Transforms Your Life

On this page, I share an experience where making music transformed my life.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake rocked the northeast coast of Honshu, Japan. This triggered a massive tsunami with waves that reached over 130 feet high. The Japan shore was hit with such force that more than 217 square miles of coastal land were flooded with salt water. The water came in as far as 6 miles in some places. As many as half a million people were evacuated. And as of December 2021, 19,747 people were killed and 2,500 people remain missing.

Complete neighborhoods and coastal businesses were swept out to sea. The homes and buildings that remained were heavily damaged in the lower stories. The saltwater made, in many cases, the ground sterile and unusable. Farmland was destroyed. Multi-story buildings were tipped on their sides and moved blocks away from their original foundations. Large ships were lying on their sides on hilltops.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was disabled by the tsunami and earthquake as well. It was described as a triple reactor melt down. A “no-go” zone of 12 miles around the plant was established April 20th, 2011, by the Japanese government. Some activity has developed in the area in recent years, but it won’t be till 2041 that the radioactivity should drop by half. (euronews.com 03/13/2021)

Nine months later, in December 2011, a group of us went to Isinomaki, Sendai, Onagouwa, Chiba, and Tokyo on a humanitarian trip to help with the recovery effort. 6 singers from my local area on the east side of Lake Washington in the United States met with 3 more singers from Japan to travel around the devastated areas. We were dressed as Dickens Carolers and came to sing Christmas carols.

We met in coffee houses, in homes that were still inhabitable, in schools, in hospitals, in tents, in churches, in senior communities, in shopping malls, in apartment buildings, and wherever people might gather to sing and listen to Christmas carols. Sharing our music was the reason to bring people together, but our hope and desire was that people would gather and begin to talk about the horrific events of their last nine months.

It was our hope that sharing our music would transform their lives and bring back some normalcy to their lives. What happened to me was that my life was transformed. All of us were greatly impacted by the music ourselves. We sang Christmas carols that speak of the birth of Christ, and about God’s great love for us specifically to the Japanese people so devastated by this event yet so beautiful, gracious, strong, loving, kind, resilient, proud, hardworking, art lovers, and more. We came to love all the people who so graciously welcomed us during this most difficult time in their lives.

In addition to singing, we helped disseminate donated recovery goods by leading bingo games under tents. When people won the bingo game, they were able to select from the donations. All ages played. By the end of the day, all the donated goods available at that time and that had come from around the world, were gone. We provided food and warmth with our fires on those cold days. Some of the people in our group worked on some home rebuilding projects and some people made snacks for a tea party that we offered to folks.

After we sang carols at the tea party, we began to chat with the people. All but two of us Dickens Carolers could speak Japanese. We spoke to the woman who had opened her home for this event. Her home would be condemned and torn down a few days later.

After telling us about her neighbor’s house with a family of four inside floating out to sea, she asked us, why was she still here? We didn’t have a good answer to that question. But she said this as we left, “I guess there is some good that has come out of this terrible disaster. I would never have been able to meet each of you Dicken’s Carolers today had this awful event not happened.” We knew that healing was beginning to happen. And I believe that healing came from our music, the message of our music, and from us making our music.

Even today, I continue to be transformed by that experience as I share these memories with you. The devastation was so great, but the people were so resilient. It was literally too much to take in at one time.