Where are the Japanese Charities?

In light of the recent devastation in the Touhoku region (Sendai, Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima), many of you are probably wondering what you can do to help. The internet response to the earthquake and tsunami has been amazing to watch—Google has a front page link to the Red Cross, and Facebook has English, Japanese, and Korean-language news updates automatically set on the homepages of people living in Japan. Everything that the world learned about viral aid relief after Haiti is being applied to Japan, and many people here in Komatsu have commented about how impressed they are with the rest of the world’s thoughts and prayers.

Yet, the international response is also a bit disorienting. We are used to a very set pattern of donors and recipients when we think of aid: the rich countries or parts of countries give to poor countries or parts of countries. The G8 send money and helicopters and special teams to Africa or Southeast Asia. People in suburbs or wealthy parts of cities hold benefits for struggling inner-city or rural communities. A whole system—a whole industry, even-- exists to turn concern into money or supplies, and move that money or those supplies where they are most needed. Churches, charity offices, and secular non-profit organizations act as conduits to get aid delivered.

In the case of run-of-the-mill disasters (war, hunger, AIDS, poverty, inequality) these conduits follow said set pattern. In the case of the US, aid programs were deliberately privatized in the 1980s, which is why there are so many private charities to help America’s poor. In the case of the world aid system, private charities exist to help countries whose governments simply do not have the stability or resources to help their own. Usually this is because these governments are so new, and are starting from scratch after being under colonial rule that left them with little sustainable infrastructure.

The countries that support third-world development are, with the exception of the US, success stories of development aid themselves. Japan and the European countries that most benefited from the Marshall Plan are the world’s top donors, behind America. Japan, Germany, Sweden, France, and these other big global donor nations got assistance to their governments in the 1950s and proceeded to use their subsequent economic success to make a vast network of social programs for their citizens. Where churches and thousands of private charities in the US redistribute money as aid, it is often government programs that do this in places like Western Europe and, yes, Japan. This has worked out well for the standard of living in these countries, if not for the national balance sheets.

If you skimmed all that, here’s what you need to know: When disasters hit the US or Third World Countries, the way aid has always operated (donors in rich place --> non-profit in rich place--> distribution networks in poor place) provides a simple structure for getting donations to the victims.

Enter Japanese history and culture.

How Japan does aid and nonprofits is vastly different from how Europe, the US, and Canada do aid and nonprofits. In the US, people donate to charities, many of which are religious. US government money goes to foreign aid, too, but only about 1%...a helpful total in the developing world, but a MINISCULE taxpayer burden. In Europe, people donate to charities and a larger chunk of their taxpayer dollars go to development aid. The tradition of donating to charity is old in Europe and North America, and has its roots in tithing. Donating came first, before government aid, because of the church. It established a pattern of giving to local charities, even as they became secularized. Government aid to suffering communities and developing countries came much, much later.

In Japan, aid happened differently on both the local and global scale. There was no big organized Church to redistribute tithes. Communities looked after each other on a case-by-case basis, often refusing to accept help from outside after disasters. Local temples and shrines provided assistance and moral support, and encouraged stricken communities to pull through independently. Until its defeat in WWII, Japan did not receive foreign aid. It was a new (and kind of humiliating) experience…keep this in mind when reading that the Prime Minister said the recent earthquake is the biggest disaster since WWII.

Japan’s war reparations debt to the parts of Asia it invaded and destroyed was called in as it still received aid from the US. The began the policy of keizai kyoryoku—giving aid (war reparations) while building its economy so it could stop receiving aid. Long story short, Japan paid off its debts in helpful Japanese products, stimulating its own modern manufacturing economy while providing Asia with infrastructure and engineers. This came from citizens in the form of taxes, not tithes. Aid, to Japan, is a matter of creating regional and global economic prosperity and cooperation. The Japanese aid model is really helpful for developing countries, but doesn’t have the warm fuzzy feeling of the American/European way of giving, which stresses people rather than progress.

Again, what you need to know: Japan thinks of aid as a government issue, not as a charity issue. As a result of its history and culture, Japan has way, way less non-profits than the US, Canada, and Europe. The nonprofts it has simply act as a way for people to give more money to the same style of aid the government gives. Japan does not have many non-profits that specialize in aiding Japanese people. Most of them are—you guessed it—almost entirely local, just like how Japanese people concerted their efforts since they came to the archipelago.

Case in point: in the Kobe earthquake, Japan refused aid. The Japanese people believed it was for their government, not charity organizations, to handle. Japan’s government was the second richest in the world at the time—why would they possibly want to receive development aid when they themselves give it?

