News

During a visit to Sendai in the Tohoku region with UNI affiliate JSD, UNI Head of Department for Commerce, Alke Boessiger paid tribute to the victims of the March 11 disaster that cost the live of ten thousands of people and destroyed the livelihood of many more.

Guided by local union leader Hidetsugu Sato, Alke was able to visit destroyed areas along the pacific coasts near the cities of Sendai and Ishinomaki.

"I don't have words to describe what I saw", says Alke. "Entire villages, housing areas and factories have been completely washed away. There is nothing left but a few personal items carried away by the giant waves. It looks like a war zone."

In a meeting with local union leaders Sato and Takahiro Ishii after the site visits, they described how JSD members, who had been undergoing earthquake evacuation training for years, lead their customers out of the department stores when the earthquake hit and to a safe assembly place. But from there people had to make their own way home and many of those who made it home found their houses and families had vanished by the tsunami that followed the 9.0 strong quake.

Unions and store managements joined forces to locate the workers and to set up emergency help. Within hours of the disaster, the Tokyo headquarters of the companies as well as the union headquarters sent lorries loaded with food supplies, generators and gas bottles on their way to the affected areas.

"We are incredibly grateful to JSD and to UNI for the hundreds of solidarity messages and funds that we received. We can feel first hand what union solidarity is all about and to know that our brothers and sisters around the world are thinking of us has been a great source of strength for us in our efforts to rebuild our lives" said Sato-san. "A lot of the money collected to support the local unions will be used to assist workers to re-build their houses and to support a local NGO taking care of surviving children who lost their families by the tsunami."

JSD affiliated unions in the area will now come together to discuss how to cooperate more closely in the future in order to even better prepared in case such an event would be repeated.

"People are incredibly strong. They don't feel anger about the tsunami and what it did as they accept nature's forces" said Alke. "But they are frustrated by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima and how the Japanese government seems incapable to come up with ideas to prevent such accidents in the future and to develop alternative energy sources."