The Indonesian province of Aceh and Japan’s northeastern region of Tohoku share one thing in common – they were both devastated by tsunamis; Aceh in 2004 and Japan in 2011. On the 2nd anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011, around 600 people in Aceh participated in a ceremony to commemorate the disaster in Japan.
The Acehnese people who gathered together – schoolchildren, representatives of civil society and nongovernmental organizations, government officials – feel such a connection with the Japanese through this disaster that they took part in the “Solidarity for Japan” ceremony, organized by the Indonesia-Japan Friendship Forum and held at a schoolhouse in a village near the provincial capital. Yuji Hamada, Japanese consul general in Medan, said at the ceremony that the disasters have bonded them like “brothers and sisters”. Hamada led the people gathered to offer their prayers at around 2:46 p.m., the time when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck Japan on March 11, 2011, taking the lives of more than 18,500 and triggering the Fukushima nuclear crisis, one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.
The province of Aceh’s feeling of kinship to Japan is borne mostly out of grief as well, from the 2004 tsunami where the region lost some 180,000 people on Dec. 26, 2004. The tsunami also claimed more than 100,000 lives in neighboring countries such as Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Umar Abdullah Aziz, the secretary-general of Panglima Laot Aceh, an association of Acehnese fishermen, expressed his hope that the connection between the regions can spark cooperation between the two countries, particularly in ways to reduce tsunami risks. “Like in Aceh, many victims in the Japanese tsunami were also fishermen,” Aziz said.
source: http://japandailypress.com