The Disaster Recovery Support Section of the FAJ first visited Minamisoma City in Fukushima prefecture on September 11, 2011, exactly six months after the disaster. Their visit was precipitated by an inquiry from Mikako Takahashi, a member of Tsunagarou Minamisoma, a volunteer group supporting the disaster recovery in Minamisoma. Takahashi sought advice from the FAJ, saying: "Our association has held several meetings about what to do to support recovery efforts, but our discussions are not leading anywhere." The FAJ decided to visit them in person to discover what they wanted to accomplish, what was not working, and whether there was a way that FAJ could be of support to them. The FAJ members, Mariko Suzuki, Masaki Onoue, and Jun Koshu (Onoue and Koshu ended up becoming members of the Disaster Recovery Support Section later), went to Minamisoma in a car driven by Tokuda. On the way to Minamisoma, they drove by Iidatemura, a village whose residents had been forced to evacuate, their beaches washed away by the tsunami. The deserted landscape looked like time had stopped there since the disaster. Looking at it, the four of them in the car were reminded that recovery would be a long journey.
The volunteer group Tsunagarou Minamisoma consists of four members with different backgrounds: Mikako Takahashi, Eiji Sudo, Yuji Miyamori, and Miharu Takamura. They were seriously looking for ways to reconnect and reunite the residents of Minamisoma City, who had been separated and scattered due to the accidents in the atomic power plants and following enormous changes in their living conditions.
Mikako Takahashi, who was running a dry-cleaning business in Minamisoma City, shared with the FAJ members what had happened in her town since March 11, going over it again in her mind as she spoke. Right after the accident in the atomic power plants, she had also evacuated from her town. However, several days after the evacuation, she realized that she would need to open her dry-cleaning business for her customers, because some of them would be needing the black formal wear kept in her shop to attend the funerals of their families and relatives who died in the disaster. So, she went back to her town. There she found that supply deliveries to her town had stopped, and the journalists who had been there had already left for somewhere else. Companies from Tokyo and other places gave up their operations in Minamisoma one after another, leaving only the local shops. Takahashi described feeling as if her town had been deserted, cut off from the rest of Japan. And when she began to share stories of how the people in her town had been living, and of the situation with the atomic power plants and the decontamination activities, it was as if a dam had broken; the words came out in a torrent.
6 months after the disaster, Takahashi wanted to talk again with the members of Tsunagarou Minamisoma about what each of the members had been experiencing and thinking. She said "I want to do something." Her resolve to take action was clear: she would take action despite the uncertainty of the situation. In the car on the way home after the short visit with Takahashi, Onoue kept hearing in his mind what she had told them: "So many people in my town died in the disaster. What I had to do first and foremost is to open my dry-cleaning business so that customers could pick up their black formal wear, so they could at least attend the funerals of their family and relatives in formal dress."
Onoue was inspired by the passion of this local dry-cleaning business owner and her caring for people, something that went way beyond ordinary professionalism, bringing her back to open her shop for the people in the town. Three weeks later, on October 4, Tokuda and Sugimura once again visited Minamisoma City. Their purpose was to create a space where the four members of Tsunagarou Minamisoma could share and listen to what each other had to say. The meeting took place at Daikonya, a restaurant run by one of the members.
Sugimura, who facilitated the meeting, began by having participants choose the OARR (the Outcomes, Agendas, each person's Role and their ground Rules). They first chose an Outcome, defined as "a statement describing their desired state." Their intended outcome: "Tsunagarou Minamisoma has found its future direction." In order for this to happen, they also decided to focus in that meeting on listening to each other's feelings and thoughts. They turned off their mobile phones to be truly present and concentrate on the conversation happening in the "here-and-now."
First, they broke into pairs and interviewed each other on the events of the last six months in their lives and how they felt about them. Then, each person introduced their partner in the pair to the others in the meeting, an exercise known as tako shokai ("Introductions of Others") based on what they had learned in their interviews with each other. Through creating this space for self-reflection, by the time Tokuda, the last speaker, finished introducing his partner, it was as if what was most important to each member and what they wanted to do had begun to emerge. All four members realized that they all felt that they had done a lot for Minamisoma, and now they wanted more Minamisoma people to get involved.
