food and water to help the 7,000 residents who are still living in temporary housing units nearly 2 years after the tsunami struck.

A more long-term project has been set up by another British expat based in Tokyo, Jo Wilkinson, who has set up a company called Vintage Kimonos to create jobs in Tohoku and provide a long term source of funding to help rebuild communities worst affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Their profits are being donated to schools and orphanages in the Tohoku region.

For more information, please click here.

• hereforever at Feb. 18, 2013 – 08:33AM JST

  Good on you, guys. Great to see some still cares about those unfortunate to be still living in shelters. My thoughts and prayers with you all. Keep warm and God Speed.

   

• kurisupisu at Feb. 18, 2013 – 10:15AM JST

  What has happened to the billions of yen donated to the homeless and dispossessed in Fukushima ?

  It has been used to buy heavy machinery for prisons and to make contact lens factories etc!!!!!!

  It is people that are at grassroots like Wilkinson that are really making a difference

   

• Dave Lawrence at Feb. 18, 2013 – 10:15AM JST

  I’m one of the riders taking part in this charity ride and would like to thank everybody in advance for their support. Any donation, no matter how big or small, is greatly appreciated.

  As well as the link in the article above, you can follow our progress at https://www.facebook.com/TokyoBrits and also https://twitter.com/TokyoBrits!

  http://www.donationto.com/TokyoBrits-Save-Minamisoma-Project

   

  City seethes in radiation zone (Oregonian in Japan)

  Published: Saturday, April 09, 2011, 11:01 PM     Updated: Friday, April 27, 2012, 10:53 AM

  By Richard Read, The Oregonian

   

  MINAMI SOMA, Japan — Threatened by food shortages and radiation, the mayor of this city issued a desperate YouTube plea March 24 after the tsunami that killed hundreds here and destroyed houses including his own.

  Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai spoke urgently into a camcorder, saying politicians and reactor managers had left his city in Japan’s nuclear shadow isolated and uninformed. He asked for volunteers to deliver supplies. He urged reporters to come see for themselves.

  “People are literally drying up as if they are under starvation tactics,” Sakurai said in the English-subtitled video. “We are fighting against the invisible threat of radiation and contamination. I beg you, as the mayor of Minami Soma city, to help us.”

  The video went viral, attracting more than 200,000 hits and spawning multiple copies. Today the 55-year-old mayor of Pendleton’s sister city says his appeal attracted help and worldwide news coverage. The prime minister’s Cabinet secretary called to apologize. A Tokyo Electric Power Co. manager said sorry in person.

  “This is a worldwide crisis, and the Japanese people still feel anger,” Sakurai said during an interview Tuesday at City Hall. “I told the TEPCO manager they need not apologize for what happened in the past. The most important thing is the future.”

  Sakurai’s video provides a glimpse of mounting anger in the nuclear zone, in evacuation centers and among Japan’s typically restrained public at the way the government and the power company are handling the continuing nuclear crisis.

  The incident also shows how, as never before in Japan, local people can bypass the national government to gain influence in ways that probably will affect the nation’s reconstruction and politics for years to come. The trend took root during the 1960s when sister-city relationships, including one of the first, the link between Portland and Sapporo, Japan, enabled direct local contact with the outside. It has blossomed by means of the Internet.

  MINAMI SOMA, Japan — Threatened by food shortages and radiation, the mayor of this city issued a desperate YouTube plea March 24 after the tsunami that killed hundreds here and destroyed houses including his own.

  Mayor Katsunobu Sakurai spoke urgently into a camcorder, saying politicians and reactor managers had left his city in Japan’s nuclear shadow isolated and uninformed. He asked for volunteers to deliver supplies. He urged reporters to come see for themselves.

  “People are literally drying up as if they are under starvation tactics,” Sakurai said in the English-subtitled video. “We are fighting against the invisible threat of radiation and contamination. I beg you, as the mayor of Minami Soma city, to help us.”

  The video went viral, attracting more than 200,000 hits and spawning multiple copies. Today the 55-year-old mayor of Pendleton’s sister city says his appeal attracted help and worldwide news coverage. The prime minister’s Cabinet secretary called to apologize. A Tokyo Electric Power Co. manager said sorry in person.

