Plus Alpha, a cram school in Minami-Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, is one of the recipients of those books. It uses the secondhand books in English grammar class, which were donated from all across the country and collected by Sankousho Takkyubin.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose books are really helpful because it\u2019s hard for me to buy them,\u201d said Kana Ishii, 16, a second-year student at a high school in the city, who was studying at the cram school. She evacuated to Niigata Prefecture and Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, after the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.\u2019s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. Her mother became jobless for a time.<\/p>\n
The requested books are sent to individual students and cram schools in devastated areas for free.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis service helps keep the financial burden low on families, whose incomes became unstable after the nuclear crisis started,\u201d said Plus Alpha head Hideyuki Kurosawa, 33.<\/p>\n
Hiromi Sato, 42, donated books from a cram school she runs, hoping to help the students in the disaster areas. Shunsuke Kiyotoki, 23, a senior at Waseda University, collected more than 500 books by putting up flyers on campus in May. \u201cI thought it would be a nice thing to do since people can help without traveling to disaster-stricken areas,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The group has received such encouraging responses as, \u201cMy child was happy to receive a book of old exam questions used by the school at the top of our list,\u201d and \u201cI passed the exam of my first-choice school.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akashio and other members of Sankousho Takkyubin were worried that their activities would affect the business of bookstores in devastated areas.<\/p>\n
Since March of last year, the volunteer group has begun to cooperate with a firm purchasing and selling used books online. The group has started selling the books it has collected and is using the profits to buy brand-new books at bookstores in quake-hit areas. They are planning to host a campus tour to various universities, inviting about 20 high school students from Minami-Soma to the Tokyo metropolitan area.<\/p>\n
Currently, about 80 students at 12 universities in the Kansai region and Tokyo are involved in Sankousho Takkyubin\u2019s activities.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll do my best to support middle and high school students in devastated areas who want to study,\u201d said Hiroki Tominaga, 21, a fourth-year student at Aoyama Gakuin University who has taken over the head of the volunteer group.<\/p>\n
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