Japanese-Americans Band Together To Raise Money For Tsunami Victims

LOS ANGELES — Japanese-Americans, expats and others in the United States opened their hearts and their wallets this week to the victims of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, finding touching and sometimes imaginative ways to donate or raise money for the Asian country's injured and displaced.

Some were motivated by a surge of sympathy, others by friendship or family ties, while many gave out of a need to do something to counter feelings of helplessness.

Sayaka Fukushima said the victims in her native country seemed distressingly far away when she saw coverage of the disasters on TV last week and she was sad not to be able to help them directly.

"I want to do something, but what can I do?" said Fukushima, 26, after making a donation this week at a memorial vigil in Japan's Little Tokyo district.

In San Francisco, meanwhile, Eric Fuji was donating profits from his sushi restaurant to Japan as he awaited word on a missing friend in Sendai.

"We should all be coming together and helping as much as we can," he said.

And in Hawaii, which has the nation's largest Japanese-American population after California, University of Hawaii at Manoa students planned to hold a "candlelight" vigil Friday – using cell phones instead of candles to provide light – to support the people of Japan, where 6,900 people are confirmed dead so far and another 10,700 are missing.

Large-scale fundraising events, along with countless donations by individuals, have been showing some results, with relief organizations having collected more than $87 million as of Thursday, according to a tally by The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Doug Erber, president of the Japan America Society of Southern California, said collections are easily outpacing those for the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, which killed more than 6,400.

He attributed the current fundraising success to recent technical innovations, such as those that allow donors to contribute using their cell phones, in addition to the images of widespread destruction seen on TV this time.

"We have footage that Hollywood can only dream of, of devastation that is heartbreaking," he said. "I would compare it to what Americans went through when they watched 9/11."

Not all quake-related activity is aimed only at raising money.

In the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, home to a large Japanese-American community, staff at a Japanese supermarket in the Mitsuwa chain were providing customers with white paper squares to be folded into origami cranes, following a Japanese folk belief that you can make a wish come true by folding a thousand of the paper birds.

Store manager Masato Takai, who hoped to have 1,000 cranes to hang in the store by next week, said his wish was for those harmed in the quake and tsunami to have a speedy recovery.

"I know a lot of people have the same feeling where they wish they could go to Japan and help them directly, but we have families and businesses and can't go there," said Takai, whose market is also soliciting cash donations for quake relief.

Cranes were also being folded with get-well wishes in mind at Somerville Elementary School in New Jersey's Bergen County, which has that state's largest Japanese-American population. Students there have also created a video about the disaster to raise awareness among their peers about the crisis in Japan and collect donations for relief efforts.

Nako Yoshioka of the Japan-US Alliance of New Jersey says that her group was planning a fundraising concert for victims in Japan as well as helping coordinate efforts across the state with other groups wanting to help.

"We're doing donations and fund raising for immediate relief efforts, but we're trying to figure out how we can contribute to rebuilding efforts long term," Yoshioka said.

Back in Los Angeles, community groups were planning a series of fundraising events in Little Tokyo over the weekend, some of which will be staffed by fans of Japanese animation who will collect donations while dressed as their favorite "anime" characters.

Little Tokyo is also the location for a daylong series of concerts Friday. The shows are free, but audience members will be urged to contribute money to the American Red Cross fundraisers who will be on hand.

Japan-born recording artist Hidehito Ikumo, who was performing at the event with his bilingual rock group Layla Lane and serving as the concerts' master of ceremonies, said his first impulse after hearing news of the quake was to offer whatever assistance his musical talents allowed.

"I feel pretty powerless and helpless, but if I just think that way and do nothing, it's not going to help, so I decided to do what I can as an artist," Ikemo said.

Radioactive Water in Japan: Tokyo Watches What It Drinks

Tokyo is not one of those cities where I normally worry about drinking the water. In fact, there's something quite delightful about a country in Asia where I can freely swig from the tap. But this afternoon, as I filled up a glass at my hotel, I hesitated. It wasn't like what I was looking for could be detected. Radioactive isotopes are, as we all know by now, colorless, tasteless and odorless. I put the glass down. Maybe I wasn't that thirsty after all.

On March 23, the Tokyo government announced that the level of radioactivity in the city's water, caused by radioactive iodine emanating from the quake- and tsunami-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant 149 miles (240 km) to the north, had exceed safe levels for infants. I am not an infant. Nor do I panic easily. But like many Japanese who have been determined not to let trace amounts of radiation get to them, this news spooked me. Indeed, on Thursday, anxious Tokyo citizens cleaned bottled water off shelves, leaving only bottles of expensive Perrier in some stores. (See TIME's exclusive pictures of the devastation in Japan.)

