TOKYO — As bodies washed ashore by the hundreds and an emergency deepened at a coastal nuclear plant today, millions in Japan faced an unabating sense of apprehension, mourning and astonishment over the emerging scope of this nation-changing catastrophe.
The toll of Japan’s triple disaster — first an earthquake, then a tsunami, then a related nuclear crisis — is both visceral and hard to see. Coastal town officials say they are running low on body bags; homes and the people inside them have been pulverized.
But Japan is also trying to quantify — and contain — the potential damage of a partial meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, where early today another explosion was heard at a damaged nuclear reactor, the third since Saturday, and a fire ignited, then was extinguished at the facility.
Initial readings suggested that this latest explosion damaged the unit’s suppression chamber, leading to a spike in radiation levels outside the plant.
Japanese authorities were seeking ways to protect the several hundred residents who had not been evacuated from within a 19-mile radius of the site, while racing to find ways to cool several overheated units.
So far, more than 500,000 people have been removed from the hardest-hit areas and 15,000 have been rescued. But time was running low for rescuers to help those stranded by flooding or trapped in debris. Officials said about 2,000 bodies were found Monday along the coast of battered Miyagi prefecture, and a survey of local governments conducted by the Kyodo news agency found that about 30,000 people in the devastated areas remain unaccounted for.
With some roads impassible and fuel almost nonexistent in the north, relief and rescue workers have struggled to reach the areas where they’re needed most. Survivors in shelters say they are short on food and water. With the country’s power supply depleted by the damaged nuclear plants, many shelters have no heat, and on Monday, Japan began widespread efforts to curb nationwide energy usage.
Order follows chaos
Japan seems to be handling its greatest crisis since World War II with decorum, fighting chaos with order. A ferryboat is sitting atop a house in the tsunami-ravaged town of Otsuchi, but at shelters nationwide shoes are neatly removed at the entrance and the trash is sorted by recycling type.
There has been virtually no evidence of looting or rising crime levels, and the Japanese have shown stoicism while waiting in long lines.
Also on display have been Japan’s unrelenting politeness and its love for group consensus. Twitter users told stories about the stranded and the homeless sharing rice balls. Travelers heading north reported 10-hour car rides — with no honking. At a convenience store in one battered coastal prefecture, a store manager used a private electric generator. When it stopped working and the cash register no longer opened, customers waiting in line returned their items to the shelves.
Even at Tokyo’s Kokubunji Station, with most train lines down, morning commuters waited hours just to board their trains. Lines reached out of the station, over crosswalks and along the streets for several hundred yards. Railway employees wearing suits and white masks directed commuters.
In Natori, where some of the first pictures of the tsunami showed a towering initial wave lashing a line of trees, all that remains along the coast is a field of black mud. Brightly clad searchers bent to their work Monday — the police in navy blue, the handlers of sniffer dogs in orange, the military squads in camouflage.
They made their way around marooned boats and collapsed houses, finding toys, torn bedding, tangled fishing nets and pieces of cars, toilets or pottery, all the mundane pieces of daily life, now broken. Occasionally, too, they found a body, sometimes already covered by a tarp.
At City Hall, officials in this town of 70,000 residents have posted a list of the 8,340 people who arrived safely at 41 makeshift shelters. Dozens of people crammed into the building’s small lobby to pore over the lists.
Those who could not find the name they sought wrote out messages on pieces of paper and taped them to the entrance. Hundreds of pieces hung there.
Mikako Watanabe, 26, and Yumiko Watanabe, 24, were looking for their mother. They were at work when the tsunami struck, but their mother was napping at home in the Yuriage neighborhood, as she always did after her night shift as a nurse.
“I hope she woke up with the earthquake and got to safety in time,” the older sister said. “We have no way to contact her.”
On Monday, three days after the tsunami, they still had no word of her. Their message said, “Yurika Watanabe, we’re looking for you. Contact us if you see this.”
But communications are badly broken. With cellphone service largely knocked out, many residents are relying on the small number of surviving pay phones.
Some meetings are by chance. In the crowds, there were squeals of joy at reunions — and crying for relatives not found.
One woman wailed over and over, “Her name is not on the list! Her name is not on the list!” She said she was looking for her sister-in-law, who lived in Yuriage. She said that if she is not at an evacuation center, she must be dead.
Massive efforts underway
Rescue teams pressed on with the searches. One used a German shepherd and a small spaniel in Yuriage. The shepherd would climb around the wreckage of homes and twisted hulks of cars, sniffing. If he started barking, the team sent in the spaniel, small enough to prowl around the crevices of the wreckage.
In the air, helicopters shuttled back and forth constantly, part of a mobilization of some 100,000 troops, the largest since World War II. Several convoys could be seen on the road to Sendai, a larger city to the north. Some firefighters in Natori had arrived from as far away as the southern city of Hiroshima.
In addition, helicopters and ships from the U.S. 7th Fleet, including the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, had joined the relief effort.
The disruptions to Japan’s $5 trillion economy, the third-largest in the world, and collective anxiety caused a rout in the Japanese stock market. The main Nikkei index fell 6.2 percent in Monday’s trading, the worst drop in three years, and plunged another 12 percent in early trading today.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
