Japan Disaster Relief Donations
the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Information and Assistance group.
Update: The official toll of dead and missing has been revised since I first published this diary. There are now 9,811 officially listed as dead and another 17,541 officially reported as missing. The rate of growth shows no sign of slowing.
Though you might not know from watching the American media, or indeed even from reading DailyKos, the reason that there was a nuclear crisis in Fukushima is that Japan was struck by the largest earthquake in its recorded history, followed soon thereafter by the largest tsunami in its recorded history. The death and destruction that these two events have left in their wake have made this the greatest disaster to strike a first world nation since that term came into common usage. The death toll is now officially 9,523 with another 16,094 officially reported as missing. Both of those numbers continue to grow and likely will continue growing for some time. For reasons I will explain below, I fear that we are, at this point, not even close to a final reckoning. Let there be no doubt about it:
This is an unprecedented catastrophe and it is only getting worse. It is likely to continue getting worse for some time to come. It is entirely possible that the death toll will more than double current figures.
I have been very busy the past couple days and unable to complete a diary on the situation in Japan. When I started to write the first draft of this diary on Monday morning, there were 20,000 dead and missing. Then my next draft had 21,000. Then 22,500. Earlier this morning it was 24,000. Now it is 25,000. As I write this, the number is probably already outdated.
The media is obsessed with the drama of the nuclear issues, even going so far as to claim that a live music venue in Tokyo was actually a nuclear power plant. I understand the primal fears that radiation leaks can inspire, and have myself been guilty of joining in the hysteria to a certain degree. However, while many here have been dead set on making this tragedy somehow about us, the toll in Japan continues to climb and it is fast becoming clear that the extent of the disaster is far beyond even the most pessimistic projections made after the quake and tsunami struck. For many in Tohoku, the situation has moved from dire to apocalyptic. While we are involved in our nuclear navel-gazing, good old mother nature has managed to kill so many people that the final death toll may very well exceed that of Japan's last major nuclear catastrophe, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The extent of the death and destruction is so great that the bodies can no longer be disposed of in the traditional manner. There are so many bodies and such extensive shortages that there is no fuel for cremation, as is the standard practice in Japan. Instead the Self-Defense Forces are interring corpses in place in temporary mass graves. The number of bodies that need to be handled is so great that some of the very few pieces of heavy equipment that are still fueled and functional are not being used to clear roads or demolish dangerously compromised structures, but to dig massive ditches in which to dispose of the dead.
Japan's Self-Defense Force Soldiers Prepare a Mass Grave in Higashimatsushima (Kyodo News)
There are so many dead that make-shift morgues have been set up in large public buildings. In a truly macabre turn of events, the dead are competing with the living for the few sheltered areas that remain standing in the hardest hit areas.
Survivors search for missing loved ones among the dead in a make-shift morgue in Rikuzentakata, Japan
The enormity of this disaster is far beyond what anyone first conceived. The number of dead and missing, huge though it already is, is extremely conservative. The numbers that have been growing at such a sickening pace in the past few days will continue to grow and the pace may even increase. The numbers that we are getting represent but a tiny fraction of the dead.
To understand that, it is important to understand what those numbers represent. Confirmed dead is the total number of those for whom the authorities have a name, a body and a confirmed identification. The total number missing includes only those for whom the authorities in Tokyo have received an official missing persons report filed by a family member of the individual in question. Those statistics do not include cases in which entire households were swept away and there is no one to file the report. They do not include those cases that took place in areas where there is no longer a functioning local government or police force to process the necessary paperwork. They do not include those cases that have been filed locally but that have not yet been reported to the National Police Agency in Tokyo. They, in short, do not include an awful lot of people.
So what kind of final tally are we discussing here? No one really knows at this point, but it seems likely that we are talking about a very large number.
Some indications of that are as follows: The official tally of dead and missing from Miyagi Prefecture is about 11,000. However, the chief of police of Miyagi Prefecture has already gone on record stating that the final death toll will exceed 15,000. However, even this estimate seems unjustifiably sanguine when one considers what the mayors and town officials from some of the harder hit areas have said.
