Watch This Anime and Raise Money for Earthquake Relief in Japan

2024 had a rough start for Japan, beginning with a 7.6 earthquake at 16:10 on New Year's Day in Ishikawa Prefecture. The earthquake did a significant amount of damage and even caused a minor tsunami along the coastline. Less than a month later, Ishikawa Prefecture is still rebuilding and recovering, and now there is something special and easy that anime fans can do to help.

While not everyone has the means to donate money directly or go to Ishikawa, Japan to volunteer, there is something that can be done, at least for anime fans within Japan. The anime Hanasaku Iroha has been made available on YouTube to watch in its entirety, and watching it will help raise money for earthquake relief. The anime is the perfect choice for this campaign for a few reasons, and hopefully, the intended effect will help.

As stated above, the earthquake on January 1st, 2024 was in Ishikawa Prefecture, which is on the Western coast of Japan near South Korea. That part of Japan is not on the usual tourist circuit, so foreigners may not know much about it. The main city in Ishikawa is Kanazawa, a historical city much like Kyoto that used to be home to samurai, and still has districts of the city that maintain their Edo Period appearance. There are still even geisha there, and plenty of traditional tea houses.

That brings us to Hanasaku Iroha, an anime from 2010 that you may or may not have heard of before. The anime follows a teenage girl named Ohana (literally, her name means flower) who has to move from the big city of Tokyo to the Japanese countryside near Kanazawa with her grandmother when her mother runs away with her boyfriend. She ends up working at her grandmother's traditional hot spring, where she has to overcome her difficulties with the other employees and grow up herself.

Not that many anime are set in Kanazawa, let alone the countryside of Ishikawa. That makes Hanasaku Iroha in the perfect position to represent the prefecture now that everyone is focused on it right now. It