Photohoku: Helping Japan’s Tohoku Rebuild Through Photos

It’s almost been a year now since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and while we don’t hear as much about the recovery efforts in the news anymore, there are still many people working to help out people in the Tohoku area. A few days ago I stumbled across a great project called Photohoku.org (the name is a portmanteau of Photo and Tohuku), which is an initiative to help families restart photo albums, after the tsunami washed away family photo collections that they had before [1].

From what I can understand , the project involves trips up north and meets with families to help recreate photo albums using instant film and empty photo albums, kindly donated by sponsor Fujifilm. The project’s website describes the importance of “encouraging [them] to start again, rebuild their memories, and make new ones.” The act of creating new albums is a way to help rebuild psychologically, and that’s perhaps a much overlooked aspect of recovering from a disaster as big as this one.

Update 01/27: : Brian Scott Peterson replied to my inquiries with a little more information about the initiative:

The project started on September 11th of last year as a response to the events of March 11th. Until then we had been involved in a few fundraising projects such a s a photo auction, a charity book, Since starting we have been been able to bring over a dozen people with us over six trips, started over 100 photo albums, gifted several dozen cameras and given countless photographs.

Photohoku is taking donations via Paypal on their website, so I encourage you guys to support them if you can. They also have a page over on Facebook and a Twitter account too, so check those out as well.

For more information about how the project works, you can also watch some of the videos from the project on YouTube. The one below is from back in October, and it gives an idea of how important photos can be to people who have lost everything.