The mayor of the devastated town of Minamisanriku has estimated that some 10,000 of the town's 17,000 people are missing and presumed dead. Later some 2,000 of them apparently showed up alive at shelters in other towns, but 8,000 are still unaccounted for.
The mayor of the city of Ishinomaki has estimated that his town suffered 10,000 deaths from the quake and killer tsunami.
The mayor of Onagawa has stated that he believes his town lost about 5,000 of its 10,000 residents.
Even assuming that both Ishinomaki and Onagawa have as many survivors among their missing as Minamisanriku, that would mean a total of about 20,000 killed from just those three towns alone.
That would not include anyone from Higashimatsushima (whose temporary graveyard is pictured above).
That doesn't include the devastation in towns like Natori, where the waves ruptured gas lines and caused the hellishly paradoxical image of fires floating on floods.
Natori, which had a population of more than 70,000, was almost completely wiped away.One of the reporters who visited afterward noted, "The wave wiped just about everything away." There was essentially nothing left. Worse, it seems that, despite their training for such emergencies, many were simply unprepared for the scale of the disaster:
One of the strange things about this disaster is that no place is as well prepared as Japan for this kind of natural disaster. In many respects they have been rehearsing for this for years – in terms of the building standards, in terms of preparedness for tsunamis. But when it struck, it was so violent that not even the best system in the world was able to respond sufficiently quickly.
And that's just Miyagi Prefecture.
In the Iwate Prefecture town of Rikuzentakata, the devastation was just as bad as it was in Minamisanriku. The town has been described as "wiped off the map" and, as the picture below shows, that is no exaggeration.
Ruins of Rikuzentakata, Japan.
Many of its residents died because they did exactly what they were supposed to do in such an emergency, or rather in what town officials had previously anticipated such an emergency to be:
For hundreds of people, if not more, the shelters they were ordered into proved to be deathtraps. Rikuzen-Takata’s disaster plan had been designed to deal with the three- and four-metre waves the city had seen in 1960 after an earthquake in faraway Chile. No one had anticipated the 15-metre tsunami that crashed through the city on Friday following a 9.0-magnitude earthquake just offshore, one that flung boats, shipping cranes and people inland, drowning those who had done as they were told and gathered in the low-lying shelters.
No one knows how many are dead, but there are reports that town officials have estimated the total at some 20%-40% of its 24,000 residents.
There are other such towns in Iwate Prefecture. There are more in Fukushima Prefecture. Along the coast of Tohoku, Japan, death is everywhere.
Worse, for the survivors the ordeal has only begun.
I have already written of how some who survived this almost unimaginable catastrophe have found themselves sheltering in park pavilions without walls. Every day more news of the desperate situation of the survivors comes in:
One journalist who went to the affected area wrote:
They need any kind of help they can get. They are not getting enough food or warmth. The entire devastated area is so dark that I even feel scared. it's so fucking cold when I was there. It snowed, hailed and rained. We don't know how cold it was because the city thermometer was not working without electricity.
The survivors are all hanging by a thread. In many places people have little more than a half a ball of rice to eat every day. A week ago they had three liters of water. Who knows what they have now.
Many of the survivors are elderly people who left their medication in their homes. Now they have nothing and they have no way to get it. Hospitals have been evacuated and the patients have died for lack of basic care in the overcrowded shelters. There are reports of children starving to death in the shelters. At least one woman had to give birth in a shelter without any medication or medical supervision. As luck would have it both mother and child are doing well, but there are others like her and they may not be so fortunate.
These people need our help
This quake and tsunami were absolutely devastating. People are now sheltering in overcrowded public buildings. They don't have enough food, water or even the most basic medical supplies. Some of them are getting ill. Some of them may already have starved to death. The situation is desperate and only getting more so by the minute. They need our help. Please do what you can.
Japan Disaster Relief Donations
the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Information and Assistance group.
UPDATE: It has just been brought to my attention that ShelterBox is not on the list of charities I posted. My understanding is that they are on the ground and doing good work in Japan. If you can afford it, please consider donating to ShelterBox. (h/t to Heart of the Rockies)