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Left: The stern of the grounded cargo ship Asia Symphony breaches the port wall and juts out onto a road in Kamaishi. Right: A girl rides her bicycle past the wreckage of burnt out vehicles in the town of Yamada
Left: The stern of the grounded cargo ship Asia Symphony breaches the port wall and juts out onto a road in Kamaishi. Right: A girl rides her bicycle past the wreckage of burnt out vehicles in the town of Yamada
For 200 miles along the coast, the scene is an exact copy of an earlier Japanese horror. In the flattened towns, with their isolated skeletons of buildings and their hectares of rubble, Hiroshima is the only possible comparison.
But at the evacuation centres in north-eastern Japan, survivors hold doors open for each other and bow politely to visitors. Postal service has resumed. The relief effort is going full blast, with even visiting foreigners offered food because there is so much. There's not much of anything
else, admittedly. But across the disaster area, journalists have searched in vain for a single case of violence, looting, panic - or even queue-jumping.
Time and again, you hear of lives saved by calmness, organisation and discipline. At one low-lying secondary school half a mile from the sea, the children lined up in the playground for a post-earthquake headcount; surely hundreds must have perished.
But the instant they saw the tsunami coming, and with little more than seconds to spare, the staff got 450 teenagers to a pre-planned fall-back site on higher ground. The school is utterly wrecked, but every single pupil in it that day lived. Now, even the teachers who have homes to go to sleep alongside their students on evacuation-centre mattresses to make sure they're looked after.
Comment: The naivete is staggering. The Arab League allowed themselves to be conned into sanctioning a "no-fly zone" over Libya. Some no-fly zone, this. What did these people think they were going to get --- radar-jamming of SAM batteries by high-flying AWACS? - Forum Member