Fearful and struggling to make themselves understood, many foreign trainees are having a difficult time coping in the aftermath of Friday's mega-earthquake and making contact with relatives back home.
Fearful and struggling to make themselves understood, many foreign trainees are having a difficult time coping in the aftermath of Friday's mega-earthquake and making contact with relatives back home.
Ofunato in Iwate Prefecture was one of the areas hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake in northeastern Japan. Some 120 Chinese were affected.
Sun Jinyan, 34, took refuge at an elementary school library with 27 other Chinese women.
"They offer a lot of food. It is not cold. No inconvenience," she said.
But with little command of Japanese, she did not understand announcements and rushed outside whenever aftershocks hit.
When the earthquake struck, Sun was at a seafood processing company receiving on-the-job training.
Hearing the Japanese employees shout, "Leave here!," "Hurry up!" and "Run," Sun followed them. When she looked back only once, she saw a wall of black water--a tsunami--crossing the bank.
She fled as fast as she could, throwing away a bag with a change of clothes as she made her escape.
Sun said she knew that Japan was prone to earthquakes, but she "did not know about tsunami."
At the evacuation center, a 57-year-old Japanese part-time factory worker, affectionately called "Okasan" (Mother), has been pulling out all the stops to help the Chinese evacuees.
The woman talks to the trainees often so that they don't feel isolated.
For example, she will say, "Help clean the facility and you will get on better with the others." On another occasion, she told them that "Japanese like tidiness, so clean well."
Sun said all 28 Chinese evacuees are getting by without major problems.
But she has been unable to make contact with her parents and boyfriend in Shandong province.
The factory where she worked was demolished by tsunami. On Wednesday, she was told by an executive to prepare to return to China.
"It would be great to see my family," she said, adding, "There's no alternative since the job is no longer available."
Many trainees are in the same boat. They have been unable to reach their family members back home.
A group of four Chinese women looked lost Wednesday as a blizzard raged outside the town office in Yamada, Iwate Prefecture.
They had walked for two hours to the town office from an evacuation center after being told they could have access to telephones at no cost. But they were unable to make international calls.
One woman, Zhao Xueqin, 33, borrowed a satellite phone and called her husband in Dalian.
Zhao attached the handset to her ear and wiped her eyes repeatedly, telling her husband, "I am safe."
The three others standing behind started crying and clung to each other.
Zhao said her husband told her: "Don't worry about money. Come back to China."
However, she replied that she would remain in Japan "because my contract expires in November."
In Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, 13 Chinese female trainees at a marine products company took refuge at a hotel lobby.
One of them, 25-year-old Li Tingting, who had been in Japan for only three months, said her husband and 3-year-old daughter live in Heilongjiang province.
"I just want to go home and see my daughter," she said.
(This article was written by Hirotaka Kojo, Hiroyuki Kamisawa, Daisuke Yajima and Kazumasa Sugimura.)