Blogs from Miyagi, Japan, Asia - page 2

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I wasn’t sure quite what I’d see. It seemed like a typical rural station as the train rolled in, and still as I walked through the overpass and out the turnstile. Choosing to walk to my accommodation, again there were no immediate clues. Further on and the picture began to look not quite right. The occasional empty lot neatly cleared and obviously being readied for construction turned into regular gaps showing an increasing state of abandonment the further I went. Little did I know. I spent the next day wandering along the edge of the river leading out to Ishinomaki Bay. It was a lot to take in. It would be easy to forget that what I was seeing was the town already two and a half years down the ... read more

Another update about my time in Japan. I've been doing a lot of '-structing', both 'con-' and 'de-'. That is to say that I've been breaking and building things of late. More breaking than building though. Destruction is much more fun! >:) So that apartment we cleaned back in the Japan - Part 1 entry was actually the second floor. The first floor was very heavily damaged by the tsunami and we'd been asked to get rid of all the remaining floorboards, insulation and walls, leaving only the major support beams. It was a job for 3-5 people for almost a week. I worked on it each day and had a crowbar glued to my hand almost the entire time. It was a lot of fun and really satisfying when that beam you've been bashing and ... read more

Japan! So, after something like 25 hours flying I finally made it to Japan. Unlike the last time I came there was literally no line at immigration and it took all of three minutes to get through. Armed with the knowledge of which trains to take and how to get to my hostel I set off from the airport. Boring story short, I made it there fine, got some sleep, next day waited for the bus that would take me to Ishinomaki and played the 'in-transit-sleep-deprivation' game again on the way. So the name of the organization I'm volunteering with is called It's Not Just Mud (or INJM for short). Here is the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ItsNotJustMud and the website: http://itsnotjustmud.com/. The website has all the information about what they're doing/what they're about in a nicer format ... read more

On the official 10 year anniversary of 9/11 and the 6 month anniversary of the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, I flew into Sendai airport, the airport that shown around the world being almost submerged by the Pacific Ocean. I flew into an area that is still recovering, still surrounded by empty and broken businesses. The first very prominent showing was the fact that the Airport Line still isn't running, a full 6 months after the disaster. After having to take a rather expensive taxi ride into the city, I could still see the destruction even in the dark. Ghost businesses span the distance from the airport to the highway and just over the edge lies the ocean that made them. As I was making my way into downtown every changes came up. E-Beans is still unusable, ... read more

We arrived at the school around 8:40. I was happy to see the school remained more or less the same as when I left it (only a few small cracks on the inside). At 8:45 I greeted the students and by 9:00 I was already teaching my first class! The grade 8 class is the biggest class in the school, with a total of 10 students. The TV crew decided they were going to film the entire class so knowing it would be a bit hard to focus, the teacher and I decided we would spend most of the time doing question and answers. For the most part, all the students and their families are well, but some of the students who used to live on the island now live in Shiogama because their houses were ... read more