Tokyo: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addressed his country on the two-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying there is still help needed to eliminate the consequences of the natural calamity.
“People in the disaster-stricken regions still need help. The help can be different, including volunteerism, financial charity, tourism or acquisition of goods, produced in these regions. There will be no real spring in Japan until spring comes to devastated regions,” the premier said via YouTube.
Two years ago Japan was hit by a massive 9.0-magnitude quake which caused a tsunami, claiming over 15,000 lives and triggering a number of explosions at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.
The tsunami caused a partial meltdown at three of the nuclear plant’s reactors.
Radiation leaked into the atmosphere, soil and seawater, becoming the world’s worst nuclear disaster after Chernobyl.
According to scientists, Japan will need at least 40 years to recover fully from the nuclear catastrophe.
Some 315,000 people are still living in a temporary housing unable to return to their houses.
Memorial services were to be held on Monday in Tokyo and in barren towns along the northeastern coast to mark the moment, at 2:46 pm, when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the coast, unleashing a massive tsunami that killed nearly 19,000 people.
In the ravaged small fishing town of Miyako, sirens wailed as residents trundled to higher ground in a disaster drill. In some areas, searches for the 2,676 people still missing in the disaster continued, as workers poked through sand and debris along the coastline.
A thin blanket of snow covered the ground in Kesennuma, where houses and fisheries once stood. Survivors live in temporary housing farther inland on higher ground, while others have decided to move away altogether.
On Monday morning, fishermen, who are trying to get the vital industry back on its feet, lined up rows of tuna and other fish for auction.
“It’s scary (living here) when there is an earthquake. It’s scary, but I don’t plan to go anywhere else. I want to give my own very best, somehow, toward reconstruction of the city,” said 75-year-old Kenichi Oi, who had to refurbish his home, just a few hundred metres from the sea, but on higher ground, after the tsunami flooded its first floor.
Throughout the disaster zone, the tens of thousands of survivors living in temporary housing are impatient to get resettled, a process that could take up to a decade, officials say.
“What I really want is to once again have a ‘my home,'” said Migaku Suzuki, a 69-year-old farm worker in Rikuzentakata, who lost the house he had just finished building in the disaster.
Suzuki also lost a son in the tsunami, which obliterated much of the city.
Farther south, in Fukushima prefecture, some 160,000 evacuees are uncertain if they will ever be able to return to abandoned homes around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. (AP)
