Japan: Bodies wash in, dashing hopes of survivors

Natori, Japan: The tsunami that barrelled into northeast Japan on Friday was so murderous and efficient that not much was left when search-and-rescue teams finally reached Natori on Monday. There was searching, but not much rescuing. There was, essentially, nobody left to rescue.

The mournful scene here in Natori, a farm and fishing town that has been reduced to a vast muddy plain, was similar to rescue efforts in other communities along the coast as police, military and foreign assistance teams poked through splintered houses and piles of wreckage. The death toll from the 8.9-magnitude quake -- the strongest in Japan's seismically turbulent history -- continued to climb, inexorably so, as officials uncovered more bodies. By Monday afternoon, the toll stood at more than 1,800 confirmed dead and 2,300 missing. Police officials, however, said it was certain that more than 10,000 had died.

Police teams, for example, found about 700 bodies that had washed ashore on a scenic peninsula in Miyagi Prefecture, close to the epicentre of the quake that unleashed the tsunami. The bodies washed out as the tsunami retreated. Now they are washing back in.

A string of crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima also continued to bedevil engineers who were desperately trying to cool them down. The most urgent worries concerned the failures of two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where workers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had already leaked.

The building housing Reactor No. 1 exploded on Saturday, and a hydrogen build-up blew the roof off the No. 3 reactor facility on Monday morning. The blast did not appear to have harmed the reactor itself, government and utility officials said, but six workers were injured in the blasts.

Later Monday, Reactor No. 2 was losing cooling function and workers were pumping in water, according to Yukio Edano, the chief government spokesman.

In the city of Fukushima, gas stations, grocery stores and restaurants were closed, and convenience stores had no food or drinks to sell -- only cigarettes. Red Cross water tankers dispensed drinking water to Fukushima residents who waited in long, orderly lines.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan described the triple whammy -- the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear troubles -- as Japan's "worst crisis since World War II."

Some 350,000 people have reportedly become homeless and were staying in shelters.

Because of the Fukushima nuclear plants being lost to the national power grid, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the plants, announced plans for rotating blackouts across the region to conserve electricity -- the first controlled power cuts in Japan in 60 years.

Tokyo-area residents worriedly followed a series of confusing statements from the power company about the location and duration of the power cuts. Just after 5 p.m., the utility said it had already started cutting power to parts of two prefectures -- Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, and Shizuoka, south of the capital.

Tokyo residents had struggled to get to work Monday as a number of important commuter rail lines ran limited schedules. Six lines featuring Japan's famous shinkansen, or bullet trains, were not running. Six major department stores also closed for the day because staffers were unable to reach the city.

Public conservation of electricity was significant enough, the company said, that the more drastic blackout scenarios were being scaled back. Still, anticipating deep and lengthy power cuts, many people were stocking up on candles, water, instant noodles and batteries for radios.

Toyota also announced it was closing all its factories until at least Thursday.

Japan's $5 trillion economy, the third-largest in the world, was threatened with severe disruptions and partial paralysis, and the collective anxiety caused a rout in the Japanese stock market. The main Nikkei index fell 6.2 per cent in Monday's trading, the worst drop in three years. The broader Topix, or Tokyo Stock Price index, dropped 7.4 per cent.

Worried about the severe strains on banking and financial systems, the Bank of Japan pumped about $180 billion into the economy on Monday, and the government considered an emergency tax increase to help finance relief and recovery work.

Thomas Byrne, a senior vice president with Moody's Investors Service, said Monday that his firm saw the Japanese economy as "having the ability to absorb the shock over time."

"In general, large, wealthy economies have demonstrated a capacity to absorb localized natural disasters," Mr. Byrne said.

The United States Geological Survey recorded 96 aftershocks on Sunday, and many Japanese were alarmed at several earthquake warnings that appeared as televised bulletins on Monday. A warning at 4 p.m., for example, an alert announced by a gentle trilling bell, told of expected "strong shaking" across the entire waist of Japan, essentially from Tokyo to Kyoto.

The first gripping images of the tsunami came from here in Natori, notably pictures of the towering initial wave lashing a delicate line of trees along the shoreline.

On Monday, across the field of black mud that used to be Natori, brightly clad searchers bent to their work -- the police in navy blue, the handlers of sniffer dogs in orange, the military squads in digital camouflage.

They made their way around marooned boats and collapsed houses, finding toys, torn bedding, tangled fishing nets, broken toilets, pieces of cars, pieces of pottery, all the mundane pieces of daily life, now broken. A wheelchair. A rubber ball.

Occasionally, too, they found a body, sometimes already covered by a futon or a tarp.

Off in the distance, a small cluster of buildings stood erect and undamaged on the sad expanse of the mud flats. Outlined against the afternoon sky, they seemed like tombstones.