I've just gotten back from a week doing cleanup and recovery work in Ishinomaki, a mid-size coastal city in the Touhoku area, north of Sendai. It will take some time to process the experience, so the following notes will be fragmentary, but the most obvious thing I learned is very simple - while financial contributions are vital, what Ishinomaki and cities like it are most badly in need of is boots on the ground. After the tsunami deposited thousands of tons of (probably toxic) mud throughout even the buildings it left standing, the amount of labor required to get even the relatively undamaged part of the city back to a state of usability is mind-boggling - and this is just one city out of dozens or hundreds so affected. Peace Boat is currently the only NPO accepting international volunteers in the affected areas, so if you can spare a week and have a tolerance for camping and hard labor, please contact them.
The Peace Boat deployment center is currently located on the campus of Ishinomaki Senshuu Daigaku (Ishinomaki Professional University). Conditions were cold early in the week, but they're warming up day by day and were fairly comfortable by the time we left.
This is what the upper part of Ishinomaki looks like three weeks after the Tsunami. The roads are cleared, but there is still debris everywhere. The wave entered every building, destroying furniture and fixtures and saturating every first-floor shop and residence with mud.