When Sugimura suggested, "it can be hard to imagine things three or five years into the future. So why don't we talk about what we want to do, and should be doing, six months from now?" people began to respond with specific ideas for actions. One such idea was to "plan a bus tour for people to visit Minamisoma when the Fukushima Convention is held in Fukushima City." Verbalizing things that had been unspoken led to new hope and action. For these two FAJ facilitators, this moment was especially memorable.
After the discussion ended, Tokuda explained to the participants how the facilitators had facilitated the discussion, the skills they had used and what they stayed aware of. The participants realized that facilitating a meeting was nothing extraordinary; if done consciously and with a little skill, anyone could facilitate a meeting. Participants reported: "in the meeting, we were able to say things we had been unable to say before, and a specific direction for the future emerged from our discussion. So that must be the power of facilitation."
Later, members of Tsunagarou Minamisoma began to consider the possibility that if more people learned to facilitate meetings, it would make things better in Minamisoma, so they asked the FAJ to hold a facilitation workshop for them. Along with Tokuda and Suzuki as facilitators, Kuniko Iijima (who later also joined the Disaster Recovery Support Section of the FAJ) attended the workshop as a process note-taker, and one more member attended as well.
The Facilitation Workshop held on October 14 in Minamisoma Citizens Activity Support Center was attended by members of Tsunagarou Minamisoma, other citizens of Minamisoma City, and key disaster recovery personnel from other cities in the vicinity, such as Iidatemura, as well as supporters from other prefectures such as Saitama, in total 13 people. Tokuda thought about how to conduct the workshop, taking into account the various needs of the participants and designed the flow of the workshop as follows: first, participants were asked to give real life examples of bad meetings they had experienced. Then these examples were broken down into a few categories. Next, a session to think about how they could improve these meetings, and finally, each one of them came up with their own recipe for facilitating.
※ OARR: Outcome, Agenda, Role, and Rules. Outcome refers to the intended state; Agenda, the meeting schedule. Roles means each participants' function in the meeting. Rule stands for the ground rules of the meeting.
"Take a look at this flyer we made together." A few days after the workshop, when Tokuda and Iijima were in Fukushima City for other business, Ms. Takahashi of Tsunagarou Minamisoma handed them a flyer titled "Fukushima Convention 2011 Bus Tour." The flyer was a product of the bus tour idea generated at the October 4 meeting. Later, the members who participated in the October 14 facilitation workshop got together on their own to bring the idea into form. This initiative began to attract more ideas, and soon the plan broadened by involving new members and asking various local residents for support. In just a few days, their intention to get more people in Minamisoma City involved had borne fruit.
A few days later, the participants of the workshop requested that FAJ support them with a project called "Dialogue for the Future of Minamisoma." This was to be a series of dialogue events for the residents of Minamisoma to create a vision of their desired future and start "taking action to build a new society," ending with a big event attended by many guests. The project already had selected the members of its planning committee and had brought many other organizations on board. What they wanted from the FAJ was their support for the entire process of designing the final event in February and facilitating the series of dialogue events.
Suzuki and Iijima went to Minamisoma in November 2011 to support the first dialogue event, and met with the key members of the planning committee. The meeting took place at a Japanese pub. Over drinks and food, Suzuki confirmed their intention for the series of events, while Iijima took notes of everything spoken in the meeting. By the end of the meeting, there were many sheets of A4 size paper strewn across the tatami mat floor of the pub.
A member of the committee, Eiji Sudo, passionately expressed his thoughts in this way: "The disaster has brought us into a time of change. We should not try to put things back as they were, but rather to create something new. I want young people to take center stage and weave in their new ideas. I want these events to go beyond localities such as Kashima, Haramachi, and Odaka, and help a new wind blow through the place." In this initial meeting, it became clear that Sudo should be the one to initiate the first dialogue at the event starting the next day.