As the Daiichi plant has continued to infect the region's air and water, Tokyo citizens have gone through cycles of alarm and ennui. A few days ago, when government officials announced trace amounts of radiation in milk and vegetables from farms not far from the nuclear plant, people grabbed whatever milk they could find in stores that was produced before the radiation tests ran positive. Dairy disappeared. But now milk and yogurt are easier to find in Tokyo, as officials have assured residents that the dairy they're consuming is safe. (Milk and certain vegetable exports from the affected region near the Daiichi plant have been stopped, easing fears.) The milk run has given way to the water scare.

What's interesting to me about Tokyo's reaction to the radioactivity issue is the level of trust that locals essentially have for their government, even if there is a reflexive unease about radiation given Japan's history as the only nation ever to have been attacked by atomic weapons. Compare Japan to China, where vague rumors of Japanese radioactivity making their way west toward the Middle Kingdom prompted a massive run on iodized salt. Why? Because people thought the iodine in the salt could counteract a radioactive haze. The assumption was wholly incorrect, and the whole scene became even more ridiculous when the iodized salt run in turn sparked a run on noniodized salt. The lesson, though, was this: Chinese people don't trust their government. Therefore, stocking up on whatever remedy they can find is a perfectly natural reaction in a country where citizens believe they must fend for themselves. (See Japan's history of massive earthquakes.)

By contrast, Japanese tend to trust that their health inspectors are doing their job. And when the issue is something as basic as water, eschewing it completely from one's diet is all but impossible. I bet that many of the Japanese drinking bottled water at ramen noodle soup restaurants on Thursday weren't thinking about the fact that the broth they were consuming was probably made with potentially tainted water. In fact, I was halfway through my own bowl of soup when that thought occurred to me. I finished the bowl.

By late Thursday, Tokyo health officials had announced that the amount of radioactive iodine in one major water purification plant had dropped to levels safe even for infants. The run on water in Tokyo will likely soon abate, unless levels spike even higher. (By contrast, the China salt scare took far longer to calm down.) In fact, the general consensus in Tokyo appears to be not only that the government should be trusted on these matters but also that foreigners are making too big a deal out of all this radioactivity stuff. Many Tokyo residents were shocked by how quickly a large expatriate corps fled the capital after the onset of the nuclear crisis. It was wounding for a city that prides itself on hospitality and livability. Now there's a paranoid strain of thought, particularly among some conservative Japanese media, that the outside world is obsessing about each radioactive becquerel as some sneaky way to hurt Japan's image. (See pictures of objects found in the rubble of Japan's quake.)

The problem is that the Japanese government doesn't have a spotless history when it comes to informing the public about potential health risks. Indeed, in some cases, the bureaucracy's reaction has been to deny, deny, deny before finally admitting that maybe something had gone awry. In fact, Prime Minister Naoto Kan made his name in the mid-1990s when he fully exposed the fact that the Health Ministry had covered up the administering of HIV-tainted blood to hemophiliacs. (See more pictures of Japan's earthquake.)

That's not to say the government is fooling people now. Indeed, with the constant tests and calls for vigilance, Tokyo health officials appear to be bending over backward to show the populace that they are monitoring the situation carefully. On Thursday, Tokyo government workers began delivering bottled water to all 80,000 local families with infants, as promised by Kan. About 240,000 bottles were scheduled to be delivered on Thursday, according to Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara. The exercise is set to be repeated on Friday. If radiation levels creep back up, then the government may even import bottled water to meet the demand. But who wants to cook with Perrier?

Japan says must review nuclear policy; radiation spreads

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan will have to review its nuclear power policy, its top government spokesman said, as fear of radiation from an earthquake-damaged nuclear complex spread both at home and abroad.

Engineers are trying to stabilize the six-reactor nuclear power station in Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles) north of the capital, two weeks after an earthquake and tsunami battered the plant and devastated northeastern Japan, leaving about 27,400 people dead or missing.

"It is certain that public confidence in nuclear power plants has greatly changed," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told Reuters late on Thursday.

"In light of that, we must first end this situation and then study from a zero base."

Japan's 55 nuclear reactors have been providing about 30 percent of the nation's electric power. The percentage had been expected to rise to 50 percent by 2030, among the highest in the world.

The 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, the tsunami it triggered and the nuclear crisis they caused have brought Japan its darkest days since World War Two.

