Hi everyone, Thanks for praying. I arrived back in California from Japan the day before the 7.1 aftershock hit Ishinomaki, a coastal town we visited last week near Sendai. It's difficult to describe the damage in Japan, we see the pictures, we scan the numbers, and our hearts go out, but it's still 6000 miles away. Most of the Japanese you meet overseas are from the Kanto and Kansai metropolises. Tohoku is like the Oregon/Washington of Japan, meaning once you meet a Japanese, the chances that they are from Tohoku are not great. But the damage to the communities struck by the Tsunami was devastating. Some towns may never recover, some no longer exist. My on-field team consisted of three members, the director of EMS, who is also a pastor and police chaplain, a second police chaplain, and experienced disaster responder, and myself, translator and driver. Among the other indispensable people that worked to make this trip happen is my wife Maki, who planned for perhaps more hours than we spent working and driving combined in Tohoku. Our first day in Tokyo was spent with the two chaplains running a stress management seminar for responders at CRASH Japan (Christian disaster relief organization) headquarters in Higashi Kurume. I picked up the rental car and began driving in Japan for the first time. The next day we headed north along the Tohoku expressway, coming within just under 40 miles of the nuclear powerplants in crisis. We drove through with the windows up and masks on. We spent that night at a Christian campsite near Sendai, which Crash Japan has secured for responders to stay while working around Sendai. Having arrived too late to help distribution we drove to the coast to survey the local damage. 
The pictures can't cover the scope of what happened, but it looked like this for miles. Actually anywhere there was a town along 200 miles of coastline the scene was not much different. The sign sign in the back says 'Let's go Tagajo!', Tagajo being the town's name. These pictures were taken three weeks after the tsunami hit, but there was still everything from cars to children's toys littered everywhere. The air smelled like rot. The next day we joined a Crash Japan distribution team and picked up goods at a Samaritan's Purse/Japan International Food for the Hungry warehouse in Sendai before heading out to Ishinomaki, a city of 164,000 before the Tsunami. Before leaving the warehouse in our four car caravan we packed our rental so tight with supplies that everytime I stopped the car the guy in the backseat was attacked by boxes of underwear. We spent about two hours distributing goods in front of a closed convenience store. We also had a doctor with us. Some of the Japanese allowed us to pray with them, we asked to pray with some of the survivors and were met with mixed results. I was blessed when one old woman stopped our chaplain mid-prayer and asked for translation, I did my best. One of the more difficult things about this trip for me came as I distributed tuna and minute rice. I was told to ask each person how many in their family, and ration accordingly. Most of them told me there was 7-10 people in their families. Japan's population is shrinking because nobody is having children, and I keep hearing 'there are 10 people in my family'. It broke my heart that these people were in this position, of course they want enough food, they don't know when we will be back (though our other group was in a needier area), they're just hungry and cold and dirty and hurting. So I gave them supplies for 7-10 people. I finally was able to joke about it with a guy in his twenties who was picking up supplies, the irony is that I come from a family of ten. Can you imagine your family in the same situation? After giving away all our supplies we drove around to survey the damage. Again, not pretty. 
The next day we filled up on gas and relief supplies and went further North to Iwate Prefecture, where we were to meet a pastor who has been driving 60 miles to the coast a few times each week to help out. He was kind enough to share his thoughts and drive us around while making preparations for team that would arrive the next day. Here are some pictures from Iwate's coastline.  
The above pictures are the East and west views from a bridge overlooking the coast. The town in the background is destroyed. 
This picture shows a street corner of Miyako Taro, a town famous for its seawall, a 30 foot high jetty built to protect the town from Tsunamis. The wave was estimated to reach 125 feet here, completely destroying the town. We visited a shelter nearby, though we weren't allowed inside. We kicked a soccerball around with a few kids. Most of the evening was spent driving along the coast where we saw town after town destroyed. 
That's only the upper half of a house in the middle of the riverbed. We asked the pastor if there was anything we could do the following day before driving back to Toyko, he said we could tarp up a few windows from the first floor of a hotel he was helping fix and using as a base camp for relief teams. As the two chaplains also had carpentry and construction experience, they jumped at the opportunity. Here are some pictures from that project.   
The largest window ended up boarded, sealed and tarped on both sides. The room is now being used as a meeting place for the teams located there. Outside temperatures can be freezing, but now the room doesn't have any wind (or rain) leaking in. 
The innkeeper received a little food and some blankets, as well as a cross pin. He agreed to host teams after meeting the pastor on an earlier trip. The pastor and some friends cleaned the mud and debris from the first floor of his hotel. He cried when we left. Now he's the only guy in town with boarded windows, other buildings are lucky to have tape and plastic, most are just open to the elements. We left around 4:30 and got back to Tokyo around 1am, and flew home the next day. The verdict? The biggest earthquake in Japan's recorded history has left Northern Japan reeling. Help is coming from all directions, but the survivors' lives will never be the same, and the number of dead and missing tops 27,000. There are 150,000 living in shelters and many more living in half destroyed homes which will need to be bulldozed. Tohoku has been an area notoriously closed to outsiders. Sometimes second or third generation locals have been considered newcomers. But as the cities and towns rebuild there is opportunity for the church to join these people from the start of their new communities. Please pray that God would direct the church and missionaries to continue in the area as their relief efforts become rebuilding, and eventually church planting. God bless, and thanks for reading. | 