Helping Disaster-stricken Kumamoto by Kitchen Cars

The Kumamoto Earthquake took place on April 14, 2016, and continued to have earth shakes until the end of August. Although the difficulties of the East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami generated a lot of delays in building temporary housing and developing emergency schemes, the government in the Kumamoto Earthquake was much quicker to respond to the needs of disaster-stricken people, owing to lessons learned from the East Japan disaster. As fast as three months after the earthquake, there were already the developments of temporary housing areas with an adequate number of houses.

Despite so, the nature of people’s fear toward the earthquake is quite different, since the fear started taking place after several days of shakes. Some families found themselves safe at the first shake, while the second and the third shakes gradually destroyed their houses, making them impossible to continue living. When the fear took place at once just like in the East Japan disaster, efforts can be made to give up what they lost and start thinking about rebuilding their communities. However, if the loss was gradual and if they found many places previously safe became all unsafe, their unusual experiences shattered their sense of efforts for rebuilding communities.

Along with this sense of deep fear for any place previously considered safe in their communities and also ease in moving to another place without any geographical restrictions make them feel less committed to rebuilding their communities. In a period when a community was destroyed by a natural disaster, rebuilding good human relations become the base of building community relations. People in the East Japan disaster learned in a very hard way how important it is to redevelop good human relations for nurturing a sense of community and redeveloping a community itself.

However, building human relations in the Mashikicho Tekuno Temporary Housing (MTTH) is found especially difficult, since HTTM consists of more than 500 houses and since the area was divided into six different blocks despite the fact they all live in one place and use one shopping arcade. These characteristics resulted in MTTH’s delay in establishing the Neighborhood Community Association (NCA) until as late as the middle of November, while people started moving into the area in July. Actually, it took four months to develop the NCA to collectively cater for the needs of disaster-stricken people. This failure very much suggests a difficulty of building good community relations and speeding up the redevelopment of the area.

People in Kamaishi experiencing the East Japan disaster, in an abrupt way, learned how important it is to develop good human relations for nurturing a sense of community. This is precisely the reason why the Kamaishi Kitchen Car (KKC) team took their roles as a facilitator for bringing people in MTTH together, and planned to have a Winter Festival in MTTH on Dec. 11, 2016 (Sun.). This festival was organized by the Kitchen Car National Disaster Support Network, which is initiated and operated by the KKC, presently operated by the Kamaishi Platform Co. Ltd. Four organizations provide funding, one of which is the Ippan Shadan Hojin DSIA. Another supporting organizations is Yashiro Fishermen’s Cooperative, which has already developed long-term mutual cooperative relations with oyster producers in Kamaishi, actually their relations going back before the East Japan disaster. This Cooperative sent seven people to participate in this festival by serving their oyster to people in MTTH.

The KCC team was acting based on their experiences of the East Japan disaster where human relations in communities are traditionally strong, especially because each community tends to be small and isolated by high mountains or deeply indented coastal lines. The KKC team started organizing the festival several months ago by contacting those whom they have met at the initial stage of serving free food. And in order to make sure that the festival works out smoothly, the team along with the author entered Mashikicho a few days before the festival.

The KCC team has earlier developed good relations with people at a temporary shop arcade, called Redevelopment Shop Arcade (RSA) (Picture 1), consisted of fifteen shops, built on a parking space borrowed from a damaged Kuroshio-Honryu-Supermarket building. However, suddenly the supermarket decided to rebuild its shop and requested the return of the parking space for bringing in construction equipment, and informed RSA to move out by December 2016. After negotiating with the supermarket, shops in RSA succeeded in postponing the deadline until June 2017. This was the very reason why many shop owners have been consulting with the KKC team, especially some of which were seriously thinking of shifting to kitchen cars to continue their businesses. At this moment, only one shop decided to do so and just recently purchased a kitchen car produced by a company the KKC team has been purchasing for their Kamaishi project (Picture 2). What is good about the KKC team was that they become one stop place for learning how to operate a kitchen car, purchasing a kitchen car, and receiving advises on conducting businesses. This team also closely coordinate with the Kumamoto Catering Car Association, which facilitates the smooth acquisitions of government permissions and advises on locations where kitchen cars can operate with some good sales. As a matter of fact, one company, which has a very good reputation of producing high-quality and constantly-improved kitchen cars, works closely with the KCC team to give advises on kitchen car operations. The company even joined this festival by bringing a newly developed kitchen car to serve food to people. The outcome of such coordinated activities in Mashikicho resulted in two kitchen car operators: one which sells coffee during day time and alcoholic drinks at night; and the other which sells sweets. The latter kitchen car even developed its original “Mashiki Pudding” (Picture 3), which has been frequently reported in local news. The KKC team has already made some impacts to develop kitchen car operators in the Kumamoto disaster.

