Disaster sites lure Japanese holiday-week helpers

It’s not the way out-of-towners normally spend the start of the so-called Golden Week holiday,when Japanese commonly leave big cities to visit their home towns,take hot spring vacations or travel abroad. But after last month’s earthquake and tsunami decimated northeastern coastal towns and left an estimated 26,000 Japanese either dead or missing,these are not normal times.

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 spaces 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.

Sugino,from the western city of Nara,is among the tens of thousands of helpers expected to converge on Japan’s northeast in the coming days.

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 ($232) 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 parachute into trouble spots to offer assistance are relatively new.