KOBE--Saeko Kanae didn't need to do the math to know her mission in life is to foster exchanges of support and encouragement between the disaster-affected Tohoku region and the rest of the world.
The 64-year-old former abacus teacher here is serving as a bicycle messenger to deliver letters and messages of support she collected in Kobe, Taiwan and elsewhere to Tohoku residents.
She plans to pedal her bike to Tohoku in late April, as the northeastern Japanese region marks its fifth spring since the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
When the disaster struck coastal Tohoku, Kanae, a native of Kobe who lost two of her relatives in the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, did not think of it as a mere tragedy that occurred in a far-off place.
Then an operator of an abacus school, she and her students immediately sent letters and drawings expressing their support and encouragement to people affected by the disaster.
Her growing sense of sympathy for the disaster victims drove her to visit Minami-Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, which was hit hard by tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as a volunteer in May 2013.
The ravages of the magnitude-9.0 quake and tsunami were still apparent in the coastal city, and residents told her that they still refrained from going out from their homes due to lingering fear of radiation exposure.
What struck her the most was the vast area in Tohoku that remained flattened and devastated even compared with the areas damaged in the Great Hanshin Earthquake.
That was the moment she thought about traveling across the region on a bicycle to serve as a messenger between residents in Tohoku and people from the rest of Japan.
She turned the operation of her abacus school over to her relatives, and headed for Tohoku from Kobe in September 2013 on a bicycle, carrying a white cloth, measuring 10 meters wide and 30 centimeters tall, to fill it with messages from people she would encounter along the way.
During five bicycle tours in northern Hokkaido, southern Okinawa Prefecture and elsewhere in a year, she logged a total of about 10,000 kilometers.
As she reported day-to-day events and troubles during her journey on her Facebook account, people showed up to offer her places to stay and often ran alongside her bicycle to offer their support.
She collected 3,000 messages from local residents, schools, welfare facilities and municipal governments on the fabric and presented it to temporary housing complexes for disaster victims in Minami-Soma and other places.
“I wanted to do something that can encourage the region affected by the disaster even if it's only a small thing,” Kanae said. “I felt strong emotional support from all the people who were involved in the project.”
During her bicycle tour of Tohoku, she felt that a sense of appreciation for the Taiwanese people, who had provided much assistance to the disaster-stricken areas, remained strong among locals.
In December 2014, she flew to Taiwan carrying 100 New Year greeting cards from the people of Tohoku, in which they wrote messages of appreciation for the Taiwanese people.
During her two-week tour in Taiwan, she traveled 800 km on a bicycle. Seeing her Facebook account, Taiwanese cyclists also pedaled alongside her to express their continued support for people in Tohoku.
At the 21st anniversary event of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe on Jan. 17, Kanae met baseball club members of the prefectural Nagata High School.
While the students had been born after the 1995 disaster, the area around their high school was one of the hardest-hit areas in the earthquake.
Kanae decided to connect the students with Tohoku residents and visited the school a few days later to ask students to write messages for them.
Satoshi Miyake, the 17-year-old captain of the baseball club, which was selected to compete in this year's spring Koshien baseball tournament, said he appreciates Kanae's efforts to convey the students’ messages to Tohoku.
Kanae plans to leave from Kobe in late April to travel the 1,000 km on her bike to Minami-Soma in 20 or so days.
“There are many people who still reside in temporary housing, and they live under huge emotional burdens,” she said. “I want them to know that students at Nagata High School and all others still really care about them.”