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Nanae Hosts Fukushima Kids’ Summer Camp

photo by Ken Ikeda

By Ben Mirin, CIR

July 27th, 2011

NANAE ONUMA—On the morning of July 26th, twenty-four of Nanae’s government employees arrived at the town office in outfits that undoubtedly broke Japan’s “casual bizz” dress code for summer.  Instead of collared shirts, slacks, and indoor slippers they tramped inside with dusty sneakers, cargo shorts, bandanas, and the occasional apron.

Moments after the morning bell rang I ran outside with this already sweaty entourage and piled into one of several cars bound for Nagareyama Onsen in the neighboring town of Onuma.  When we arrived crates of vegetables and packs of ice were already streaming across the spa’s luxurious grounds.  An early start was critical; soon, 235 children and parents from Fukushima would arrive for an all-day barbecue to kickoff the first season of Fukushima Kids’ Summer Camp, and to enjoy their first leisurely day outside in over four months.

“You are wonderful hosts!” exclaimed the Camp’s founder Toru Shinshi.  “Normally we have about 80 volunteers with us on the program, but today there is a great local turnout.”

Not thirty minutes had passed and already Nanae’s task force was greeting the first waves of students and summer camp staff.  As they arrived, so did volunteers from Nanae’s Board of Education and from the Higashi Onuma Elementary student body and Parent-Teacher Association.  Groups from all around Nanae would arrive that day to help the Summer Camp achieve its simple, heartfelt goal:

“All we want is for these kids to be able to play outside again, especially during their summer break,” Shinshi-san explained.  “Towns throughout Fukushima Prefecture have cancelled all of their student programs for the summer of 2011 because of the accident and unfolding crisis at the [Fukushima Daiichi] nuclear power plant, and children are being forced to stay indoors.”

photo by Ken Ikeda

Continue reading “Nanae Hosts Fukushima Kids’ Summer Camp”

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The Mirin Family Visits Nanae

By Ben Mirin, CIR

As seen in The Concord Journal column, “The Japan Connection.” Stay tuned for pictures on Concordnanae’s Flickr Photostream and Photo Gallery!

July 4, 2011

Hold the bachi at your navel. Is it touching the surface of the taiko? If not, go lower.

With this mantra in mind, I assumed an increasingly strenuous stance alongside the rest of my family as we merged mid-song into the ranks of Nanae Danshaku Daiko Sosakukai, the Nanae taiko drumming ensemble. Before an audience of nearly one hundred Japanese town office workers, English students, and high-school students, the latest delegation from Concord, MA, struggled to keep the beat.

Like every other day in Nanae, tonight was another chance for my family to be a part of something extraordinary. Eight days had passed since their bleary-eyed arrival at Hakodate Airport. Now, at the farewell potluck party in Nanae’s Bunka Center, Japanese friends from every part of my multifaceted life in the sister city had converged in one place, to treat us one final time as special guests in their community.

The days leading up to the farewell potluck were filled with a rich variety of events and excursions. At the center of the schedule were the routine responsibilities of the CIR. My family visited four of my six English conversation (eikaiwa) classes, toured the town office, ate dinner with Mayor Nakamiya, and made origami with the children of Donguri Kindergarten. With incredible help from Koji Teraya and Emi Kimura (International Relations), we also managed to go sightseeing in Onuma Park and Hakodate. We played park golf, went fly-fishing in Nanae’s Ookawa River, and went bird watching in Onuma and southern Kameda. We even attended a big-band jazz concert in Hakodate’s Public Meeting Hall, and enjoyed a fabulous cooking class with my eikaiwa student, Yoko Sato.

Our final day in Nanae began with a visit to Nanae High School, where we arranged to have a special meeting with Principal Kogoshi before attending the Tea Ceremony and English clubs and the brass band rehearsal. Enthralled by the brass band’s final piece, a stellar rendition of the Super Mario medley, we barely made it to the Bunka Center before Nanae’s Vice Mayor, Shuichi Baba, began his official address to open the Mirin family potluck party. Continue reading “The Mirin Family Visits Nanae”

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Tanabata Matsuri

By Ben Mirin, CIR

July 7th, 2011

Parents race to catch up with their kids as they cross Route 5 at rush hour.

The drive home from the Yakuba usually takes about two minutes, but this evening was different.  At nearly every intersection, Nanae’s rush hour traffic came to a halt as crowds of children in brightly-colored yukata flooded the crosswalks.  They rushed to keep time with the changing of the lights, swinging bulky cloth knapsacks and scattering their contents of sweets and little trinkets that clattered like a festive hail on the pavement.

