A few days later, elementary schoolchildren from relatively unscathed areas came to the aid of affected people, joining adult volunteers and local residents in cleaning up the afflicted areas, where piles of soaked, mud-covered electric appliances, furniture, and other bulky household items littered the streets. S ixth-grader Shugo Mizutani of Ichinomiya City, Aichi Prefecture, came to Nishibiwajima Town, one of the areas that took the heaviest brunt of the flooding, with about a dozen Boy Scouts friends. T he town office sent Shugo and his friends to help a plumber's family, whose two-story house was inundated up to an adult's waist height on the first floor. They spent three hours bringing out mud-covered furniture and removing floorboards to rake out mud underneath, getting themselves all muddy, too. I am glad if I can make other people happy.
Children dump mud that collected in the floods into a truck.