Japan 8.8 earthquake & Tsunami

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

DEVASTATED Yoshie Murakami tenderly takes the hands of her dead mother after finding her buried in rubble near her home yesterday.

She gently holds the dusty fingers encrusted with m&d from the tsunami that swept the old lady to her death.

And, sobbing quietly, she knows she could soon face even more heartbreak.

For her 23-year-old daughter has not been seen or heard of since a wall of water virtually wiped Rikuzentakata from the map on Friday.

Yoshie's nightmare is one being repeated countless times across this city that once housed 24,000.

In the town of Onawaga, northern Japan, Yoshikatsu Hiratsuka was seen crying as he grieved in front of rubble that had buried his mother AND his wife.

Hiratsuka sat weeping near his dead family crying out: "Sorry, sorry" that he couldn't save them from the tsunami.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

As temporary housing goes up, Japan's tsunami survivors wonder when they'll be able to go home

But like more than 400,000 others staying in shelters since a powerful tsunami plowed through their homes 10 days ago, the 73-year-old has no idea when she'll be able to. Rebuilding Japan's northeast coast is expected to take years, and the monumental effort is not even close to beginning.

Instead, another phase is slowly getting off the ground: the construction of prefabricated homes as temporary housing for the displaced.

"We're anxious to leave here," Yamaguchi said, sitting with her husband on a woven mat in a middle-school gym that has been their home since the town of Rikuzentakata was flattened by the raging torrent of water on March 11.

On Monday, construction workers outside the school screwed in the corrugated aluminum rooftop of one of the first temporary homes to spring up: a metal-sided box raised on wooden stilts above a muddy soccer field.

The house is one of 135 that will be built at the school by the Iwate provincial government, and one of thousands that will go up in the coming months outside other shelters scattered across Rikuzentakata's hilly outskirts. Residents will likely stay in them for a couple of years until more permanent homes are ready.

"It's simple and easy to feed people," Yamaguchi said, referring to the meals prepared daily at her shelter, where laundry hangs in classrooms. "But the question everybody is asking is, when can we go home? We want to know how they plan to rebuild this town."

So far, there are no answers.

The epic task of removing the debris must be completed first, and firefighters and soldiers are still removing bodies from the rubble. In Rikuzentakata, bulldozers began demolishing a few uninhabitable homes Monday. The steel claw of one earth-moving machine ripped off a green rooftop and dropped it in a mountain of twisted beams.

Elsewhere in the rubble, one woman stood, mouth agape, over a rectangular sheet of white metal that had been crushed to half its original size. "This is the front door of our house," she said in disbelief. Only a square concrete foundation remained.

The rest was carried away by the tsunami as it pushed more than three miles (five kilometres) up a river. When the wave receded, it left a m&d-covered plain of wrecked cars and nail-studded wooden planks, mixed in with what once made up lives here: smashed pianos, soiled picture albums, torn shoes.

As authorities collate the casualties, the toll steadily rises. Japanese authorities say more than 8,600 people are confirmed dead and 13,200 are missing.

"It's all so hard to believe," said Tsutomu Nakai, 61, a former secretary general of Rikuzentakata's chamber of commerce who runs the shelter where Yamaguchi is staying — a hilltop junior high-school housing nearly 1,000 people.

Nakai, too, wonders when he'll be able to go home. The hardest thing, he said, is the sudden dependence on charity. He has no identification, no credit cards, no money. He wonders what difference it would make anyway — even the banks were swept away. The charcoal-grey sweater he is wearing was given to him by a friend.

"I have trouble sleeping," he said. "I want to believe this isn't real, but it is."

He said he would rebuild, though he was unsure how. "I was born here. I will spend the rest of my life trying to rebuild this place," he said.

Some say it's too dangerous to live next to the water.

"I can never see myself living here again," 75-year-old Minoru Sato said in Onagawa, a harbour town to the south, as he picked through remnants of his shattered apartment. He found a photo of himself on a ski trip and stuffed it into a plastic bag.

Kadzuhiko Kimuri, another Onagawa resident, said some towns would never be the same. "I don't see how they can ever rebuild it. I think most people will never come back — especially not the young generation," he said. "There weren't many jobs here for them, and now there are none."