Fast forward to March 10, 2011. Japan has one of the largest national debts in the world. It just lost its second-biggest-economy status to China. The Japanese people are losing confidence in the ability of the government to keep Japan at its current standards. Then, it is hit with a 9.1 earthquake and one of its biggest northern cities, surrounded by some if its most rural prefectures, gets hit with a tsunami. Whole towns go missing. The world watches.

Then, the world offers to help.

Haiti had organizations already there on the ground ready to mobilize. So did Chile, and the Pacific Islands hit in the tsunami there. Japan has its own government, budget shaking before the earth did, and its small local organizations. They can’t do it alone any more, not this time.

How should Japan accept these offers? Even though the government has accepted foreign agencies and foreign volunteers, they face a huge language and cultural barrier.
Japan has never, been on the receiving end of a giant private aid operation. It has always been a giver in the global aid system—it’s never had an armada of private charities and nonprofits line up to give it volunteers, medicine, blankets, or money.

Japan decided what to do—it will let them all in as a supplement to its own efforts and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, Japanese nonprofits want to help, and can do so without running up against the language and culture barrier, but don’t have a base like foreign charities do.

I have been searching far and wide for Japanese non-profits to support, and found two to share with all of you. If you can, please donate to Japan Emergency NGOs (JEN) or Association for Aid and Relief (AAR Japan). These are great organizations that have helped internationally with earthquake relief, and now are additionally helping their own. They are less funded than big international organizations, and could really use donations.

Donating to them is difficult from abroad—you’ll need to do an international money wire, and the dollar is far weaker than the yen. Yet, these nonprofits can operate faster and more flexibly than the Red Cross. If you live in Japan now, please consider these first.

If wiring money to these organizations is out of the question, please support organizations in your country that are reaching out to Japan…by not earmarking your donation. There are so many other crises in the world, and Japan will recover years before places like Haiti that faced similar disasters.

Update

I'll get back to regular posts after this--I just wanted to reiterate that the area I live in hasn't been hit by any of the recent earthquakes. We're not experiencing any tsunami, power outages, food shortages, significant train delays, or building damage. What earthquakes we've felt have been of the "hey, is the ground rocking a bit or am I just dizzy?" variety.

People in Touhoku (and now Shizuoka) are not so lucky. Because of quake-related structural damage, tsunami, and now the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, thousands and thousands of families have lost their homes.

While Japan's compulsive earthquake preparation measures mitigated this, the damage to people's lives is great.

If you've been wanting to do something to help, awesome. Because shipping items takes a long time, I would suggest monetary donations. It doesn't have to be a lot, but please put it in the right place! The Red Cross has a history of sitting on monetary donations for a long time (up to three months!), especially the by-text donations. Consider giving to Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps, or Medical Teams International (religiously affiliated, formerly Northwest Medical Teams).

Thank you for keeping Japan in your thoughts and prayers, but as the saying goes: pray for the best, work for the rest.

There was a 7.9 mag earthquake off the coast of Northeastern Japan about 45 minutes ago. In Ishikawa, we felt some rocking, but it was very slight.

Note to family: I'm fine. I just wondered if someone was trying to squeeze by and rocked my chair, then listened to everyone play the news reports on their phones.

Sendai and the other cities in Northeastern Japan are prepared for these earthquakes, but people are scared nonetheless.

The government has issued tsunami warnings for the other side of the country. Near the epicenter, the waves weren't bad, but they give these things a lot of notice and a lot of time. If you know anyone on the Eastern side of Japan, check in with them.

Inside Students' Heads

I'm often surprised by what goes on in my students' heads at all the schools where I teach, but more so at the elementary school. I asked them if they knew any American folktales and they said "Tom and Jerry!" I told them that Portland is two hours away from the sea and that people consider that close, and they uniformly freaked out. I told them I have an uncle who is a cowboy, and they fell into two camps: half were convinced I was lying, because clearly cowboys don't exist any more, and and half were totally unphased, if not disappointed that all my relatives weren't cowboys and cowgirls.

Today I told them an old Native American folk tale from the Northwest, the story about how Raven stole the sun from the Sky Chief, who appears to professionally hoard celestial objects. I started off by showing them a painted carving from the Sk'klallum and having them guess where it came from.


To see more pictures like this, check out the Pacific Northwest Native Flickr Photostream.

