Bob Stilger’s Blog

Dear Friends,

As those of you know who have been reading my notes form Japan, powerful things are happening there.  Most of the world has moved on from last year’s disasters of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns.  But in Japan it is like a fragile truce has settled in.  Almost like the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath.  It has been a hard winter for the 300,000 or so who are living in temporary housing and the anniversary of the day that changed their lives forever is just around the corner.

Japan “started” as isolated villages surrounded by high mountains where everyone had to work together to raise a wet-rice crop, or starve.  Those origins of collective communal culture are very present today.  One of the sad aspects of this is that it is often really hard for people to talk about how lousy they feel — disheartened, in grief, uncertain.  There’s an unwritten block that goes something like this:  no matter how badly I feel, i know you must feel worse, so i will not burden you with my story.

Miratsuku, an NonProfit Organization founded last year has been making a huge difference.  Whenever and wherever possible it is creating safe spaces for people to dialog with each other — to speak out their grief and confusion and to on to dream about what is possible now that wasn’t possible before.  They need our support.  I am convinced this work in Japan is important to the entire world — we are learning how to create a new future.

PLEASE, please, consider a donation to Miratsuku (which means Emerging Future by the way) to support this important work.  You can do so online and contributions are tax-deductible in the US.  Just go to:  http://i4japan.jolkona.org/projects/180.  This dialog work – which I have been deeply involved in and which I have written about before — is critically important.  You can read more about Miratsuku’s work on their new website:  http://emerging-future.org/about/what-is-miratuku/, and here is a report on 2011 activities that Miratsuku’s Founder Yuya Nishimura has written:  http://emerging-future.org/report/miratukureport2011.pdf (look in downloads folder).

There are many steps and stages to this work of creating a new Japan.  The first is making it possible for people to talk with each other.  I’ll always remember a Park director from Fukushima who came to the first Youth Community Leader Dialog we did hosted a little more than 2 months after the disasters.  We had  no money, but we managed to bring about 60 people from all across Japan together.  One was the Park Director, in his mid-fifties.  I said to me “when I saw the flyer, I knew that I was too old for this — but I had to come.  I need some way to move forward again.”  I could see in his eyes a combination of anger, despair and helplessness.  I could also tell from his manner that before 3.11 he’d always been the one who had stood up and said to others we an do this, let’s go!  At the end of the third day, he ran around the inside of our closing circle shouting “I have hope again.”  Simple, honest, authentic dialog with others who cared.

Please support this important work of Miratsuku.  It is essential work, healing work, building work.

Blessings,

Bob

Hi friends,

I’m beginning the “soft launch” of something that has grown out of my work in Japan over the last several years.  The Transformation Institute:  Community, Business and Personal Transformation is coming to life at web address Robert Theobald and I used for our work from the mid-nineties until his death just before the beginning of the new century.  Seems very fitting and appropriate.

Frankly, I don’t know exactly what the Transformation Institute is.  I just know it wants to be born.  Several questions contribute to its formation:

• We will encounter more and more collapse of existing systems in the coming years.  How can we use collapse (disaster/emergency/revolt) as a springboard to transform our communities and our lives into ones which are healthy, resilient and thriving?  A friend in Japan made a critical observation last April, speaking of the triple disasters in Japan.  She said “we caused this.”  Three simple words.  They make us face the fact that while a natural disaster occurred, it was precipitated by an array of human choices.  Many of our choices will lead to more collapses.  Will we try to reconstruct the old normal, or can we learn how to use the energy of collapse to transform to a new more desirable state?
• While there are differences in our community, business and personal lives, transformation of the three is interwoven.  How will we reconceptualize and recreate the relationship between these three aspects of our lives? One of my biggest lessons in Japan has been seeing what it looks like when business is still a part of community rather than apart from community.  I’m not trying to glamorize business in Japan or say there are not issues and problems, but what’s been striking to me are the ways in which community and social needs trump financial profit.  CSR isn’t enough, it feels kind of like an “oh, and, by the way, I wonder if there is something good we ought to be doing.”  What would it be like for community, business and personal to conceive of themselves as integral parts of a greater, related whole?
• There is a great, latent potential for great cooperation and greater learning linking the whole of the Pacific Rim.  We are an ecology together.  How might the diverse insights, questions, knowledge and experience of countries, cultures and peoples on the Pacific Rim be invited into a deeper co-creative relationship?  How do we honor the particular problems and potential present in each context and learn together a we work to create a future that works for all?
• Finally, the emergence of a new Tohoku Region in Japan will be a teacher to all of us.  How do we learn with and from the people of Japan as this beautiful Tohoku region comes back to life? What can those of us elsewhere around the rim contribute as people in Tohoku learn how to work together to create the communities, businesses and lives they want?  I remember the feeling in early April when I was co-hosting a group of 40 or so business leaders in Japan.  We began with grief, sadness and confusion that turned into excitement within three hours.  The shift was remarkable.  When I sensed into the shift these words came back to me:  we’ve been released from a future we did not want!  How can Japan lead the way in transformation?

