15 March 2011 Last updated at 22:25 GMT
Japan earthquake: Tokyo jittery under surface calm
Tokyo's usual bright lights have been dimmed because of power shortages Tokyo was not badly damaged by Friday's earthquake or the tsunami but growing unease over the radiation leaks from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant has reached the capital, says the BBC's Roland Buerk in Tokyo.
On the surface the city is still deceptively normal.
The usual man is behind the till at the convenience store where I buy my daily paper, still giving a cheery hello.
I bumped into my neighbour last night, coming home from work, late in the evening as usual from his job at the bank.
His wife has told him she is staying put in their flat and has no intention of going anywhere.
There are taxis waiting at the rank down the street.
In the early hours a few late night revellers were going home.
Empty shelvesBut look a bit closer and the concern people are feeling here about radiation leaks at the Fukushima nuclear power station is clear.
After explosions and a fire, which seeped radiation into the atmosphere, there is unease about what could happen next.
There are fewer cars on the streets than normal.
“Start Quote
End QuoteAdding to the jitters just as people were going to bed on Tuesday night there was another tremor, this time a bit larger, and longer than before”
There are queues an hour long and more for petrol, although the attendants are still politely manning the pumps, bowing when customers leave.
In some places only 10 litres is available at a time, others have run out.
Shelves are bare in some shops as people buy up food.
Tokyo's stock market has seen two days of heavy losses.
Foreigners have been leaving in increasing numbers.
Austria has moved its embassy from Tokyo to Osaka. Britain is advising against all non-essential travel to Tokyo.
Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan has urged people to remain calm.
The government has imposed an exclusion zone 20km (12 miles) around the plant and urged people living within 30km to seal themselves indoors.
Adding to the jitters just as people were going to bed on Tuesday night there was another tremor, this time a bit larger, and longer than before.
But most people remained inside their homes and went to sleep.
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Certainties of Modern Life Upended in Japan
A rescue worker walked through the destroyed village of Saito in northeastern Japan on Monday. Rescue teams with sniffer dogs yelled as they dug. “Is there anyone here? Is there anyone alive?” More Photos »
By KEN BELSON
Published: March 15, 2011
TOKYO — In a country that prides itself on its orderliness and predictability, these are very anxious times. While their brethren in the north pick up the pieces of lives smashed by an earthquake and tsunami, residents of Tokyo, which suffered relatively little damage, are wondering whether to trust government reports that the city is largely out of harm’s way.
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A body found in Natori on Monday. All that remains along the city’s coast is a field of mud. More Photos »
Hiroaki Ohno/Shiyo, via Associated Press
Soldiers carried a tsunami victim who was found alive Monday, buried in rubble in Minamisanriku in northern Japan, an area of widespread damage. More Photos »
All the while, frequent aftershocks small and large continued to rattle windows and fray nerves, including a magnitude 6.4 shake late Tuesday evening centered in Shizuoka, south of the capital.
In the wake of Friday’s natural disaster in northern Japan, and the growing nuclear catastrophe that it touched off, residents here are fast learning that many things they have taken for granted — fully stocked supermarkets, precisely punctual trains, power for their electronics and cars — can readily slip beyond their reach.
Across the vast Tokyo metropolis, home to about one-quarter of the nation’s population, life has suddenly been upended in ways large and small. Some stores have been stripped bare of essentials like rice and milk, prompting the prime minister, Naoto Kan, to go on national television and implore people not to panic. Rolling blackouts to save energy have forced office workers to head home early rather than be trapped downtown. Many people are staying inside to avoid contact with any radioactivity from the stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, 170 miles to the north, that may be carried this way by the wind.
Japanese are bracing for word of more deaths — although the confirmed death toll is nearly 3,000, with thousands of people still missing, it is clearly going to be far higher. Bodies continued to wash ashore. A brief ray of hope pierced the gloom on Tuesday, when two people were rescued from collapsed buildings after being trapped for more than 90 hours — a 92-year-old man was found alive in a collapsed building in Ishinomaki City and a 70-year-old woman in the wreckage of her home in Iwate Prefecture.
In the disaster zone, some 400,000 people were living in makeshift shelters or evacuation centers, officials said. Bitterly cold and windy weather descending on northern Japan compounded the misery as survivors endured shortages of food, fuel and water.
Rescue teams from 13 nations, some assisted by dogs, continued to search for survivors, and more natons were preparing to send teams. In the air, helicopters shuttled back and forth, part of a mobilization of some 100,000 troops, the largest in Japan since World War II, to assist in rescue and relief work. But a no-flight zone was imposed around the stricken nuclear plants.
