Air, railway and road traffic of travelers flowing out of Tokyo for the annual Golden Week holidays peaked Friday, though at a relatively modest amount following the March 11 quake-tsunami disaster, with some going to stricken areas to volunteer.
According to the most severely hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, the numbers of visitors to their volunteer centers more than doubled, causing the centers to stop accepting volunteers before noon as the total likely outpaced any such amount previously seen since the disaster.
‘‘We were told we couldn’t do anything because they already had enough volunteers,’’ said Toru Kuwahara, 35, from Yamaguchi Prefecture who along with his wife was among the more than 300 visitors to a volunteer information station at JR Sendai Station in the morning alone.
‘‘Maybe we can take part tomorrow, so we will go to Ishinomaki,’’ he said, referring to the tsunami-ravaged city in the same Miyagi Prefecture with Sendai.
In Ishinomaki, dozens of volunteers donned white disposable
jumpsuits, rubber boots and hard hats at the 370-year-old Jionin
Buddhist temple cemetery to help shovel away layers of tsunami mud and
debris.
Others did more intricate work, tenderly wiping dirt off Buddhist statues and stone carvings.
“I saw the devastation on TV and felt I had to do something,” said Junko
Sugino, 49, as she dragged a crate of mud through the narrow lanes
between the tombstones.
“This is hard work, but it’s something that has to be done by people. Machines can’t fit into these tiny spaces,” she said.
At hard-hit Ishinomaki city’s Senshu University, which has become one of
the region’s largest volunteer centers, administrators have been so
deluged by inquiries they’ve started telling applicants to stay home or
postpone their trip until after Golden Week.
Some 1,500 volunteers already are camped on the university’s sports
fields, Ishinomaki welfare department manager Katsuhito Ito said.
Farther north, in Iwate Prefecture, officials are bracing for an influx
of volunteers on four-day tours organized by travel agencies through May
8.
They’re paying 19,000 yen for bus fare, accommodations and the
opportunity to remove rubble from homes in the cities of Yamada, Otsuchi
and Noda, said Iwate official Susumu Sugawara.
Noriyuki Owaki, 37, another of the workers at the Jionin temple cemetery
said he’s never volunteered for anything before, but decided almost
immediately after the March 11 disaster that he would help out during
Golden Week.
“It’s meaningful work, because you’re dealing with so many families’ memories,” Oikawa said of his cemetery toils.
While Japanese communities have long had a tradition of looking out for
one another, organized non-profit-backed volunteer groups who descend on
trouble spots are relatively new.
The 1995 earthquake in the city of Kobe was a watershed moment for
volunteerism in Japan, said Charles McJilton, founder the Second Harvest
Japan national food bank.
Many people wanted to help Kobe victims, but the government was unable
to handle the influx of volunteers. That experience led to a new law on
nonprofit organizations in 1998 that allowed citizens to incorporate as
legal entities, McJilton said.
“There hadn’t been a history of volunteerism, but there’s a tremendous
surge of interest in volunteering right now,” said David Campbell, who
directs the U.S.-based nonprofit All Hands Volunteers.
In Japan, a string of national holidays at the end of April and
beginning of May are collectively called Golden Week. If there’s a
downside to the Golden Week volunteer boom, it’s being felt by the
traditional tourism industry, which usually cashes in on holiday
business.
JTB Corp, the country’s largest travel agency, forecast that people
traveling domestically between April 24 and May 5 would drop some 28%
from the previous year, while travelers abroad would sink nearly 17%.
One tourism industry advertising campaign is urging Japanese to visit
the damaged Tohuku region, saying that their spending will help with the
area’s recovery, saying “Tohoku’s path to recovery may be long and
difficult, but we want tourism, one of the region’s main industries, to
be a bright spot along the way.”
Prime Minister Naoto Kan has even urged Japanese to open their wallets
during the holiday to help prod the post-disaster economy.
But Toshinobu Muto, director of the Tokyo-based Fareast Inc travel agency said those pleas will likely fall on deaf ears.
“The Japanese have a custom where if their neighbors have it really bad,
they try to be quiet, so that kind of mindset makes a lot of people
really not want to travel,” Muto said.
Back at the Ishinomoki volunteer center, which has hosted more than
27,000 helpers since March 15, lead coordinator Hideo Otsuki was
grateful for the swing from traditional vacations to volunteerism, but
wondered how long it would last.
“There is a concern that volunteers may stop coming after Golden Week,”
he said. “We hope that’s not the case because we need them.”