It’s an exciting time.  Much is possible.  I invite you to help me think about how the new Transformation Institute might contribute to the possibilities which surround us!

Cheers,

Bob

Wow,

I’ve been back in Japan for a quick visit.  When I left in mid-December, my intuition was that I should come back for a quick visit to begin the new year.  I wanted to know what the energy would be of the new year.

Incredible, overwhelming, stupendous. Those are a few of the words that come to mind.  Yesterday, on one of the coldest days in Tokyo this year 120 people showed up for a day long workshop on creating a network of social issue future centers.  We scheduled the workshop in early December and thought that perhaps 30 or so people would come.  Towards the end of the month, my dear friend and colleague Nomura-san from Fuji/Xerox’s KDI realizedt he would dedicate himself to launching a new Nonprofit Organization this year which would grow a network of social issue future centers. Miratsuku, the NPO founded last year by our dialog colleague Yuya Nishimura (http://emerging-future.org/), will incubate this network.

We started with stories.  I talked about different community work in Tohoku which was Future Center work — it just didn’t carry the name.  Nomura-san talked about the principles and practices of Future Centers that we’ve been articulating over the last year.  Then four different people talked about the work they were already doing which could easily be called Future Center work. When we planned this workshop we were using last year’s language of a network of 500 Future Centers.  But I saw immediately that was too few.  The energy in the room was for at least 1000!

I talked about the reasons we can plan on finding, creating and connecting 1000 Future Centers in Japan when then are only ten or so in Europe.  In Europe, a Future Center is a building.  In Japan a Future Center is a BA — a hospitable space which hosts the energy, dreams and possibilities or a group of people who come together to get something done.  And the energy in Japan is astounding right now.   3.11 has been the cause of great destruction, devastation and grief AND it has also sparked a sense of release from a future we did not want.  What’s happening — all over the place — is that people are stepping forward to take responsibility for their own lives.  It’s what we saw in the four presentations — one on TEDxTokyo which was one of the first TEDx programs in the world and which continues to morph into a more and more activities, one on Hana Lab which works to empower college aged women, one of a major insurance company that has embraced Future Centers as a way to get their work done, and one on an extensive community involvement program in Kyoto.  In each case what they’re doing is releasing energy and co-inspiring each other.

When I first arrived in Japan in 1970, one of the first phrases I encountered for describing Japan was “the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.”  This was one aspect of collective culture — people did not individuate.  They did not stand up for what they wanted.  Well, what’s happening now is that the same collective culture is becoming a force to help all nails stand up!  And this is a powerful shift.

So this work is already happening.  Why are Future Centers needed?

At The Berkana Institute we’ve talked for years about the power of a four stage process:  Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate.  Naming gives power.  It makes something going on visible.  Connecting begins to build a system of action which serves to increase the power:  we inspire each other.  Nourishing people doing Future Center work with explicit principles, practices, methodologies and resource materials make it possible to do even better work.  Illuminating the work already being done tells powerful stories which inspire and inform others.  We believe that by consciously creating a wide network of Future Centers it will be possible for more and more people to step into creating Japan’s future.

And the time is now.  There’s a readiness.  An eagerness to get to work.  In April of last year when I arrived three weeks after the disasters, the main emotional tone was grief and trauma; something else was stirring, a sense of the future being now — but grief was what was most present.  In August the mood was one of “it’s time to do something, but we don’t know what to do.”  By the end of the year there was another shift — a quiet determination that was beginning to quicken.

And now it is time.  If we had held yesterday’s workshop in early December, we probably would have had 30 or so people.  They would have been getting ready — but I doubt the spirit and determination we saw yesterday would have been present.  Professors, students, business people, NPO leaders, government officials, men and women. Youngest around 20 and oldest around 70.

The second half of the workshop was people talking about what they would contribute to build this network of 1000 social issue future centers.  We announced Future Center week for 2012 for the end of May.  Last year we made an all out effort to have 5 future center sessions in one week.  This year we want to have 100!

We’re getting traction.  This work is going to have to be nurtured and supported.  We’re going to learn our way into it.

The Future is Now.

Blessings,

Bob

I just receive these pictures from a colleague:  http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-111211/daiichi-111211.htm

They give an immediate overview of the disaster of Fukushima.  They are part of a large collection of images and PDFs at http://cryptome.org/nppw-series.htm

Fukushima is so hard on my heart.  It just feels impossible.