The threat of further releases of radiation loomed. Chinese health and environmental officials held urgent meetings on Tuesday about how to respond if radioactive fallout should reach China, and South Korea and Singapore said they would step up inspections of food imported from Japan. Some foreign embassies suggested that their citizens in Japan head south, away from Fukushima, or leave the country entirely, directives that have led to a rush of departures this week at Narita Airport, Tokyo’s main international airport. (The United States embassy has not advised Americans to leave, but it is warning against starting a trip to Japan now.) A number of foreign airlines suspended flights into Tokyo and shifted operations to cities further south, and some expatriates were leaving on Tuesday.
Ben Applegate, 27, an American freelance translator, editor and tour guide, said he and his girlfriend, Winnie Chang, 28, of Taiwan, left Tokyo to stay with his former host family in the ancient capital,Kyoto.
“I realize that everything is probably going to be fine,” he said, but the combination of a forecast for another major quake, which has since been revised downward, and the nuclear accident had been a strong incentive to leave. “Plus, our families were calling once every couple of hours,” he said. “So we thought everyone would feel better if we went to Kyoto.”
For many Japanese, the options are more limited, and excruciating. Even those with second homes or family and friends in safer locations are torn between their deep-rooted loyalty to their families and their employers, and their fears that worse is in store.
"I’m a little scared,” Yuko Ota, 38, an office worker, said Tuesday as she stood in a long line at Meguro Station in central Tokyo for a ticket to Osaka, her home town.
“My company told me to go back now because they think the disaster will have an impact in Tokyo, and the earlier we go, the better,” she said. “So for one week, to begin with, the whole company is either staying home or going away. I’m lucky, because I can go be with my parents.”
But most Japanese in Tokyo, it seems, are staying put for now.
“I’ve been checking the news on the Internet, and I really don’t know who to believe, because first they say it’s okay, and then things get worse,” said Shinya Tokiwa, who lives in Yokohama and works for Fujitsu, the giant electronics maker, in the Shiodome district of Tokyo. “I can’t go anywhere, because I have to work my hardest for my customers.”
Even in Tokyo, more than 200 miles south of the Friday earthquake’s epicenter, Mr. Tokiwa’s customers are grappling with its effects. The computerized systems that Fujitsu sells to banks have crashed under the strain of so many people trying to send money to their relatives and friends in stricken areas. That has kept Mr. Tokiwa busy with repairs and unable to make any sales calls.
Just meeting a customer or colleague has become a chore, though. The loss of the nuclear power plants’ output has led to blackouts, and the frequent aftershocks and smaller earthquakes have slowed Tokyo’s network of trains and subways markedly — something unimaginable under normal circumstances, when conductors apologize if their trains are delayed by even a minute.
Of course, Japanese are no strangers to catastrophe. Earthquakes, typhoons, mudslides and other natural disasters routinely batter this archipelago, which is smaller in land area than California but has nearly four times as many people. Japan is the only nation to have suffered an atomic attack, an event that has left deep scars on its psyche.
One older taxi driver taking passengers through largely deserted downtown streets on Tuesday compared the rising uneasiness in the city now to the shortages during the OPEC-led oil embargo nearly 40 years ago, when a spike in prices led Japanese people to stockpile everything from rice to toilet paper.
But that inflation subsided. Most Japanese have only read in books about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945. Many of the most recent environmental disasters, including the earthquake in Kobe in 1995, occurred far from the capital. The last devastating earthquake to hit Tokyo was in 1923.
The confluence of events in recent days — one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded, followed by a huge tsunami, coupled with a nuclear disaster — have once again raised the notion that Tokyo is living on borrowed time. It has also heightened the distress among Japanese who are taught from a young age to try their best, persevere and suppress their own feelings for the sake of the group.It has not helped that government officials and executives at the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the nuclear reactors in Fukushima, have sometimes offered conflicting reports and have often declined to answer hypothetical questions or discuss worst-case scenarios.
“I’m not sure if what they’re saying is true or not, and that makes me nervous,” said Tetsu Ichiura, a life insurance salesman in Tokyo. “I want to know why they won’t provide the answers.”
Like many Japanese, Mr. Ichiura is transfixed by the flood of bad news. At home, he keeps his television tuned to NHK, the national broadcaster. Even his seven-year-old daughter, Hana, has sensed that something unusual is happening, prompted partly by the recurrent temblors. She cried before going to bed the other night.
“She understands that this is serious,” he said.
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