SA medicine men go East

Bafana Mahlangu and Ronnie Medupe get a kick out of putting a smile on the face of people who are desperately unhappy.

The two South Africans are a long way from home, but their audience, in the makeshift community hall of a temporary housing project in Yamamoto, in northeastern Japan, couldn't be more appreciative.

Mahlangu, Medupe and the two young Japanese men on stage with them are part of Drum Cafe, a world-famous interactive music events company founded in South Africa. It is staging therapeutic drumming sessions for the survivors of last year's devastating earthquake and tsunami in the Miyagi, Fukushima and Iwate prefectures.

Their audience in Yamamoto is a mix of the very young and the old. All have either lost loved ones or been displaced by the wall of water - as high as 7m in some areas - that engulfed homes, farms and towns across a 400km swathe of Japan's northeastern coast on March 11 last year, killing almost 16000 people.

Most of them have lost everything and must now live in cramped temporary homes made from containers and prefabricated panels. The Yamamoto centre houses about 500 people.

And yet they are having the time of their lives as Mahlangu leads them in a team drumming session in a hall. They hammer their West African djembe drums with gusto, clapping their hands and swaying.

They erupt with laughter as Mahlangu counts down each drumbeat in Japanese and then deliberately tricks them by missing a beat.

''We are here to help people who are stressed after the disaster, to bring a smile to their life'' says Mahlangu, 32, who is from Katlehong, east of Johannesburg.

''We have been to all the schools and temporary shelters [in the affected areas]."

Mahlangu, a former soccer player, joined Drum Cafe 10 years ago and has travelled to New York, Australia and China with Drumstruck, the group's renowned drumming production, to offer his kind of help.

Drum Cafe is working with international NGO Plan Japan, which brings emergency aid to developing countries but switched its attention to Japan after the quake and tsunami.

The natural disasters also triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima No1 nuclear reactor, sparking mass evacuations - and anxiety among survivors.

A great many people in the affected regions continue to live under constant stress and psychologists say it is important for victims to share their emotions.

''One of the purposes of the drumming sessions is to make people smile and get together - it's a team-building experience,'' said one of the organisers, Plan Japan's Mina Funakoshi.

''After the sessions we have tea parties and people open up about their issues.''

The Japanese government has set aside about R1.75 -trillion for the reconstruction of the region.

• Jepson was in Japan as a guest of the Japanese government