Because this sort of preparatory meeting plays a very important role in supporting disaster recovery at the scene, it is always necessary to take certain intentional steps. This means using graphic facilitation to collect information even if it is only a social gathering, and facilitating the actual meetings using OARR. It can also include clarifying the roles of each participant or discussing the ground rules of the meeting together. Especially because this project was a series of dialogue events over time, one focus in the preparatory meeting was to find a flexible format for the dialogues that could be easily taken over and replicated by any facilitator from the Disaster Recovery Support Section of FAJ if needed. In addition, as this project had many uncertain aspects, such as the number of participants for each dialogue event, they carefully discussed how to handle a variety of cases.
Suzuki and Iijima hoped that the local organizing members would appreciate the value and effectiveness of "facilitation" through the process of working together. A member of the organizing board was surprised to see Suzuki and Iijima drawing graphics on many sheets of paper in the midnight discussion at the pub, but these two people's sincere effort to gather and share participants' intentions in the meeting actually led to the building of the group's trust.
The next day, November 14th, Suzuki served as a facilitator and Iijima as a graphic recorder in the first dialog event. Expecting some of the participants might wonder why people outside Minamisoma took the roles of facilitator and recorder, they arranged for a member of the Tsunagarou Minamisoma to explain the roles of the two and get consensus about it at the beginning of the event.
The OUTCOME, the state aimed for at the end of the first dialogue, was set as "people shared their intentions, got an image of how they can relate to each other, and the proposal for the February big event is ready to be made." Standing in the outcome, participants had opportunities to express their thoughts and desires to envision a new future for Minamisoma and even to start providing something from Minamisoma to the world. The intention was for these thoughts to converge into some ideas about what they want to do in the February event. One of the ideas generated in the dialogue was "5 dialogue sessions in one event mimicking the 5 petals of cherry tree flower, which is the designated city flower of Minamisoma." All participants felt this idea was a coalescence of their individual thoughts and ideas. At the end of this dialogue event, each participant had a chance to declare how he or she would relate to the plan. In this exchange the February event got a name: Minamisoma Dialogue Festival - Let's Dialogue Our Future Out. They decided to continue dialogue to realize this plan.
In the second dialogue event on November 28th. Mr. Sudo newly communicated his visions to the assembled participants, using phrases such as "to establish community-initiated recovery movement", "transform ourselves from receivers to givers", etc. Based on the outcome from the previous dialogue, participants this time discussed coming up with "Five Themes of the Dialogue" and who would be responsible for each theme.
Participants of this round of the events had various roles in the disaster recovery. Many of them had never met each other before. Some participants didn't have any information about the next February's big event being planned, or even that this dialogue was a part of series of dialogues. They came here longing for a space to share the anxieties and difficulties in their lives since the disaster. The roles members from FAJ's Disaster Recovery Support Section took in this dialogue was like "a guardrail in the space of dialogue"; that is, to have the dialogue deepen according to the theme while allowing people to experience that they had shared their concerns openly, and also developed ownership of the February event. In almost all preparatory meetings, they reviewed what was accomplished last time and checked what they wanted to talk about this time to decide the procedure of dialogue. The FAJ facilitators were always trying to share their "know-how" about workshop facilitation and skills to create an appropriate space, and also give advice if appropriate on how to manage the complicated operations of workshop organization.
After the third dialogue event was complete on December 19, <FAJ冊子 p17 > Yuji Miyamori of Tsunagarou Minamisoma proposed that they would serve as facilitators in the fourth dialogue event. No one would argue against the importance of facilitation being provided by the local people who love and know the area deeply especially when they volunteer to be facilitators. The FAJ members heartily welcomed his proposal and switched their roles to be that of supporters of facilitators.
※ "The guardrail in the space of dialogue" means to provide gentle watchfulness, so that participants can talk in a safe environment just like guardrails at the sides of the road keep drivers safe.
In this preparatory meeting, FAJ members reviewed supporting Miyamori's proposal to facilitate the dialogue by themselves. They also advised other people to take over some of Miyamori's current tasks such as making rosters, setting up reception tables, etc.
