Tokyo - Military search teams pulled a young man from a crushed house Saturday, eight days after an earthquake and tsunami wrecked northeast Japan.
The young man, found in the rubble in Kesennuma city, was too weak to talk and was immediately transferred to a nearby hospital, said a military official. The official, who declined to give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the media, had no other details.
Kyodo, the Japanese news agency, said the man was in his 20s.
The rescue is the latest and one of the few after the March 11 disaster, as the power of the tsunami, triggered by the magnitude-9 earthquake, likely pulled many people out to sea.
The National Police Agency raised the death toll Saturday, reporting that 7,197 people had died - exceeding the deaths from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Another 10,905 were reported missing, the police agency said.
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The man, in fact, had been in an evacuation center and had just returned to his ruined home, where he lay down in a blanket, one of thousands of victims of Japan's magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, but not quite a miracle.
"He had been staying in the shelter since the quake and tsunami hit the coastal city on March 11 and returned home in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, around noon Friday to clean it up," news agency Kyodo News reported.
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