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

With floodwaters finally gone, a Japan town searches for tsunami victims
Days after the quake and tsunami, a farm town finally begins a grisly task in a once-flooded rice field. 'These aren't faceless victims; I know most of these people,' one searcher says.

Nakanosawa, Japan— They covered the body with a child's blanket, a fluffy blue-green cloak decorated with white lilies. Beneath the cloth was a man, maybe in his 40s, missing his right arm from the elbow, a final insult to one of the countless victims of this agricultural town's tsunami nightmare.

On a warm late-winter morning, four recovery workers bent low, slowly lifting the corpse in silent deference, before splashing through the muck and ooze of the rural rice field toward the road.

On Sunday, the ritual was repeated again and again, at least a dozen times, as teams — many in hazmat gowns — finally had an opportunity to reach the bodies of friends and neighbors that had languished in a sea of m&d and wreckage since the earthquake and tsunami struck March 11.

On this day the floodwaters at last receded, giving Nakanosawa a chance to collect its own.

"Before today, this field was an ocean," said volunteer officer Hideaki Suzuki, gesturing with a hand sheathed in a blue surgical glove.

Nakanosawa, 220 miles north of Tokyo in isolated Iwate prefecture, is one of many coastal towns in northeastern Japan that have been decimated by nature's mayhem. A few have been swept out to sea — people, houses, cars and all.

Others, like this farm community of 23,000, are reeling from a one-two earthquake-tsunami punch from which many here wonder whether they will ever recover. The ranks of the missing in Nakanosawa number 1,800. Authorities have recovered 700 bodies, but have been hobbled by a lack of resources, including gas and electricity, as well as by floodwaters that had stubbornly refused to recede.

The weather and water finally relented. Days ago, the field, nearly three miles inland, was covered with a film of snow, but on Sunday the sun shone through, bringing a hint of spring that belied a grisly task.

"These aren't faceless victims; I know most of these people," Suzuki said as he directed a line of traffic that included passing drivers who covered their mouths in shock and teenage gawkers taking pictures on their cellphone cameras. "Just a few moments ago, they carried out a volunteer fireman. It's hard to watch. But it's worse when you know them."

The day's salvage effort focused on the rice field along Route 45, a onetime thoroughfare for families on their way to a nearby beach, now transformed into a grim avenue of death.

The field, several miles long, at places a mile wide, sits littered with detritus: parts of upside-down houses, trucks and cars carried here from who knows where. Here and there lay snapped-off tree trunks, shards of wood, blankets, car tires, dolls, an ice chest, a wooden ornamental sake bucket, a refrigerator door and a book called "Setting Free the Bears."

The adjacent country road, mostly cleared of wreckage, weaved between mountains of debris at some places 40 feet high, from which the tail ends of cars protruded like Christmas tree ornaments. There was a yellow crane, toppled on its side, that was too big to move, so motorists just swerved around it.

At first light Sunday, the search teams fanned out into the field, picking their way along paths marked by muddy footprints, crossing small inlets of standing water over bridges made from wooden doors and window sills.

Workers said little as they went about their task. A parade of men in white suits walked in formation, sweating in the sun. At one point, the first in line sighed and dropped a heavy portable generator as the others passed in silence.

Amid a sickening smell of decay, the crews found so many bodies that they ran out of space to store them. At one point they stopped carrying their finds to the roadside, instead marking them before moving on to the next. Submerged for days, many of the corpses had simply fallen apart, forcing workers to collect what limbs they could find.

Suzuki watched from the roadside, shaking his head in disbelief. The 27-year-old truck driver and his wife and 1-year-old son were safe, but he couldn't just sit in front of the TV gawking at the nonstop images of disaster. He volunteered.

"Who knows where these bodies came from?" said Suzuki, in hip boots, a blue kimono, white belt and helmet. "There was nothing to stop the water. Now this place is a disaster zone."

Nearby, a dozen workers congregated on the road as their counterparts carried out two bodies at once, both covered by the same blue tarp, the men supporting their load solemnly, as though part of a funeral procession.

"I don't think they'll ever replant this field," Suzuki said. "They'll let it sit fallow. They'll be afraid to find more bodies."