The head of the Temporary Shops Association in MTTH has been rather taking a passive stance to solve several issues due to the difficulty of coordinating diverse interests. It was clear that a sense of community was not well nurtured in MTTH, especially because NCA was established only three weeks ago. Even though a sense of community may be different from East Japan, the difficulty of coordination itself actually suggested the importance of developing a sense of community in MTTH and the importance of activities, such as the festival, by the KCC team.

Naturally, the KKC team encountered a lot of miscommunications among participants and visited each shop in MTTH on Dec. 9 (Fri.), cleared misunderstanding, and obtained the promises of their participation. Since solving miscommunications was quite a tough work, the KKC members even started worrying whether there will be enough participants to this festival. Fearing a possible unexpected outcome, on Dec. 10 (Sat.), the team delivered announcements to all 500 households and went shopping to prepare for food to be served.

Anxieties that the KKC team had was meaningless. Although only twenty people were waiting for the opening at 9:00 am, people started gathering around 10:00 am. It was the idea of the KKC team to have games for both adults and children. For adults, people could get for free a fairly large amount of potatoes and onions, may be worth about 500 yen, if they had the right amount of weight, while if not, they had to pay 100 yen. Even so, this was a bargain. Many people lined up waiting for their turn, and loud voices of one in charge of this game created quite lively atmosphere (Picture 4). Next to that place, children played ring throwing, which was operated by high school volunteers, some of whom were from MTTH and some from outside (Picture 5). Then, around 11:00 am oyster soup and yakisoba (Picture 6) came to be served. Many people were just waiting for lunch-time food, especially for yakisoba. which ended up having a line of 20 to 30 people waiting. An interesting phenomenon is that when one person asked if she could bring her own pan for oyster soup and when she was approved to do so, then many people went back home and brought small-sized pans. Consequently, giving a bigger serving to a pan than a small soup cup at the same price, this practice ended up reducing the number of people who could be served out of one large-sized cooking pan. Since heat from LP gas was rather weak, cooking oyster soup took a long time and created a longer line. Although many people lined up, they did not mind at all to wait for a fairly long time, since the soup was really good with an unexpectedly many oysters in it.

Adult weighing game with vegetables was priced at 100 yen (93 cents). children’s game at 50 yen (46 cents), oyster soup at 50 yen (46 cents), yakisoba at 50 yen (46 cents), and coffee and corn soup at 10 yen (9 cents). Free food was considered not good, since some shops in MTTH tried to get their own customers on that day. If it is completely free, those shops will not get any customer. But the earning of about 30,000 yen through these activities actually suggests that a fairly large number of purchases and playing took place. It was donated to the Temporary Shop Association for their activities. At the end of the day, everybody who helped to make this Winter Festival success gathered for picture taking (Picture 7). Surprisingly, the number was about 25 people, quite many volunteered to make this event successful.

Thus, people seemed to be very happy to attend the Winter Festival, and offered a lot of opportunities for them to meet with each other. They relaxed at tables located in the center of the arcade. And many people expressed their appreciation for the kind offering of helping hands to them, though many people still do not know where they are going. Some expressed that they will never be able to go back where they used to live, simply because they do not have any saving to build a house, while the government cleans up a piece of land for them. Quite a significant portion of people in MTTH may belong to this category, greatly due to their age. Many people who attended the festival, at least for a moment, had a sense of warm community relations, which might have triggered future-oriented thinking.

Links:

• Shops in Mashiki Techno Temporary Housing
• Mashikicho Techno Smiling Shops