As I write, it’s Golden Week in Japan.

Each year, this celebration of four holidays spanning the last week of April and the first week of May unites the country in festivities commemorating everything from the Japanese constitution ratified after World War II to the glories of nature to the children of the land.

Most businesses are closed and it is traditional during this time for Japanese parents to pray for the health and success of their children.

Houses are decorated with carpshaped streamers and displays of samurai dolls for the boys. The girls get to enjoy a doll festival known as Hina Matsuri.

In recent years, Tokyo Disneyland has become a magnet for celebrating families and so it will be again this year. The fantasy destination reopened within days of the monstrous March 11 earthquake and tsunami on a reduced schedule in order to serve as a place of comfort for those who survived.

Headlines in the Japanese press report that this year, many of the adult survivors will be forgoing the celebration to volunteer in the badly battered northern sections of the country.

Such stories haven’t attracted much interest from the American press who seemed fixated for a time on the after affects of the horrendous natural and nuclear disaster that followed. In fact, in the last 10 days or so, coverage pretty much seemed to drop off the radar.

After trying for some weeks to put together a column that could help localize the story for our readers, it pretty much dropped from my radar too. Attempts to contact one of a number of Japanese alumni of Georgian Court University in Lakewood were on hold.

Then just before Easter, I signed on to find the answers to a number of questions I’d e-mailed Yayoi Toyama-Ogawa, class of 1974, in the dark days following the cataclysmic event.

From the e-mail, it quickly became clear that even though more than a month had passed and even though Yayoi lives in Tokyo, far away from the earthquake-tsunami zone, the impact was still strongly felt.

She wrote that she could not reply to the questions in March because of “lots of sadness and tears.”

Yayoi had seen the 2004 Tsunami that devastated so much of the Pacific rim on television. “But when I saw the TV this time… it was a strong shock to me. Even though (we are) in Tokyo, in the case of my house, some dishes were broken, books came down… the walls in two places were damaged and they are not fixed yet because this will be an extremely big (carpentry) job.”

“Inconveniences,” as she termed them, were ongoing. “Lack of regular transportation, no electricity, lack of food, especially (bottled) water,” became a strange new norm for the Japanese, she wrote. “But thanks to God, we learned that we can survive with a piece of bread and a cup of water.

“Nowadays,” she wrote, “we try to save energy as much as possible.”

In the e-mail, she provided figures that showed 12,876 are known dead and 14,865 are “not found yet. 219,628 houses got damaged. People lost family and houses, money and everything. The Japanese people are trying to help to unite them with people in the world. They have received a lot of pressure physically and mentally.”

Yayoi ended that line with, “Sorry, I cannot describe the words.”

She went on to say that the people “really hope that the radiation leaking will stop and hydrogen explosion will not occur. We expect the U.S. to help (with this),” she wrote. “Actually, the experts from the U.S. and France have come to Japan but they could not stop it.”

“We hope,” she wrote, “that all the nuclear stations in Japan will disappear. “ The Georgian Court alum, who enjoys acting as an “alumni ambassador” promoting the university in Japan, was grateful for the way GCU rallied to help by sending bottled water and flashlight batteries so critically needed to provide light in the darkness in those first weeks. “Thanks to God, GCU sent them by airmail and we received them at the end of March.”

Yayoi wrote that she was thankful for the warm messages from Mercy Sister Rosemary Jeffries, president of Georgian Court, as well as other faculty and staff and ’74 alumni. “I sincerely appreciate their love and kindness. It is great to hear that they pray for the Japanese people at Mass.”

She closed by expressing the hope that everybody in the world would think about peace.

On this day, when a timely article about the situation in Japan was nowhere to be found, her genuine words moved the story right back onto my radar. The people of Japan still need help and Catholic Relief Services is ready, willing and able to direct our donations to this worthy cause.

To make a donation to Catholic Relief Services to help the people of Japan visit www.crs.org/japan or send a check to Catholic Relief Services, 228 W. Lexington St. Baltimore, MD 21201-3443. For information call 888-277-7575 or e-mail [email protected]