It appears that summer will bring little relief to the anxieties of people in the disaster-stricken Sanriku area.
It appears that summer will bring little relief to the anxieties of people in the disaster-stricken Sanriku area.
Three months after the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, nearly 90,000 evacuees remain displaced and unsettled due to the triple disasters of quake, tsunami and Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power accident.
Takata Daiichi Junior High School in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, where about 1,400 evacuees took shelter, is less crowded today. All 413 of its last evacuees are expected to move to provisional housing in July.
Yet tons of debris still clog the area, and reconstruction will be a long, hard road ahead.
Toshimichi Sasaki, secretary-general of the residents' organization at the evacuation center, is pessimistic.
"Even after we leave here (in July), we won't be able to draw a road map to the future," Sasaki, 32, said.
As of June 11, 15,413 people were confirmed dead, 8,069 missing and 88,361 living in evacuation centers, according to the National Police Agency. The missing-persons figure far exceeds the tally for the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, at 3 persons, and the 401 missing after the 1959 Ise Bay Typhoon, the NPA said.
An Asahi Shimbun survey sent to leaders of 42 municipalities in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures found that none had yet been able to develop a plan for recovery three months after the disaster.
A vision of reconstruction is "completely invisible" or "almost invisible," 27 municipalities said.
While the central government plan calls for a completion of provisional housing construction by mid-August, the mayors of Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, and Hirono, Fukushima Prefecture, said it would take two or three months longer, while the mayor of Minami-Soma, Fukushima Prefecture, figured it would not be completed until the end of the year.
As for clearing the debris, 13 municipalities said "almost all the rubble is uncleared." Seven of those places were in Fukushima Prefecture, where no-go zones have been declared due to the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant crisis.