Yoshimura talks with carpenter Kenji Hoshino about their work for the nonprofit organisation at a tsunami-struck house in Ishinomaki.


By Takehiko Kambayashi

An unusual freelance relief worker, Seiji Yoshimura, is still toiling in the part of Japan that was struck two years ago by a devastating earthquake and tsunami.
In a country where volunteer work is unfamiliar to many, Yoshimura, 47, lives on standby so that he can rush in his own car to sites within hours of a disaster, supported by private donations.
In the scarred zone of north-eastern Japan, many other non-profit groups have left and media coverage of the reconstruction has receded from the front pages of newspapers.
But Yoshimura is still there, filling his days with repairs of disaster-damaged facilities and care for elderly residents who have lost their houses. He arrived soon after the region was struck by the March 2011 earthquake that left about 18,500 people dead or missing.
“It’s only two years that have passed since the disaster,” he stresses. “There are still some people who are not able to talk about what took place two years ago.”
In Ishinomaki, Yoshimura set up a base for volunteers which was later turned into a non-profit organisation, Open Japan. The group, which is helping to rebuild, is one of several that continue to provide individual support, said Yoshinori Abe, an official at the city’s social welfare unit, which also runs volunteer centres.
Open Japan has conducted “invaluable work” in Ishinomaki, he said.
The city is just the most recent place where Yoshimura has done relief work. He has dedicated his life to rescue operations and reconstruction assistance at disaster sites in Japan and abroad.
On March 11, 2011, Yoshimura was ready for a major earthquake, as a big tremor had shaken north-eastern Japan just two days before.
 “I had put all the equipment in the car,” he said. But it still took him about 11 hours to drive to Ishinomaki from Tokyo, which is 370km to the south-west. “I arrived in Ishinomaki at 2am and saw burning red over the mountain,” he recalls. “It was an unforgettable scene.”
Amid aftershocks following the main quake, Yoshimura spent the next five days on an intensive search for survivors in devastated coastal areas, working alongside police, troops and professional rescue workers. While a number of bodies were on the shore, “it was hard to find people who were still alive,” he said.
Yoshimura puts priority on rushing to a disaster scene for initial-stage relief activities to save as many lives as possible.
He still regrets having reached Kobe only four days after that western Japanese city was struck by a magnitude-7.3 quake in 1995, the country’s worst post-World War II disaster until the 2011 tsunami.
 “It was too late. I could have saved more lives,” he recalled.
Yoshimura, who was a city councillor in western Tokyo at that time, drove a truck to Kobe carrying relief supplies and two huge cauldrons in which meals could be cooked for 1,000 people at a time.
Upon his arrival, he was appalled to see the scale of the devastation. “I felt powerless. But I started to be involved in relief activities,” he said.
Yoshimura settled in Kobe and became a leader of a volunteer group at a time when the word “volunteer” was unfamiliar to most people in Japan. Spurred by delays in government relief operations, tens of thousands of citizens flocked to aid at the disaster scene, although the country had no tradition of volunteerism.
Yuka Inoue, who has known Yoshimura since she was involved in volunteering in Kobe, said volunteer work is a “moving experience.”
 “I want more people to get involved. You gain the experience of making society work. That’s what we did in Kobe,” she said.
 “Kobe was a starting point,” Yoshimura said.
Of more than 6,400 deaths in the 1995 quake, many were blamed on the failure to contain the Kobe fire sooner. About 7,000 houses were completely destroyed by blazes, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency.
Yoshimura later trained to become a volunteer fireman.  “Without a knowledge of firefighting, it’s impossible to co-ordinate closely with firefighters at a disaster scene and operate smoothly as a team,” he explained.
Yoshimura, who had originally learned to be a canoeist, also became a logger and learned how to operate heavy machinery.
While he was involved in reconstruction efforts in Kobe and gaining more skills, Yoshimura also had interludes at disaster sites overseas, including a 1999 earthquake in Taiwan, the 2000 Yunnan Province quake in China, the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and the 2005 Pakistan quake.
He also flew to China in 2008 to be engaged in relief operations after the Sichuan earthquake in that year. And in 2009, he travelled to Indonesia after another big quake there. “We should develop a good relationship with other Asian countries,” because of Japan’s wartime atrocities during World War II, Yoshimura said.
 “At a disaster site, I often find the local soldiers and rescue workers and myself too in tears when we grasp the extent of the damage and see the people who have who lost loved ones weeping,” he said.
Yoshimura had travelled widely even before graduating from Japan Lutheran College in Tokyo.
His father is a pastor at an Episcopalian church in Tokyo. At 25, the son was the youngest person elected as a city councillor in Kokubunji City, Tokyo. Before the Kobe quake, he decided not to seek re-election.
Yoshimura, who now has two daughters of his own, has been funded by some 200 individuals since the Kobe quake, he said.
His example is unique in a country where most of the public is used to relying on their government to carry out humanitarian aid.
Yoshimura “has many supporters and attracts a variety of people,” said Tsukasa Kurosawa, a disaster expert at the Nippon Foundation, who has known him since the Kobe quake. He also brings along “exceptional skills.”
 “He is among the first to get to a disaster site and then create a base for volunteers. So I know who to go to and help him,” Inoue said.
Behind Yoshimura’s passion for disaster relief is the example set decades ago by an American, Dr Paul Rusch, an Episcopalian missionary who contributed to the rebuilding of St Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo after the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake killed about 105,000.
Rusch also helped to develop a rural area in Yamanashi, central Japan, soon after World War II, and founded the Kiyosato Educational Experiment Project (KEEP).
 “I feel he is encouraging me to go” to disaster sites for relief operations, Yoshimura said of Rusch, who died in 1979. “One person can make a big difference,” he said. — DPA