On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, police are accelerating efforts to identify the remains of 83 victims in the three hardest-hit prefectures by examining photographs of the bodies and their belongings.
On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, police are accelerating efforts to identify the remains of 83 victims in the three hardest-hit prefectures by examining photographs of the bodies and their belongings.
As of March 6, prefectural police are still trying to identify 64 sets of remains in Iwate, 18 in Miyagi and one in Fukushima. With time running out to the anniversary on March 11, the Tohoku Regional Police Bureau has also distributed a poster featuring facial sketches of the victims and asking for information on their identities.
Miyagi prefectural police’s special task team has so far located 9,519 victims of the deadly magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. Currently staffed by eight officers, the team is still working to identify the remaining 64 bodies.
The remains have been cremated, so the only leads they have are the photos of the victims’ bodies and their limited belongings. In January, the team started reviewing all the pictures of the victims in hopes of finding clues that have been overlooked, such as small moles and scars.
There is a high probability that officers missed minor clues simply because they had to handle so many bodies shortly after the disaster.
The team members are now engaged in painstaking work to compare these new discoveries with photographs of 450 people who remain missing since the disaster in the prefecture.
Their efforts bore fruit on Feb. 23 when police returned the ashes of Yukiko Abe, a resident of Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, who was 66 at the time of the disaster, to her bereaved family.
Poring over pictures of Abe’s body, the team found moles on her left cheek and chin, which became clues to piecing together her identity. Her artificial tooth became the final determining factor.
While police have identified many of the bodies through DNA profiling, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain blood and other samples from bereaved families of victims with the passing of time.
Miyagi police’s team has also compared DNA from victims with those of the relatives of missing people.
An investigator recently matched the DNA from a body to that of a brother of Kyoko Sasaki, a resident of Minami-Sanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, who was 59 when she went missing. Her cremated remains were returned to her family on Feb. 25.
To address the dwindling number of responses from the public with information, Tohoku Regional Police Bureau, which oversees the three prefectural police departments, has recently handed out 1,500 copies of a
The posters, the first such effort, have been placed at police stations, government facilities, train stations and highway rest areas in 12 prefectures in the Tohoku and Kanto regions. About 30,000 evacuees from the disaster-stricken areas now reside in the Kanto region.
The number of contacts from the public with victim-related information has dwindled from 21 in 2013 to 12 in 2014 in Miyagi Prefecture.
Iwate prefectural police were contacted 40 to 50 times with information between June and December 2013, but the figure dropped to just two times in 2014.
Each of the victim’s profile is accompanied by a bar code, which links to the bureau’s homepage that provide more detailed information, such as the deceased's sex, age bracket, clothing and other belongings.
The homepages also feature available information on the other 58 victims, such as locations where their bodies were found.