In the nineties I spent six years on the Governor’s Nuclear Waste Advisory Board in Washington State, home of Hanford Nuclear Reservation.  At one point we were spending $4-5 Million a day planning clean-up.  At the end of the day, what’s clear is that we really don’t know what to do with the nuclear waste we’ve created.  I recall one project where millions of dollars had been spent trying to figure out how to alert people in 10,000 years who might discover buried waste.

I look forward to finding ways of supporting the people of Fukushima as they rebuild their lives and their communities.  And I send them so much prayer and energy and support.

It’s been another busy week.

First, we gathered 60 people together for three days of dialog about their leadership at the KEEP at Kiyosato.  They came from all over Japan; two thirds of them in their 20s and 30s.  It was our fourth Youth Community Leader Dialogs since May; they have now involved more than 200 people  — many of whom either live in or have volunteered in the disaster areas.  Each time the mood has been different.  I’d call this last dialog “quiet determination.”  One young man from Fukushima, location of the nuclear disasters came to the May dialog.  Something started to grow in him.  He was a bit afraid of it, but the idea would not leave — he had to start bringing people in Fukushima together to talk and to listen to each other.  He’s ready now.  Small steps.  Important steps.  People finding their way forward.  And that is what in our collective field.  In May’s dialog the grief was overwhelming.  In September, confusion dominated the field.  Now, quiet determination.

I came back from Kiyosato to spend a morning with ETIC — the Entrepreneurial Training for Innovative Communities (English:  http://www.etic.or.jp/english/index.html; 日本語: http://www.etic.or.jp/).  They’ve been doing creative work for many years and now they are working with 20 communities in Tohoku to place young social entrepreneurs in those communities for 3-12 months.  AND, they are working with community to build community — not just sending in the young experts to tell people what to do.  The ETIC Fellows join a growing number of “U Turns” — people who grew up in Tohoku and left who are now returning to help and “I Turns” — people who never imagined themselves living in Tohoku who are now dedicating their lives to work with people there to recreate a ravaged region.  As I told Kogi Yamaguchi, the program director, if I was Japanese, I’d be doing exactly what he’s doing.  More quiet determination.  People just stepping in to get the job done.

The last three days have been with the Goi Peace Foundation (日本語: http://www.goipeace.or.jp/japanese/index.html; English:  http://www.goipeace.or.jp/english/index.html).  And it’s been quite a journey!  Goi Peace Foundation gives a Peace Prize for outstanding work to one person each year.  This year’s prize when to Bill Strickland,  social innovator and the President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation—an extraordinary jobs training center and community arts program, which gives disadvantaged students and adults the opportunities they need to build a better future.  Last Friday I sat in as young social entrepreneurs told Bill about their work, then on Saturday I was part of the panel at the Peace Prize Forum which talked about how we create the future now.  Yesterday, Susan Virnig, Alan Briskin and I joined Bill and leaders of the Goi Peace Foundation on a day long visit to Ishinomaki — one the areas of extensive tsunami damage, which I visited first in April (see earlier notes:  http://www.resilientjapan.org/content/id/6c0ebc).  It was Bill and Alan’s first visit to Tohoku, Susan’s second and my third.  We each felt overwhelmed.

Both what’s been done and what remains for doing are staggering.  Last April many thousands of people were in shelters; now all the shelters are closed and people are either in temporary housing or have moved in with others.  The long corridors of debris that are visible in the slide show on the home page of this blog have been consolidated into mountains of rubble.  People are discovering how to get on with their lives.  They are just doing what’s  needed.

We were joined by Yamamoto-san, President of Peace Boat Vounteers.  He’s been in the area since April working with as many as 200 Peace Boat volunteers a week who have come to help.  They just show up.  Willing hands needing to help.  They’ve moved tons of rubble and listened, listened, listened as people have shared their grief.  Yamamoto-san has worked all over the world with Peace Boat relief efforts — he’s never seen destruction as extensive as Ishinomaki.

We spent time in the community of Ogatsu.  They now work under a banner of OH GUTS.  And they have guts.  It was both heartbreaking an inspiring to talk with the Junior High Principle.  His school was totally destroyed.  The building stands, but rubble not students populate the corridors.  When the earthquake came, the evacuated the children outside.  It saved their lives.  Had they thought the third floor of the school, a fair distance inland from the ocean would be safe — most would have died.  But when the waters came, they ran into the surrounding hills.  The waters covered the three story school.  It took the Principal eight days to find every child from the school — most of them spent three days in the surrounding hills in freezing temperatures while the waters receded.  He found them all.  They survived.  Miracles do happen.

