JICHIRO is conducting support activities for those affected by the Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters from 11 April to 10 July 2011.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan’s eastern coast on 11 March 2011, and the resulting accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, have caused severe damage for members of PSI affiliates and their families. Although members are facing large-scale damage on a personal level, they immediately went to work helping residents, confirming safety status, and organizing evacuations. Some union members continued support activities, confirming the safety of residents, distributing relief items and running evacuation centres, despite losing, or not being able to confirm the safety of their own family members. Working round the clock is causing mental and physical exhaustion and we hear from unions in the disaster-affected areas that some members have collapsed due to illness and others have taken early retirement.
Based on experience of support activities gained after the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in 1995, JICHIRO made every effort to immediately contact after the earthquake each of the prefectural offices in the disaster area and began preparing a support system. In order to lighten, as much as possible, the workload of the local government employees, JICHIRO started full-scale support activities on 11 April 2011. Base camps were set up in four places, Iwate, south Miyagi, north Miyagi and Fukushima. About 300 union members from all over Japan were sent there every week. As of 20 May, about 10 000 union members in total had helped with various activities including evacuation centre support, recovering items from family home altars and family photographs, dividing up relief supplies for distribution, processing applications from residents for temporary housing and so on. Until 10 July, JICHIRO plans to continue support activities, scaling up or down and changing the contents according to needs.
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