Japan’s day of devastation

In nuclear plants, which provide a third of the energy in oil-starved Japan, technicians raced to shut down reactors. But at the 40-year-old Fukushima 1 reactor the situation turned critical yesterday. An explosion blew the roof off the building as engineers fought to stop a meltdown.

More than 200,000 people were evacuated. The ghosts of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island hung in the air.

When news spread of a radiation leak at the nuclear power plant, which is run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, there was panic on social networking sites.

“Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night ... Now the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity,” said a 23-year- old female office worker from Tokyo on a Facebook page. “I just don’t know what to do — what’s coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?”

The nuclear alarm capped a double disaster. The quake of 8.9 magnitude was followed by a tsunami — a word Japan gave to the world — which tore into the isolated northeast coast of the main island of Honshu and was so powerful that it rippled around the Pacific Ocean to California and Chile.

“I heard a strange sound, the kind of sound I have never heard before,” said Kazushi Ara, a 51-year-old office worker in the city of Soma, near the stricken nuclear plant. “I looked back. Waves cascaded over the trees that make up our beach windbreak and rushed towards me. I ran like crazy.”

When the waters receded, whole cities were ablaze and in ruins. Trains had vanished. Ships and boats lay tossed like bathtime toys along a ravaged coastline.

Survivors, who had spent a freezing night in the open in the worst affected areas, fell weeping into the arms of the first rescuers to arrive. But international relief teams were in difficulties: many roads had been swept away or blocked by landslides.

Huge lakes left behind by the retreating tsunami changed the landscape. As a result the true extent of the damage and casualties was still unknown last night.

“It is early days to get a full picture,” said Patrick Fuller of the International Red Cross, who was trying to drive to the northeast.

As many as 10,000 people were feared missing in Minamisanriku, a small northern port, according to the local authorities. Helicopters reaching the town found devastation. Just about the only building to remain largely intact is the local hospital.

Footage on Japanese television showed about 200 survivors who had made it on to the roof. At least seven patients died overnight. “We have about 20 patients who need treatment and shipments to other hospitals. We are hoping for immediate evacuation,” Mitsuya Sakuma, a hospital official, said on Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK.

For Japan, the third largest economy in the world, it was a national catastrophe. The country looked as though it had been bombed. Indeed, for some Japanese the smoke and sirens called up a nightmare that haunts this rich and secure nation. “I thought war broke out,” said Kazue Ninose, a retired nurse. “Could it be missiles from North Korea?”

From the highest to the humblest in the land, the Japanese shared the moment of horror and the hours of tension that followed.

The calamity began to unfold on a normal Friday. In parliament Naoto Kan, the prime minister, was defending himself against a financial scandal when the ceiling began to sway. The politicians gaped upwards, aghast. Kan was rushed away by his bodyguards to an emergency headquarters that the government had long prepared for this day.

The Japanese are used to earthquakes and visitors learn to live with the queasy rocking motion in a high-rise hotel. Usually the tremors stop after less than a minute but on Friday nothing was usual. The shocks went on and on.

At the city’s gleaming Haneda airport, Yukako Tsuda, a retired school teacher, had just landed on a visit to see her grandchildren. “There was a huge crowd. People were stunned and silent,” she said.

Tsuda managed to find a taxi but the journey to her grandchildren took six hours instead of the normal 90 minutes as huge traffic jams built up.

Both of Tokyo’s main airports closed. Some planes were diverted to the US military airfields at Yokota and Atsugi, dumping hundreds of foreign passengers at locations without luggage or immigration facilities.

President Barack Obama ordered US warships to prepare to help and dispatched a second aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, into the seas off Japan.

Rigorous drills and earthquake planning prevented many deaths and injuries in Tokyo. Radio stations broadcast an automatic warning to drivers to brake slowly. Trains ground to a halt at a single command.

As the capital’s office blocks emptied of their workers, hundreds of thousands of people milled around in the chilly air of early spring. Most would not get home because the transport systems were shut down.

Universities and institutions opened up makeshift dormitories where many slept. Others tried to catch some sleep in their offices. Police said about 120,000 were stranded.

While the capital had survived, the cities of the northeast coastline felt the full brutal force of the disaster. What happened was best described by Masatoshi Yamada, a reporter who was covering his local beat in the port of Miyako for the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

“I was eating lunch and watching the quake alerts on the TV when the shocks hit,” he wrote. “I somehow managed to get down to the water gates at Miyako port. The traffic lights were off. Uniformed guards were directing traffic. A handful of firefighters were closing the gates.

