ISHINOMAKI MISSING PEOPEL JAPAN EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI

 Thousands of families are missing loved ones almost three weeks after a powerful earthquake and tsunami devastated towns and lives along Japan’s northeast coast.
Every evening Suzuki slips under the quilt of her futon shortly after sunset around 7:00 pm because there is nothing to do in the pitch darkness.
This district of Ishinomaki still has no electricity, tap water or gas.“I don’t read newspapers, I don’t listen to the radio. They are talking about horrible things,” Suzuki, who has been a widow for years, says as she prepares to sleep on the second floor of her house.“Why do I have to know more when I’ve seen enough myself?” She wakes up as the sun rises. She goes downstairs to clear rubble left by the tsunami that smashed into the ground floor on March 11 and heaped tragedy on this quiet town in Miyagi prefecture.
It was a day when in Miyagi a man felt his mother’s hand slip out of his tight grasp, three children watched their mother being washed away, and an elderly couple vanished with their grandchild, their three bodies later found.Suzuki clears the debris inside her house, which was hit by a wave that at this point was two metres (six feet) high, against the sound of a helicopter overhead that is carrying away newly retrieved bodies.Mud covers family photos and other keepsakes, and the smell of rotten seawater with fish and kelp fills the air.
In the neighbourhood, overturned cars and ships lie scattered on the roads and in other people’s gardens. People walk under a car that is stuck between two buildings like a bridge.
Suzuki’s most important mission is not to clear up rubble but to find her 41-year-old daughter, who has been missing since the day of the disaster.
Suzuki was in the city of Sendai, some 60 kilometres (37 miles) away from her home town, when the 9.0-magnitude quake struck beneath the sea floor.
She managed to return home on the afternoon of the following day, having shared a taxi from Sendai to a place near Ishinomaki and then walked through knee-deep water amid floating bodies for seven hours.When she got home, her daughter was not in the house they have shared.“I failed to die,” Suzuki says as she ponders her pain.Throwing away her tatami mats, fridge, TV sets and furniture means nothing compared with the agony of searching for her daughter, she says.Whenever she spots earth-moving machinery clearing a mountain of rubble to the side of a road, she trails it. “Please, please do it gently. My daughter may be in there,” she asks the driver.The body of another, elderly woman was indeed found in the debris of a nearby supermarket.Many who are searching for their loved ones have experienced the painful process of feeling their hopes whittled down slowly, day by day.
They initially hope that the person is unhurt, then they think he or she isn’t home or is at a shelter, or has been injured and hospitalised.After they learn that the person’s name is not on the lists of inpatients at hospitals, they are left with the hope the person is in a coma and therefore cannot be contacted. Finally, their wish becomes only to find the person’s body.
Families visit makeshift morgues to find the last thing they want to see.There are lists of bodies, all numbered.Some are identified by the name on the papers they carried, others are anonymous and described only in sparse phrases such as “a female in her 30s. Height about 160cm” or “about three years old”.When you give the police the number of the body you want to see, you are shown its pictures.If you think it is the person you are looking for, you are led into a hall where rows of bodies are laid out in plain-wood coffins or plastic bags, with the smell of burning incense sticks in the air.People weep as they find a person they have cared for dearly or shared their lives with, now a stiff body with drenched hair, naked and in a blanket following their autopsy.In the nearby town of Higashimatsushima, a young couple sits by a coffin, which seems too big for their dead baby inside. They are in utter silence, staring vacantly into space.A line of relatives passes another coffin, and one says to the lifeless body inside: “The way you held out is great!” Identical memos, handwritten in large red letters, are left on two coffins lying side by side.