The day of the fourth dialogue event. Miyamori facilitated the dialogue throughout by continually keeping the spotlight on the participants, not on himself. Participants said that this worked great, and they ended up saying "Let's do these dialogues on our own without being supported by the FAJ."
As supporters, it is desirable to think that real joy is in developing local facilitators rather than in expressing one's own superb facilitation skills. Effective means of support will change over time. This was the day for FAJ to change their role from facilitators to guardians, who keep watching people from that area, think "with" them, both on how to proceed with the dialogues (program design) and on appropriate ways to facilitate depending on the space.
2011 passed and 2012 began, though the memories of 2011 may never leave people. The big event, "Minamisoma Dialogue Festival - Let's Dialogue Our New Future Out" was held on February 18th and 19th at a venue called "Yumehat," Minamisoma citizen's cultural hall. A total of 1,500 people attended the two days, which were filled with programs and activities. These included a symposium with distinguished guests and many scheduled opportunities for dialogues. Because this event was generated and realized through many discussions and dialogues by the residents of Minamisoma, a chain reaction of participation may have been created: people invited people.
Local organization members had double roles, one to organize the large-scale event the other to facilitate in their own concurrent sessions. In order to support them, the FAJ decided to send 11 members, 6 of them belonging to the Disaster Recovery Support Section, to Minamisoma one day before the event to do whatever was necessary as supporters behind the scene.
On the day of the event, some of the FAJ members who were visiting Minamisoma for the first time got in a car driven by Miharu Takamura, a member of the Tsunagarou Minamisoma to visit the beach area. Takamura always takes the trouble to guide visitors to Minamisoma in this way because she wants them "to see the facts of what happened to this area with their own eyes." The FAJ members were at a loss for words and remained silent when they saw the mountainous piles of debris extending as far as they could see. Takamura began to share what had happened in this area one scene after another in a calm voice as she was driving her car. Listening to her, Iijima, a member of the Disaster Recovery Support Section of the FAJ, painfully realized how small his contribution to the recovery was, and he renewed his determination to do anything he could do for the success of the today's Minamisoma Dialogue Festival.
Graphic control was one of the biggest things the FAJ team paid attention to in preparing for the Dialogue Festival; many concurrent sessions had been planned, and they were concerned about not being able to see the whole picture of the entire event and to know what was happening where in real time. To solve this problem, they took it upon themselves to participate in the preparatory meetings of each concurrent session. At 11 pm the night before the event, they gathered in a hotel room and listed information, like timelines of events and other information given by each event manager, on Post Its and put them on several large sheets of paper to display on huge tables - displaying all necessary information at a glance.
A huge number of dialogues on various topics occurred in the Dialogue Festival. Participants reported impressions about these such as: "This is the first place I ever experienced that it is okay to talk about what I felt," and "Speaking what was on my mind made me feel free." Local facilitators, while experiencing some natural struggle, gave everything they had to keep creating this space for people.
One of the dialogue sessions topics was "Father League." When the accidents in the nuclear power plants occurred, mothers with small children evacuated to other places in Japan to protect their children. Fathers were not able to go with them because they had their business or employment in their hometown, so many families have lived separately since then. In this dialogue session, these fathers got an opportunity to share as well as listen to difficulties they had never spoken about until now, and to express their deep concern, saying "I want to do something for children."
There are many different ways to have dialogues and discussions. It is not rare that people with different perspectives and backgrounds are deliberately gathered so that a variety of views can be expressed. However, this particular session was designed for and participated in by fathers who seemed to have much in common with one another in terms of their relationships with their families. This session turned out to be very productive in that it generated a specific proposal to construct a place for kids to play safely, which got much support from other fathers. This idea later took form as a real project called "Everyone Republic."
The Minamisoma Dialogue Festival was a complete success. Everyone involved in creating this event seemed to experience a sense of huge accomplishment. One of the local members said, "This event represents the first step for us to stop being in the role of receiver and start actively causing something to happen in our towns." According to the Minutes of the first meeting with Tsunagarou Minamisoma voluntary association and the FAJ, the goal was recorded as follows: "Until now we had many events which someone else prepared and we just received. So, we, Tsunagarou Minamisoma will initiate something on our own. We will create a network of citizens, where the citizens are key players. And we will create a stage on which they can share their struggles, efforts, and passion for recovery with the world." Six months later, their commitments were realized.
