Tsunami leaves trail of destruction

Miles from the ocean’s edge, weary, mud-spattered survivors wandered streets strewn with fallen trees, crumpled cars, even small planes. Relics of lives now destroyed were everywhere – half a piano, a textbook, a soiled red sleeping bag.

Today, one day after a massive tsunami tore through Sendai, residents surveyed the devastation that has laid waste to whole sections of the northern port of one million people, 80 miles from the epicentre of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that set off one of the worst disasters in Japan’s history.