Under Your Wings

Everyday I passed by this breathtaking harbor view to get to the temporary housing complex.  Not far from this bay, it is a sight full of destruction: bare foundations of houses, metal infrastructure of buildings with many artifacts hanging over them, proving once there were lives living here.  I stared at the beautiful, calm horizon, trying to imagine what it was like on that fatal day.
Did these pastel colors turned black?  How high did the water go?  Were there any cars taken from my current position?   My imagination is out run by the reality.  

I continue to pass by it everyday, pondering what it is like when such beauty turned into a monster.
And I ponder, what I am like when that time comes.

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, 
though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging." ~Psalm 46:1-3  

O God my Lord, if I am less faith than that, please help me. Because I am of little faith, but I choose to believe in You.

There is a Story to be Told

Jan 13, 2012.

This was the first time I talked with a survivor who has lost an immediate family member.

In our mobile cafe, Yuri was a middle-aged lady with a polite smile.  Sitting beside me, she joined in the conversation occasionally.  When she was not, Yuri would seemed to have left us briefly to be in a world of her own, deep in thoughts, frozen in time.
When I asked about if her family was ok in the tsunami, her facial expression froze for a moment.  Then she shook her head and said in a quiet voice, "My son was gone."
I wasn't quite sure of my ears and was suspecting my crappy japanese had misinformed me.  In the moment I was hesitating, the topic of the group conversation changed like a tidal wave in the ocean, washed over the hidden wound Yuri has just spoken of.  I felt a great sense of grief and tenseness from Yuri, and somehow I felt this was something very important that needed to be told today.  I caught a chance to ask her again about her son.
Where was your son at that time?  I asked.
He was working, in the car on his way going somewhere, then the tsunami came,  she said. Tears started glittering in her eyes.  They found his car, but not him.
The group went quiet.
"Can you tell us about you son?" I asked gently. "Anything... something happy, something special, something that you remembered about him."
"Something about my son..." she hesitated, and her eyes started wandering into that world of her memory.
"Don't strain yourself over it," one of the volunteers said.
I prayed desperately in my heart, asking God how far would He allow the story to be told today.  From my experience in playback theater, I truly believe being able to tell one's experience of pain is the first step toward healing.  I stayed with her in that moment of  brewing thoughts, guarding that moment of awkward silence that I could see others were uncomfortable with.
Suddenly she broke the silence.
"He was huge," she said.
Then she told us about her son Kasuki practiced Sumo from from primary school to junior high.  Because he was big and practicing Sumo, no one on the class dared to bully him.  Just when he started high school, he refused to do Sumo anymore.  "I hate it!" Kasuki said.  I'd always wandered why he hated it, Yuri smiled.  She was smiling faintly and there was a sparkle in her eyes as she told us about Kasuki.
But with my house washed away, I have lost everything of him.  Not even a picture.

At the end, we prayed with Yuri.  There was no one I really could tell this to in the temp house, Yuri said.  But I felt more relieved now that I have spit it out.  One of the volunteers, who is also a mother, gave her a hug in tears and Yuri broke down crying in her arms.

It was a beautiful scene.

In a Loud Silence

Jan 12, 2012.

Varying from the previous work I have done with All Hands, the type of work we are doing at CRASH Japan is mainly emotional/spiritual care.  A mobile cafe that goes to different temporary housing complex regularly creates a space for people to be listened to and to build community.  It has been almost a year since the devastating disaster has happened.  I was abit in shock when I first learned how some residents still  do not know anyone in their temporary housing complex. Slowly, I began to learn this is at large a common phenomena, if not the majority.  In many of the temp house complex, residents come from different area, only a few lucky complexes are blessed with people who come from the same neighborhood of their previous life.  Japan is a society where the building of community takes time and relational connections.  The earthquake and tsunami have not only torn families apart, but also communities that had been living the area for years if not generations.  The devastation is not physical and emotional, but social as well.

My first day's work was distributing blanket at temp house complex.  An elderly grandma came to answer the door.
"Come in, come in, it's so cold outside!"  She greeted us with the warmest smile.
Grandma Setsu* lives in this unit alone with a daughter living close by.  As we were drinking green tea and peeling mandarin over an exchange of conversation, she told us about herself.  Because of her diabetic condition and other unmentioned reasons, she said she doesn't go out much nor does she has visitors.  She pulled out a letter she has received from her long time friend Miyu.  Miyu left her home town Ootsuchi, an area seriously damaged by the tsunami, to live with her son in Chiba.  She wrote in her letter that she doesn't know anyone in the neighborhood, alone in the house everyday.  Miyu desperately wants to come back to Ootsuchi, where her friends and home are, and were.  Grandma Setsu paused, with her gaze far far away.  After a moment of silence, she said, "I want to meet her so much.  But she did not include a returning address."  I held her hand in mine, patting the back of her hand gently, as we took a moment to let all the feelings occupy the tiny room in a loud silence.

