A report by Stephanie Yuko Miwa

Our last place to go on that day, was a day care center for old people, located above the coast on the top of a hill. The ocean view was beautiful there, but it struck me, when I heard that the tsunami came to this height (more than 20 meters high). In the center, the principal and one member of staff made a presentation and told us about their experience during and after the disaster. On one hand, we saw pictures of the high wave, broken, torn off houses, snowfall, beds under tents outside, old people covered in several blankets and many clothes, volunteers using pet bottles as temporary toilets, but on the other hand, support, help in reconstruction, building new roads, volunteer cleaning the area, people who were smiling and gained new hope. We had many questions after the presentation and finally we went outside and were standing on the side to which the tsunami approached.    I stared at wrecks in the sea:

I suddenly felt terribly upset, while thinking of all the people who died. I got to know, that many old people had died, due to the fact, that they had to be removed from their familiar surroundings and got too depressed and stressed.  In Germany, I just heard about the huge number of people who died, and it seemed so abstract to me. Coming to Japan and going to this place it made me able to show more empathy and understanding of what the people were going through.    

After the trip, one friend who had done volunteer work in Miyagi during the spring break, said that I must have been surely surprised about the different damage to cities in the same area. I was, indeed, very surprised when we arrived finally at Matsushima and I was also amazed by the beauty of this place. Matsushima stayed quite unaffected and undamaged by the tsunami and one reason was the small islands in the coastal area, which stopped or weakened the tsunami’s power and strength. We went to see a shrine and a small museum, which was once a place for Japanese princesses.  Probably, it was good to go to Matsushima on that beautiful, sunny day, since it showed the opposite of the grey disaster day, more than one year ago.

People were asking me, after I came back from Sendai, if I had been afraid of radiation.  I talked with the trip members about the radiation, just a few times, but especially on our way back to Shizuoka, when we passed Fukushima shinkansen station, I thought about the time before I came to Japan last year at the end of September. Mostly, what friends and other people were afraid of, when I told them I would go to Japan, was the radiation. One reason is surely the matter of Chernobyl and also, because in Germany we are not so used to the other aspects of the whole disaster, the natural disaster (tsunami and earthquake).  

Despite this, for me it was right to go to these places and I’m grateful to the people who made this important experience possible for me.  I experienced how valuable it is to support each other in a good and careful way, not just giving physical and material support, but mental support, support for the soul.