How to Help / Donate to Japan

Some tips from Yomiuri Daily (and me) on donating relief supplies, summarized below:

* Don't send used, worn-out clothes. They may be hip in Williamsburg, but Japanese people are superclean and germophobic. (Have you seen the face masks??) But seriously, if you were a refugee, wouldn't you want ONE thing that's new and clean? Also, there's no water there, so no laundry and no showers (only wet naps, and those are needed too.)

* Pack each box full of ONE thing; don't throw a bunch of stuff together

* Write clearly on the outside of the box what the contents are  (type, quantity, and if applicable, for which gender or age)

* Some prefectural offices are only accepting packages made in person, because otherwise, it will take a long time to sort

* Other prefectural office will accept packaged delivered by courier service

* Still others will regard sent by mail or courier service will be returned cash-on-delivery

Please check the prefectural office's website to see what they need before you donate, or they will get flooded with stuff that evacuees don't need right now, while the real crucial items are somewhere, still in the stores.

So if you're already in Japan and decide to send relief supplies, pack one box full of that one thing, be it sanitary napkins toilet paper, underwear, whatever. Label the outside with the contents (type, quantity, and if applicable, for which gender or age). Then pack another box full of one thing--can be the same as the box before, or not.

But if you're overseas, you can make a bigger impact, and faster, if you donate money. I always wondered about this, thinking that some organizations will pocket a lot of the donations for personal use, but now it makes sense.

First, no matter what you buy--$80 worth of sanitary napkins, for example (Amazon has 36 24-packs for $80.61 with free super saver shipping to the US)--you have to pay to ship it to Japan, which will cost at least another $80. But you could have used that $80 to buy more sanitary napkins, which would benefit more people than just those in the shipping industries.

Second, if you donate money (to a reputable charity, of course, like Japanese Red Cross, Oxfam, Red Cross, Salvation Army Japan, Oxfam Japan, JEN, Jhelp and Second Harvest Japan, etc), that money can be used right away to buy the materials and get it to the people who need them. It's a lot faster than your going to the store, going to the post office, packing it up, the package taking another 1-2 weeks to reach Japan and clear customs, then another week or however long it takes from where you sent it in Japan to the evacuees. That's 3 weeks vs. the 1 day it will take for people here on the ground to get it to the evac centers.

Third, if you donate money, that money can be spent here in Japan, which will help the local economy, and we all know that it could sure use the help. The country has been in a deflationary period and economic depression for the past 20 years, and these recent events will cost $300 billion to repair, rebuild and recover.

Fourth, if you donate food from overseas and the volunteers are unable to translate the label to check for allergy information, they cannot send the food onto evacuation centers. No one wants to be responsible for an allergic reaction that results in severe illness or death.

Fifth, if you donate food in large quantities from overseas, it will get stuck at customs, which has to spend more time inspecting it.

So...bottomline, if you're not in Japan, the best, most efficient way to help, with maximal impact, is to donate money. I'd love to say, Send your money to me, and I could buy these items and get them to the collection  centers. But I don't have a car, so it'd be hard to get huge amounts of stuff from one place to another by subway. I'm going to just buy stuff near the collection centers and then make a drop-off right after I get out the store. But since I'm kind of broke and can't afford to buy much, I'm going to be volunteering my time instead--probably sorting the supplies.

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Here is a useful article from the Japan Times on how to help.

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A Big Box of Everything for One = A Big Box of Garbage

Vlad talked about how, when people send relief supplies as one box of a variety of items for one person (eg. one toothbrush, one toothpaste, etc), that this box cannot be distributed at an evacuation center because...how would you decide which person out of the hundreds at the center gets this box? And even if you split it up, it would be a nightmare to say, Ok, you get the toothbrush, but you get the toothpaste. Or, Fine, you get these two things because they go together, but everyone else only gets one item.

It may sound petty, but imagine that you have lost your home, your office was washed out to sea, maybe you even lost your family, and you're living at this evacuation center, on the floor, with hundreds of other people; there is constant talking, crying, sniffling, babies making noise, no privacy, no place to put what little stuff you own on the blanket next to your shoes, you get one canned soup and three crackers a day, the government is telling you that you can't go outside because of the radiation and you have already been indoors for three weeks straight now, and then some guy is telling you that you can get the toothbrush but no toothpaste? You just might have to kill him for it.

Ok- maybe I exaggerated a little, but only the last part, because everything else is true. The evacuation centers really are short on food, and people really aren't getting enough to eat. See the list from the website of Watari town in Miyagi prefecture, one of the hardest hit regions. Second Harvest Japan and JHelp also have lists of needed supplies on their websites.

Vlad said there are volunteers completely devoted to sorting out the relief supplies received. If there are boxes with a bunch of mixed goods in them (eg. a big box of everything for one person), they are sometimes thrown out because no one has the time to go through it, figure out which of the 50 different items go where, etc.

It's kind of disheartening to know that usable or possibly necessary items are being thrown out because they were not packed properly. And yeah, maybe if the volunteers and collection centers had the space to store tons of these kinds of boxes and all the time in the world to go through them, maybe they wouldn't get tossed in the garbage. But the reality is both time and space are limited, and you have to work so that the most people get the most benefit. You can't spend a lot of time sorting one box.

So if you're going to donate, make sure that whatever you donate--whether it's money or materials--will be used, and fully.