Independent on Sunday:
After a cataclysm so powerful it moved the Earth 10 inches off its axis, Japan woke yesterday to find itself a country that had, literally, been knocked sideways.
With the north-east coast now shunted two metres from where it was on Friday morning, neighbourhood after neighbourhood is submerged under a grotesque soup of water and debris. Homes have been flattened as if by the swiping forearm of an angry giant. Tens of thousands of once orderly acres look like the world's ugliest landfill – a jumble of broken homes, cars, boats, and concrete, with shipping containers cluttering the landscape like Lego on an unkempt nursery floor.
And somewhere, under all this vast mess, are four entire trains, small towns, villages, and a fearful number of bodies. It could be 2,000, 10,000, or many times that number. In one town alone, 9,500 people are unaccounted for.
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... Friday's quake was the most monstrous even this, the world's most tremor-prone country, has ever recorded. This was strong enough to leave a 186-mile rupture on the ocean floor, but it was the subsequent tsunami – sending 30ft-high waves barrelling into Japan's north-east coast – which has turned a disaster into a cataclysm. The wall of water, moving at an estimated 25 mph, swallowed boats, homes, cars, trees and even small planes, and used these as battering rams as it charged up to six miles inland, demolishing all that stood in its way.
The town of Rikuzentakata, population 24,700, in northern Iwate prefecture, looked largely submerged in muddy water, with hardly a trace of houses or buildings of any kind. And in Kesennuma, where 74,000 lived, widespread fires somehow burned, despite a third of the city being submerged. And then there is – or, to be more accurate, was – the port of Sendai, which had the misfortune to be only 80 miles from the epicentre of the 8.9 quake.
Here, until Friday early afternoon, was the city of a million people. Now, at least a third of it lies beneath the filthy waters and mud, and what isn't drowned is largely destroyed. The city's Wakabayashi district, which runs directly up to the sea, remained a swampy wasteland, with murky, waist-high water. Most houses were completely flattened, as if a giant bulldozer had swept through.
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We are just beginning to get reports of the enormity of the damage done by the quake. Japan has a large rebuilding task ahead of it, but it has friends who will help them too. They will find out who their friends really are in the coming weeks and months.
CNN reports the quake moved the coast of Japan eight feet.
Image via Wikipedia
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