Now the principal is working closely with two others — a local fisherman and a “U Turn” from Tokyo.  They can’t wait.  They have to rebuild the community now.  If they don’t start now, chances for creating a viable community will diminish each each day.  Many things happening.  One is their own version of “cloud investment.” The local pearl industry was destroyed and will take a several years to rebuild.  But it takes investment.  Starting in September, people all over Japan were invited to invest 10,000 yen — roughly $125 — and their dividend will be a pearl in a couple of years.  Nearly 2000 people have already stepped forward and the re-seeding of the oyster beds has begun.  The big Taiko drums from the school were destroyed — but guess what, duct tape and old tires make good drums.  The sound may not be the same, but the energy of the playing the field of presence they create is.  Kids are making rhythm again.

As we spent the day driving around Ishinomaki, I don’t know how many times Bill said “we got to do something, man.”  He’s a doer.  He attracts energy and gets things done.  Like the people in Ishinomaki, he doesn’t wait for anyone.  He knows that when you pay attention to people, nurture them and respect them, they can get just about anything done.  The people in Tohoku are a lot like Bill.  They’re not going to sit around and talk something to death.  Yes, they will talk and they will listen.  They will grieve.  And then they’ll take the first step.  They’ll get something done.

That’s the energy stepping forward in Ishinomaki, across Tohoku and throughout Japan.  People are just getting on with building communities that work.

It’s a long journey.  As Hiroo Saionji, President of the Goi Peace Foundation, said in his opening remarks:  its time now to create a world that works for everyone.  It’s time now to meet together in peace.  It’s time now to set aside our behaviors that are destroying the planet and diminishing our lives.

It’s time to find and take the first steps towards a new civilization

Last day of three days in Tohoku disaster area.  We woke to a beautiful morning with a bright autumn sun on a smooth ocean.  Such a different view than the one eight months ago.

Rikuzentakada was a jewel of a small community.  Population of 17,000, it had a mild climate and a great deal of natural beauty.  It’s downtown area was also built on a wide plain at sea level facing the ocean.  It has been completely destroyed.  It is just isn’t there anymore.  A few buildings are still standing — but mostly the shops and houses and businesses are simply gone.

We spend the day with two pretty ordinary guys.  Fukuda-san is a former politician in his mid-fifties.  He stopped working with government a few years ago.  Tamara-san is bit older; they’ve been friends for 35 years.  Tamara-san is the President of a large Driving Training School.  They are both filled with ideas they are putting into action.  Tamara-san has started a company called Natsukashii Mirai which means, literally, “the future you long for because you remember it from the past.”  It is a business incubator founded for a ten year period to give birth to 7-8 businesses that can make a difference in the community.  Part of the difference Tamara-san wants to make is that he want’s young people to go ahead and leave — as they will — and go to Tokyo, but to come back to good jobs in Rikuzentakada.

Fukuda-san talks about how government can’t create anything new.  People need to do that.  Govenment goes in circles, ending up in the same place.  Upward spirals are what is needed now.  We need to really unleash the creativity of people to make a new future that combines old traditions with new technologies he says.  We need to plan and build differently for a future we want, not the past.  Talk about new building styles and zero-emissions.  Crazy ideas like, perhaps the young people who can run from a tsunami should live on lower ground than old people – but in 30 or 40 years they’ve be old people so that won’t work!

They were both so alive and engaged.  They believe that what they are doing is important for the restoration of their community as well as a model for the rest of Japan.  Tamara-san, who has a big collection of smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, says I’m a merchant priest.  Later I say to him, I imagine you’ve been a merchant priest for a long time — 3.11 created a context in which you could step forward more and offer yourself and your ideas.  I asked, how do we help others step forward as well?  Iwai-san, an old friend and colleague, a business executive from Tokyo who has been doing extensive volunteer work in Ishinomaki, another tsunami struck community, joined us as well. His comment was powerful:  people have changed since 3.11, but the old system is still in place.  Fukuda-san and Tamara-san nod in agreement.

Their sense is that even though so much has been destroyed, we can create a wonderful new community.

When I arrived in Japan this past spring, three weeks after the triple disasters, I started to believe that the ways in which the Tohoku was re-created would have profound implications for the rest of Japan and all the world.  It seemed possible that the dynamics of collective culture, combined with overwhelming needs, might unleash a collective creativity.  That’s what is happening in Rikuzentakada!  We came here because Ooki-san, an executive with a major Tokyo public relations firm visited here twice the summer and was overwhelmed by what he saw.  He came to our of our Youth Community Leader Dialogs in August and came away thinking that dialog with youth here might be one of the keys.  The purpose of our meeting today was to test the waters.  I suspect we’ll be back both with Youth Dialog as well as Future Center work.

Part of what makes this story inspirational for me is that Fukuda-san and Tamara-san are, at many levels, just a couple of ordinary guys.  We find them in communities everywhere.  People who are called forward to offer their leadership in a time of need.  I suspect that if they lived in the US, both would be Republicans — but those labels really don’t mean very much when we start to work with each other in community.

It’s been a honor to be with them today and I look forward to my next visit.