Explosions in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station last week made this the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl and raised fears of a catastrophic meltdown.

While that has not happened, radiation has been leaking and four of the plant's reactors are still volatile.

Engineers from the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), have been making some progress in restoring power and regaining control, but periodic emissions of smoke and steam revive fears of a nuclear nightmare.

"It's still a bit early to make an exact time prognosis, but my guess is in a couple of weeks the reactors will be cool enough to say the crisis is over," said Peter Hosemann, a nuclear expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It will still be important to supply sufficient cooling to the reactors and the spent fuel pools for a longer period of time. But as long as this is ensured and we don't see any additional large amount of radioactivity released, I am confident the situation is under control."

Three workers replacing a cable to help cool a reactor were injured by standing in radioactive water. Two were taken to hospital with burns, nuclear safety agency officials said.

On Wednesday, Tokyo's 13 million residents were told not to give tap water to babies after contamination hit twice the safety level this week. But it dropped back to safe levels the next day.

Despite government appeals for people not to panic, many shops saw bottled water supplies flying off the shelves.

"Customers ask us for water. But there's nothing we can do," said Masayoshi Kasahara, a clerk at a Tokyo supermarket. "We are asking for more deliveries, but we don't know when the next shipment will come."

Radiation above safety levels has also been found in milk and vegetables from Fukushima and the Kyodo news agency said radioactive cesium 1.8 times higher than the standard level was found in a leafy vegetable grown at a Tokyo research facility.

Alarm has spread, particularly among Japan's neighbors.

MASS GRAVES

Singapore said on Thursday it had found radioactive contaminants in four samples of vegetables from Japan.

Earlier, it and Australia joined the United States and Hong Kong in restricting food and milk imports from the zone, while Canada became the latest of many nations to tighten screening.

Tiny radiation particles have also spread on the wind and been found as far away as Iceland, although experts say they are not dangerous.

Japan has urged the world not to overreact, and plenty of experts appeared to back that up.

Jim Smith, of Britain's University of Portsmouth, said the finding of 210 becquerels of radioactive iodine, twice the safety limit for children, at a Tokyo water purification plant on Wednesday should not be cause for panic.

The safety level for adults is 300 becquerels.

"The recommendation that infants are not given tap water is a sensible precaution. But it should be emphasized that the limit is set at a low level to ensure that consumption at that level is safe over a fairly long period of time," he said.

The estimated $300 billion damage from the quake and tsunami makes it the world's costliest natural disaster, dwarfing Japan's 1995 Kobe quake and Hurricane Katrina, which swept through New Orleans in 2005.

In Japan's north, more than a quarter of a million people are in shelters. Some elderly displaced people have died from cold and lack of medicines.

Exhausted rescuers are still sifting through the wreckage of towns and villages, retrieving bodies.

The official tolls of dead and missing are both revised up every day; police said on Thursday 9,811 people were confirmed dead and 17,541 were missing. Authorities have been burying unidentified bodies in mass graves.

Amid the suffering, though, there was a sense that Japan was turning the corner in its humanitarian crisis. Aid flowed to refugees, and phone, electricity, postal and bank services began returning to the north, sometimes by makeshift means.

"Things are getting much better," said 57-year-old Tsutomu Hirayama, staying with his family at an evacuation center in Ofunato town.

"For the first two or three days, we had only one rice ball and water for each meal. I thought, how long is this going to go on? Now we get lots of food, it's almost like luxury."

Aftershocks are still jolting the country. Several shook Tokyo on Thursday.

The crisis in the world's third-biggest economy -- and its key position in global supply chains, especially for the automobile and technology sectors -- has added to jitters in global financial markets, also worried by conflict in Libya and Middle East protests.

Toyota Motor Corp, which has suspended production at all of its 12 assembly plants in Japan, said it would slow some North American production because of supply problems although it would try to minimize disruptions.

Baby dolphin saved from Japan rice field

A baby dolphin has been saved after being dumped in a rice field by the tsunami which hit Japans coast earlier this month.

The dolphin was spotted about 2 kilometres away from the coast in a flooded field says Ryo Taira, a pet shop owner who has been rescuing abandoned animals after the huge earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

"A man passing by said he had found the dolphin in the rice paddy and that we had to do something to save it," Taira told Reuters.

He attempted to net the 1.2 metre dolphin out of the shallow water but ended up wading into the field.

“It was pretty weak by then, which was probably the only reason we could catch it.”

