Page 14 - TORCH #18 - May 2021

bringing aid in the form of temporary accommodation but had little in the way of medical supplies.
Masafumi Nishizawa, a local physician, was the only medical doctor in the town’s evacuation centre in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. A week later
he was joined by twenty specialists from around Japan, but the medical facilities had been decimated. The hospital building, though still standing, had been gutted by the waves. Most of the patients and some medical staff had sadly been killed with only a few surviving on the roof of the hospital. The hospital had little remaining equipment to treat people.
help. The Japanese parliament, for example, held a special session to grant permission to the Israelis to treat locals.
“Israel—despite its being so far away and so different—will always be remembered as the first country that came to our rescue and gave us the feeling that we are connected to the rest of the world"
“There were many elderly in the city who needed medical attention. When I heard that a foreign delegation was on its way, I was a bit worried, because there was concern that they would be terrified of having to be checked—amidst the chaos of this tragedy—by a foreigner, having not met a non-Japanese all their lives,” Nishizawa explained.
Thankfully, the 53-person Israeli team that arrived a week later brought with them 62 tons of medical equipment and supplies.
“We required that they [the Israelis] be able to conduct tests, but we could not imagine that they would have so much equipment and be so skilled at what they do,” Nishizawa recalled in an interview marking the tenth anniversary of the tragedy.
Nishizawa worked with the Israeli team for the duration of their time in Japan and remarked, “their expertise was amazing, and they had everything up and running at record speed.”
Despite the expertise Israel had to offer, there was a worry that the locals, due to cultural barriers, would be weary of foreign
One of the first people to be treated
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