I was on my way home today and picked up the Evening Standard Newspaper and the first couple of pages was just about the Japan Tsunami. I don't know why exactly, but this article caused me to get all teary-eyed on the tube :\ lol
Nobuko Kamata and the scores of people sitting on blankets in this fetid room in a junior school have barely eaten since the tsunami struck.
"There was no food the first day, a sausage on the second, half a banana on Sunday and a rice ball yesterday and today," she said.
"Why has no food aid arrived? This is Japan. We are supposed to be a G7 country." As she talks, a man rushes in frantically shouting the name of his wife. "Has anyone seen her?" Nobody answers. He runs out.
Another man shouts: "We're out of blankets." Conditions are deteriorating. This country is on the brink. There is no food, no petrol, no water, no nappies. Lavatories are not working and the stench is becoming overwhelming. It is snowing outside, yet apart from the odd kerosene heater, there is no heating. Masao Hara, mayor of Koriyama city, near the stricken reactors of Fukushima, said today: "I really would like to appeal to the world: We need help."
With the government consumed by the unfolding spectre of nuclear disaster at Fukushima to the south, there appears to be no visible plan to urgently address the humanitarian needs of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
France is pulling out its citizens. William Hague is drawing up contingency plans to withdraw Britons. These people need help, not abandonment.
Today I walked through the shattered streets of Ishinomaki, a city of 160,000 people with thousands missing and 120,000, according to the local newspaper, in 250 evacuation centres.
I struggle to comprehend - let alone put in words - the horror I witness. At Hiyorimi Yama Park, famous for its elevated scenic views of the city, I look out over a neighbourhood the size of Islington reduced to rubble. It is hard to grasp the scale of the devastation. Here is a city that looks like landfill.
We make our way down muddy, waterlogged streets strewn with smashed up cars piled on top of each other. There is no disaster movie that comes close: thousands of cars picked up by the 10ft high tsunami that raged through here on Friday strewn like toys. Shop fronts are smashed. We are told there is no gas or food in the city.
It is day five and aid has yet to reach here. We are, as far as I can tell, the only foreign press in the city, having travelled in with the Japan Emergency Team, a disaster relief outfit who have the permits required to access petrol and use the highway.
We have water tanks, cartons of nappies, sanitary pads and boxes of food, which we deliver to the evacuation centre. But it's like a drop in the ocean compared with the need.
Ken Joseph, 53, an associate professor at Chiba University who was born in Japan to American parents, is heading our small convoy and he is at his wits' end. On the way up from Sendai, he had said: "I used to come to Ishinomaki as a kid. It's a whaling town and we used to call it Stinkimaki because of the rank fish smell."
But he isn't joking now. "I think the death toll is going to be closer to 100,000 than 10,000," he said. "Why is there no food? I have been to every disaster zone in the last 20 years and I have never seen anything remotely like this. I think we're on the brink of chaos. We have a prime minister who is a wonderful man in many ways but totally indecisive as a leader.
"In yesterday's press conference on the nuclear reactor, he looked like he was going to cry, like a man having a nervous breakdown. Where is the sense of urgency? We need somebody to take charge. We've had an earthquake followed by fire, then a tsunami, then radiation, and now snow. It's everything.
"There is nothing left. The world needs to step in. Where are the Americans? The Japanese are too proud to ask, but we need help and we need it now."
In Sendai, where 100,000 of the one million population are said to be in shelters, the queues for food are round the block, the queues for gas two miles long with each car limited to 10 litres. "Look at those food and gas queues," exclaimed Mr Joseph. "My God, I've never seen anything like it. This is serious. I wouldn't be surprised if we have looting."
With news coming through of workers withdrawing from the Fukushima power plant after radiation levels had surged, it feels like the entire country is going into meltdown.
Just hours earlier, another fire at the facility had sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo, triggering fear in the capital and international alarm. France ordered an evacuation of its citizens, although the British embassy said it was safe after experts reported that the levels recorded are not harmful to human health.
Radiation levels have now dropped significantly, but in the evacuation centres, the situation is worsening by the day.
Back at the over-crowded evacuation centre in the devastated city of Ishinomaki, Motoko sits on the floor and tries to comfort her friend Nobuko, whose daughter and grandchildren are missing. But Motoko, 60, is desperately worried, too, for her own daughter Yukiko, a 27-year-old teacher who is missing along with her class of children.
"I want to find out if she made it to an evacuation centre like I did, but there is still no official list," wailed Motoko.
"For all I know my daughter thinks I'm dead and I have no way of knowing if she is alive because mobile phones here don't work here. This is day five, day five! Why is there still no list for people to track their relatives?"
For now the survivors post hand-written notices - "I am Hiroshi Yamada and I am safe" - as well as desperately sad missing persons notices on the doors of the evacuation centres in a way that is reminiscent of New York after 9/11, but which totally dwarfs it in scale.
A sign pinned to the door of the evacuation centre says: "We are family, join hands and try hard and together we can overcome."
But the mood is changing. Everybody here knows, it's going to take a lot, lot more than that.
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