Tokyo runs short of supplies as panic hits
Women and children packed into the departure lounge at an airport, supermarkets ran low on rice and other supplies and frightened residents, tourists and expatriates either stayed indoors or simply left the city.
“I’m not too worried about another earthquake. It’s radiation that scares me,” said Masashi Yoshida, cradling his five-month-old daughter Hana. The nail-biting eased in the afternoon after Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano appeared on national television saying radiation levels at the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear-power complex had fallen dramatically since morning.
But confidence in the government is shaken and many decided not to take chances, especially after radiation levels in Saitama, near Tokyo, were 40 times normal — not enough to cause human damage but enough to stoke fears in the metropolis of 12 million people.
Many hoarded food and other supplies and stayed indoors. Don Quixote, a multi-storey, 24-hour general store in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, sold out of radios, flashlights, candles, fuel cans and sleeping bags.
At another market near Tokyo’s Yotsuya station, an entire aisle was nearly empty on both sides, its instant noodles, bread and pastry gone since Friday’s earthquake and tsunami killed at least 10,000 people and plunged Japan into crisis.
At Haneda Airport, hundreds of young mothers lined up with children, boarding flights out of Tokyo.
Winds over the troubled Fukushima complex, about 240km north of Tokyo, blew slowly southwesterly toward Tokyo for much of the day before shifting westerly, a weather official said.
Some scientists, however, urged Tokyo to stay calm.
“Radioactive material will reach Tokyo but it is not harmful to human bodies because it will be dissipated by the time it gets to Tokyo,” said Koji Yamazaki, professor at Hokkaido University graduate school of environmental science.
“If the wind gets stronger, it means the material flies faster but it will be even more dispersed in the air.”
University of Tokyo professor of bioengineering Hiroyuki Takahashi added: “If the nuclear fuel remains contained, there will be very little health risk.”
US banking giant Citigroup said it was keeping workers in Tokyo informed. The US embassy has not urged nationals to leave.
Levels of radiation had risen in Tokyo but for now were “not a problem,” the city government said.
However, some Tokyo markets had run out of rice, a Japanese staple. Yoshiyuki Sakuma, a musician who lives in Yashio city in Saitama prefecture, just north of Tokyo, searched for bread.
“If you lose electricity, water and gas, at least you can still eat bread,” he said.
The French Embassy advised citizens to leave. The German Embassy urged its nationals to consider doing the same.
Some people wanted the government to expand the 30km evacuation zone surrounding the nuclear plant. “The evacuation zone may not be enough,” said a Hiroshima-based Japanese scientist who treats nuclear radiation victims.
The number of stranded passengers at Tokyo’s main international airport at Narita was rising but only Air China and Taiwan’s EVA Airways cancelled flights to Tokyo.
Flights heading into Tokyo were nearly empty. “I am afraid to go back,” Makoto Usui, 74, as he boarded a flight to Tokyo from Hong Kong. “I don’t know what to expect.”
“Everything goes wrong. They say one thing and then do something completely different the next day,” Masako Kitajima, an office worker in her 50s, said of the authorities’ handling of the quake aftermath.
- RESCUERS pulled a 70-year-old woman from her the wreckage of her home today, four days after it was demolished in the Japanese quake.
The rescue of the elderly Sai Abe and a younger man pulled from rubble elsewhere in the region were rare good news following Friday’s disaster.
- Another survivor, in his 20s, was pulled from a building in Ishimaki.
Conditions for those still alive in the rubble worsened as a cold front arrived today.
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