Search for Survivors Amid Rising Toll

NATORI, Japan — What the sea so violently ripped away, it has now begun to return. Hundreds of bodies are washing up along some shores in northeastern Japan, making clearer the extraordinary toll of the earthquake and tsunami that struck last week and adding to the burdens of relief workers as they ferry aid and search for survivors.
On Monday, various reports from police officials and news agencies said that as many as 2,000 bodies had now washed ashore along the coastline, overwhelming the capacity of local officials to deal with what Prime Minister Naoto Kan described as Japan’s worst crisis since World War II.
Some 350,000 people have reportedly been left homeless and are staying in shelters, anxiously awaiting news of friends and relatives among the many thousands who remain unaccounted for. The national police said early Tuesday that more than 15,000 were missing, though just 1,898 deaths had been confirmed.
With police officials estimating that 10,000 people may have been swept away in one town alone, Minamisanriku, north from here, there was every expectation that the toll would rise.
“We have already begun cremations, but we can only handle 18 bodies a day,” Katsuhiko Abe, an official in Soma, told The Associated Press. “We are overwhelmed and are asking other cites to help us deal with bodies. We only have one crematorium in town.”
With so many bodies to dispose of, the government waived a law on Monday that required permission from local officials before cremations or burials, The AP reported. “The current situation is so extraordinary, and it is very likely that crematoriums are running beyond capacity,” it quoted a Health Ministry official, Yukio Okuda, as saying. “This is an emergency measure.”
Some of the first gripping images of the tsunami came from here in Natori, notably pictures of the towering initial wave lashing a delicate line of trees along the shoreline after the quake, which the United States Geological Survey revised to a magnitude of 9.0 on Monday.
Across the field of black mud that used to be Natori, brightly clad searchers bent to their work — the police in navy blue, the handlers of sniffer dogs in orange, the military squads in digital 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 futon or a tarp.
The region is facing widespread power and water outages. When supplies do come, residents clamor for help. At Natori city hall, survivors quickly lined up at a truck giving out large containers of water. Lines of nearly a mile also formed in front stations providing gasoline, which is also scarce.
At city hall, officials have posted a list of the 8,340 people who have arrived safely at the city’s 41 makeshift shelters, mostly schools and community centers. Dozens of people crammed into the building’s small lobby to pour over the lists, searching for friends and family members.
Those who could not find the name they sought wrote out messages on pieces of paper, and taped them to the city hall entrance. Hundreds of pieces hung there.
Mikako Watanabe, 26, and Yumiko Watanabe, 24, were sisters looking for their mother. They said they were at work when the tsunami struck, but their mother was napping at home in the Yuriage neighborhood of Yuriage, 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, four 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 cell phone 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 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.
Rescue teams pressed on with the searches, meanwhile. 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 one case, the spaniel also barked. The team began digging in the debris, but found nothing. “Is there anyone here? Is there anyone alive?” They yelled as they dug.
A member of the dog team, who did not give her name because she was not authorized to speak in public, said that there was now a low chance of survivors, and the dogs were finding only corpses.
Off in the distance, a small cluster of buildings stood erect and undamaged on the sad expanse of the mud flats. Outlined against the afternoon sky, they seemed like tombstones.
Such was the rubble that members of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces used olive drab power shovels and construction equipment to cut roads through the mountains of debris.
In the air, helicopters shuttled back and forth constantly, part of a mobilization of some 100,000 forces, the largest since World War II. Several convoys could be seen on the road to Sendai, a larger city to the north that was also badly hit.
Some firefighters in Natori had arrived from as far away as the southern city of the Hiroshima, reflecting the fact that rescuers had descended from all around Japan. The government closed off national highways in the north for the exclusive use of emergency vehicles, bypassing the traffic jams in many afflicted areas.
In addition, helicopters and ships from the United States Seventh Fleet, including the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, had joined the relief effort.
Farther south, in the city of Fukushima, gas stations, grocery stores and restaurants were closed, and convenience stores had no food or drinks to sell — only cigarettes. Red Cross water tankers dispensed drinking water to Fukushima residents who waited in long, orderly lines.
Because of the Fukushima nuclear plants being lost to the national power grid, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the plants, announced plans for rotating blackouts across the region to conserve electricity — the first controlled power cuts in Japan in 60 years.
Tokyo-area residents worriedly followed a series of confusing statements from the power company about the location and duration of the power cuts. Just after 5 p.m., the utility said it had already started cutting power to parts of two prefectures — Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, and Shizuoka, south of the capital.
Tokyo were feeling the effects, too. Residents had struggled to get to work Monday as a number of important commuter rail lines ran limited schedules. Six lines featuring Japan’s famous shinkansen, or bullet trains, were not running. Six major department stores also closed for the day because staffers were unable to reach the city.
Public conservation of electricity was significant enough, the company said, that the more drastic blackout scenarios were being scaled back. Still, anticipating deep and lengthy power cuts, many people were stocking up on candles, water, instant noodles and batteries for radios.
Toyota also announced it was closing all its factories until at least Thursday.
Japan’s $5 trillion economy, the third-largest in the world, was threatened with severe disruptions and partial paralysis, and the 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. The broader Topix, or Tokyo Stock Price index, dropped 7.4 percent.
Worried about the severe strains on banking and financial systems, the Bank of Japan pumped about $180 billion into the economy on Monday, and the government considered an emergency tax increase to help finance relief and recovery work.
Thomas Byrne, a senior vice president with Moody’s Investors Service, said Monday that his firm saw the Japanese economy as “having the ability to absorb the shock over time.”
“In general, large, wealthy economies have demonstrated a capacity to absorb localized natural disasters,” Mr. Byrne said.
The U.S. Geological Survey recorded 96 aftershocks on Sunday, and many Japanese were alarmed at several earthquake warnings that appeared as televised bulletins on Monday. A warning at 4 p.m., for example, an alert announced by gentle trilling bells, told of expected “strong shaking” across the entire waist of Japan, essentially from Tokyo to Kyoto.