At 10:50 p.m. last Monday night, a bus carrying 42 people, mostly employees of the Shangri-La Hotel Tokyo, left the underground car park of the luxury hotel adjacent to JR Tokyo Station.
Their mission: A one-day volunteer trip to the city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, where efforts to recover from the devastating tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 are stalling, and where 1,012 people are still missing, presumably swept out to sea or buried under the debris.
Having spent the night on the bus, the hotel's multinational team of volunteers, including its general manager, Wolfgang Krueger, arrived in the city's Watanoha residential district at 6 a.m.