** For privacy reason, all names in all entries will either be a partial or fake name.

Flower on the Pebbles

January 13, 2012.  Tono-->Otsuchi.

Second day working at CRASH Japan Tono base.
On our way to Otsuchi, a tsunami-devastated area, to distribute blankets to residents of temporary housings, we passed by a deserted land of an originally what supposed to be a residential area,  a man on the side of the road caught my eyes.
He was sitting squarely on the edges of what was the foundation of a house.  A solemn silence was frosted on his slightly frowning eyebrows.  His eyes was staring deeply beyond the space in front of him, as if this is only his shell with a world of memory living within.  Not far away from him, a small bouquet of flower was lying against a short wall of rubble.
As our van passed by him, our eyes met.  I am not sure in what dimension we were looking at each other at, but I was almost certain that we saw each other.
I bowed deeply to him, and to whom he is grieving and mourning for.

Loss and grief, are pebbles that you can find on the frozen ground of Tohoku.

May a Flower Blossom for You Everyday

Lovely bouquet from Yoshino coffee shop owner @Ofunato.
I told her that it was abit scary to stay in the japanese style old apartment all by myself, and she gave me this cute bunch when I was about to leave.
"It may make the room abit brighter," she said.
Indeed, it is warmer!

An Imperfect Offering

After 5 hours of travelling, here I am, back to the city of Ofunato.  Only this time there are no ditches to be dug nor walls to be knocked down.  I walked on the street where our base used to be.  It seemed awfully quiet and empty.  The Yoda figure in the t-shirt shop’s window is no longer holding the All Hands poster.  The big blue handprint sign of All Hands Volunteer is now buried under a layer of white paint.  No hands, only the same hue of blue and white is only trace that the busy traffic of volunteers had once constantly flooded in and out of the shop’s gate.  I took one last look of the empty street, and turned into the small street toward Mr Asano’s house, who has kindly offered me an empty apartment to stay at during my time here.

        In between pints of beer and exchange of updates, Yu-san told me after the project was finished and the volunteers left, he felt such a huge, indescribable emptiness grew within that at times, he would wander to the places where the volunteers had worked at.  Sometimes, he walked along the ditches that we had cleared; Sometimes, he sat in the Midori Park by himself. Yu’s eyes were misty as he told me, and added, “Sometimes, my eyes would become teary when I looked at the messages you guys have signed on the benches.”

        My eyes became teary too, as I listened to Yu.  All of us who have been here are inevitably bonded to the people of this land more or less in some ways.  We are not of the same blood line, nor do we have the same color of eyes or skin, nor speak in the same tongue.  But only because we allowed ourselves to be here at a time of great need, consciously or unconsciously, an imperfect offering we have made ourselves to be. To the people in need, to the hearts in distraught, even though we, ourselves, are as broken as we are in our own life.      

Blood Sucker in Shibuya

In between appointments, I had 1.5 hour wandering around by myself in Shibuya, one of the busiest districts in Tokyo.  As I was swimming through the sea of people, a red cross caught my eyes. It was the blood donation center of Red Cross Japan. For some reasons I thought to myself, “I have nothing to do now anyways, why don’t I go give blood?”

        Yup, just like that.

So a few moments later, I found myself filling out a form, given a locker, and in a roomful of snacks, free drinks and manga/magazines. Hagandez ice cream, donuts, cookies, sweets, and all you can drink free drinks ranging from sport drinks, coffee, carbonated drinks and hot soups.  I guess if they want to pump something out from you, they have to pump something in first and afterward XD  The corn soup and seafood flavor miso soup were yummy! 

The doctor who went through the questionnaire with me saw that I have filled Ofunato as my address, so he asked what I am doing about there. I told him I am a volunteer in the Northeast.  He told me he came from that area too, and his grandmother was lost in the tsunami too.  A strange connection arose from inside, and we smiled at each other.  An unimaginable disaster of deep waters and trembles has destroyed countless lives. But somehow, in some inexplicable ways, lives from different worlds and all walks of life are intertwined through this web of debris, loss and death.  Whether willingly or unwillingly, Tohoku, is the place that has linked us all together.  However the circumstance we met, as Ann Sally sings, “I am glad that you came inside my life.”