LEWISTON — A Bates College music professor born in Sendai, Japan — one of the regions hardest hit by last week’s massive earthquake and tsunami — is organizing a fundraiser to help those in the coastal town struggling to recover from the horrific disaster.
The fundraiser will coincide with a Bates Orchestra concert on Saturday. Hiroya Miura, the orchestra’s conductor and a professor of music theory and composition, had been talking with other Japanese musicians about holding a charity event in New York when he realized Monday that he could combine the already-scheduled Bates concert with a fundraiser closer to home, he said.
Miura’s parents now live in Yamamoto-cho, a smaller town about 25 miles from Sendai that was also slammed by the magnitude 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami on Friday. All donations from the concert will be given to Yamamoto-cho’s mayor to support relief services and rebuilding efforts, according to Bates’ website.
“The area that my parents are in now is isolated from Sendai,” Miura said Tuesday night. “A thousand people died. It still doesn’t have power, or water. And communications are difficult,” he said. “The tsunami effects were just incredible.”
His parents’ small wooden house survived the earthquake, although the disaster broke windows, knocked down bookshelves and threw pictures off the walls. “Sometimes the wooden houses survive earthquakes better,” he said. “They’re more flexible, and they shake with the ground.”
The house sits a half-mile from the edge of the tsunami’s destruction, and approximately 36 miles from the beleaguered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, whose explosions and threat of nuclear meltdown have kept the world watching in anxious anticipation since the catastrophe.
One of Miura’s aunts lives even closer to the plant, just beyond the 18-mile zone around the nuclear facility where Japanese officials have been telling citizens to stay inside and keep their mouths covered to guard against potential radioactive contamination.
Miura’s parents and aunt were lucky, however: much of Yamamoto-cho was flattened by the tsunami. Looking at pictures on the Internet, the area, once a beautiful coastal town marked by fishing ports and strawberry fields, is nearly unrecognizable, he said. Where he used to wait to catch the train to Sendai, he said, “You can’t even tell the train station was there; it’s just rubble.”
Communicating with his family has also been challenging, he said. “The first hours were quite scary. The only way I could find out about the situation was from people tweeting” on the website Twitter.com, he said. “That’s still how I’m finding out.”
Thanks to Twitter, Miura has been able to learn that most of his friends in the Sendai area were safe. “Fortunately, all my friends are fine as far as I know,” he said.
He reached his parents by telephone on Friday, and was unable to contact them again until Monday, when his father called while Miura was out. His father left a message, telling Miura that the couple was fine but not where they were.
Being so far from his home and the events there is unsettling, Miura said. “The last week, physically I’ve been here in Maine. But mentally, I’ve been in Japan.”
“It’s frustrating; there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “At least I can organize a fundraiser.”
The concert, which begins at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, will be held at the Olin Arts Center on Bates’ campus. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, Eroica and Serenade for Wind Instruments by Richard Strauss had been chosen before the earthquake, but Miura says that the Beethoven piece is appropriate for the event: It is a funeral march.
The concert itself is free, but tickets are required and donations are recommended. Tickets are available at www.batestickets.com, and credit card donations can be made on the website as well. Checks and cash donations will be accepted the night of the performance.
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