Japan disaster: To save just one life now gives us hope... and we are desperate for hope

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12 April 2012

As stories of survival emerge, Japan's devastated coastal communities are facing a new fear - radiation poisoning.

It took Reverend Hideo Ishibashi two hours to drive from Sendai to the hill overlooking Ishinomaki, the coastal town 25 miles to the north-east that until yesterday was cut off from the outside world for four days. He went to search for missing friends, a local pastor and his wife. What he saw left him shaking with dread.

For a mile, from the ridge where he stood all the way to the sea, large swathes of the fishing port, home to 160,000 people, were no more. Houses, 10-storey buildings, shops, schools, businesses: almost all of it had been flattened and washed away by the tsunami.

"It was totally silent with no signs of life," said the pastor, 66. "I started taking pictures but I had to stop because my heart was beating so fast. I said to my colleague: "There are thousands dead. If there is hell on earth, it is down there in that killing field."

He tried to drive into the part of town still partially intact, but the Japanese Self-Defence Force barred his way, saying: "It's off limits, it's not safe."

Hideo, who leads the United Church of Christ in Japan, the largest Protestant group with 200,000 members, insisted he had to find his friends, Pastor Kyoichiro Morita and his wife, and headed for the house of a female church member on the edge of the devastated town. The house was in darkness with no electricity or water and half-submerged in mud, but the woman was alive. With her was a frightened stranger, a young man in his twenties. Listed by his company as "missing for four days, presumed dead", he couldn't stop laughing and crying that he had been rescued. His survival story is perhaps one of the most dramatic to emerge so far.

The young man hugged Hideo repeatedly and told him that just before the tsunami hit on Friday, few people in Ishinomaki had managed to leave. He had scrambled on to the roof of his house and watched in horror as the wave came in, crushing and uprooting other buildings.

His house was one of the few not swept away, but for the next 24 hours he remained stranded on the roof, surrounded by a sea of water and freezing cold, dressed only in a soaked suit as it started to snow. It was 6.30pm on Saturday before the water subsided enough for him to come down, revealing a grim sight as it receded. "All around", the man said, he saw "hands and feet sticking out of the mud".

He fetched blankets from his house and tried to wrap the dead bodies "to give them some dignity". Then, fearing for his own life, he walked to a part of town that was still standing, where Hideo's friend found him and gave him food and clothing.

"For the next three days, until we arrived this afternoon, they had no contact with the outside world and no way of knowing what was going on," Hideo told me, only moments after returning the young man - whose name he forgot to ask - to his mother's home in Sendai and reuniting him with his work colleagues.

"We took him to his company and everyone was hugging him - they had thought he was dead. He was laughing and crying and telling his story over and over. It's a miracle.

"We also found my pastor friend and his wife alive. They had got in their car and almost outdriven the tsunami, before getting caught and having to wade to safety."

He shook his head. "To save even one life at this time gives us hope. And we are desperate for hope."

Hideo's poignant rescue of the young man is one of many stories emerging as the scale of the devastation in this part of Japan becomes increasingly apparent. In greater Sendai - a city the size of Birmingham with a population of a million - the tsunami roared 11 miles inland. Everyone here either had a narrow escape, or knows people who are still missing.

The official death toll as of yesterday was 800, but people expect that to rise beyond 10,000 and everyone I've met in Sendai since arriving last night after a crazy six-hour taxi ride from the north, is worried sick about missing friends, family or colleagues.

But there is another fear: a sense that a third disaster, worse even than the earthquake and the tsunami, is about to unfold. People are wearing masks and staying indoors, and there is an unshakeable fear that the air holds lethal radiation levels.

Jeff Mensendiek, 49, a US-born missionary who has lived in Sendai most of his life, today took his last few precious gallons of petrol and evacuated his wife and two children to a city 150 miles away. "I feel so relieved to have got them out," he said.

Radiation levels at a site 80 miles from the damaged nuclear power plants of Fukushima are reported to be far higher than is normal or safe, he added. "With Sendai halfway between those two points, people fear a nuclear disaster is unfolding and we don't know it."

Why doesn't he join his family? "I love this city and won't abandon the people." He supplies us with face masks, offers us seaweed ("it helps protect the glands from radiation") and tells us to keep our skin covered.

Mr Mensendiek is a distant friend of my close friend Erica, who grew up in Japan. With people unable to reach him in the aftermath of the tsunami, Erica had supplied me with his contact details before I flew out and I had promised to "find Jeff, hopefully in one piece".

Amazingly, I found him and he was unscathed. He and his United Church of Christ colleagues are setting up a database for relatives trying to track missing people.

He showed me a map of the Miyagi prefecture but said: "This coastline is no longer accurate. The tsunami ate large chunks of the land and recovery workers have been unable to get to the dead bodies because the area is still partly under water, and because there are fears of another large quake and tsunami in the next three days. Despite this being a supposedly advanced country, we still have little reliable information."

Sendai on day five of the disaster is a city of stunned people, severe food shortages and no hot water. Petrol is rationed: you queue for two hours to get a maximum of five litres. For three days there was no electricity and little communication - parts of the city are still blacked out - so people had little idea what was going on. Some say they cannot understand why the government is taking so long to get things moving. Food and petrol is, however, available at towns to the west and north of Sendai.

This is the worst natural disaster ever to hit Japan, yet driving south to Sendai from Hachinohe yesterday, a six-hour, 200-mile journey down the spine of the country, I saw only one aid convoy, two ambulances, and no roadblocks or police vehicles.

I bed down on the floor at the home of Hirotaka Satoh, 33, a friend of my translator. Five evacuees are already here, including Satoh, a geologist who was taking coastal soil samples at Sendai when the quake struck. "We knew we had to get out fast but our equipment got stuck in the mud. By the time we got it to our car, 15 minutes had passed. I think we escaped death by about two minutes."

I tell him about the man with no name who was saved in Ishinomaki. "We wish a similar outcome for my wife's friend," he said. "She went there to her parents to have her baby." His face darkened. "She is still missing. We fear the worst."

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