Tokyo:World Health Organisation Report

 World Health Organisation said on Monday that radiation in food after an earthquake damaged Japanese nuclear plant was more serious than previously thought, eclipsing signs of progress in a battle to avert a catastrophic meltdown in the reactors.
Engineers managed to rig power cables to all six reactors at the Fukushima complex, 240 km north of Tokyo, and started a water pump at one of them to reverse the overheating that has triggered the world’s worst nuclear crisis in 25 years.
Some workers were later evacuated from one of the most badly damaged reactors when gray smoke rose from the site. There was no immediate explanation for the smoke, but authorities had said earlier that pressure was building up at the No. 3 reactor.
The amount of smoke later receded and Japan’s nuclear safety agency said there was no significant change in radiation levels at the site.
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami left more than 21,000 people dead or missing and will cost an already beleaguered economy some $250 billion, making it the world’s costliest ever natural disaster.
However, he said there was no evidence of contaminated food from Fukushima reaching other countries.
Tap water
Japan’s health ministry has urged some residents near the plant to stop drinking tap water after high levels of radioactive iodine were detected.
Cases of contaminated vegetables and milk have already stoked anxiety despite assurances from officials that the levels are not dangerous. The government has prohibited the sale of raw milk from Fukushima prefecture and spinach from a nearby area.
There were no major reports of contaminated food in Tokyo, a city of about 13 million people. City officials however said higher-than-standard levels of iodine were found in an edible form of chrysanthemum.
Japan is a net importer of food, but has substantial exports – mainly fruit, vegetables, dairy products and seafood – with its biggest markets in Hong Kong, China and the United States.
The prospects of a nuclear power plant meltdown in the world’s third-biggest economy and its key position in global supply chains rattled investors worldwide last week and prompted rare joint currency intervention by the G7 group of rich nations to stabilise markets.
Tokyo’s markets were closed for a holiday on Monday. The Nikkei index shed 10 per cent last week, wiping $350 billion off market capitalisation, and at one point had lost as much as 20 per cent in value.
In a much-needed boost for the battered market, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said the earthquake and tsunami were an “enormous blow” but should not prompt the selling of Japanese shares. Instead, he called events a “buying opportunity”.
Situation critical at plant
At Fukushima, 300 engineers have worked around the clock inside an evacuation zone to contain the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.

Japan's nuclear crisis escalates further

 SENDAI: Japan's nuclear crisis escalated Tuesday as two more blasts and a fire rocked a quake-stricken atomic power plant, sending radiation up to dangerous levels.
Radiation around the Fukushima No.1 plant on the eastern coast had "risen considerably", Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, and his chief spokesman announced the level was now high enough to endanger human health.
In Tokyo, some 250 kilometres (155 miles) to the southwest, authorities also said that higher than normal radiation levels had been detected in the capital, the world's biggest urban area, but not at harmful levels.
Kan warned people living up to 10 kilometres (six miles) beyond a 20 km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the nuclear plant to stay indoors.
The fire, which was later reportedly extinguished, was burning in the plant's number-four reactor, he said, meaning that four out of six reactors at the facility are now in trouble.
The official death toll has risen to 2,414, police said Tuesday, but officials say at least 10,000 are likely to have perished.
The crisis at the ageing Fukushima plant has escalated daily after Friday's quake and tsunami which knocked out cooling systems.
On Saturday an explosion blew apart the building surrounding the plant's number-one reactor. On Monday, a blast hit the number-three reactor, injuring 11 people and sending plumes of smoke billowing into the sky.
Early on Tuesday a blast hit the number-two reactor. That was followed shortly after by a hydrogen explosion which started a fire at the number-four reactor.
Hashimoto said supermarkets are open but shelves are completely empty. "Many children are sick in this cold weather but pharmacies are closed. Emergency relief goods have not reached evacuation centres in the city.
Everyone is anxious and wants to get out of town. But there is no more petrol. We are afraid of using a car as we may run out of petrol."
The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Tokyo had asked for expert assistance in the aftermath of the quake which US seismologists are now measuring at 9.0-magnitude, revised up from 8.9.
But the IAEA's Japanese chief Yukiya Amano moved to calm global fears that the situation could escalate to rival the world's worst nuclear crisis at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986.
Officials have already evacuated 210,000 people in the exclusion zone around the crippled plant.
At one shelter, a young woman holding her baby told public broadcaster NHK: "I didn't want this baby to be exposed to radiation. I wanted to avoid that, no matter what."
Further north in the region of Miyagi, which took the full brunt of Friday's terrifying wall of water, rescue teams searching through the shattered debris of towns and villages have found 2,000 bodies.
And the Miyagi police chief has said he is certain more than 10,000 people perished in his prefecture.
Millions have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and facing harsh conditions with sub-zero temperatures overnight, and snow and rain forecast.
Tokyo stocks, which were punished Monday when the markets reopened, sending indexes around the world sliding, plummeted another 12 percent by early afternoon on Tuesday.
Leading risk analysis firm AIR Worldwide said the quake alone would exact an economic toll estimated at between $14.5 billion and $34.6 billion (10 billion to 25 billion euros) -- even leaving aside the effects of the tsunami.

Japan:Tokyo,Osaka earthquake,tsunami update

TOKYO: Japan instructed local authorities to start screening food for radioactivity after accidents at an earthquake-hit nuclear power plant sparked fears of wider contamination.
It is the first time Japan has set radiation limits on domestically produced food, a health ministry official said.
The limits are in line with an anti-disaster programme prepared in advance by the government's atomic power safety commission, said the official.
Limits vary depending on the type of foodstuff but have been set in consultation with internationally accepted levels and average intake in the Japanese diet.
Radioactivity leaked into the air after explosions at the Fukushima No.1 plant, where last week's quake and tsunami knocked out the reactor cooling systems.
Several Asian nations have said they will screen food imported from Japan for radiation while the European Union has called for similar checks.

