HIGASHI-MATSUSHIMA, Japan—Across northeastern Japan, the colossal physical devastation wrought by Friday’s tsunami humbles all adjectives.
Yet the colossal physical havoc might be matched by the wrecked lives left in the tsunami’s wake.
Outside the public gymnasium here, on a hillock about a kilometer from the Pacific Ocean, 216 sheets of printer paper were stuck on a wall, one for every body brought to the gymnasium so far, some with names, most bearing only physical descriptions.
Hands anxiously clutched to mouths, people pored over them until, finding nothing, most turned away in relief. Syunsuke Doi, 22, did not.
At noon, Doi heaved great sobs on the gymnasium’s concrete steps, head in hands.
He was at work when the wave drove inland on Friday. His childhood sweetheart and wife, Sayaka, 22, was at home with their 2-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son.
Searchers found their bodies over the weekend, in the wave-battered family car in which they were trying to escape.
“I’d been looking everywhere, but I couldn’t find them,” Doi said. “I didn’t want to believe it, but I came here—and it’s my wife and my children.”
At the gymnasium, as many citizens were reporting lost relatives as were searching the roll of those confirmed dead.
The death toll from last week’s twin disaster jumped on Tuesday as police confirmed the number killed had topped 2,400, though that grim news was overshadowed by a deepening nuclear crisis. Officials have said previously that at least 10,000 people may have died in Miyagi prefecture alone.
Millions of people spent a fourth night with little food, water or heating in near-freezing temperatures.
Though Japanese officials have refused to speculate on the death toll, Indonesian geologist Hery Harjono, who dealt with the 2004 Asian tsunami, said it would be “a miracle really if it turns out to be less than 10,000” dead.
The 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people—of which only 184,000 bodies were found.
Harjono noted that many bodies in Japan may have been sucked out to sea or remain trapped beneath rubble as they did in Indonesia’s hardest-hit Aceh province.
But he also stressed that Japan’s infrastructure, high-level of preparedness and city planning to keep houses away from the shore could mitigate its human losses.
Humanitarian crisis deepens
Even so, the humanitarian crisis was deepening by the day.
“People are exhausted both physically and mentally,” said Yasunobu Sasaki, the principal of a school converted into a shelter in Rikuzentakata, a nearly flattened village of 24,500 people in far-northern Iwate prefecture.
Sanitation was also a problem. The shelter has fewer than 10 temporary toilets and several makeshift wooden toilets with a hole in the ground.
“That’s not enough for the around 1,800 people here,” Sasaki said, adding that medicine for the chronically ill was dwindling.
Local officials have lost contact with about 30,000 people, according to a survey by Kyodo News, raising concerns of a dramatic increase in the number of dead as authorities grapple with Japan’s biggest emergency since World War II.
Roads and rail, power and ports have been crippled across much of the northeast of Japan’s main island Honshu, hampering relief efforts. The government has mobilized 100,000 soldiers to deliver food, water and fuel and around 70 countries have offered assistance.
But the increased radiation caused the US Navy to temporarily pull an aircraft carrier group from the coast while major international relief agencies have been kept out of the radiation hot zones.
The Japanese Red Cross has deployed about 90 medical teams who are trying to provide the basics in care for 430,000 in remote towns spread along the coast.
Battered, bruised, hungry
“It is the elderly who have been hit the hardest,” Patrick Fuller of the International Federation of Red Cross said, in a memo written from Ishinomaki, one of several coastal cities brutalized by the swirling wall of waves.
“The tsunami engulfed half the town and many lie shivering uncontrollably under blankets. They are suffering from hypothermia having been stranded in their homes without water or electricity,” Fuller said.
Hundreds of foreign rescue workers are assisting quake and tsunami victims but the United Nations does not plan to mount a bigger relief operation unless requested, UN aid officials said.
All along the ravaged northeastern coast, there were similar scenes of desperation and destruction. The wall of water transported homes inland, swept ships into fields, upended cars and left trains scattered across fields like toys.
Toshiyuki Suzuki, 61, has a heart pacemaker and takes seven kinds of medicine a day. He lost all of them when the waves swept away his home, along with his 91-year-old father and 25-year-old son. He cannot go to hospitals because there is no gasoline at local fuel stations.
“I am having problems with walking and with my heartbeat. I absolutely need medicine,” he said. Reports from The New York Times News Service, Associated Press and Reuters