Japan’s imperial couple made their first visit to the country’s tsunami-ravaged northeast coast yesterday to comfort thousands of survivors still huddling in evacuation shelters.
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, living symbols of the nation’s unity, were to visit a devastated coastal port town, followed by a trip to a sports gymnasium in Sendai City that houses hundreds of evacuees.
The emperor, 77, and empress, 76, arrived in the morning from Tokyo by plane at an air base in Higashimatsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, about 350km north of the capital, television images showed.
Bowing to military rescue and relief workers who greeted them, the couple received a briefing before being taken by helicopter to Minamisanriku, a coastal town with a pre-quake population of around 20,000 people.
Since the disaster, 496 bodies have been recovered there and 656 people are still listed as missing. The tsunami destroyed more than 3,800 houses in the town, leaving over 6,000 people sheltering in evacuation centers.
The emperor — who delivered his first ever televised address to the grieving nation on March 17 — and his wife have in recent weeks visited evacuation shelters further south, in prefectures near Tokyo.
However, the trip yesterday was their first to the area that suffered the most devastation in the March 11 disaster, Japan’s worst postwar calamity that killed more than 14,500 people and left almost 11,500 missing by the latest count.
The Imperial Household Agency said the couple would on Monday next week visit disaster-hit Iwate Prefecture and travel on May 11 to Fukushima Prefecture to meet people forced from their homes by Japan’s nuclear crisis.
Emergency crews are still battling to cool reactors at the tsunami-hit Fukushima Dai-ichi atomic power plant, which has leaked radiation in the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl a quarter-century ago.
Japan has enforced a 20km no-go zone around the plant, where workers are dousing reactors and fuel rod pools with water to prevent the nuclear fuel inside from overheating and fully melting down.
Radiation from the stricken and explosion-hit facility has wafted into the air, seeped into the ground and leaked into the Pacific Ocean, leading to bans on some farm produce and a fishing ban nearby.
In Koriyama, Fukushima, some elementary and junior-high schools on Tuesday began removing the surface soil from playgrounds because of concerns over radioactive contamination, officials said.
Japan’s parliament meanwhile unanimously approved legislation to exempt disaster victims from paying auto and real-estate taxes in an effort to reduce their financial burden, Diet officials said.
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