Dear friends,

We* spent a second day visiting four different places in the the Tohoku disaster area.  I’ll just talk about two.

Eight months ago today the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown hit Japan.  Back in the tsunami area of Miyagi Prefecture, I impressed with the extent of clean-up and it is still hard to look at the extensive damage.

We started the day meeting with Watanabe-san, the volunteer coordinator in Minami-Sanriku-cho.  Watanabe-san was born in Sendai, and was working in Tokyo when the disasters came.  A young man, he returned because he needed to help.  He found his way to the Minami-Sanriku-cho area where 7 communities with 2500 people were completely destroyed.  Slightly more than 200 lives were lost eight months ago.  About 700 people now live in temporary housing in the minami-sanriku-cho area.  Others have gone moved elsewhere in temporary or permanent housing.

The system around temporary housing was designed to get people out of shelters as quickly as possible with as much fairness as possible.  That means housing was assigned by lottery with no accommodation made for community or origin.  The 700 people are distributed randomly in 7 shelters and now live in the company of strangers with no former community ties.  They are complete scattered!  Imagine, first the life you know ends, then you live in close quarters with strangers for five months and then you move into temporary housing with even more strangers.

There was one large meeting facility in the area — the County Training Facility.  It sits a short distance from the largest temporary housing project which has 250 people.  Until a month ago, people had use of the facility — that’s no longer true.  The people who work there had to reclaim it so they would be sure to get a budget for their activities for next year.  It’s crazy!  Especially since people are scattered, they need someplace to come together as communities.  But they can’t.  Until they can come together as community, they are dependent on government — at the mercy of government — as applicants.  Meeting with Watanabe-san today the sixties radical was rising up inside of me -  “heck, why don’t you occupy the training center and demand that the county build you a center,” I said.  I know this won’t happen here — but heavens, the current situation is just stupid.  Later in the conversation we talked about the need for a Future Center session (see other blogs for information on Future Centers or visit http://wiki.newstories.org/wiki/Future_Centers.)  I left Minami-Sanriku-cho feeling sad — how could people here begin to make community again.

Several visits later we ended the day with Chiba-san.  A sea-going engineer whose home was Oosawa, a small village which he finally returned to permanently when he retired.  His village of 188 households was near the ocean and totally destroyed.  150 people lost their lives on that fateful day.  Those who heeded the warning and retreated to higher ground were saved; they had about 40-50 minutes before the tsunami came.  Those who thought they would be safe perished.  What we heard, as we listened to him, was a very different story than the story of the morning.

He and several others from Oosawa got lottery assignments to a temporary housing project about 1 km from the old Oosawa.  Chiba-san immediately approached friends in local government and asked if people could trade assignments — they said yes.  He and his old neighbors started to work and gathered most of those from Oosawa into the same housing project.  So they started with relationships and history.  And they immediate started helping themselves.  They started to self-organize to get things done — no waiting for government here.  Chiba-san is a very modest man, and it is clear that his determination played a key role here.  He’s a natural communtiy organizer.  As I listened to him, I started to hear several key principles:

• Don’t ever wait for government.  When you want something go to them until you get it.
• Don’t let problems grow.  Bring people together immediately to talk
• Make as many relationships beyond the community as possible.  Stay connected.
• Do whatever is needed ourselves as soon as we possibly can.  Don’t wait for anyone.

Several months ago they told the main nonprofit organization that had been working with them that they no longer needed their help — “please go help someone else who really needs it.”  They made additions and modifications to their housing so it suits them better.  They organized their own security system.  They knew it was also a time for celebration so this past summer they organized a big summer festival.  They have been reclaiming their lives.  I wasn’t surprised when one of my partners notice the Japanese translation of Meg Wheatley’s Turning to One Another on the library shelf.

Much is possible here in Tohoku — and it is going to take patience, perseverance, ingenuity, creativity and leadership.  It is humbling to stand with these fine people as they get on with rebuilding their lives!

*Yesterday’s group grew by three more.  Naho Iguchi, Yurie Makihara and her husband joined me and Susan Virnig, my spouse, who has done extensive work in Japan these last two years; Yuya Nishimura, my dialog partner here and the founder of a new nonproft, Miratsuku (Creating the Future) Kumakura-san, another Miratsuku Board Member and Teacher at Keio Unversity, and Ooki-san, a public relations executive who has created a Youth Community Dialog project in Rikazentakada after participating in the August Youth Leadership Dialog.

The word “volunteer” took on new meaning for me today as we listened to four different stories today in the Tohoku disaster area.  Five* of us left Tokyo this morning and traveled to Sendai.  I’m just blown away.  Let me briefly share four stories.