OSAKA:

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake rattled Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture south of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant on Saturday, the US Geological Survey said, but no tsunami warning was issued.
The USGS said the quake struck at 6.56 pm (0956 GMT) and was centred 98 kilometres (61 miles) south of Fukushima and 142 kilometres from Tokyo.
The quake shook buildings in Tokyo, but no damage was immediately reported, public broadcaster NHK said, adding that flights at the capital’s Narita Airport were briefly suspended for safety checks before resuming.
The quake struck at a depth of 24.7 kilometres (15.3 miles).
Japan’s meteorological agency measured the quake at a magnitude of 6.1.

TOKYO:

 The number of people confirmed as dead or listed as missing by Japan’s national police agency topped 18,000 on Saturday, eight days after the massive earthquake and tsunami struck.
Hopes of finding many more survivors amid the rubble have diminished amid a cold snap that has hit Japan’s northeast, covering much of the disaster area in snow earlier this week.
The death toll has surpassed that of the 7.2-magnitude quake that struck the western Japanese port city of Kobe in 1995, killing 6,434 people.
The March 11 quake is now Japan’s deadliest natural disaster since the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 142,000 people.
The latest police figures for people missing do not include local reports from along the tsunami-hit coast of vast numbers of people unaccounted for.
The mayor of the coastal town of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture said Wednesday that the number of missing there was likely to hit 10,000, Kyodo News reported.
On Saturday, public broadcaster NHK said that around 10,000 people were unaccounted for in the port town of Minamisanriku in the same prefecture.

 

Japan's nuclear crisis

 SENDAI: Japan's nuclear crisis escalated Tuesday as two more blasts and a fire rocked a quake-stricken atomic power plant, sending radiation up to dangerous levels.
Radiation around the Fukushima No.1 plant on the eastern coast had "risen considerably", Prime Minister Naoto Kan said, and his chief spokesman announced the level was now high enough to endanger human health.
In Tokyo, some 250 kilometres (155 miles) to the southwest, authorities also said that higher than normal radiation levels had been detected in the capital, the world's biggest urban area, but not at harmful levels.
Kan warned people living up to 10 kilometres (six miles) beyond a 20 km (12-mile) exclusion zone around the nuclear plant to stay indoors.
The fire, which was later reportedly extinguished, was burning in the plant's number-four reactor, he said, meaning that four out of six reactors at the facility are now in trouble.
The official death toll has risen to 2,414, police said Tuesday, but officials say at least 10,000 are likely to have perished.
The crisis at the ageing Fukushima plant has escalated daily after Friday's quake and tsunami which knocked out cooling systems.
On Saturday an explosion blew apart the building surrounding the plant's number-one reactor. On Monday, a blast hit the number-three reactor, injuring 11 people and sending plumes of smoke billowing into the sky.
Early on Tuesday a blast hit the number-two reactor. That was followed shortly after by a hydrogen explosion which started a fire at the number-four reactor.
Hashimoto said supermarkets are open but shelves are completely empty. "Many children are sick in this cold weather but pharmacies are closed. Emergency relief goods have not reached evacuation centres in the city.
Everyone is anxious and wants to get out of town. But there is no more petrol. We are afraid of using a car as we may run out of petrol."
The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Tokyo had asked for expert assistance in the aftermath of the quake which US seismologists are now measuring at 9.0-magnitude, revised up from 8.9.

But the IAEA's Japanese chief Yukiya Amano moved to calm global fears that the situation could escalate to rival the world's worst nuclear crisis at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986.
Officials have already evacuated 210,000 people in the exclusion zone around the crippled plant.
At one shelter, a young woman holding her baby told public broadcaster NHK: "I didn't want this baby to be exposed to radiation. I wanted to avoid that, no matter what."
Further north in the region of Miyagi, which took the full brunt of Friday's terrifying wall of water, rescue teams searching through the shattered debris of towns and villages have found 2,000 bodies.
And the Miyagi police chief has said he is certain more than 10,000 people perished in his prefecture.
Millions have been left without water, electricity, fuel or enough food and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and facing harsh conditions with sub-zero temperatures overnight, and snow and rain forecast.
Tokyo stocks, which were punished Monday when the markets reopened, sending indexes around the world sliding, plummeted another 12 percent by early afternoon on Tuesday.
Leading risk analysis firm AIR Worldwide said the quake alone would exact an economic toll estimated at between $14.5 billion and $34.6 billion (10 billion to 25 billion euros) -- even leaving aside the effects of the tsunami.