“Then I drove my car up a hill about 15 metres above sea level. From there I watched the tsunami hitting the fish market, pouring across its car park. Someone shouted ‘A bigger wave!’ and a tsunami wave perhaps 10 metres high washed around where we were standing.

“The owner of an iron works on the hill was staring out of his window and someone yelled ‘Stay where you are!’ The tsunami flowed back and forth. Very fast. I’ve never seen anything moving that fast.”

All along the stretch of eastern coast, where Honshu looks out across the far Pacific, terrible scenes were playing out in fishing towns, ports and quiet suburbs of neat houses. The Japanese media are so efficient that viewers were able to watch a lot of it live on their plasma television screens.

From helicopters, camera crews filmed waves bearing foul sludge and debris spreading like a giant stain across flat farmland. Hundreds of cars were thrown up and dumped in heaps. Almost no humans could be seen in the devastated places below.

The water swept inland about six miles in some areas, swallowing boats, homes, cars, trees and everything else.

The little town of Ofunato, wrecked by a tsunami in 1960, was once again flooded by waves as high as 30ft that breached concrete sea barriers and rushed into canals and riverbeds. On the roof of a hospital, surrounded by water, desperate staff waved banners reading “help” and “food”

Mitsuo Nakai, the primary school headmaster in the town of Kesennuma, sheltered 350 frightened children in his school overnight. The teachers tore down curtains and cut them up to make blankets. “I couldn’t get through to the city hall,” he told the Yomiuri Shimbun. “I had to communicate via the firefighters.”

Japan’s firefighters emerged as early heroes. Fumiko Murai, a 63-year-old woman, told of being rescued by them in a boat. “I feared it was all over for me,” she said.

The firemen also got her 89-year-old father and 88-year-old mother out of the second floor of their house, where they had taken refuge after the tsunami smashed into the ground floor.

By dusk the news crews were televising great spouts of flame and pillars of smoke from burning homes, petrol stations and ruptured gas pipes.

Thanks to the ubiquity of camera phones and the popularity of social networking sites, amateur footage of the disaster flooded YouTube and Facebook.

In his secure command centre, Kan was soon getting the harsh statistical reality from the famously diligent civil servants at his command.

In and around the university town of Sendai, only 18 miles from the offshore epicentre of the earthquake, police reported between 200 and 300 bodies. But this was just the start of a grim accounting.

Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, told reporters yesterday: “It is believed more than 1,000 people have lost their lives.” But even as he spoke the toll was rising to 1,300 or perhaps many more.

Edano confirmed that the quake was the largest since the era of Emperor Meiji, who ruled in the late 19th century. About 3,400 buildings were completely destroyed and 200 fires were raging in the earthquake zone. Officials estimated that more than 215,000 people had sought refuge in shelters on Friday night.

In the Iwate prefecture, the coastal city of Rikuzentakata — which lies at the end of a long narrow bay that turned the tsunami into a battering ram — was “virtually destroyed” and almost completely submerged, police reported.

At least a million households were without running water. One nuclear power plant after another shut down and electricity was cut off in almost 6m homes. Cars queued for rationed petrol. As aftershocks continued to terrify people, with 160 by mid-afternoon yesterday, snowfall compounded the misery in wrecked northern towns.

Survivors huddled in shelters and hoarded supplies as rescue workers searched the mangled coastline of submerged homes, cars and stranded boats. It was a mark of Japan’s law-abiding society that there were no reports of looting or violence.

In stricken Sendai, smashed cars and small aircraft were jumbled up against buildings near the airport, several miles from the shore. Felled trees and wooden debris lay everywhere as rescue workers in boats moved through murky waters around flooded structures.

A 29-year-old man told how he survived the wall of water that hit Sendai. “I hurried into my car,” he recalled. “Then came the tsunami. But fortunately my car floated on the waves. I saw three men working at a petroleum pumping station being swept away. It’s strange that I am alive.”

Koichi Takairin, a 34-year-old driver who was inside his four-ton lorry when the wave hit, said: “The tsunami was unbelievably fast. Smaller cars were being swept around me. All I could do was sit in my truck.” He joined the flow of survivors who walked along the road away from the sea and back into the city yesterday.

One of them, Kumi Onodera, a 34-year-old dental technician, said the night after the tsunami was “like a scene from a disaster movie” punctuated by frequent aftershocks. “The road was moving up and down like a wave. Things were on fire and it was snowing,” she said.

“You really come to appreciate what you have in your everyday life.”