Suji-san is in his late twenties or early thirties.  He came to Sendai from Tokyo in early April, just weeks after the disaster.  He just had to help.  And he has learned his way forward.  Today he is the founder and leader of Sanaburi Foundation. Sanaburi is the name of an ancient festival of giving thanks to the ancestors after the seeds have been planted.  The Foundation’s work is to support the planting of a variety of “seeds:”  the many projects needed to recreate this region.  He and others have established Sanaburi as an intermediary matching the needs of those who have money they want to invest in Tohoku and the needs of those who have work they want to undertake here.  Suji’s had some experience in community foundations and saw the need her.  Already Save the Children and a major UK donor have become partners.

Keita-san was finishing off a graduate degree in education in Yokohama when the disasters hit.  He game to Sendai in March.  He started off driving trucks of supplies needed in the region.  He kept working and working and looking for where he might be of the most service.  Just this week, two cooperatives in different parts of Japan have provided the initial funding for the “Foundation of Cooperative Community Creation.”  Like Suji, his purpose is to collect funds needed for work in Tohoku and to distribute them to those who can use them well in a way that satisfies donor’s desires for accountability.

Oyashiki-san has put his undergraduate degree at University of Tokyo on hold.  He came to the region in May.  His work has been with the “bedroom community” of Takajo.  Here’s what’s been happening.  For many months, people whose homes were destroyed by the Tsunami lived in shelters.  There was no privacy; everyone was connected, whether they wanted it or not.  All of the families of Takajo are now out of the shelter.  340 families — about 500 people — are now living in temporary housing.  They’re the elderly, the hardest to employ, the least resourceful, the most dependent.  Now they’re isolated in separate housing units; disconnected, unemployed.  They are a community within a community and, to some extent, the surrounding community turns their backs on these new residents.  The result has been both an alarming number of suicides as well as people getting sick and sicker because they have no relationships.  Oyashiki works with them.  Doing things like visiting all of the shopkeepers in the neighborhood and making a directory of the shops and what they offer those in temporary housing.  He also helps to set up ways to make sure everyone is visited on a regular basis.  He speaks of his work as trying to make a bridge from the old community to the new community.

Before going on to the fourth story, let me pause a moment here.  These are three young men (20s and 30s) who had no idea they would be in Sendai eight months ago.  They came because they felt a deep calling.  In part because they are young, they are able to walk through the normal isolating boundaries common in the region.  They are also able to enter into relationship with the other young people from the region.  They’ve stepped forward into work that needed to be done.  They’ve done so with commitment, passion and willingness to do whatever it takes to serve.

Okay, the fourth story.   This one from Tome, a community about 2 hours from Sendai which was ravaged by the tsunami.  We arrived at 7:30 in the evening just in time for the nightly meeting of the RQ Volunteer Center there.  RQ is a nonprofit organization which responds to disasters.  There are about 5 or 6 RQ Volunteer Centers in Tohoku.  We visited one.  Thirty people were seated on Tatami mats in the multipurpose room of a former school.  There’s an agenda on the whiteboard in the front of the room.  The basic agenda is reports from the 10 or so different teams on what they did today and what they plan for tomorrow.  The reports are brief and to the point.  The meeting closes by going through the community tasks needed for tomorrow — chairing the morning meeting, chairing the evening meeting, cleaning the baths, cleaning the men’s and women’s toilets and a few other basics.  After the close of the meeting, we spend 3 more hours talking with people about their work.  This is a completely self-organizing system.  The fellow who ran the meeting tonight arrived two days ago.  Of the 30 or s people now in the center, many come for 5-10 days.  Some have been volunteering in the center since March or April of May.  People come, people go.  They sleep in other rooms in the former school and cook for each other in the school’s old kitchen.  They come from a wide variety of backgrounds — ranging from one fellow who had spent the last four years biking around the world to one woman who quit her job as an elementary school teacher.

Tomorrow it will be 8 months since the disaster hit.  People are still showing up to volunteer on a regular basis.  They form teams going out and cleaning tsunami debris,  supporting the fishermen of the area in rebuilding their businesses, creating crafts businesses with women, visiting people living in temporary housing, playing with children, tending to the basic tasks of the RQ volunteer center.  I can’t imagine volunteers showing up like this after eight months anyplace else in the world!  As we continue our discussions, one of the things that comes up is they’re concerned about creating dependency:  are the people in the area getting lazy because we’re doing all these things?  The volunteers come from all over Japan.  Drawn by a desire to help.

I think this is just amazing.  All four stories.  People stepping forward because help is needed how. They’re finding ways to see what’s needed now and stepping forward to get it done.

Incredible energy and dedication.

*Five includes: Susan Virnig, my spouse, who has done extensive work in Japan these last two years; Yuya Nishimura, my dialog partner here and the founder of a new nonproft, Miratsuku (Creating the Future) Kumakura-san, another Miratsuku Board Member and Teacher at Keio Unversity, and Ooki-san, a public relations executive who has created a Youth Community Dialog project in Rikazentakada after participating in the August Youth Leadership Dialog.

