Dazed and bewildered, thousands roam streets

TENS of thousands of stranded people roamed the streets of Tokyo or holed up in offices and train stations as the capital’s usual bustling traffic came to a standstill yesterday after the biggest earthquake in modern Japanese history struck.

The magnitude-8.9 temblor off Japan’s northeastern coast shook buildings in the capital, left millions of homes across Japan without electricity, shut down the mobile phone network and severely disrupted landline telephone services. It brought the train system to a halt, paralysing the daily commuter flow of more than 10 million people.

Akira Tanaka, 54, a restaurant worker, was among those who just gave up and decided to walk home — to suburban Saitama, 12 miles north of Tokyo, an endeavour he has never tackled before.

“I’ve been walking an hour and 10 minutes, still have about three hours to go,” he said. “This is the kind of earthquake that hits once every 100 years.”

Phone lines were crammed, preventing some calls and messaging from getting through. Calls to northeastern Japan, where a 23-foot tsunami washed ashore after the quake, often failed to go through, with a recording saying the area’s lines were busy.

Unable to rely on their mobile phones, lines of people formed at the normally vacant public phone booths dotting the city.

Japan’s top telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. set up an emergency phone line and a special Internet site for people to leave messages for families and friends to inform them of their safety.

Tokyo commuter trains and subways, as well as the superfast bullet-trains, all shut down. A handful of subway lines resumed service were back up, but only after six hours.

Earlier in the day, people continued to pack stations, hopeful that the trains would start again. Trains in Tokyo run like clockwork and when they have temporary problems, they usually are running within an hour.

But the company announced late in the day that services would not resume for the rest of the day, sending a crowd pouring into the streets.

Government spokesman Yukio Edano advised commuters to stay where they were to avoid injuries. But people flooded train stations and stood in long lines for cabs, trying to find a way home.

Yokohama Arena, a concert hall in a Tokyo suburb, near a major bullet-train station, which handles not only Tokyo commuters but travel throughout Japan, was offered as an emergency place to stay overnight.

“There has never been a big earthquake like this, when all the railways stopped and so this is a first for us,” said arena official Hideharu Terada. “People are trickling in. They are all calm.”

Yokohama city hall officials put up posters at stations, inviting people to stay, and planned to provide blankets and other amenities, he said.

GOOGLE AID: person-finder

WHILE authorities are still attempting to assess the extent of the destruction the tsunami has caused, people are desperately trying to reach loved ones in areas affected by the natural disaster.

Internet search engine Google has set up a ‘Crisis Response Center’ page on which it provides links to disaster resources, related news reports and the Google Person Finder tool.

The tool was designed after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and allows users to share and gather information about missing people. Users enter the person’s name and Google provides any related information, including last known location, physical descriptions and messages left by those searching.