Sister city helps post-quake Japan

By MADELINE POWER
The smell of tantalising, steaming udon noodles hung upon the air, and further in among the crowd a set of drums tapped out a very festive beat. Canberra celebrated its 18th year of a successful sister city relationship with Nara, Japan, with the Canberra Nara Candle Festival – hosting 12,000 visitors, according to organisers.
Families enjoyed flying kites with their children, enjoying Japanese stage acts and hanging written wishes on a cluster of trees. These wishes varied in topics – one of them had a cheeky child’s writing wishing for a sweet treat and another a wish for a happier future for a family member.
Many of the festival stalls had small donation boxes. The stall belonging to the Embassy of Japan had a wall of images behind theirs — pictures of families and homes with piles of debris and rubble in every image and a seemingly inescapable amount of water. The earthquake and following tsunami that had devastated Japan in March this year killed 15,833 people and damaged or destroyed more than 300,000 homes.. The festival was full of laughing children dressed in kimonos and smiling adults enjoying the event but the heartbreaking images bore the reminder that this year has not been a happy one for the people of Japan.
The tsunami was triggered by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake on 11 March, with waves ten metres high hitting the coast of Japan and putting the rest of the Pacific in danger of tsunamis. Australia was one of those countries on alert.
In Japan, the prefectures that suffered the highest loss were Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima.
Following the earthquake, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the northeast of the country suffered an explosion, experiencing radiation 20 times over the average level. It was subsequently shut down by the Japanese government.
There has been a recent fear that a new fission has resumed in one of the reactors, despite shut-down, with deadly gases xenon 133 and xenon 135 being detected in the air. It is for this reason that Jeremy Barnes and his family left Japan and returned to Australia.
Jeremy, an expat Australian working in Japan with his family, lived in the Chiba prefecture, roughly 220 km south of Fukushima. He described the earthquake and following tsunami as an ‘experience like no other… you feel like you’re going to die and the world’s ending’. Jeremy, his wife and two children evacuated on 11 March, then left Japan one week later.
“We had fears of radiation,” he said. “The government didn’t want the whole of Japan to panic if it released all the test results.
“That made us fearful. They only allowed certain media to report the incidents and they said ‘There’s no immediate health risk’ but I wasn’t going to risk, ten or fifteen years down the track, my kids getting cancer from radiation.
“We have Japanese friends still living there and when we left we felt guilty. We had to assess so many issues and radiation was the main cause for us to move back.
“We could be incorrect. I’m hoping for the sake of everyone living there that we are, but we think we’ve made the right decision.”
The worldwide responses to the disasters were various forms of fund raising and volunteering aid. Australia participated in sending the disaster relief CD, Songs for Japan, leaping to the top of the charts in iTunes.
The charity compilation album was released on 25 March 2011 through iTunes, then a physical album was released in April, and over 500,000 copies of the album have been sold and $5 million has been donated to the Japanese Red Cross Society. A charity concert in Hong Kong raised $2.31 million. The Australian Red Cross assisted the Japanese Red Cross Society through the Pacific Disaster 2011 Appeal which raised $23.5 million to support recovery efforts.
Alex Drake from the Special Events Team, organisers of the Candle Festival, says that the Canberra Rotary Club, members of the Japanese Community, Canberra Japan Club and the Australia Japan Society (ACT) were some of the groups contributing individual donations collected at the event.
However, there is still much to be done. If you wish to support Japan and make a donation, you can visit The Japanese Red Cross Society website and donate through the Emergency Relief selection on http://www.jrc.or.jp/english/