Their first guess was Japan, which seems odd until you take a look at Ainu art. (The Ainu are one of Japan's indigenous groups, closely related to the Small Numbered Peoples of the Russian North and the First Nations of Alaska.) Then they guessed New Zealand. The US was their third guess, and Canada their fourth.

For the folktale, I decided to try and translate it into Japanese first--that way, the corresponding English would be easy enough to learn from at their level. One of my teachers proofread and edited my translation. Then I bought Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest as an ebook and used the pictures and my simplified text to make a PowerPoint.

After they heard the story, it was their turn to tell me a Japanese folktale in English. We went over basic folklore sentences like "she saw a ~~," "they became ~~,"and "they said/asked." There were many gestures, including a boy acting like a bullied turtle. This was the high point of the lesson for them, since they were really stoked about getting to be the first people to tell me about Momo-Tarou, Kin-Tarou, and Uroshima-Tarou.

The folktale lesson was for the sixth graders, some of whom I won't see again. The school is on the intake boundary between two middle schools--some will go to the one I teach at, and others will go to a different one. There were pictures and messages scrawled on the back cover of their paperback English workbooks.

With the fifth grade class, who I'll see next school year, there were speeches. The vice principal (who substitutes for a substitute homeroom teacher just for English classes, and has taken extra English lessons privately to feel qualitified) asked them if they had anything they wanted to say. English for them is games rather than grammar, and several students said (in Japanese) that they were nervous about English, but aren't any more because English class is fun.

The strangest part of my job is effect that I'm supposed to have. I'm supposed to be proof that the students need to know another language to communicate with the rest of the world, and I'm supposed to personalize (and personify) the Anglophone world. It's easy to get caught up in lesson planning and schedules and forget that in a day, up to 150 kids are learning from me...and forming opinions about language, culture, and even their own ambitions based on what I bring to the classroom, whether it's a folktalke, holiday presentation, or just how enthusiastically I can chant about what people had for breakfast.

It's weird to be responsible for making kids want to learn about something, and even weirder to get a peek inside their heads and see that you're actually having an effect.

The nice things they said about my class and about me as a teacher haven't made me think that I just must be good at; rather, they've made me realize just how much better at it I should be, just because they're soaking everything in.

Posts Owed: Yuki Matsuri (Snow Festival)

In mid-February, the city of Sapporo in the northern island of Hokkaido turns its snow and ice into something awesome. The Yuki Matsuri is one of Japan's biggest festivals, and it attracts people from all over the world. I went with Erin and three of my friends from Komatsu over a four-day weekend. We flew from Komatsu to Tokyo, and taxiing in, saw the Pikachu Plane. We talked about what it would be like to ride it and took pictures. Then we got to our gate...

...AND REALIZED WE GOT TO RIDE THE PIKACHU PLANE TO SAPPORO.

(Photo by Suoh Sato, not me. But you get the idea.)

That set the tone for the trip. Hokkaido is famous for its beer, the quality of its seafood and veggies, and also for how open people are to visitors. The people at our hotel were super nice, and our stay included free drinks at the bar and breakfasts. Something I learned last time I went to Japan (with my college choir) is that upper-mid range Japanese hotels are serious about breakfast. There's an equal array of Western and Japanese breakfast foods, and most of the Japanese foods have a pedigree--there were signs about where the rice, miso, and veggies came from. Some of the Western foods seem a bit out of place--breakfast salad, anyone?--but were all tasty. The hotel would have been out of our price range entirely if not for early booking through a travel agency...which still exist here and do decent business.

The main attraction of the Yuki Matsuri is the snow and ice sculptures. These were all intricate and gorgeous beyond words, so I'll let them do the talking.

Yes, those are real fish.

You can see more on my Flickr page and (soon) my Picasa page, which won't limit me to 200 photos to share with you without paying. I recommend the "Yuki Matsuri by Day" set, which has the entries from Sapporo's sister cities.

The food was amazing: salmon dumplings, crab shells full of fresh crab meat, seafood gumbo, and what the meat-eaters described as amazing ramen. Erin and I have plans to go back to Sapporo in the summer for the food and giant beer garden alone.

Incidentally--I like to think because of the beer and tasty food--Portland and Sapporo are sister cities. All of Sapporo's sister cities entered snow sculptures, including Portland. The piles of snow mask the detail, but not the hilarity of the title.

Dear readers, I give you: Spawning for the Future.

Yes. That is what it is called. To be fair to it, its design is covered by about three inches of powder snow. I'm sure the future and the spawning are much more discernible once it's dusted off.

The other sister city sculptures' designs weren't hit so hard by the snow...at the snow festival.

