How the disabled gathered

When Hitakami-en first became an evacuation center, around how many people did you have including non-disabled folks?

Yanagibashi: I think there were around 20-30 non-disabled people from the region at first. That’s including small children and such.

As for disabled people, at first there were only a few. But then of course we heard about all kinds of problems happening at other evacuation centers (such as schools, where both disabled and non-disabled people were living).

So the Shoshinkai staff went around all the general evacuation centers (in the region), told them about the kind of center we were running, and asked disabled people if they’d like to move. After that, more and more disabled people gradually came to the Hitakami-en evacuation center.

By the first week or so, the big hospitals nearby were already full. Nurses couldn’t really do anything for people whose hometowns were unknown, who couldn’t talk well, or who were injured but couldn’t go home after treatment, so they sent them to our evacuation center.

For the first few days after we started the evacuation center, people were brought to us because their names were unknown and they seemed to have special needs, or because they had dementia. But we also got people who just didn’t really need medical treatment, and we completely immersed ourselves in caring for them all.