95 billion yen in donations yet to reach disaster victims

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Billions of yen in relief donations have yet to make their way to survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

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95 billion yen in donations yet to reach disaster victims
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Billions of yen in relief donations have yet to make their way to survivors of the Great East Japan Earthquake.

An Asahi Shimbun survey of 36 municipal governments along the Pacific coast in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures found that 95 billion yen ($1.24 billion) remained undistributed.

The delay in distribution was especially conspicuous regarding donations received directly by municipal governments. Two-thirds of the total amount collected had yet to be handed out, and no money had yet reached disaster survivors in 11 municipalities.

According to the latest summaries by prefectural governments and information provided by municipal government officials, relief donations received by the 36 coastal municipalities in the three prefectures hardest hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami totaled 236.75 billion yen between July 27 and Aug. 12. Of this amount, 141.7 billion yen, or 60 percent, had been distributed to disaster survivors, leaving some 95 billion yen in arrears.

Disaster relief donations are categorized into three classes:

* Funds received by the Japanese Red Cross Society and other entities and allocated through the intermediary of prefectural governments;

* Funds received directly by prefectural governments; and

* Funds received directly by municipal governments.

The distribution ratio was especially low for donations in the third category, where municipal governments are free to decide their own distribution standards.

Donations in the third category received directly by 35 of the 36 municipalities surveyed--Futaba town in Fukushima Prefecture did not reply--totaled 9.47 billion yen as of July 27, of which only 3.33 billion yen, or 35 percent, had reached disaster survivors. The rest, or 6.14 billion yen, remained in the hands of the municipal governments. No funds in the third category had yet been handed out to disaster survivors in the 11 municipalities of Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Miyako, Otsuchi and Yamada in Iwate Prefecture; Sendai, Kesennuma, Tagajo, Iwanuma and Onagawa in Miyagi Prefecture; and Minami-Soma in Fukushima Prefecture.

Ofunato, Yamada and other municipal governments blamed the delay in distribution on personnel shortages. The Sendai city government said that checking applicants' qualifications was a time-consuming task.

(This article was written by Daisuke Ono and Nobuyoshi Nakamura.)

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