The people of Japan were told last night to brace themselves for their most brutal ordeal since the Second World War after last Friday’s earthquake: nuclear threat, a massive human toll and widespread disruption.
Leading the long list of crises was the struggle to reduce temperatures at two malfunctioning nuclear reactors in Fukushima, one of which may already be in partial meltdown.
Geologists gave warning that there was a 70 per cent chance of an aftershock measuring 7 magnitude in the next three days.
Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister, publicly scolded the Tokyo Eletric Power Company for its failure to report the situation in Fukushima promptly, before declaring the crisis the country’s toughest test of national mettle in 65 years.
Japan’s ability to recover from the disaster “depends on each and every one of us”, he said.
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Mr Kan’s comments came amid mounting concern over the impact of the earthquake on the world’s third largest economy and the possible ripple effect on global growth.
Huge disruption to Japan’s manufacturing mean that the factories of car and electronics producers are unlikely to resume operations today. Hundreds of empty merchant vessels are moored outside the ports of Tokyo, Yokohama and Nagoya.
Tokyo’s Nikkei stock exchange opened 2.05 per cent down this morning and within minutes had fallen by 5 per cent. The Bank of Japan said that it would inject 7 trillion yen ($85.7 billion) of additional liquidity into the banking system in an attempt to keep markets stable.
As Tokyo and other cities prepared for planned electricity blackouts, minimal public transport, fuel rationing and possible cuts to water supplies, Mr Kan called on the country to endure the worst.
While aftershocks continued to hit northern Japan and shake buildings in the capital, TV helicopters provided relentlessly shocking images of a vast region in abject ruin. The official death toll climbed steadily throughout the weekend reaching 1,597 by last night. Up to 450,000 people have been taken to safety.
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But few believe those figures offer even an approximation of the true loss Japan has endured. A spokesman for the Miyagi prefecture police said that in his region emergency services expected to count the dead and injured in tens of thousands.
But even for those who escaped the apocalyptic violence of the earthquake and tsunami with their lives, the worsening nuclear crisis cast its unnerving shadow over the rescue centres.
Thousands of evacuees from the 20-kilometre exclusion zone around Fukushima were tested for exposure to radiation while a state of emergency has been declared for four other reactors in the same extended Fukushima nuclear complex and at a separate plant 120 kilometres to the north, where unusually high levels of radiation were briefly detected outside the plant.
The increasingly desperate damage limitation efforts by technicians included multiple attempts to drain pressure from the malfunctioning cores by allowing radioactive steam to escape into the sky — supposedly with levels of radiation that pose minimal risks to human life.
Finally, and with options fast shrinking, seawater enhanced with boron was pumped into two of the reactors in a process that is not thought to have been tried before and may take days or weeks to be assured of success.
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Japan’s leading government spokesman warned that hydrogen vented from the No 3 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant posed the risk of causing an explosion similar to the blast that blew the roof off the building surrounding the plant’s No 1 reactor on Saturday afternoon. Officials said that about 1,500 people had been scanned for radiation exposure.