Two remarkable meetings today in Tokyo that I’d like to share with you.

The first was with my friend Tamio Nakano and his friend Makoto, who developed the Junbun-ko process I described in my last note, and Kathleen Sullivan and Hazuki Yasuhara whose work is with www.hibakushastories.org, bringing the stories of survivors of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb to the world.  Earlier this year Tamio and I and another good friend, Hide Enomoto, had been talking about wanting to bring Joanna Macy to Japan.  It seemed to us that her work with grief and despair could be especially important in Tohoku right now.  All three of us have worked with Joanna before and consider her a dear friend.  When I talked with Joanna I discovered she’s decided to limit her travel to North America.  A new plan started to emerge when she pointed to Kathleen as someone she had full confidence in to bring The Work That Reconnects to Japan at this time.  Things moved quickly when I discovered that Kathleen and I would be here at the same time.  This morning’s meeting emerged.

Makoto, who lives in Fukushima, talked about what a rare and hard time it is.  People want things to be normal, he says, even though they know it is not. It’s hard for people who are normally quiet and reserved to open their emotions even to themselves.  One of the reasons he and Tamio have been doing workings with Junbun-ko is because it feels like one way to help people let their pain out so they can begin to go beyond it.  We talked about how their are many people hosting dialog in Tohoku now.  Not as much as is potentially needed, but many see that conversation and other forms of process work are essential now.  An idea began to emerge.  Not all dialogues need to be able to host grief and despair — but there are a number of facilitators who could use more skill, tools and experience in working with grief.  So we’ve begun talking about how we might work with and through our various networks to organize a training workshop next spring for dialog hosts and facilitators on ways of working with grief and despair.  This feels like a really important step.

The second was a half-day gathering of people who have been to one or more of the Youth Community Leader Dialogs we’ve been doing at the KEEP at Kiyosato since May.  Three have been held, with about 150 participants and fourth is scheduled in a little more than a week.  The purpose of these dialogs has been to create a space to connect youth and their allies from across Japan who want to understand how their lives have been changed since 3.11 and how they now want to live their lives.  The dialogs have become a combination of personal exploration to discover calling and a time to collectively consider what’s needed now, not only in Tohoku but across Japan.

A little more than 30 came to this afternoon’s gathering to be with each other and to talk about what they’ve been up to and where they’re going since their time at Kiyosato. There was high energy in the room as some people reunited and as others met for the first time.  One of my frustrations in work here is that my limited Japanese means I only know a little of the content of what’s going on.  I can sense the energy and get the high points — but sometimes I’m clueless in terms of what’s happening.  I can tell you about two things that give a “sense of the room:”

I’m trying to organize a story collecting project which would surface the stories of new ways in which people in communities are working with what they have to improve their collective lives.  I hope that collecting the stories, itself, will be a deep witnessing process and that the stories will be inspirational both in Japan and in other parts of the world.  We plan to offer an English version of the stories on the www.newstories.org website.  A woman whose worked with me as a translator got excited about this.  She started expanding the idea.  Coming up, for example, with the idea that we could put together a team of people where people who speak Japanese and some English could work with people who speak English and some Japanese to do the translations.  I immediately saw an outlet of work for the English speakers here who have been asking me how they could help.  It made me realize, once again, how what’s important is we find simple beginning points — like story collecting — and they will be magnets for energy of others.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we tried something new.  Naho Iguchi, who’s been one of the organizers of the Youth Dialogs is also one of the founding members of TEDxTokyo.  She described a bit of the TEDx process and the power of learning how to express important messages in short time frames.  She asked for volunteers to create a 3 minute presentation in the next 20 minutes.  When 7 people volunteered, she asked people to self-organize in support teams around them and then offered some simple guidelines for creating a powerful presentation quickly.  I think all 7 were both nervous and very brave.  But they had things they wanted to say and they saw the benefit of getting coaching from those present.  There was a fair amount of trust in the room, and people moved ahead.  Seven wonderful 3 minute presentations emerged.  I didn’t understand what they said (no one was translating for me today), but I could feel the power as could the group.

So we’re finding starting points.  Finding the way forward.  Step by step.

It has been two months since I wrote.  I’ve been back in Japan for two weeks and having a difficult time finding my ground.  I’ve actually been home in Kyoto for the past week, and feeling unclear.  Today the fog lifted a bit…

Near my host family’s home in Kyoto is a famous Shinto Shrine – Fushimi Inari.  Although it is close by, I’ve not been there since the mid-nineties.  Today it called me.  A long path leads up to the top of the shrine’s mountain; literally thousands of red tori frame visitors’ steps.