It was a rare spectacle to see Japanese people trying to cheat the flickering crosswalk signs, but I had to pull over into a 7-11 parking lot to learn what could entice them exhibit such outlandish behavior.  I got out just as a group of girls emerged from the store peering intently into their bags and nearly tripping over one another to compare their latest payload.  They mingled and danced impatiently on the corner until the lights changed, then merged with an oncoming group of mothers and toddlers and raced over to the yakiniku shop across the street. I followed them up to the door, but there was no way to see inside beyond the crowd that had amassed outside, so I waited.

Through the doorway sounds of chanting could be heard, punctuated frequently by the affirming laughter of several deeper, gruff voices inside.  Within moments, the children emerged in a rush to meet up with their parents, who had caught up and were waiting just outside.  As they moved off and crossed the street again I pushed through the tousled curtains hanging above the doorway and entered the shop. Continue reading “Tanabata Matsuri”

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Marching in the Meiji Restoration Parade

By Ben Mirin, CIR

As seen in the Concord Journal bi-monthly column, “The Japan Connection.”

May 22nd, 2011

Ben Mirin (CIR) in full costume for the Meiji Restoration Parade. Photo by Hisao Higuchi

Any crowd of foreigners in Hakodate is usually very conspicuous, but in my search for the starting point of this year’s Goryokaku Festival, I knew I had no way of asking for directions. Asking passersby downtown where I could find a crowd of foreigners in 19th century military garb surely would have drawn blank stares.

Now in its 42nd year, the Goryokaku Festival is never complete without foreign volunteers. Festival organizers use word of mouth to recruit them to march as soldiers and flag bearers in the Meiji Restoration Parade. Every year on the Sunday after the third Saturday in May, this huge event commemorates the end of Japan’s Boshin War period with reenactments of the Battle of Hakodate in Goryokaku Square.

“Ben!”

Hearing my name with perfect American pronunciation catches me off guard nowadays. My friend Bill Bowman, a 10-year veteran flag-bearer for the Parade, was waving to me from across the street.

“Let’s go get you into costume,” he said. For the first time, I noticed his mid-western accent, or what was left of it after 16 years of living in Hakodate.

We walked together for a mere five minutes before the clang of Japanese katana and synchronized shouts from reenactment volunteers were clearly audible in the Sunday morning stillness. I passed through crowds of Japanese high school students dressed in the colors of the Meiji and the Tokugawa shogunate armies and ascended the stairs to the costume room.

Upstairs, a man in a shogunate uniform greeted me and gestured to a group of boldly dressed men at the far end of a large tatami room.
Continue reading “Marching in the Meiji Restoration Parade”

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The Concord-Nanae Student News Exchange Begins

By Ben Mirin, CIR

April 25th, 2011

Hitomi Shihoya

On April 11th, Concord-Carlisle High School’s student newspaper, The Voice, published its first article submitted by a student from Nanae High School.  Second-year student (high school junior) Hitomi Shihoya of the Nanae High School English Club wrote about her experience of Japan’s terrible earthquake last month and her reflections on its aftermath.

“I was very surprised because I had never seen such a large-scale earthquake in my whole life,” Shihoya writes.  “I came back to everyday life in a few days, but I am very anxious because I don’t know when the next natural disaster will happen. I am also very worried about more aftershocks, and the nuclear radiation in Fukushima.”

Shihoya’s article also expresses personal gratitude toward the US and other foreign nations that contributed to Japan’s relief efforts following the disaster. The complete text of her article can be seen on The Voice‘s website.

This publication marks the launch of what will hopefully become an ongoing exchange between high school students in Concord, Carlisle, and Nanae.  The projects’ orchestrators–the CIR and the faculty advisors to The Voice and the English Club–hope eventually to establish a written cross-cultural dialogue between students in both towns on at least a monthly basis.

Concord-Carlisle High School and Nanae High School are officially sister schools.  Official visits and home-stays between the schools’ bands and the CCHS Sci-Fi Club have been centerpieces in the rich history of the Concord-Nanae sister city relationship.  The Student News Exchange, as the project is tentatively titled, is intended to bring two more student organizations, the English Club and The Voice, more deeply into that framework. Continue reading “The Concord-Nanae Student News Exchange Begins”

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Reflections on Japan’s March 11th Earthquake, Tsunamis, and Their Aftermath

by Ben Mirin, CIR

What follows is the combined text of my first and second entries for “The Japan Connection,” my new bi-monthly column in The Concord Journal, the local paper in Nanae’s American sister city Concord, Massachusetts. I am currently working on my 3rd piece, which will reach print on Wednesday, May 4th.

Look for this article in the Summer 2011 issue of Concord Academy Magazine.

The Sun Will Rise Again: Japan in the Aftermath of the March 11th Earthquake

HAKODATE, Japan: Driving away from the oncoming wave, I hit Route 5 and had to stop suddenly.  No one else seemed to know that a second tsunami was coming.  For what felt like an eternity, I sat at the intersection near Jujigai as citizens waited patiently for the light to turn green.

