"Supplies with nowhere to go! The public effectively grasps the need." This article came out on November 6, 2011 in the "Asahi Shinbun" (Morning Sun Newspaper), the second largest newspaper in Japan. The article on the top shows what happened in many parts of the country where the government collected supplies from people but then did not know where to send them. The article printed just below highlights "Tsukuda Loves Tohoku," the community led disaster relief effort directed by my wife Abi and her friend Miho, as a model for how to get supplies where they need to go by building personal relationships with people in disaster areas. The picture was taken at a flea market near our building, selling goods in order to raise money for tsunami survivors. You can find a pdf of the article
here. (Sorry, Japanese only!)
As a follow-up to this article, Tsukuda Loves Tohoku called the location in the upper picture and are now in the process of distributing the city's supplies in tsunami hit areas.
(Additional comment: The main reason for the distribution problem was that the government focused on establishing and providing for shelters where the need was quickly filled, but most people stayed in their own broken homes or moved into temporary homes and were outside this system. The only way to find these ongoing needs is through person-to-person contact and networking, the core of Tsukuda Loves Tohoku values.)