All in all, the trip was fabulous. I was expecting freezing cold, but it stayed around 0 to -4 degrees celsius (32 to about 26 fahrenheit) the entire time we were out and about. Drinking in public is legal in Japan, so we had plenty of beer and hot wine from the booths to keep us fortified.

Yuki Matsuri is one of those things that sounds gimmicky, but, now that I've been, I can say for certain that it's worth the trip!

Elementary, my dear Walker

The fifth-grade teacher at the elementary school I sometimes teach at deposits a stack of thin paperback books on my desk. Combined, they weigh as much as two or three of my high school textbooks. Most of them seem to be about half illustration, filled with blindingly clear timelines and diagrams or black-haired manga-style children bandaging simple injuries and doing science labs.

This stack of 8 by 11 sized books represents the standard Japanese fifth grade curriculum.

Basically, one of these books—Eigo Note, an activity book for very simple spoken English lessons—brought along all of its friends to help out with today’s lesson. Today is school subjects. Because of the surprising variability of Japanese school schedules, I see this class only about half the days that I’m at the elementary school. The homeroom teacher fears that they don’t know the subjects, and figured that the best way to teach them is through associating them with the books they see every day.

Every class has its unforeseen difficulties. Once lined up on the blackboard chalk shelf, there are more textbooks than subjects mentioned (in Japanese) in the book: English, Japanese, Social Studies, Science, Math, Gym, Health, Home Economics, Calligraphy, Arts and Crafts, and Moral Education.

Maybe I’m a victim of my major, but as I model pronunciation for the fifth graders, I’m thinking, budget cuts, education policy, socialization. When they reproduce their own schedules in their activity books and report, “On Monday, I study…” it becomes impossible not to compare. Their books are tiny compared to the hardback brick I had for prealgebra in fifth grade, or the history textbook we sometimes got to use. They don’t read whole novels for homework. Look at all those classes with hands-on activities! What’s even in the moral education textbook?*

The teacher must notice the way I’m staring at the books, and asks the question that always makes my classes go over time: what’s this like in America? The students’ eyes get wide and they start whispering rumors to each other. “I heard they have school buses” tops the charts.

I don’t explain that I moved in elementary school, that I did a two-year science magnet, or that I was possibly the most cynical fifth grader my school district had ever seen. I don’t explain about small schools and blended classrooms.

I do explain that we didn’t have periods and bells. They ask how the kids knew that they had a break between subjects, or how the teachers knew when to change subjects. I explain that we didn’t have breaks, and that we knew the times for when we had to move to things like math or PE.

They are surprised that we had math for an hour every day compared to their 45 minutes, and that people moved to different teachers depending on their math ability. Some of the students like the idea. They’re really shocked that we had not one, but effectively three English classes: a session for literature, a session for writing, and a session for vocabulary.

Next come the real shockers, to the teacher and to the students. They ask what days I had science. I explain that there were some weeks when we didn’t have science, but when we did, it was usually twice a week. I explain that to my knowledge, we didn’t have a science textbook—we had videos and some simple experiments and a teacher doing his best.

“Social studies?” they ask. Two times a week, perhaps, I answer. “Music?” Once or twice a week. “PE?” Once or twice a week. “Arts and crafts?” Once a month. The teacher asks me to repeat and explain what that means. The phrase “once a month” isn’t taught in conjunction with their school subjects.

Suddenly they look at me differently, the ten-year olds I’m supposed to get accustomed to foreign faces and foreign voices. They look at me with same expression I see on the faces of people listening to accounts of growing up poor in the world’s backwaters or war zones. My students are looking at me like a survivor, like someone deprived of something basic.

I went to one of the best elementary, middle, and high schools in my state. I was a National Merit Commended Scholar without taking PSAT prep outside of my school. I went to a selective private college and graduated Magna Cum Laude. I am, by my country’s standards, well-goddamned-educated.

It’s too much. I tell them about school buses and summer vacation. They like that, and finally, they don’t appear to pity me any more. Smiling becomes difficult.

That internal voice that only appeared when I started living abroad—the little nationalist in my head that urges me to defend American policies I disagree with—starts its whine. We spend time on writing. We don’t have entrance exams.** We spend money on ships and military bases that keep you safe from North Korea.

