In the News / Restoring public documents in Philippines
January 9, 2014
Masafumi Taga
Isamu Sakamoto, 65, landed on the central Philippines island of Leyte on Dec. 5, a month after it was severely damaged by Typhoon Haiyan. More than 1 million official documents, such as original records of land deeds and drivers’ licenses, were soaked in mud when the provincial government office and governmental institutions were flooded by muddy water.
Faced with a situation “beyond my imagination,” he thought: “Two or three years will hardly be enough to restore it all.”
As he began cleaning the documents, he also began teaching students and teachers at a local university on the island how to do document restoration.
At the age of 32, Sakamoto left an organization to support agricultural business and went to Denmark to study. There, he encountered state-of-the-art technologies for paper conservation. He saw various special techniques such as repairing moth-eaten paper by soaking it in a pulp solution.
Upon returning to Japan, he launched a company to repair public documents. For three years beginning in 2001, he taught the conservation of cultural property, such as historical documents, at Kibi International University in Okayama Prefecture. Sakamoto also restored public documents in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.
In Leyte, he has been appealing to the world through his blog, with photos showing the dismal state of the island, which lacks the minimal equipment required to prevent huge numbers of documents from decaying, such as a large refrigerator to freeze them. Keeping in mind his belief that document restoration is the first step to rebuilding disaster victims’ lives, he says he will go back to the site and work on long-term humanitarian support this year.
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