In the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi Prefecture, heavily devastated by the tsunami on March 11, college students were handling photos salvaged from the rubble and carefully cleaning them, one by one.
In the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi Prefecture, heavily devastated by the tsunami on March 11, college students were handling photos salvaged from the rubble and carefully cleaning them, one by one.
The photos showed images of wedding ceremonies, "Shichi-Go-San" rite-of-passage ceremonies for children and scenes from trips. Many had faded in color and had mold growing on them.
Beside the students, photographers were taking digital pictures of the images, because the photographs may undergo further deterioration during rainy season.
"The repair can be done any time on your personal computer, even after rainy season starts, if only you have digitized them," said Yuji Mizoguchi, 27, a graduate student at Kyoto University and a volunteer administrator.
Activities are under way to repair photos that were damaged by water and mud when a massive tsunami struck Japan's northeastern coast on March 11 triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake.
The staff hopes to return them to their owners after digitizing them with cameras and scanners and tweaking the images. The goodwill effort is spreading throughout Japan to save the "tokens of happiness" from fading away.
The project, "Omoide Salvage Album Online" (Memories-salvaging album online), was organized by the Japan Society for Socio-Information Studies (JSIS), an association of informatics researchers. The approximately 120,000 photos were collected by the Self-Defense Forces from among rubble and close to 20,000 photos have so far been cleaned in disaster-stricken areas since April. The staff plan to repair the digitized images as best they can and to give prints to their owners.
They are also planning to create a website where the collective photos of school graduations and community residents will be made available to the affected inhabitants, provided that approval is obtained from the photo owners.
Besides professional photographers, Nifty Corp., an Internet access provider, and Fujifilm Corp. are also pitching in, but the efforts mainly rely on volunteer students from Tohoku University and local junior high school students. The activities allow them to have an opportunity to study information technologies and to preserve the collective images and memories of their local communities.
"Restoring memories of local communities and individual lives helps to promote reconstruction," said Kuniomi Shibata, 37, a JSIS director and associate professor at Otsuma Women's University, who is calling for more participants. The JSIS is holding "Great cleaning and re-photographing rallies" in Yamamoto over weekends to accelerate the efforts.
Digitization of disaster-stricken photos is also going on at Kobe Gakuin University in the far western Japan city of Kobe.
The staff receive photos from disaster survivors and then clean the prints of mud and scan them in. The images are repaired and then returned. The group has received 104 requests as of June 2 and more than 100 volunteers, mostly students, have taken part.
The project, "Anata no Omoide Mamori-Tai" (Want to save your memories), was initiated by the Japan Society for Social Service, organized in March by researchers in the fields of disaster prevention, welfare and volunteer work at Kobe Gakuin University, Kogakuin University in Tokyo and Tohoku Fukushi University in Sendai.
"Unlike in the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, keepsakes of memories were scattered around by the tsunami," said Nobue Funaki, 34, associate professor at Kobe Gakuin University. "We would like to be as careful as possible in helping to restore the 'tokens of happiness.' "
(This article was written by Ryoko Suzumura and Kiyoko Miichi.)