In this part of Japan, it seems as though nearly everyone has lost a loved one. At a nearby communications center, Futoshi Toba, mayor of Rikuzentakata, looked wan with shock as he consulted with workers.

After 18 years in office, Toba finds the town he has come to love has been crippled and himself with it. His wife, Kumi, is missing in the floodwaters. The last time he saw her was the morning of the quake when he left home for work. When he returned, there was nothing left of his home but its foundation.

Now his wife's parents have taken up the search for her remains. Toba, 46, acknowledges that he's too busy keeping his community from coming apart at the seams.

"Many people here have lost family. I'm not the only one," he said, his eyes glassy. "We all have to keep working. We have to be strong. Right now, there is no space in my brain to consider the future. There is no room to grieve, not yet."

The same could not be said for other residents. At a nearby middle school, one of four collection spots for Nakanosawa's recovered bodies, old women wiped their eyes as they arrived to search the list of victims for their relatives — a husband, son-in-law or an infant granddaughter.

Mayumi Yoshiaki came with a friend to find the remains of her 56-year-old husband, Sato. The construction worker was seen by friends being carried off by the floodwaters.

"This is the first day that I could come out and look for him," she said. "We have no gas to drive the car. I'm not sure if he is here, but I will keep looking."

She joined a small crowd that studied the names of recovered bodies posted to the school's cafeteria window. Her body slumped as she scoured the names. Her Sato was not there, so another would-be widow walked away in silence.

Those who identified relatives or friends showed up with wooden caskets to carry them home. All day long, the cars and trucks pulled up to the school, moving slowly across the dirt soccer field.

Just as one body was claimed, a new one would arrive, delivered by salvage workers. Inside the gymnasium, a row of covered bodies rested beneath a Japanese flag on a wall, with flowers placed beside each.

In the late afternoon, a refrigerated truck backed up to the delivery port and several men carried out the latest of Nakanosawa's deceased. Moments later, a worker emerged to dispose of the shroud that had been used to cover the body, throwing it atop a growing pile of scores of colorful blankets.

Then he disappeared back inside.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

Together, but apart at Japanese refugee centre

RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan — The sign on the wall of the school hall that is now home to hundreds of Japan's tsunami homeless reads: "Let's all support each other. One for all and all for one."

The rescue centre at Daiichi middle school in Rikuzentakata is testament to that spirit of standing together in the face of an incomprehensible tragedy.

Staffed by 21 volunteers, many of whom lost homes and family members themselves when the devastating power of the sea crashed into the city on Japan's northeast coast, it runs on hope and determination.

"We are really short of water and food. We don't have enough toilets either," said Tsutomu Nakai who was director of the local chamber of commerce and is now in charge of relief efforts for about 1,000 people sleeping here.

"We need fuel for the heaters and we are short of blankets. But without our asking, people are helping out; they are cleaning the toilets, the corridors and the sports hall or they are cooking for others," he said.

"People are doing the things they are best at to help the whole community out."

Nakai said it would be normal for people to complain after what has happened, with many along the coast having lost everything when the March 11 tsunami -- triggered by a massive earthquake -- struck.

"I'm not sure if it's a characteristic of Japanese people or just the people of Rikuzentakata, but no one is complaining. Everybody wants to do their best," he said.

The school was one of the many public buildings earmarked as a refuge by a government painfully aware that at any time nature could unleash its might on a country regularly rocked by earthquakes.

In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, people gathered at the site.

That evening, volunteers were sought to represent each affected area of the city and Nakai set up his headquarters in the school's home economics classroom.

The cavernous school hall serves as the main sleeping area, with families or couples allocated a makeshift mattress around which they have gathered the few personal belongings they may have salvaged.

One room serves as a Red Cross medical centre, while another has become a dentist's surgery.

Classrooms have been turned into creches or set aside for the elderly and infirm.

Volunteers sort boxes of clothes according to gender and size while others take charge of getting food to their fellow refugees.

Honami Suzuki had just graduated from high school when her home was reduced to splinters. She now spends her days helping out at the shelter.

"When I'm free I go down to the town to look around my house for useful things. I found these mugs, which we're short of at the school," she said.

There is a definite sense of camaraderie among those who have thrown themselves into volunteering. But for others there is an obvious emptiness.

