Two weeks later, five people from Hobonichi (Sato, Kohno, Isawa, Okamura, and Sugano) joined Schop-Dan again, together with chief editor Shigesato Itoi.

Today, in total about forty volunteers gathered for the task ahead.

This time, we were going to "schop" (shovel) a house. The building was flooded to the second floor and you could see from the tell-tale mud "line" that the tsunami had reached the upper storey.

Team leader Ryo Taira told everyone, "This house has not been touched since the tsunami. Please search carefully. You'll find valuables in the mud."

The ceiling was about to cave in: Not a safe place to live in. Occasionally, residue from fusuma partitions and crumbling walls came showering down on our heads, while we scooped up and cleaned away the mud with shovels and scrubbing brushes.

Taira told us that the owner has said that he has no intention to live here again. In fact, it seems this whole area is now going to be redeveloped. That being said, the group still wanted to clean and tidy up the house.

Taira talked about the background of Schop-Dan. "We started out with only three, but now we sometimes have a hundred volunteers in one day. Three was really tough.. But eventually, one guy came and he brought another guy, and then it went on like that."

Itoi remarked, "Instead of growing too rapidly, your group grew gradually. Perhaps that was the key for why the team shares the same ethos, and at the same time, why it can stay motivated to work so proactively. As you said, Taira-san, I think it's a good idea to clean this place even though it might be taken down."

"Yes," Taira said, "Although the house may be taken down, our 'schopping' will include a thorough search for the family's valuable items. I think cleaning the house will help the family to move on. In fact, the pillars are still strong. The house is almost livable in."

We searched through the scooped up mud with our hands to make sure there were no rings or children’s medical records, or other things like that. We would only dump the mud after that.

The best way to find valuables is to dig without machinery, just with your eyes constantly on the look out. Just pay attention to detail and gentle probing rather than relying too much on high-powered tools.

You might find this strange but we eventually gained a kind of second sense, a kind of talent for knowing whether we'd find valuables in a spot -- even before starting to dig.

"I always tell the team, 'Imagine this is your own house'," said Taira. "If you think this home is yours, you'll put far more effort into cleaning it."

An empty pouch is just an empty pouch. But it could be important to the family if it was handmade by their daughter. We save what we think would be important to the family.

The Schop-Dan t-shirts are rather surprising to some observers. On the back it says in a striking mixture of English and Japanese, "Fuck Saigai"! ("Sagai" means "natural disaster".) "There are other words like 'Ganbaro'," explained Taira, mentioning the recently popular slogan meaning "Go for it!" in Japanese. "But I lost my friend and other Schop-Dan organizers lost a mother, or lost a child. Someone else even lost his wife. We are all pissed off, to put it mildly. So we chose 'Fuck Saigai'."

Today one man who lost his wife was with the group. But during the clean-up we focused on our tasks and did not ask personal questions.

The Schop-Dan worked diligently all day as usual. You could hear the volunteers asking each other, "Should I keep this?" "Could you shove this down from your end with your broom?"

The Hobonichi colleagues blended into the team and soon you couldn't tell who was who. We could each just focus on whatever we could do to help the group's efforts.

Piece by piece, little by little, the valuables rescued from the house started to pile up on Schop-Dan's wheelbarrow.

(To be continued)