Kuchikomi May. 09, 2011 - 05:05AM JST ( 4 )

TOKYO —

“My parents were extremely worried. They wanted me to quit and come home.”

Why they feel that way is not immediately obvious. Chiharu Sakuma, 30, is chopping vegetables, ladling miso soup and, as much as possible, smiling. It doesn’t look like dangerous work – but in an earthquake zone where radiation exposure is a constant fear, danger comes with the territory. “I told them,” she continues to Josei Jishin (May 10-17), “how happy it made the people in the shelters to get hot meals. Now they’re supportive. They say ‘Good, keep it up.’”

The remarkable thing about Sakuma is not so much the activity she’s engaged in as the uniform she’s wearing. She’s a servicewoman in the Air Self Defense Force, one of 900 or so female SDF members deployed in the wasteland the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor damage have made of much of the Tohoku region.

Joining the ASDF was a childhood dream come true. Probably as a child she imagined herself in quasi space garb in a high-tech cockpit. If adult reality lived up to childhood fancies, the world would be vastly different. But if she’s disappointed at finding herself posted instead to an elementary school turned shelter in Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, it doesn’t show. Quite the contrary. She seems the sort to cheerfully throw her sense of mission into whatever task is at hand. “The elderly residents all say, ‘Not so much, I can’t eat all that!’ But I want them to eat a lot, I heap up their plates.”

Sakuma, herself, meanwhile, gets by on a little rice and tea. “It’s good, it’s enough. I’m trained, you see.

“People,” she tells Josei Jishin, “don’t seem to fully realize that there are women in the SDF. They see me and say, ‘A woman! How unusual!’ or, ‘Oh, so there are women in the military too.’ That breaks the ice, and suddenly it becomes easy to talk, which makes me very happy.”

Smiling is part of the job, but a smile is not easy to convey through the pollen mask she wears. “I make eye contact as much as possible,” she smiles.

Hanae Kawamura, 31, is another servicewoman Josei Jishin speaks to. She’s a “consultant,” making the rounds of the shelters in and around Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture. Being a consultant means getting to know refugees, especially women, and responding to their special needs. “There are certain things it’s easier to approach a woman about,” she explains. “It’s hard to explain to a man what kind of sanitary napkin you need.”

Eighty percent of married servicewomen are married to servicemen. Sakuma and Kawamura are no exceptions. Kawamura and her husband have two daughters, 6 and 3, staying with their grandparents. Kawamura has seen them once, for five hours, since the maelstrom began.

Once she happened to appear on TV. “I’m told the younger one saw me and began screaming and crying, ‘Mama, mama!’” It’s hard to bear sometimes. But there’s a bright side. “On April 7, the older child started elementary school, and I was able to attend the ceremony. Some of the people I work with weren’t so lucky.”