Tourist trail

OUT of the tragedy of ruin wreaked by the tsunami that laid waste to large stretches of Japan's northeast coast, a beacon of international friendship has risen. In a famously homogenous country where foreign faces are rarely seen outside the major cities, international volunteers have poured in to help the victims of Japan's March 2011 earthquake disaster put their lives back together.

Ishinomaki has never been on the foreign tourist trail. A year ago it had a sprinkling of non-japanese that included English teachers, but it was not a place that many outside Japan had ever heard of.

However, in the 10 months since huge waves crushed large areas of the city, washing away or badly damaging half of its 61,000 houses, thousands of people have offered to lend a hand, many of them from abroad.

"I'm doing volunteer work together with people from countries such as Singapore, Canada, Britain and the United States," said Koichi Murai, a 29-year-old ski resort employee from northern Sapporo.

"I know the country is providing money and instructions (for recovery) but it's not moving very quickly," said Murai, who plans to stay in the city for around a month.

"On the other hand, volunteers can start to help quickly, which is an advantage."

Across the disaster-hit northeast nearly 900,000 people have so far joined volunteer activities formally organised by local offices of the Japan National Council of Social Welfare, according to the council website.

On top of that, many other people, both Japanese and foreign nationals, have visited the devastated regions individually or in private groups to help local survivors from the disaster that claimed more than 19,000 lives.

"We have many local friends who don't speak any English at all," said Jamie El Banna, a 26-year-old from London, who moved to Ishinomaki from Osaka in June to help out. "We just communicate... heart to heart," he said.

El Banna, a former City of London worker who came to Japan in 2008, gathered a group of foreign volunteers through social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

"(In September) I had maybe 20 tents and I had to find somewhere to put people, in the end I went on Twitter and asked if anyone had a house that could sleep 20 volunteers.”