After watching 10-meter waves destroy much of northeastern Honshu on television, I had driven downtown from my government office in Nanae, Hokkaido, upon receiving word that Hakodate–a city just 10 kilometers south of my beloved town and home to many of my coworkers and English students–had experienced flooding after the earthquake.  To what extent, I did not know.

In an explosion of debris and muddy water, the tsunami caught up with me.  It was faster now, and higher. Fishmongers dropped armfuls of merchandise and ran across the highway as an oncoming bus veered around them onto a narrow side street. I mounted the curb and careened through the city’s back roads in an effort to get to higher ground…

The next day the streets were filthy.  Storefronts near Toyokawa Wharf were in complete disarray as storeowners, government workers, and volunteers trudged through muck and piles of destroyed merchandise.  Heaps of dead and dying seafood punctuated a parade of ruined furniture, plastic bags filled with wet clothes, and fragments of shattered architecture.  King crabs worth 18,000 Yen lay worthless upon overturned wooden crates.  Even the noble squid, for which Hakodate is famous worldwide, could be seen lying dead on the pavement.

The tsunamis in Hakodate had reached an approximate height of 1.8 meters.  From what I could see, the water had pushed at least 3 blocks inland, flooding several evacuation sites where hundreds of residents and tourists were taking refuge.

“When the second tsunami hit, the first floor of our building flooded,” said volunteer and Hakodate native Toru Maruyama.  He stood outside the third-floor conference room of the O. Loisir Hotel, where a weary crowd was lining up to receive a delivery of fresh packed lunches from the Hakodate Town Office.

“When I arrived at 11pm last night there were about 100 people staying here.  When the floods came, the street outside became like a river.”

As volunteers poured into Hakodate, life back in Nanae was eerily silent.  No one seemed to be mobilizing recovery teams.  They were all staying home with their families. Perhaps they were glued to their televisions, watching the news unfold:

“Route 5 is closed until further notice. Hakodate’s JR Train Station is expected to reopen this Sunday afternoon. One man, 67-year-old Teguramori Keiji of Wakamatsu-cho, Hakodate, has drowned.” Continue reading “Reflections on Japan’s March 11th Earthquake, Tsunamis, and Their Aftermath”

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Temporary Leave of Absence

I wrote this letter a couple weeks ago, but felt it prudent to post it here as well.   I am still on leave, and currently scheduled to return to Nanae on April 10th.

-Ben Mirin, CIR

Dear friends and family,

I will keep this brief.  First of all, I am writing to let you all know that I am safe and healthy.  Thank you to everyone who has expressed concern about my safety and wellbeing over the past couple weeks.

As of March 24th I will be taking a temporary leave of absence from my job in Nanae, Japan.  The current plan is to abscond to Hawaii on standby, with the intention to return to Japan on April 3rd.  If, however, the nuclear crisis in Fukushima remains as nebulous as it is right now, I will likely extend my stay and will consider returning to Concord to continue my work as Coordinator of International Relations from there in our American sister city.

Experiencing this terrible tragedy firsthand has been a life-changing experience.  I have grown as a journalist, a government employee, and most of all as a person, and have been awakened to the full depth of my appreciation and love for Nanae.  My heart remains with the Japanese people during this tense time, and I ardently hope that we will be reunited very soon.

I hope this message finds you well.

-Ben

 

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Official Communication: Nanae to Concord after the Earthquake

–Translated by Ben Mirin, CIR, and Emi Kimura, Assistant CIR–

March 17th, 2011

Nanae Town Office

Nanae-cho, Kameda-gun

Hokkaido, Japan 041-1192

 

Board of Selectmen’s Office

Concord, Massachusetts 01742

 

Dear Chairman Wieand and Friends in Concord,

We deeply thank you for your expressed concerns and warm messages following the earthquake.  We are glad to inform you that Nanae did not sustain any damage.  However, the Tohoku (northeastern) and Kanto (eastern) areas of Japan are suffering from this disaster.  The earthquake and the tsunami caused massive damage to their towns and many people have died or gone missing.

This was the biggest earthquake to hit Japan since the government started keeping records.  Not only did it leave mortal damage and scars, but it also made many people lose their homes and evacuate to shelters.  There are no words to express how these people are feeling now or how hard their lives have become.

We are grateful to the American government for sending teams to Japan so quickly.  We thank all of our friends in Concord and the American nation for their support.

Right now our government is working with full force for a fast recovery.  The Town of Nanae is going to contribute as much as we can in this regard.

Sincerely,

 

Yasukazu Nakamiya

Mayor of Nanae