25 Million

Met Koichi-san from Kobuchihama and Sachi-san, Shiho-san and Toru-san today. We talked about many things, but most of all about life after 11.3.11.

If the great earthquake of Tohoku and the following tsunami would never have happened… Then we would not be sitting here together. In fact, we would probably never have met. Though the earthquake was a disaster, there is always something good coming out of something bad.

Also got to know that the small, private volunteer group we joined have collected donations and arranged flee markets to collect a total of 25 million yen. All of it went into things for Kobuchihama and Fukukiura.

Visiting Kobuchihama

Visiting people in Kobuchihama. Giving some gifts from Tokyo and receiving tea, Cola and food in return 🙂


Flowers

We stayed at Atagoso, the ryokan that was almost totally destroyed in the tsunami but that they have now rebuilt. We had a great dinner at Atagoso and friends from Kobuchihama joined. We spent most of the evening talking and eating, before I got so tired I just had to go to bed.

Shinobu-san in Tokyo

A friend from Kobuchihama have come to Tokyo to help out one of here friends here. Ishihara-san arranged with a dinner for her volunteer group at KotoKoto to “celebrate” that Shinobu-san was in Tokyo.



It was fun to meet Shinobu-san and great to see here smile and laugh after the tough year they had since the 3/11 earthquake. I know Shinobu-san’s top-most want-to-travel-to country right now is Sweden so I had bought some Swedish things for her on my business trip last week. She seemed to appreciate it 🙂