Miyagi girl at the U.N.

March 5, 2013

High school girl from disaster zone to give speech at U.N.

http://mainichi.jp/graph/2013/03/05/20130305p2a00m0na013000c/001.html

An 18-year-old girl from a tsunami-devastated Miyagi Prefecture town will have the ears of the world on March 6 when she gives a speech in front of a special United Nations session in New York City.

Honoka Miura, a student at Motoyoshi Hibiki High School in the town of Kesennuma, will speak at the Special Session on Water and Disasters, stressing the need to tap teenagers' ideas to rebuild Japan's Tohoku region. Miura has spearheaded a campaign to engage youth in reconstruction planning in her own town.

"I want to deliver a message calling for the use of young people's power," Miura said before leaving on March 4 to make her speech, which will also be attended by Crown Prince Naruhito.

Miura's Minamisanriku home was washed away by the March 11, 2011 tsunami. She fled to higher ground with her family, where she saw young children looking very sad. Then a first-year high school student, Miura was also a "junior leader" for the local children. Thinking that she could "do something" to help the distraught kids, she sang songs and read them stories, and the kids even began calling her "principal."

As disaster recovery began, Miura and her friends talked about how they could get the junior leaders in on the reconstruction of Minamisanriku. Backed by a non-governmental organization, she conducted a survey of young children and found that they, too, wanted to get involved.

In June 2012, she presented a proposal to Minamisanriku Mayor Hitoshi Sato featuring a "community center complete with a cafe." With the proposal, Miura wanted to convey her desire to help people "restore the human connections transcending age that existed before the disaster but that fell apart in temporary housing complexes." Her activity caught the attention of United Nations officials, setting the stage for her to report on her own experiences at U.N. headquarters.