CRWM Posts Video Marking Japan Disaster

On the second anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Christian Reformed World Missions has posted a video detailing the impact the disaster had on many Japanese Christians with whom CRWM has worked.

The earthquake swamped the northern part of Japan on March 11, 2011, causing nearly 20,000 deaths, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and leading to widespread destruction.

Despite the wide-ranging nature of the disaster, it led to a reassessment among some Japanese Christians as to the expanded role that they — as messengers of God’s kingdom — can play in Japanese society.

“The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, really shook things up here and exposed lots of needs that may have been here,” Larry Spalink, Japanese team leader for CRWM, says in the video.

Among those needs: Missionary work had been focused to a large part on church growth and education before the disaster.

But after the earthquake and tsunami, the work branched out into efforts to reach and offer hope and healing to those impacted by the disaster.

In the video, Ken Lee, a CRWM missionary, says many CRC members have participated in helping to clean up after the disaster as well as to offer assistance in other areas.

As a result, the love of Christ has been shown and is being shown to many in Japan.

“We have had a whole gamut of ministries to help people find hope and rebuild lives,” says Lee.

Across Japan on Monday, and in the towns  along the northeastern coast, people gathered and bowed their heads in a moment of silence marking the moment, at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake — the strongest recorded in Japan's history — struck off the coast.

The disaster at a nuclear power plant that was swamped by the tsunami expanded the terrible the scope of the tragedy. In fact, many of the more than 200,000 people who were displaced by the earthquake were evacuated from the area around the nuclear facility.