Death Toll in the Hundreds; Government Orders Mass Evacuation Near Damaged Nuclear Plants
By CHESTER DAWSON in Sendai, Japan, DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI in Fukushima Prefecture and JURO OSAWA in Tokyo
Tens of thousands of Self-Defense Forces searched desperately for survivors in earthquake-ravaged northern Japan on Saturday as rescue and relief efforts went into full force, even as concerns rose that a radiation leak may have occurred at a nuclear-power facility in the country.
More than 200,000 Japanese were ferried to relief shelters and millions of homes were left without power and water after the country's most powerful quake ever struck on Friday.
Rescue efforts accelerated as police, fire department and defense forces deployed to severely affected areas. Low-flying government rescue helicopters, including Japanese Self Defense Force Blackhawks, hovered low over houses with roof tiles ripped asunder, looking for survivors. Further up the coast toward Sendai, entire roads and bridges were washed away. A few cars could be seen carefully navigating twisted and sand-strewn roads in an apparent attempt to flee, or survey the damage to their communities. No more than a handful of pedestrians could be seen for hundreds of miles up the coast.
An estimated 3,400 buildings have been partially or completely destroyed. In Sukagawa, a small town located in Fukushima Prefecture, about 200 people stood in line to receive water supplies through the night at an emergency distribution center, and water was rationed to a maximum of about 2.6 gallons per household. A team of rescue workers from Singapore arrived in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon, bound for Fukushima Prefectutre, Japan's foreign ministry said.
"Power is cut in some parts of town, but what we need is water and food," said Dai Iwaya, a 37-year old city project and fiscal planning officer. Homes are in various states of disrepair, with fallen roof shingles and concrete blocks strewn about.
WSJ's Daisuke Wakabayashi reports from Northern Japan, where the extent of the devastation from a 8.9-magnitude earthquake and subsequent Tsunami became even clearer with the arrival of daylight Saturday morning.
.Northeast Japan was a wasteland Saturday morning after the country's earthquake triggered a 30-foot tsunami. The cascade of destruction killed hundreds, forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and raised fears of a radioactive release from damaged nuclear power reactors.
Sendai, a city of one million people, was among the hardest-hit areas of the nation. An aerial tour by helicopter Saturday morning near the local airport here showed a dead zone of small planes, helicopters and cars strewn half-submerged in green-brown water.
Along the coast north of the airport, oil-storage tanks burned brightly, sending a funnel of pitch-black smoke nearly a mile into the sky. Fires also burned in industrial parks ringing the area, nearly 24 hours after Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake, one of the world's five strongest over the past century, ground life across the country to a halt.
Japan's northeast appeared to have been subject to the most severe damage, as powerful waves swallowed warehouses and fishing boats and swept across neighborhoods and rice paddies. Damage and disruption was aggravated by more than 100 powerful aftershocks in the hours after the first jolt.
As of 5 p.m. Saturday, Japan's official toll stood at 605 dead, 654 missing, according to police, with more than 1,000 injured.
A building at a troubled Japanese nuclear power facility collapsed Saturday afternoon with smoke billowing out, and officials responded by expanding the evacuation perimeter to a 12-mile radius and saying they were preparing to stockpile iodine supplies "just in case."
Officials declined, however, to say whether the explosion had occurred specifically at the Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear reactor, or to confirm media reports that a sharp increase in radiation outside the site had been detected.
Earlier in the day, Tokyo Electric Power Co. had been taking emergency measures to avert a meltdown of a stricken nuclear-power plant hit by Friday's massive tsunami in northern Japan. Those steps appeared to be bringing down the dangerous pressures that had built up in the container, a Tepco spokesman said Saturday afternoon.
Previously, the utility had said there was a risk of a meltdown in the core after the quake cut off power to pumps providing cooling water. That, in turn, could lead to heating of the core, the risk of a meltdown, and the release of radiation.
Strong Quake Strikes Japan
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Houses swept by a tsunami seen as residents walk in Kesen Numa, Miyagi prefecture on Saturday.
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Japan Quake's Effects
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See a map of post-earthquake events in Japan, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.
The impact of the quake's first jolt, which hit at 2:46 p.m. on a clear Friday afternoon, was felt around the country, including in Tokyo. There, office buildings swayed. Trains, buses and phone service stopped. Millions of households lost power.
Japanese spent the rest of the day and night watching televised images of fires, collapsed buildings and deadly debris-filled waves, delivered by news anchors in hard hats. Powerful aftershocks emanating from off the eastern coast shook the country and its people.
The quake's footprint spread at about 3 a.m. local time, as new seismic activity rippled through the center to the country's western coast, raising the specter of a series of quakes extending throughout the country, which sits atop crisscrossing fault lines on the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire.