  “This is a worldwide crisis, and the Japanese people still feel anger,” Sakurai said during an interview Tuesday at City Hall. “I told the TEPCO manager they need not apologize for what happened in the past. The most important thing is the future.”

  Sakurai’s video provides a glimpse of mounting anger in the nuclear zone, in evacuation centers and among Japan’s typically restrained public at the way the government and the power company are handling the continuing nuclear crisis.

  The incident also shows how, as never before in Japan, local people can bypass the national government to gain influence in ways that probably will affect the nation’s reconstruction and politics for years to come. The trend took root during the 1960s when sister-city relationships, including one of the first, the link between Portland and Sapporo, Japan, enabled direct local contact with the outside. It has blossomed by means of the Internet.

  In response to Sakurai’s video, the city received truckloads of relief goods, hundreds of boxes of food and other supplies from individuals. “We got visits from The New York Times, L.A. Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Japanese newspapers,” the mayor said with a grin.

  Bill Powell, a Fortune magazine writer visiting City Hall, encountered a Western television reporter decked out in what appeared to be a full hazmat suit, but it was made of ineffective fabric. A cameraman, there to record the heroic correspondent in action, wore jeans and a light jacket.

  Radiation levels recently have declined to near-background levels, said Sakurai, who keeps two dosimeters clipped to his jacket.

  But life, he said, is hardly back to normal.

  Banks remain closed. Not enough supermarkets have reopened, Sakurai said. Japan’s Education Ministry won’t reopen schools in the nuclear exclusion zone, deferring to the atomic safety agency. Recently, the national government issued a directive, which the mayor wants reversed, closing post offices in the exclusion zone.

  Several thousand Minami Soma residents have returned, Sakurai said. “I cannot encourage people to come back,” however, he said, “because the nuclear-station problems are still very, very unclear.”

  Sakurai sleeps on a couch in City Hall. He’s unable to return to his house, which falls within the nuclear evacuation zone. He said central-government bureaucrats still don’t understand the difficulties faced by Minami Soma residents. National directives remain unclear, he said.

  Late arrival

  Prime Minister Naoto Kan waited until April 2, more than three weeks after the quake and tsunami, to visit an evacuation shelter, making then-President George W. Bush’s delay in viewing Hurricane Katrina’s damage seem trivial.

  “That is unbelievable,” Sakurai said. Kan did view tsunami wreckage from a helicopter a day after the gigantic wave hit.

   

  Up close in Minami Soma, the devastation is breathtaking. Smashed and pancaked houses litter fields of rubble. Pulverized vehicles are sprayed across sand-filled rice paddies. Fishing vessels, tossed like toy boats, remain miles inland.

  “There used to be a baseball field around here,” said Shoichi Suzuki, a Minami Soma City Council member, driving through a vast plain scraped clear of entire neighborhoods. Passers-by gazed at a bulletin board posted with appeals from survivors searching for missing relatives. Incense burned in a vase nearby.

  To the south, Futaba Sekiya walked silently between shattered houses. Sekiya, nattily attired as a candidate for local office in Tokyo, had arrived in the cab of a truck delivering emergency supplies donated by her political party. She was inspecting cleanup efforts, gathering campaign fodder, and forming opinions about how Japan should finance and organize reconstruction projects.

  “The parliament is discussing the source of the money, which could be raising taxes or borrowing,” Sekiya said. “The distribution should be done very equally.”

  Sekiya stopped to examine a page from a family photo album she’d found in the rubble. Snapshots showed proud grandparents and smiling children. Sekiya burst into tears.

  “I have two children,” she said. “I feel such pity.”

  In City Hall, Mayor Sakurai is encouraged to see more residents returning to Minami Soma, where shops and other businesses gradually are reopening. Survivors who lost everything to the tsunami crowd into City Hall to obtain replacement documents.

  Asked whether he’d use his recent YouTube publicity to run for higher office, Sakurai demurred.

  “I was born here and grew up here,” Sakurai said. “Right now I’ve made up my mind to stay here and contribute to the local people.”

  — Richard Read

  http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2011/04/city_seethes_in_radiation_zone.html