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5 years in Tohoku: Ongoing Community Building
Onagawa is located in the far east of Miyagi Prefecture, where 14.8m high tsunami attacked and 89.2% of houses were washed away or damaged and turned into some of 44t debris. (Announced by Onagawa municipal govenment)
The picture in the right was taken in early summer, 2011 when the Great East Japan earthquake hit there. Tsunamis covered the whole town coming from the Onagawa harbor and only the devastation was left.
It was in summer 2011 that Habitat for Humanity Japan started disaster response in Onagawa. In a bad location, Onagawa had a problem of access to any supports and that delayed building temporary shelter complexes there. It was in November 2011 that the last temporary shelter complex was built in Onagawa. Habitat for Humanity Japan distributed futon sets (Japanese mattresses with bedding) to some complexes with volunteers from September to November 2011. In 2012, Habitat Japan started building fishermen's huts to support the affected fishermen community. 
Habitat Japan closed the disaster response program in 2014 and supported to revitalize a community facility in the last year. It is "Yume(Dream) House" and local people use it not only as a spot to gather and also run it as business to grow vegetables and serve them to visitors.
"Yume House" used to be an old shed owned by a local fisherman. His house and 27 other houses in the community were washed away by tsunami and the shed was the only left there. This fisherman's daughter, Junko Yagi decided to rebuild the shed to a community facility for those affected there. Junko said, "People used to live this community are now living in temporary shelters and gradually moving to permanent houses and apartments. This means people scatter and we wanted to somewhere we can get together for chatting, working and enjoying together."
"We had a great help from Habitat Japan and its volunteers so we would like to make this business grow not only for us but for many people who have been supporting us," said Junko, showing a picture of Habitat Japan volunteers. Habitat for Humanity builds homes, communities and hope. This case is one of Habitat's community building. Habitat Japan brings more people together to support more communities locally and overseas to help those in need of decent homes and communities.