"There's nothing to do," said Rinzo Chikutsu. "We only have newspapers to read."

Juichi Kanno paces through the hall trying his best to comfort his fretful great-grandson, 17-month-old Yushi, too young to understand that his mother is probably never coming back.

"I don't do anything," Kanno said, when asked how he fills his time. "I just sit."

His wife Tokiko added: "It's awful, but everybody is in the same boat.

"You can't complain," she said, her eyes filling with tears.

That quiet despair and the vacant stare that comes with it can be seen all around the school hall.

The lucky children skip among the mattresses or sit and pick out a tune on a guitar. Others can't bear to leave the comforting embrace of a grandparent or an aunt.

Outside, men who have worked hard their whole lives to save the money to build a home that no longer exists stand listlessly around a brazier, smoking cigarettes and warming their hands against the cold, talking only in hushed tones.

Takayoshi Murakami kneels on his bed staring into the distance. He has not seen his wife since the day of the disaster.

"She is still missing," he said blankly.

Occasionally, refugees shuffle hopefully up to the school's reception area where noticeboards display lists of people known to have escaped the waves.

One by one they scour the sheets of names, hoping they have been updated or that they had mis-read the list the first several times they looked.

Then one by one they shuffle away again, back to the hall to be alone with their hopes and their fears among the other evacuees.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

Fishing bitch, dare to write her betray on internet some more, no shame.

US Evacuee: 'I Left My Japanese Husband

With fears of nuclear fallout swirling after Japan's earthquake and tsunami, American newlywed Brooke Lathram was forced to make a heart-wrenching decision: She evacuated her home in Tokyo and left her Japanese husband behind.

Lathram, 29, spent two agonizing days deliberating over what to do and then bought a last-minute ticket on a Delta flight out of Tokyo last Thursday. In the end, her uncertainty over the unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, wrecked by the March 11 quake and tsunami, got the better of her.

"We don't know much about what happens with spent nuclear fuel. ... I thought it was sort of uncharted territory. Let's say there's just a 1 percent chance -- even if it's that low, I don't want to be around," Lathram told AOL News via Skype from her parents' home in Memphis, Tenn. She described her deliberations and fears in a series of interviews from her home in Tokyo before she left and then again once she'd landed home in America.

American newlywed Brooke Lathram, shown with her Japanese husband, had to evacuate Tokyo and fly to the U.S., leaving him behind.
"My husband said, 'I can move a lot more quickly by myself than if I'm worrying about you as well,' and I understood that," said Lathram, who has diabetes. "I'm a burden on him and the country. .... I'm one extra mouth to feed. Protecting myself is actually helping the people around me as well."

More workers were evacuated from the Fukushima nuclear plant today, as gray smoke rose from one of its reactor units. Japanese authorities also urged nearby residents not to drink tap water, after radioactive iodine was detected in the water supply for a least one village. Police also said today that more than 18,000 people are believed to have died in the quake and tsunami. And the World Bank estimated the cost of rebuilding to hit $235 billion.

Lathram flew Sunday to New York, where she plans to work out of her company's office. Her husband continues to stay at the couple's apartment in Tokyo, some 150 miles south of the stricken plant, as daily life returns almost to normal in the Japanese capital, 10 days after the deadly quake. He's scheduled to begin a new job there in April and doesn't want to jeopardize that. But he has has relatives in towns even farther south, and he could evacuate to that area if needed.

"He's a very resourceful person. If anything happens, he can pack up his things quite quickly and get to his family's house in Nagoya or Osaka," Lathram said. "But I'm ultimately someone my husband and my husband's family would worry about. Both of them told me to leave, and my husband said he would feel better if I did, and I believed him. I think he really meant that," she said. "So when I broke it down to kind of a moral issue, I thought of it as, What is really the best thing to do for the people around me?"

Because of Lathram's diabetes, the shortages of food and medicine in Tokyo in the days immediately following the 9.0-magnitude earthquake were especially scary.

"Let's say something happens -- that 1 percent chance -- and everyone really has to get out of Tokyo, and it's frantic. I don't just have to worry about basic food supplies, I also have to worry that all my medicine is with me, that wherever we go next, there won't be any medical shortages," Lathram said. "It's not a huge thing, but it's just another thing that my husband would be worrying about, and that I would be worrying about if we had to leave quickly."

