The Wall Street Journal - ASIA
By Juro Osawa & Phred Dvorak in Tokyo and Daisuke Wakabayashi & Toko Sekiguchi in Onagawa Japan
The number of dead and missing after Japans twin earthquake and tsunami stood late Wednesday officially at 12920.
In reality Japanese widely agree the toll of last weeks disaster is likely much higher. In Miyagi a coastal prefecture that bore some of the tsunamis worst destruction officials estimate the toll there alone will be in the tens of thousands.
Accounting for the gap between the official and true count are places like Otsuchi until March 11 a town of about 15000 people on Japans northeastern coast.
Japan wont declare someone missing unless they have been reported missing. In Otsuchi where Fridays tsunami is believed to have swept away entire neighborhoods and families no one is left in many cases to report names. About 5000 people were evacuated. Otuchis dead number 221 officially. Seven are declared missing. That leaves more than 9000 uncounted.
The effect is repeated in towns up and down the coast in the prefectures including Miyagi Iwate and Fukushima. Survivors in Minamisanriku a town in Miyagi washed nearly clean of its houses believe about half of its 17000 residents are gone. Press reports suggest roughly half of the 23000 people of Rikuzentakata in Iwate are unaccounted for. In Onagawa a seaside town where 106 residents are officially counted dead and 125 officially missing residents believe about half of the pre-tsunami population of 10000 will ultimately be counted as lost.
But the official toll rises one by one as it did Wednesday in Onagawa.
Japanese firefighters assigned to relief work in this coastal town picked through a landscape of metal beams downed cables and slabs of concrete. Wet snow fell as the firemen moved trying each footstep.
Working through one mound a firefighter from Wakayama Prefecture jammed a long metal bar and lifted a vending machine.
He peered underneath. There was a body.
A few hundred feet away another firefighter with a clipboard and bullhorn asked: What is the sex?
Woman replied the firefighter standing on a pile where a liquor store once stood.
How old?
In the seventies.
Two more firemen walked over with a blue plastic sheet and wrapped it around the body. They left the corpse marking the site with a piece of red tape.
Wed ideally like to move it now but we dont have the time for that said one firefighter. Another crew will come by later to pick up the body.
These bodies are eventually brought to a missing persons center and morgue that police have set up behind Onagawas athletic stadium. A list of 100 found bodies is affixed to the concrete wall with brown packing tape.
As for the missing and uncounted the town was unwillling to consider them dead said Toshiaki Yaginuma Onagawas city planning official. Since all forms of communication are down except one satellite phone in the central offices the missing may not be able to alert townspeople that they are safe.
Japanese officials say they have always handled disaster tolls this way with painstakingly precise tallies rather than grand estimates that are honed later.
We value each and every life said Noriyuki Shikata deputy Cabinet secretary for public relations. Estimates are so rough. We dont take that approach.
The final mortality figure from the Kobe earthquake 6434was logged in December 2005 a decade after the quake hit. Most of those dead were found within a year since Kobes population was more compact and bodies tended to be buried under their houses when they collapsed.
The tally this time could go more slowly because the uncountable are so many and so hard to find. The tsunami swept many victims out to sea and they will be counted as they wash ashore. Eventually towns and villages could report missing people although many town offices have been destroyed further delaying the process.
Onagawa is one of the many small towns sitting along the deeply indented sawtooth shore that lines the coast of northern Miyagi prefecture. The jagged coastline has made the region ideal for oyster and salmon farming. The estuaries that make for rich sea life also allowed powerful waves to build. Seawalls built to keep out high waves also kept tsunami waters from washing back out to sea quickly leaving whole sections of towns submerged and inaccessible.
Firefighters from across Japan are splitting Onagawa into sections to simplify the searches. Many parts of town are largely untouched by rescue crews standing as testaments to the waves destructive power. An upside-down car dangled off the edge of a hollowed-out office building. A bicycle twisted among cables and metal scraps.
In a subtle nuance of language to indicate the slim hopes of finding any survivors here firefighters used the Japanese word for search instead of the more commonly used rescue.
As rescuers across the area break through impassible roads and search untouched piles the tally of the countedincluding those deemed missingclimbs. A day after the big quake Japans National Police Agency reported 1597 dead and 1481 missing. The next day it was 1897 dead and 3002 missing. By Wednesday the number of dead had risen to 4314; those declared missing had soared to 8606.
At the Onagawa missing-persons center on Wednesday two officials backed up a cart to a set of doors leading into the stadium. On the back were two bodies wrapped in blue tarps. Two men carried the bodies inside.
Outside the stadium was the list that provided identifying features of bodies recovered so far. One reads: White hair black sweats white sweater head facing east lying face down half the body was hanging over a second-floor veranda.
Police said people who believe one of the descriptions matches that of a loved one are taken inside to a holding area where they are asked to identify the body.
As the two men entered bearing two gurneys a woman walked back out. A man consoled her his arm across her shoulder.
Seeing an elderly man she knows she sobbed and said: Did you hear?
Write to Juro Osawa at
juro.osawa@dowjones.com Phred Dvorak at
phred.dvorak@wsj.com and Daisuke Wakabayashi at
Daisuke.Wakabayashi@wsj.com