As 50,000 soldiers from Japan’s Self-Defence Forces went in to establish order and organise rescue work, Kan flew over the devastated zone in a helicopter. He later emphasised that immediate action was vital. “Successful rescue depends on what we can do today,” he said.

“People in the area need food and water, of course, but it is [also] very cold there.”

Helicopter crews plucked survivors to safety from rooftops and flooded farmland. They also located several missing trains, forced off the rails and into the mire. Coastguards rescued 87 people from a ship that was swept out to sea, where giant whirlpools caused by the tsunami caught vessels in their vortices.

Offers of aid poured in from other countries, including China, Japan’s giant neighbour and great historic rival. Britain was preparing to send 63 fire service search and rescue specialists, two rescue dogs and a medical support team. The Department for International Development said they would travel directly to the centre of the disaster zone in northern Japan and join the search for survivors, providing relief for Japan’s own rescue teams.

David Warren, the British ambassador to Japan, said there were no reports of UK casualties but tracing citizens had been made more difficult by power cuts and the disruption to phone links. “They may well be safe,” he said, but he needed to be certain.

Japan has a history of surviving natural disasters stretching back for thousands of years. In the late 19th century the modernising Meiji oversaw the keeping of records and the scientific study of seismology.

Successive Japanese governments were acutely aware of the political and social damage in the wake of disaster. In the great Kanto earthquake on September 1, 1923, more than 140,000 died in the Tokyo area and militarist mobs went on the rampage against ethnic Koreans whom they blamed for the disaster.

Japan has also experienced the costliest earthquake in history. In 1995 the city of Kobe was devastated by a quake that killed 6,000 people and injured 25,000. It cost the country £62 billion.

Since then Japan has intensified its already rigorous building safety standards. Skyscrapers sit on huge rubber pads and giant hydraulic shock absorbers in the framework of the buildings expand and contract so they bend with the seismic waves. Extra steel bracing strengthens the structure.

From schoolchildren to geishas, everyone does an earthquake safety drill at least once a year, learning to shelter under desks or strong beams as sirens sound a public warning. Such rigorous training and enforcement of safety standards mark out Japan from other nations such as China and Haiti, where shoddy building and corruption have contributed to huge death tolls in recent years.

Although this weekend’s casualty figures are mounting, the final toll will be small compared to the 60,000 who perished in the Sichuan earthquake in China in 2008, when hundreds of children died as classrooms collapsed.

Tragically, most of Japan’s dead were killed by the sea rather than directly by the earthquake. Tsunami defences proved catastrophically inadequate against the previously unimaginable height and force of the water.

The price that the Japanese will pay for this disaster is steep. The country is already the most heavily indebted in the industrialised world and the repair bill will have to be raised by more government borrowing.

Private companies, too, face heavy costs and the liabilities for insurers are staggering. The total insured loss could be up to $15 billion, equity analysts said yesterday.

Although the disaster spared most of the industrial heartland of car plants and electronic factories, it is a blow to hopes of recovery from the economic slump. Toyota yesterday temporarily shut down all its car plants for safety reasons.

Yet Japan will recover. It opened up to the world in the 19th century and transformed itself from a poor agrarian nation into a first-rank global power. Out of the ashes of the second world war its tenacious people built one of the richest, most successful democracies in history.

Britons hit

In Tokyo, 185 miles south of Sendai, it was still an alarming experience. I was at work on the 10th floor of our block when the quake hit and the building began swaying so violently you had to hold onto something. The first big shock built up and up — it was probably only a minute but it seemed to last an age.

My wife, Emily, had a more frightening time as she was at the British embassy trying to get a passport for Charlie, our three-month-old son. She had to persuade staff to let her out so she could get back across town to collect our other three children after school. The phones were down, so neither of us knew how bad it was for each other or the kids and it was an hour before I heard that the family were all okay.

Andrew MacKay is head of Asia Pacific for IG Group, the financial derivatives trader

Further reading:

News
Fears of catastrophe as nuclear plant explodes
Expert told Japan nuclear plants’ quake protection ‘too lax’
British team joins hunt for quake survivors
History of leaks, blasts and secrecy
Charles Clover: Coastal location leaves power stations exposed
Built to bounce and quiver, skyscrapers that save lives

Focus
‘Superswarm’ of quakes may have primed Japan for disaster

Leader
This disaster must not halt nuclear power

Multimedia
Graphic: How the earth moved
The Image Gallery: Japan earthquake
The Image Gallery: Pictures of the week