With the help of some friends he got the dolphin back to the ocean as quickly as possible.

Taira says the dolphin appeared to perk up when it was released into the water but he is unsure whether it survived or not.

“But it's certainly a lot better than dying in a rice paddy."

Japanese firemen battle invisible danger

TOKYO (Reuters) – The most difficult thing in a nuclear crisis, the Tokyo firefighter said, was the inability to sense where the danger was.

The Tokyo Fire Department's elite rescue team was among those called in to cool down a nuclear plant north of the capital that was badly damaged by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami and was leaking radiation.

"We usually detect dangers, like fire and smoke, with our eyes, ears and nose, and eliminate some of them, if not all," said Yukio Takayama, a leader of the team.

"At our latest site, we couldn't sense the dangers. It can be very scary if you cannot eliminate dangers for yourselves. As long as you work on the scene, you are constantly in danger, and a sense of fear is with you all the time ... But someone had to do this and that someone was us."

Takayama said he and his men had been tested for radiation exposure after they installed equipment and left the plant and they were all fine.

After the disaster knocked out cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power plant in Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, the government scrambled to send in military and firefighters to hose down the reactors and spent fuel pools.

The magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami devastated northeastern Japan and left more than 27,000 people dead or missing.

Radiation was released into the air as the plant operator was forced to vent nuclear containment vessels to reduce high pressure building up inside.

Underlining the risk the damaged nuclear plant poses, three Tokyo Electric employees were injured by radiation on Thursday, and two were taken to hospital with burns, Japan's nuclear safety agency said.

"There were no people for us to help on the site. There were no flames to douse. But I believe having given relief to the Japanese people through our activities was a form of a rescue operation," said Takayama, a 54-year-old father of two daughters and a son.

The plant was littered with rubble after a series of explosions, making running water hoses from the nearby coast to the reactor No.3, their target, difficult and time-consuming.

Takayama said he did not know whether the industry minister had threatened to punish rescue workers if they refused to participate in the operation, as reported by some media.

But he added that a final decision in a life-threatening situation like at the Fukushima plant should be left to a leader on the scene.

"We work to fulfill the duties that are given to us. But part of the job of a leader on the scene is to discern what's doable from undoable. You can't give instructions without knowing what's going on the ground."

"As a squad leader I can never tell my men to go in there and die."

Japan earthquake: Mothers at Sendai school receive the dead bodies of their children

Bracing herself for the worst Miyuki Fukuda steps gingerly out into the muddy wasteland that used to be her children's school.

It is two weeks since the tsunami struck but only now is Ookawa Elementary School giving up most of its dead.

Of its 108 pupils, 77 were buried, along with 10 teachers, when water surged over the top of their two-storey building and dumped tonnes of earth on the playground.

That was where the entire group was standing, having followed their well practised response to an earthquake, filing outside and waiting for the danger to pass.

There was a hill 50 yards away, where they would have been safe from a tsunami, but the teachers didn't think a wave could reach two miles inland.

So instead, for 45 minutes, they stood patiently as a 30ft wall of water was rushing up the nearby Kitakamigawa river, and across the rice paddies towards them.

The school's clocks now stand still, frozen at the moment the tsunami hit.

For many days after the disaster the school, perched on the river's scenic south bank under a pine forested hillside near the city of Ishinomaki, was hard to reach. A 50-metre section of the bridge across the river snapped and was washed half a mile upstream. Other roads were washed away.

Only now has heavy digging equipment arrived to help parents in their desperate search.

Mrs Fukuda, 43, reached the scene by wading for miles through water on foot.

Her daughter Risa, 12, and son Masaki, nine, were among the pupils.

When she got there only the skeleton of the semicircular concrete school building was still standing. Nearby, around 100 homes had been washed clean away.

She has roamed the area ever since with other families, looking under tree trunks, smashed cars and blocks of concrete for their missing children.

The body of her daughter was among the first found, but her son remains lost.

"Risa played the piano and she had just started learning English. She loved it," Mrs Fukuda said in tears. "Masaki was in all the school plays. He had a beautiful face. "I told my children if there was ever a tsunami they should go into the hills. But when I got here, they were not there."

According to parents, one teacher, Jinji Endo, who had previous experience of tsunamis, took a single child up into the hills to safety. But the other teachers told the rest of the pupils to stay in the playground.