Suzuki and Iijima of the FAJ once again visited Minamisoma, where air remained still chilly, on March 14, 2012. It had been three weeks since the Dialogue Festival. They came here because the FAJ proposed having a meeting to reflect on "Minamisoma Dialogue Festival." Getting together with the local administration members for the Festival, they started by setting the OARR (Outcome, Agenda, Role Rule) for the meeting as usual. The intended outcome created for this meeting was that "Through today's reflection on the festival event, everyone is committed to keeping themselves involved in the Minamisoma dialogues." The FAJ members proposed to employ the perspective of KPT* so that this gathering could develop itself into a more constructive one, rather than just being a reflection on the past event. Twenty-one persons participated in the meeting including the two from the FAJ. Iijima, as facilitator, was concerned to find a space to put on many Post Its because there was no white board or empty walls in the venue, the restaurant "Daikonya." They decided to put a large sheet of paper on the floor of the restaurant surrounded by chairs set in circle and everyone put written Post Its on the paper.
* KPT: One of the frameworks to facilitate reflection, standing for Keep (good things), Problem (items to be improved), Try (items to be tried on newly), three angles to reflect on something.
The facilitator asked, "Please read what you wrote on the Post Its when you put it on the sheet of the paper in the center." The large sheet of paper ended up very being very crowded with Post Its written by participants, and the room was filled with friendly peaceful dialogue throughout the meeting. This kind of deep, fulfilling moment was the result of the cultivated relatedness among participants, including committee members, throughout many layers of dialogues from the first meeting up to and including to the Festival.
These dialogues were carried on even after the Festival. Although from time to time the FAJ members were consulted for the program design of these sessions, but basically they confined their engagement to being general participants, so that they could devote themselves to the role of the "mentor" here.
There was an exception to this, in the form of a request from Miyamori. The following year's dialogue session of the "Minamisoma Dialogue Festival - Let's Dialogue Our New Future Out" was scheduled in Ryogoku in Tokyo on March 14, two years after the disaster. Miyamori said, "We request you be the facilitators of the next dialogue session because we, the local members from Minamisoma, want to concentrate on the dialogue. We want to be main characters in the dialogue this time." The FAJ was very happy to accept Miyamori's request because it showed that he deeply understood the significance of the role of facilitator.
The day of the dialogue in Ryogoku, the six participants from Minamisoma first shared what they have each been thinking, then they made a circle to reconstruct "a live conversation in Minamisoma" for the other participants, who surrounded them in the outer larger circles. Suzuki and Iijima served as the main facilitators for this part. For the small group sessions later, the other six FAJ members including Yusuke Asaba, who subsequently the Disaster Recovery Support Section of the FAJ, volunteered to facilitate.
Although it has been a while since the FAJ members and people from Minamisoma last met, they are still able to talk each other like old friends, because they are connected as human being-to-human being, not as supporter and supported. They had already built enough relatedness, and that allowed them to contact and consult each other anytime it is necessary.
Remember that Minamisoma City is in Fukushima prefecture, and in the beginning the FAJ didn't have any particular relationship to this city. As they kept visiting Minamisoma and joined the local people's efforts to devise what they could do for their hometown's recovery, a solid "EN", or relatedness, was forged among them. Throughout this process, facilitation - a culture of dialogue- gradually permeated the area. Maybe each day in the past two years had been adding new brushes to paint this new picture.
The FAJ provided another six-series facilitation workshop in Minamisoma Citizen's Activity Support Center from June 2014 to Mary 2015. Some participants in the workshop came from the Minamisoma Dialogue Festival - Let's Dialogue Our New Future Out in 2011.
That's right, the endeavor of disaster recovery of the town is still underway, and facilitation is still in demand.
But what is to support others? One thing we can say for sure is it does not mean that members of the Disaster Recovery Support Section of the FAJ keep coming back to facilitate. What is to support others? - this potent question is still being asked newly day after day.