“Village Revitalization Volunteer” is a continued and developed activity from our previous “Agricultural Volunteer” and “Snow-removal Volunteer”. Since the earthquakes, we have been dispatching volunteers to work cooperatively with the local villagers, as part of a village revitalization project to bring the depopulation to a halt. There are around 10 dispatching events throughout one year. These events include snow-removal in snowy winter, agricultural work in the summer, road cleaning, cleaning of woods and forests, and harvest celebration in fall.

Despite the short and limited time during the events, Iketani becomes a second home to those that visit. There are increasing repeaters that join our events as volunteers. The local villagers are more than happy to receive and welcome the volunteers. JEN strives to build the capacity and system of the village, to increase Iketani ‘fans', and to strengthen ties between individuals and the village through these volunteer dispatch events.

JEN has organized 19 volunteer dispatches from August 3rd until October 14th to assist the aged population living in Betsuyama area. This project was implemented with the assistance of USAID/Japan Platform, UBS Securities Japan and Yomiuri Light and Humanity Association. We have dispatched 97 volunteers in total, visited 258 houses, and assisted 932 aged affected persons in total.

The dispatched volunteers assisted in activities such as cleaning up the aftermath of the earthquake, moving to temporary accommodation, reparation of cracks on the ground, and reparation of Japanese paper sliding doors. These activities are difficult for the aged persons to do by themselves. Through these activities, the volunteers and the affected people could exchange talks, which led to psychosocial care.

The senior population could regain optimistic thinking for reconstruction from the earthquake by working together with the volunteers that regularly visited their homes. By cooperating with the community and helping the reparation of community facilities and organization of workshops, the whole community revitalized, and the senior population could engage themselves in the reconstruction.

On the last day of our assistance, JEN has organized an exchange event with the Tokamachi Development Committee, an organization that JEN has been assisting since three years ago. There were more than 120 participants from each side, both the affected persons and volunteers, and could deepen the link between each other. To realize further reconstruction by using the villagers' own network, through this exchange event we deepened the cooperation between the villagers, local authority and community groups. This signifies the sustainability of activities in the future by villagers themselves.