Childcare Support at Disaster-Stricken Tohoku

     The Halloween Party is now spreading all over Japan, even in Tohoku area, and unexceptionally the Kirarin Kids (KK) also offered the party on October 29, 2015. Twelve pairs of parents and children participated in the party, in which all toddlers wore hand-made pumpkin-looking costumes. Children just loved this event. KK was very happy that they could offer this enjoyable event to young mothers in Rikuzen Takata as the Halloween Parties are organized in many other cities.

     However, what is unique about KK is that they offered hand-made cookies with their own recipes, since they believe that dietary education with hand-made food signifies one of their important missions to transmit from old generations to new ones warm and heart-filled parents-children relations found in their tradition. Every season, they organize a session for hand-made modern as well as traditional food. Their recipe for the Halloween Party was donuts made with brown seaweeds, scorn made out of rice flour which causes less allergy reaction among children, and pumpkin soup. A dietician explained their menu. One mother with a baby was really happy to learn the recipe, since she has not given any commercial cookie to her baby and will try to make it at home.    

     Despite the fact that such recipe is available in internet, important is offering an opportunity for mothers to actually experience to eat hand-made food, know its ingredient and nourishment to children, and learn how to make it. Behind such activities, there is a special reason for KK to offer dietary education with home-made cooking. It is because the disaster changed ways people live, forcing each family to live in a very small space in a temporary housing, making it difficult to mingle even with family members, and drastically reducing opportunities to get together with older and younger generations. The simplified funeral customs due to a large number of diseased people also changed the role of traditional food and community relations. Besides, the core of community relations in this area was to exchange fresh and delicious food among people, which became impossible due to dispersed residences and the reduce amount of catches. Since KK believes that the disaster changed local people’s habit of eating and destroyed community relations, it hopes to contribute to rebuilding community relations by promoting hand-made food and offering dietary education of both modern and traditional food, especially the latter to young mothers.   

     Several families attended KK’s Halloween Party for the first time. They decided to come to the Party, simply because they participated in the KK-organized children’s athletic meeting in which even a zero-year old baby could participate. As many as fifty families participated in the athletic meeting, which was the first event ever organized in the city since the disaster. Parents and children from neighborhood communities also participated. Consequently, KK became famous for offering events, responding to the needs of the community, and developing ways to solicit parents and children to participate in community activities.

     However, as it has been reported in the past to the GlobalGiving, despite that four years have passed out of five year guarantee to remain in this temporary shopping arcade, has evolved no clear picture where KK’s future location will be. They do not know whether they can even extend their stay in the present place, since negotiation between three land owners and the city government does not seem to be working out well. Several offers to move into a supermarket or a public housing area exist, but they do not have enough revenue to manage their activities in those places. They also think that they would like to apply to cloud funding. But people are not any more paying attention to the disaster area. Many people in a similar situation, including KK, really feel uncertain about their future.

     A national meeting for children-rearing support organizations will be held in November this year in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, for two days. Among many sessions, there will be one session for Tohoku-based organizations, including KK, which will discuss about support to disaster-stricken families in Tohoku. In October, the entry was closed, disappointedly only to find the lowest number of participants in the session in comparison to others. It clearly suggests that people are now less interested in problems in the disaster-stricken area.

     Given the situation stated above, despite clicking time bomb, no vision has been developed, simply aggravating KK’s anxiety and uncertainty. Clearly, no end is yet foreseen about redevelopment out of the disaster.

Links:

• Kirarin Kids Rikuzen Takata