Survivors search rubble for bodies
A cold wind blowing at her back, Tayo Kitamura knelt beside her mother’s body and pressed her palm against the blue plastic tarp rescue workers had just wrapped the corpse in. She leaned in as if to hug the body, then closed her eyes tightly as tears slid down her cheeks.
Firefighters had just pulled her 69-year-old mother Kuniko from the rubble of Onagawa, a once vibrant fishing town that was obliterated when last week’s tsunami converted it into a landscape of death and destruction.
Eight days after one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded unleashed the cataclysmic wave, desperate families are still searching for loved ones in the ruins of lost towns.
The painstaking task must be completed before heavy machinery can be called in en masse to begin the next phase: clearing away the oceans of debris that are all that’s left of much of north-eastern Japan’s coast. So far, police have confirmed more then 7,300 deaths. Another 10,900 are missing and feared dead.
The search repeats itself up and down the coast. In Kesennuma, Sachiko Kikuta, 27, walks 12 miles a day, looking for signs of her sister. She does not think about the possibility that she might not be alive.
“We talk about how the search is going, but we don’t talk about the worst that might have happened, that I might not find her,” she said.
In the cold remains of Onagawa today, one boy ignores his own worst-case scenario, calling hopelessly across the wasteland for his mother. “Yuki! Yuki!”
The call seemed futile.
The March 11 tsunami was so powerful it sucked away entire towns. With almost no survivors amid the wreckage, rescue teams are searching almost exclusively for the dead. Residents say half of Onagawa’s 10,000 people are gone.
The boy and his family pulled up wooden beams and iron bars from a tangled mass of debris that used to be his mother’s home and cast them aside. She was not there.
