The body of a man missing since the March 11 disaster has been found in a crushed car that had been stored at a temporary junkyard since August.
The body of a man missing since the March 11 disaster has been found in a crushed car that had been stored at a temporary junkyard since August.
The driver, clearly a victim of the tsunami that swept through the northern prefecture of Iwate, was discovered on Nov. 2.
The car was under a pile of other wrecks on the grounds of a housing complex in that was heavily damaged in the Great East Japan Earthquake.
The victim was identified as a 35-year-old resident of Kamaishi in the prefecture. His family had already held funeral services for him.
City government and prefectural police officials were unable to explain how the body had gone unnoticed for so long.
The man's family mounted a search for him after learning he was driving along a coastal road when the tsunami swept ashore.
They eventually abandoned the search and notified the city government in May of his vehicle's license plate, asking the municipality to find him.
On Nov. 2, nearly six months later, his wife was informed by city authorities that her husband's white station wagon had been left unattended at the temporary storage site since August.
The woman rushed to the site with a friend and located his car underneath several other wrecked vehicles. She checked the number plate and confirmed it was her husband's car.
Catching a glimpse of clothing in the wreckage, her friend operated heavy machinery to remove the other cars from the heap. It was then that the woman discovered the body of her husband still in the driver's seat.
Municipal officials acknowledged they had mishandled the situation.
"We did not check whether the license plate numbers (of the abandoned cars found) matched those submitted (by people wanting local authorities to locate the vehicles)," said one official.
Officials explained that it took time to track down the owners of cars found abandoned. They said that about 3,000 cars were abandoned in the city following the tsunami and that city officials are still doing their best to locate the owners.
Some 1,400 residents of Iwate Prefecture are still listed as missing.
The prefectural police department said 200 officers were helping in the search effort.
The discovery of a body at this late juncture prompted an immediate search of other wrecked cars at temporary storage sites. So far, no other bodies have been found.
"This is a very regrettable situation," said a security division official at the prefectural police department. "We could have found the body much earlier if we had thoroughly checked temporary storage sites even though we have very little information about how the car was moved to the site.
"It was not possible to break every car apart at the sites to search for bodies at that time."
The friend who helped recover the body from the wreckage, said: "I thought he had been carried away to sea. His family went ahead with the
funeral while clinging to hope that he could still be alive."