"I really thought I was going to die," Yuhei Sakaibara, a reporter for the local Sendai newspaper, said in a telephone interview Friday night. "Dishes went flying in every direction and huge cracks ripped up the walls. When I got outside, I saw that several houses in the neighborhood had collapsed."
In a town of about 12,500 residents in neighboring Fukushima prefecture—at the outskirts of the worst-damaged areas—roads were cracked. Goro Okawara, a 68-year-old farmer who said he was in the fields when the first quake hit, said he thought the temblor would last 30 seconds but "it just kept going and kept getting worse and worse."
The traditional kawara tiles on Mr. Okawara's roof "came flying off," he said, crumbling and spraying red clay blocks in all directions. A glass door shattered. A crater appeared in his driveway. Nearby, he said, the crematorium where his family was planning a funeral for a relative Saturday had collapsed. At the local cemetery, many headstones were snapped in half.
Some 100,000 people had left Fukushima province by early Saturday, Kyodo reported.
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The damage slammed a nation that has had its prolonged share of miseries. A long economic decline saw Japan recently slip behind China as the world's second-largest economy. A series of scandals have not only discredited and paralyzed its political leadership, but also tarred institutions from elite universities to the ancient sumo sport.
Japan's long-deadlocked parliament appeared initially to have set aside political bickering and rallied around calls for unity and new measures to keep the quake from further weakening the economy.
With damage estimates likely to mount quickly, news of the quake—which struck near the close of trading Friday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange—may pummel Japanese shares next week. Should the already debt-burdened government be forced to issues trillions of yen in reconstruction bonds, the move would affect the Japanese fixed-income market and weigh on Japan's already-weakened credit rating from the world's major rating agencies.
Yumiko Ono reports from Tokyo that more than 1000 people are dead or missing after a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake and devastating tsunami struck Northern Japan Friday.
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.Some economists have argued that a quake could actually lift the economy in the long run, by requiring a surge in rebuilding spending. But more immediately, the impact disrupted a spectrum of the nation's industries, from auto and consumer-electronics makers to steel and beverage producers, forcing a number of them to shut factories.
Offers of sympathy were swift from around the world, with Japan's foreign ministry saying it had received assistance offers from some 50 governments. These included China and Russia, which have recently had testy territorial disputes with Tokyo.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao expressed "deep sympathy and solicitude to the Japanese government and the people" and told Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan that China is willing to offer aid.
"Today's events remind us of just how fragile life can be," U.S. President Barack Obama said at a news conference. "Our hearts go out to our friends in Japan and across the region."
See all video on the Japan quake.
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Mr. Obama said he spoke Friday morning with Mr. Kan and offered assistance. He said the U.S. has an aircraft carrier in Japan now, with another is on the way. A third ship is en route to the Marianas Islands to assist as needed, he said.
Friday's quake was the strongest ever to hit the earthquake-prone country in terms of strength, but didn't appear, at least in the early hours, to be as devastating as two great quakes of the 20th century. More than 100,000 people died or went missing in the 7.9-magnitude Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. The 1995 Kobe earthquake, which registered 7.3, killed more than 6,000 people in the region.
Disastrous Japan Earthquakes
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In September 1923, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo.
See some of the most powerful earthquakes to have hit the island nation.
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A photographer looked over wreckage as smoke rose in the background from burning oil storage tanks at Valdez, Alaska, March 29, 1964.
One reason for the lower death toll appeared to be a heightened readiness in Japan, raised particularly after the Kobe quake embarrassed the government and builders for weak preparedness.
The central bank quickly announced that it has set up a disaster-management team, headed by Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa, and said it was standing ready to supply liquidity to ensure stability in financial markets. The government will likely first use roughly 200 billion yen ($2.41 billion) in emergency funding left in the budget for the current fiscal year ending this month, several Finance Ministry officials said.
Across Japan, ports, railways and airports shut down. Car-navigation systems indicated that almost every entry point in Tokyo to the nation's highway system was closed.
In Tokyo, cellphone reception was down, causing long lines to snake around pay phones. Children walked home from school, some with protective head gear.
Journal Communitydiscuss..“ This is truly a horrible tragedy. I feel very sorry for those affected as well as their family members. I hope they can get back on their feet quickly.
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—James Mims.
At 3:24 p.m., the first large aftershock could be felt by those standing in central Tokyo. Looking up at construction cranes shaking violently atop half-completed buildings, people gasped. As of early Saturday, at least 50 aftershocks had been recorded.
—Mariko Sanchanta, Kana Inagaki, Yoshio Takahashi, Mari Iwata and Andrew Joyce contributed to this article.
Write to Daisuke Wakabayashi at Daisuke.Wakabayashi@wsj.com and Juro Osawa at juro.osawa@dowjones.com
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