The U.S. Embassy arranged more than 600 seats for Americans on buses evacuating the quake-stricken city of Sendai to Tokyo, and it has also sent charter flights to ferry families of U.S. diplomats and other personnel out of Japan. It's unclear how many Americans have also fled the country on commercial flights, as Lathram did.

Many Americans living in Japan also vowed to stay in their adopted home, and some joined the earthquake relief effort.

"There are quite a lot of us [Americans] in Tokyo that they would have to evacuate," Jessica Ocheltret, from Arizona, also told AOL News. "It depends on how bad the situation gets."

Ocheltret, 30, also spoke to AOL News via Skype from Tokyo, and she said it would be difficult for her to leave, since her Japanese fiance and friends are all there.

"I live here, my life is here, and to just up and leave when things get tough seems a bit of a weak character," she said. "But if the Japanese government and the U.S. government were saying that U.S. citizens should definitely evacuate, I would follow their instructions."

The U.S. government has cautioned Americans against visiting Japan and encouraged those already there to consider leaving, but so far any evacuation orders are only voluntary.

Ocheltret said that even though she plans to stay, she understood the decisions some Americans are making to leave Tokyo. "People have their personal situations -- if they have small children, or a medical condition, I understand that," Ocheltret said. "In a way, that makes it more difficult for them. If you live here, your life is here."

Such is the case for Lathram, who said she was "really kinda freaking out" in those difficult days last week while she decided whether to leave her husband behind in Japan. "I didn't want to leave, and I was going back and forth about whether it was really necessary," she said.

Upon landing in Detroit, she said a passport agent asked her inquisitively about what it was like in Japan, amid the quake and nuclear worries.

"My husband is still there, and I bought a ticket back for April 10," Lathram said. "I'm hoping everything will be fine and that I'll use it."

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

A young Japanese survivor of the earthquake and tsunami searches her family home for any belongings she can find in the leveled city of Minamisanriku, in northeastern Japan, Tuesday March 15, 2011

A woman greets a baby as she reunites with her relatives at a shelter for the first time after an earthquake and tsunami in Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture, northeast Japan March 15, 2011.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

A South Korean rescue worker sits on scattered beer cans as his team stops searching after the radioactive warning in an area hit by an earthquake and tsunami in Sendai, northeastern Japan March 15, 2011. Japan warned radioactive levels had become "significantly" higher around a quake-stricken nuclear power plant on Tuesday after explosions at two reactors, and the French embassy said a low level radioactive wind could reach Tokyo by the evening.

A resident recovers family photos from his destroyed shop house in the harbor Tuesday, March 15, 2011, in Soma city, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, four days after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the country's north east coast.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

An injured girl is brought to a Japanese Red Cross hospital after being evacuated from the area hit by tsunami in Ishinomaki March 13, 2011. Japan faced a growing humanitarian crisis on Sunday after its devastating earthquake and tsunami left millions of people without water, electricity, homes or heat.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

A technician in protective gear scans for signs of radiation on a child at a makeshift facility that screens, cleanses and isolates people with high radiation levels in Nihonmatsu, northern Japan March 14, 2011. Japan battled on Monday to prevent a nuclear catastrophe and to care for millions of people without power or water in its worst crisis since World War Two, after a massive earthquake and tsunami that are feared to have killed more than 10,000 people.

A family who evacuated from their home eats breakfast at an evacuation centre in Sendai, northeastern Japan March 14, 2011, after a massive earthquake and tsunami.

postnew · Mar 21, 2011

In this photo released by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), gray smoke rises from Unit 3 of the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, Monday, March 21, 2011. Official says the TEPCO temporarily evacuated its workers from the site. At left is Unit 2 and at right is Unit 4.

singveld · Mar 21, 2011

Sumi Abe, 80, is rescued from the wreckage of her home nine days after the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, March 20, 2011.

Rescue workers carry Jin Abe, 16, from the rubble, March 20,2011.

Emergency workers transport 16-year-old Jin Abe to a hospital after he and his grandmother were rescued from quake rubble in Ishinomaki, Japan March 20,2011

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Japan 8.8 earthquake & Tsunami

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