"If they had all listened to Mr Endo and climbed up the hill they would all have been safe," said Mrs Fukuda. "I think about that a lot. But the teachers died as well so there is no point being angry. I cannot criticise them, what would be the point? No one knew the wave could come this far." Kazutoshi Ogata, 44, and his wife Emi, 38, found the body of their son Ryusei, 10, but there was no sign of their seven-year-old daughter Karen.

Mr Ogata said: "This place looks like a missile or a bomb has hit it. When I first got here I just dug with my hands.

"I found my son's satchel and his calligraphy brushes and that's all I have now. After we found his body I got permission to bury him because the man who does cremations has been killed as well.

"The saddest thing now is waiting for my daughter, but I will wait here and keep looking, as long as it takes."

His wife said: "I wish they had all gone to higher ground. But I think the teachers tried their best to protect the children. Nobody could have expected what happened. It's not their fault."

Nuclear plant shadows future of neighboring towns

TOKYO/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Millions of Tokyoites are worried about radiation in tap water or in the air, but the thousands of people living in the shadow of Japan's stricken nuclear plant have another fear: it may force them to abandon their homes for years, if not forever.

More than 70,000 people have already been evacuated from an area within 20 km (12 miles) of the plant, and another 130,000 are within a zone extending a further 10 km (6 miles) in which residents are recommended to stay indoors. They too could be forced to leave their homes if the evacuation is extended due to worsening radiation levels.

Nobody in government has yet touched on the issue directly, but given growing worries about soil contamination in the largely rural area and bans on shipping and sales of local milk and vegetables, many residents fear the worst.

"Nobody wants to say it out loud, but I think that in their hearts everybody worries that they won't be able to go home for years at least," said Yoichi Azuma, principal of Koriyama Commercial High School, not far west of the 30-km (18-mile) zone, whose gymnasium has been turned into an evacuation center.

"People here have suffered three disasters: the quake, the tsunami and the invisible danger of radiation, which is a man-made disaster. We feel a lot of anger about the last one."

Though some experts say the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, will likely turn out to be less serious than the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the radioactive substances being emitted are the same -- iodine 131, caesium-134 and caesium-137.

The radioactivity in iodine-131 fully disintegrates in 80 days, but it can find its way rapidly into people through the air and through milk and leafy vegetables, lodging in the thyroid gland, where it can cause DNA damage and raise the risk of cancer, particularly in young children.

Caesium is more troubling as it remains radioactive for over 200 years, threatening people with longer-term exposure through food and from external exposure as it settles on the ground.

"The length of time these areas will remain contaminated depends on the radionuclide composition," said Jim Smith, Reader in Environmental Physics at the University of Portsmouth in southern England.

"If a significant proportion is radiocaesium, food bans and, potentially, evacuation may be long-term."

FOOD CONTAMINATION

Food contamination levels in Fukushima, which is known for its peaches, nashi Japanese pears, apples and strawberries as well as milk and vegetables, have risen sharply over the past week, opening up the logical option of extending the exclusion zone.

The United States as early as last week said its citizens should stay out of a broader 50 mile zone, but the Japanese government has not spoken of extension -- a view backed by experts such as Kenji Kamiya, director of the Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine at Hiroshima University.

"We must consider the impact of radiation on human health, but at this point I think the government's decision is correct given the radiation levels," he said.

A Fukushima prefectural official said there are no firm numbers on how many people remain within the 20-30 km radius but added that many appear to have already left voluntarily, whether from worry or just the growing difficulty of life within an area running out of food and other goods. Media reports say some truck drivers, wary of radiation, refuse to enter the zone.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano touched on this on Thursday, noting that "social needs" might have to be dealt with over the longer term.

"But we must be careful not to send the wrong message that danger is getting bigger if we were to issue such a direction (to evacuate)," he said.

In addition, experts said, the practical issues are huge.

"There is a limit to extend the zone because Japan is an island and one thing we have to face is we have to provide shelter, prepare enough housing and schools for these people," said Lam Ching-wan, a chemical pathologist at the University of Hong Kong and member of the American Board on Toxicology.

Some Fukushima towns and cities have laid on buses for citizens who want to leave, in some cases to nearby prefectures.

At present, Azuma's school hosts 150 people ranging in age from infants to 97 years old. Some had homes destroyed by the tsunami, but many were fleeing the radiation.

Some have chronic health issues, such as kidney problems requiring dialysis, and there are several pregnant women. There are enough blankets to go round, and enough food -- barely.

"People really want to go home, but since many of them grow things or are dairy farmers, they're really worried about what might happen and what the experts might say," Azuma said.

"Foreigners might be told to leave a wider area, but all we have is what we have here."