Out of the tragedy of ruin wreaked by the tsunami that laid waste to large stretches of Japan's northeast coast, a beacon of international friendship has risen.
In a famously homogenous country where foreign faces are rarely seen outside the major cities, international volunteers have poured in to help the victims of Japan's March 2011 earthquake disaster put their lives back together.
Ishinomaki has never been on the foreign tourist trail. A year ago it had a sprinkling of non-Japanese that included English teachers, but it was not a place that many outside Japan had ever heard of.
However, in the ten months since huge waves crushed large areas of the city, washing away or badly damaging half of its 61,000 houses, thousands of people have offered to lend a hand, many of them from abroad. (AFP)
Out of the tragedy of ruin wreaked by the tsunami that laid waste to large stretches of Japan's northeast coast, a beacon of international friendship has risen.
In a famously homogenous country where foreign faces are rarely seen outside the major cities, international volunteers have poured in to help the victims of Japan's March 2011 earthquake disaster put their lives back together.
Ishinomaki has never been on the foreign tourist trail. A year ago it had a sprinkling of non-Japanese that included English teachers, but it was not a place that many outside Japan had ever heard of.
However, in the ten months since huge waves crushed large areas of the city, washing away or badly damaging half of its 61,000 houses, thousands of people have offered to lend a hand, many of them from abroad. (AFP)