After the earthquake disaster, the first thing I wanted was light.” (Sato Shinichi, Director of General Affairs, Saito Hospital) “When the lights went on at home, I felt gratitude from the bottom of my heart.” (A woman living in the city) “The lights dispelled the anxiety that people were experiencing.” (Kimura Shin, Head of Disaster Countermeasures Office, Ishinomaki City) Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture. When I came here on April 21 to research this story, I met many people who were happy that the rays of hope that light up people’s lives were making a comeback in their day-to-day lives. At the time of the disaster, a total of 4.86 million households lost power in the area under the jurisdiction of Tohoku Electric Power Company. The scale is 7 times that of the Miyagi-Oki Earthquake of 1978. In order to deliver power to users, a ... ... [Read more]

It was April 12, one month after the Great East Japan Earthquake. We visited Mikamine Park in Sendai’s Taihaku Ward, known as a scenic spot for cherry trees (sakura). While the trees had yet to bloom, in the park we saw a large tour bus with a Yamagata Prefecture license plate. Posted on the windshield of this bus, which appeared empty, was a paper reading “Chugoku/Shikoku Company, Squad No. 1-2.” It sounded like it came from the Japan Self-Defense Forces, but that was not the case. The passengers from this bus were employees of Hiroshima Gas and they had come to recover Sendai’s town gas system. The bus acted as a base camp on this day for the company’s Valve Opener Unit. According to Okazawa Keisuke, Manager of Public Relations at Osaka Gas who came to assist The Japan Gas Association (JGA) with public ... ... [Read more]

How important a lifeline mobile telephones have become was brought home to many people in the recent earthquake disaster. Immediately after the earthquake struck on March 11, mobile telephones were unable to connect across a large area, including the Tokyo capital region, the reason being a concentrated and enormous volume of calls “reaching an unprecedented increase of 60 times normal levels.” (Fukushima Hironori, Director of the Disaster Countermeasures Office at NTT DOCOMO) The three mobile operators, DOCOMO, au (KDDI) and SoftBank Mobile, were forced to impose strict service restrictions of maximum 70-90%. Mobile phones were the first choice for confirming safety, a pattern of behavior completely different from the time of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. In addition, all the communications companies suffered unprecedented damage. Many communications facilities were swept away in the tsunami... [Read more]

The massive earthquake and tsunami damaged distribution channels of automakers. But cars and scooters are essential to recovery. “Even if it’s just one car, we want to make the delivery.” Honda Dream Tohoku and Sendai Toyopet Ishinomaki took action. Close to the mouth of the Kitakami River and at the northern tip of Ishinomaki City is a small village. In the Ohsashi District populated by fishermen’s households, about 200 residents were quietly forced to live as disaster victims, as if the world had forgotten them. Relief supplies from the JSDF and private volunteers finally began to steadily arrive, but the residents had one main concern. The undulating geography of the village made it difficult for the volunteer doctor to make the rounds of homes of the elderly, either by foot or bicycle. They realized they needed a scooter. Kofude Kaiji (second from left) traveled ... ... [Read more]

Yamato Transport resumed operations at an office with no gas or electricity. The driving force for quick recovery was in employees on site acting voluntarily. Their sense of mission as being part of a lifeline fed their motivation. The Watanoha District is located close to the fishing port of Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture. A major supermarket nearby had been hit by numerous trucks carried by the tsunami, and a house that drifted there was empty of people. While the road was just barely cleared of debris, the area was largely in the devastated state the earthquake and tsunami had left it three weeks prior. On April 1, in this area reduced to earth, the Yamato Transport Ishinomaki/Watanoha Center resumed operations. There were no electricity or gas supply, and nothing of the office remained but a roof. Sign found from beneath the debris In ... ... [Read more]

The Tohoku Shinkansen and local lines of the quake-hit area suffered severe damage from the Great East Japan Earthquake. Yet many of the lines resumed operation between late-April and May, and passengers are returning. Behind this quick recovery were lessons learned from the past and painstaking efforts of the workers on site. On July 9, the East Japan Railway Company (JR East) and Tohoku Shinkansen (bullet train) took another step toward complete recovery. Since the full 675 km stretch (actual distance) between Tokyo and Shin-Aomori opened on April 29, trains had to run at slow speeds between Nasushiobara and Morioka (344 km), but the subject section was reduced to the span of Fukushima to... [Read more]

The Japanese economy suffered tremendous damage from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. As recovery progresses, much attention is placed on cases where a company and its employees act voluntarily and highly effectively toward recovery. The following examples are reports on actual cases in which several companies volunteered efforts toward recovery. Some points of particular note are as follows. One is that these corporate employees gave their efforts toward recovery based on their own motives rather than from top-down command. In the case of Japan’s largest logistics company Yamato Transport, we see Yamato employees who witnessed the confusion in relief supply delivery in affected areas manage relief supplies and create a distribution system on their own. The cases of Honda Dream and Sendai Toyopet illustrate automotive dealers keeping their stores open every day in the disaster-hit area to work on repairing cars and... [Read more]

It was nothing like any catastrophe you would see in a manga — the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake caused calamitous damage, primarily in the Tohoku region. In the disaster-struck areas, filled with tension and anxiety, a growing number of people, primarily children, were still wanting to read manga. A store in Sendai was reportedly circulating a single volume of the latest Weekly Shonen Jump (“Jump”) among 100 people. It was under these circumstances that the magazine’s publisher, Shueisha announced that it would offer a special Internet release of all titles on its March 14 release of Jump Vol. 15 for free. The company also decided to release Vol. 16 for cell phones free of charge. Behind these decisions was the fact that some regions were unable to receive deliveries of Jump because bookstores and convenience stores had become inoperable due to... [Read more]

The 16th Association of Media in Digital (AMD) Awards for the Digital Contents of the Year 2010 gave the Life Achievement Award to the Paris Japan Expo’s co-founding trio plus International Relations Director for their contributions in promoting Japanese digital content in Europe. As one of the Life Achievement Awardees, International Relations Director of Goma Communication, Mlle. CIBOT, was interviewed by Prof. HAMANO, as below: Prof. HAMANO Yasuki: I think Japan Expo is part of the fourth post-war “Japan Boom” in Europe, having a focus on the youth culture. According to my perspective, the current boom follows in the footsteps of the movie boom of the fifties, as exemplified by the Kurosawa genre; the Kabuki as well as other stage activities boom... [Read more]

Rebuild new, yet rebuild “as it was before “First, I offer my sympathy to those who have suffered as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and my condolences to the families of those who lost their lives. The idea that nature is a good thing, as implied in words such as “nature conservation” and “natural food” only shows one face of nature. Nature, as we saw in the latest disaster, also has another face: that of fear. It was a “once in a thousand years” massive earthquake and tsunami. Although under the current circumstances we have little data on damage resulting from causes other than the tsunami, the earthquake itself caused up to several hundred aftershocks. While some disasters come once in a thousand years, some greater disasters come once in ten thousand years. There is even a theory of an extinction ... ... [Read more]