I was called to Fushimi-Inari and offered a prayer at the base of the mountain.  Asking for clarity.  Asking for guidance.  I don’t often pray, but today I felt moved to do so.  And as I started to climb the mountain, with each step, my own way forward became a bit more clear.  Half way up the mountain a noticed a small stump by a side trail which, while a bit small for my bottom, looked as if it would hold me in a meditation posture.  I began to meditate.  Many things happened in that session, and one was that the words 世界人が平和であいますうに — seikaijin ga heiwa de aimasuyoonni — may the people of the world meet together in peace — began to flow through me.

In some ways, no mystery here.  Those words have been with me since I visited Hiroshima in 1971.  The are on a small sign on my front door in Spokane which Susan received when she visited Hiroshima separately in 1971.  Being in Hiroshima was deeply moving for me and those words have been part of the center of my being.  Only earlier this year did I learn they were first spoken by Goi Sensei as his invitation to the world to find its way to peace after the devastation of World War II.  His work continues today through the efforts of http://www.worldpeace.org and http://www.goipeace.or.jp/.  Goi Peace Foundation has provided guidance for some of my work in Japan this year.  Today’s clarity was about some work we might do together in the future.

But let me back up a bit.  Why am I here?  Why have I been called so strongly to Japan?  There are many reasons, of course. But I think I am here because Japan may play a pivotal role in creating the new world so many of us yearn for, and I think I can help.  We may learn, finally, what it means to meet together in peace, supporting each other in honest lives that honor each other and this remarkable planet.

It’s happening everywhere and we all know it:  the world is shaking.  The triple disasters of 3.11 in Japan were one powerful manifestation of the unsuitable and unsustainable ways in which we’re living on the planet.  But in many places — Greece, the US, the Middle East, Europe — the world is shaking.  And I don’t expect 2012 to be calmer.

A couple of nights ago my 83 year old Japanese host father was in a thoughtful mood.  We were watching a documentary on early Christian worship caves in Ethiopia and he asked me why the US was so adamantly opposed to Palestine becoming part of UNESCO.  That conversation quickly turned to the protests and revolts in many parts of the world.  Then there was a pause and he said I think the age of mono — things — is over. He went on to talk about how the production and acquisition of mono has been the dominant feature of daily life in Japan since the end of World War II.  He went on to say that he thought it was time to begin the age of relationship and happiness.  These ideas aren’t particularly new or earth shattering (at least in concept) for many of us.  But there was something powerful about hearing them be voiced by an 83 year old physician who has lived a mostly normal middle class life.  The age of mono is over.

But what is the new age and how does it get created?  All around the world people are engaging in the activities that may create that new age.  They are mostly invisible, seen by only a few.  They certainly don’t have the media attraction of protests or revolts or revolutions.  They are just people going about building lives that work a little better for them and their neighbors.

This work is coming to a new scale in Japan as ordinary people like my host father start asking for something new.  Futurist Willis Harman many years ago said the world changes when large numbers of people change the way they think a little bit.  That is what is happening now in Japan.  It’s easy to miss.  Most of the country wants to just get back to normal.  Outside of Tohoku, people in Japan would like to not think about Tohoku.  But seeds have been planted.  It is time to nurture them!

I think one of the reasons it’s been hard for me to get traction this time is because what’s happening now is more subtle.  Next week when I have the first of three visits to Tohoku I’ll have more of a sense from inside the region where I think more is happening — it has to:  people have communities to rebuild. I believe the quiet, mostly invisible rebuilding and recreating that will go on here needs to become visible to itself, needs to be connected, needs to be nourished and needs to be illuminated to Japan and the world.  At Berkana we speak of this as NAME. CONNECT, NOURISH and ILLUMINATE.  It’s needed now.  It will change Japan and it will offer a vision of new possibilities to the world.

It is going to continue to be a challenging time.  Everywhere.  Recently one of my friends here, Tamio Nakano, introduced me to some work he had witnessed in Fukushima.  One of Tamio’s colleagues had invited him to a community workshop that used the concept of Jubun-ko which literally means the child of myself.  In the workshop participants were invited to draw a line-figure of themselves on a large piece of paper and then begin to draw inside the figure the many children that live within.  Tamio showed me the pictures:  faces crying, angry faces, sad faces, faces with a glimmer of hope, faces sparkling.  I could tell just from the pictures that Tamio had taken that the process had been a powerful one.  People were able to point to the parts of themselves on the paper outside and express their many and varied feelings.  It was, I could tell, a safe way to speak the truth.

I’m aware of how many Jubun-ko are inside of me.  I want normal.  I want complete change.  I am angry.  I cry.  I want financial security.  I want true community.  I want have a more sustainable lifestyle.  I am afraid.  I want to thrive.  So many children inside of me.  And I suspect within many of you.

By the time I climbed down from the mountain top of Fushimi-Inari, darkness had claimed the light.  There was an embracing beauty there as well