All of those rationalizations are missing the point. The point is that American education has so much potential (our books are thicker, we have writing, and we have levels of math!) but fails to deliver. Education in the US is asked the impossible: give us world class scientists and inventors without a substantive science or engineering curriculum; give us fitter kids even though we’re cutting gym; nourish our kids with pizza pockets; attract top teaching talent with $24,000 salaries and careers at the mercy of cuts. If the level of science and hands-on activities at my well-funded and small suburban elementary school shocks Japanese fifth graders, what must it be like in big cities or in states like Texas that are considering cutting the senior year of high school?

In the race toward economic and intellectual primacy, the race in which Asia is our biggest competitor, our Achilles heel is the lip service and hypocrisy surrounding the importance of education. The results of ignoring science, of ignoring hands-on activities, and of refusing to even be a real competitor in the world field of education are so plain even a Japanese fifth-grader can see them…when presented to them in plain English.

* Want to know what’s in the moral education textbook? Among other stories of world leaders and community heroes, there is a long chapter on Martin Luther King Jr.

** America doesn’t have the infamous recall-based entrance exams of East Asia. However, writing and math emphasis in wealthy suburban elementary schools like mine is intentionally designed to accustom children to the way of thinking measured in America’s de-facto entrance exam, the SAT. Never mind that intelligence tests like the SAT are regarded by research psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists as utterly bogus; we get into our unique habit of disregarding science fairly early.

On Winter

I dislike generalizations, but I'm fairly comfortable with this one: most Japanese people pride themselves on being extremely aware of (mainland) Japan's four seasons. Coworkers remind me of the four seasons. Student compositions on what they want to tell foreigners about Japan often feature the four seasons somehow. I have students named, literally, "four seasons." Beer comes in autumn leaf bedecked cans in October and cherry blossom bedecked cans in March. You cannot find a fan in October, and come April, I probably won't see a kotatsu (heated table) cover for six months. There. Are. Four. Seasons. In. Japan.

Yet, in Ishikawa, it would be polite never to talk about winter.

January and February are when Siberia dumps whatever it has left over on the west coast of Japan. The form of precipitation can change depending on the minute--I have been snowed, rained, hailed, and sleeted on within the space of the fifteen minutes it takes me to walk to school. None of the houses or apartments I've been to have central heating. Most people keep warm via kerosene heaters or heat/ac units, piling on thermal underwear in their own homes to keep costs down. There is no sunlight.

Minnesota got me used to meter-tall piles of snow, dead vegetation, bitter winds, and ice biking. Despite this, NOTHING could have prepared me (or Japan Railways West) for the sheer amount of snow that hit us in early February.

I was coming home from visiting my partner in Gifu one Sunday night. It had been snowing in Gifu prefecture, and there they were big, pretty snowglobe flakes drifting down past the city lights. Sometime between there and Tsuruga--a charming port city in Fukui prefecture--it turned into a snow storm. In Tsuruga, our train stopped.

Our train stopped for almost 36 hours.

It turned out that almost a meter of snow had fallen in just over a day. That weekend dumped so much snow that the tracks were under too much for the train to move forward. We had to wait in the train until JR West's track plows could dig us out, or until another train could get through. For the first time in its history, JR West shut down all its Hokuriku (Northwest Japan) lines for a full day because of snow.

Needless to say, I missed work that Monday. I didn't get back to Komatsu until 5 am Tuesday morning, and went to work a few hours later hating trains and snow and my phone's battery life. I had kept in contact with my school, and they responded like I was sending them secret messages from inside a hostage cell: "are they feeding you??" "I am relieved to know they are treating you well!" "Please don't come to work if it has been too much for you," etc. My poor supervisor might never let me travel again.

My students got a snow day. They studied. Some came to school anyway.

Apart from the train adventure, most of my winter time has been spent finding ways never to leave my apartment, and preferrably, not to move away from the heater or blankets. The computer was farther away than my Kindle (thanks Mom and Dad!), so blogging was clearly far too much effort.

I did my first legitimate grocery shopping trip yesterday, because this weekend was sunny and warm. Until lately, grocery shopping has entailed ice biking and its impossible cousin, slush biking. Between ESS recitations and helping students with studying for their entrance exam English compositions, grocery shopping has been me grabbing what I can as quickly as I can before it gets too cold and dark outside to get home safely--before the ice refreezes. The roads to the stores have been icy and frought with peril, but the little sushi place is close and tasty.

Now that the stores are more accessible by bike--and now that I see the sun once or twice a day, hooray!--it's like a big dark sheet has been lifted from my culinary vision. I realized...I can cook food! It will taste delicious! So now I'm back on my bento kick and dinner planning kick.

My goal? Never get prepared food unless I am with friends.

Wish me luck. I might post a bento recipe or two.