SENDAI--In a room littered with toys in a building outside JR Sendai Station, the headquarters of the Children's Grief Support Station, children are often hesitant to enter, but the NPO's director, Masahiro Nishida, does not pressure them.
SENDAI--In a room littered with toys in a building outside JR Sendai Station, the headquarters of the Children's Grief Support Station, children are often hesitant to enter, but the NPO's director, Masahiro Nishida, does not pressure them.
The children who come to the room are free to talk about the people they have lost or can remain silent. Eventually the children start to talk. "Um ..." And Nishida kindly lends them his ear. He also travels around Japan to assist and train NPOs engaged in the same line of work.
He knows from personal experience the difficulty of coping with the loss of a loved one, having lost his own father in a traffic accident when he was 12.
"Before they learn how to live, they are confronted with death," he says. "I want to give back to such children the power to go on living."
After university, Nishida, now 53, worked for 28 years at the Kotsuiji Ikueikai scholarship fund for orphans of traffic accidents and the Ashinaga scholarship, where he oversaw affairs such as a camp for high school and university students whose parents have passed away.
But the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which resulted in about 600 orphans, changed his focus. "High school is too late to help them," he says.
At the end of 2010, Nishida joined a civic movement to help orphans in Sendai. Three months later, the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11, 2011, in which more than 2,000 children lost their parents.
In February of last year, Nishida founded the children's support effort, continuing the work of the civic movement, and became the organization's leader.
Even now whenever Nishida leaves his home, a question races through his mind as he asks himself if he will ever see his family again, like what happened to his father.
It is a conviction that "people eventually die," which often defines the mindset of orphans, Nishida says.
Children who have experienced the death of a close person at a tender age tend to see less potential for themselves.
"I want to tell them that's not true," Nishida says. "They can't erase their feelings of hurt. But they can lead a life that is different from their parents'."