>More quakes rattle northeastern Japan

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A fresh round of tremors, including one with a magnitude of 6.3, shook northern Japan on Tuesday afternoon, the Japan Meteorological Agency reported.

The quake was centered in Fukushima Prefecture, near Japan’s Pacific coast and about 64 kilometers (40 miles) southwest of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Workers retreated to earthquake-resistant shelters during the event, but there was no loss of power at the plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company told CNN.

It followed a magnitude-6.4 quake Tuesday morning that killed at least six people when it triggered a landslide in Iwaki, north of Tokyo.

The earlier quake buried three homes, the Iwaki fire department said. Three people were rescued and hospitalized, and fire officials were working to rescue an unknown number of others believed to be trapped, the department said.

The quake struck at about 8:08 a.m. Tuesday (7:08 p.m. Monday ET), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It had a depth of about 13 kilometers (8 miles) and was centered about 77 miles east-southeast of Tokyo.

Monday night, one person was killed in Iwaki and several others were trapped when a powerful 6.6-magnitude earthquake triggered landslides there, the fire department said. It happened exactly one month after the country’s devastating 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami.

Since the March 11 disaster, there have been more than 400 aftershocks of magnitude 6.0 or greater.

The earlier quake was centered about 100 miles (164 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo and about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of the nuclear facility, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The landslides in Iwaki buried three houses. Police in Fukushima Prefecture initially reported that four people were trapped. The Iwaki Fire Department later said more than four people were trapped, but the exact number was unclear.

>Japan gov’t demands quick action to avoid sea contamination

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TOKYO – Japan’s government on Monday told the operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to move quickly to stop radiation seeping into the ocean as desperate engineers resorted to bath salts to help trace a leak from one reactor.
One official has warned it could take months before the nuclear crisis caused by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami is under control.
“We need to stop the spread of (contaminated water) into the ocean as soon as possible. With that strong determination, we are asking Tokyo Electric Power Co to act quickly,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told a news conference.
He warned that accumulating radiation from a leak that has defied desperate efforts to halt it “will have a huge impact on the ocean”.
In the face of Japan’s biggest crisis since World War Two, one newspaper poll said that nearly two-thirds of voters want the government to form a coalition with the major opposition party and work together to recover from the massive damage from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Underlining the concern over the impact on the world’s third largest economy, a central bank survey showed that big manufacturers expect business conditions to worsen significantly in the next three months, though they were not quite as pessimistic as some analysts had expected.
An aide to embattled Prime Minister Naoto Kan said on Sunday that the government’s priority now was to stop radiation leaks from the Fukushima nuclear plant, 240 km north of Tokyo, and that the situation had “somewhat stabilised”.

“How long will it take to achieve (the goal of stopping the radiation leaks)? I think several months would be one target,” said Goshi Hosono, a ruling party lawmaker and aide to Kan.

In their desperation, engineers at plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) have used anything to hand to try to stop the leaks.
At the weekend, they mixed sawdust and newspapers with polymers and cement in a so far unsuccessful attempt to seal the crack in a concrete pit at reactor no.2, where radioactive water has been flowing into the sea.
On Monday, they resorted to powdered bath salts to produce a milky color to help trace the source of the leak.
TEPCO is planning to put some sort of curtain into the sea by the nuclear plant to try to prevent radioactive water spreading further into the ocean. It has not decided what material to use.
The government has said three of the six Fukushima reactors were now generally stable. At least four will eventually be scrapped but that could take decades.

>Embattled Japanese power company chief hospitalized due to ‘fatigue’

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The president of the embattled utility that owns the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been hospitalized due to “fatigue and stress,” the company said Wednesday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. President Masataka Shimizu was hospitalized Tuesday. The company has not released further details about his condition.

Shimizu made a public apology several days after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the plant. The last time he was spotted in public was at a March 13 news conference.

Reporters peppered company officials with questions about the president’s whereabouts Sunday. A spokesman said Shimizu had been staying inside the company’s Tokyo headquarters.

His physical condition had been on the decline from overwork, the spokesman said Sunday.

News of Shimizu’s hospitalization comes a day after an inspector for Japan’s nuclear safety agency described austere working conditions at the plant.

Workers were sleeping in conference rooms, corridors, and stairwells on leaded mats intended to keep radiation at bay, safety inspector Kazuma Yokota said.

They were also eating only two meals each day — a carefully rationed breakfast of 30 crackers and vegetable juice, and for dinner, a ready-to-eat meal or something out of a can.

“My parents were washed away by the tsunami, and I still don’t know where they are,” one worker wrote in an e-mail that was verified as authentic by a spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Co.

“Crying is useless,” said another e-mail. “If we’re in hell now, all we can do is crawl up towards heaven.”

In a statement released March 18, Shimizu said the company was taking the crisis seriously.

“We sincerely apologize to all the people living in the surrounding area of the power station and people in Fukushima Prefecture, as well as to the people of society for causing such great concern and nuisance,” he said.

Meanwhile, tests revealed radioactive iodine at more than 3,000 times the normal level in ocean water near the plant — a new high, Japan’s nuclear safety agency said Wednesday.

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said monitoring data collected Tuesday afternoon detected the I-131 isotope at 3,355 times the normal level.

The sample was taken 330 meters (1,080 feet) away from one of the plant’s water discharge points, the agency said.

Radiation readings from seawater outside the plant have fluctuated. They spiked Sunday, then dropped a day later.

Officials did not pinpoint a particular cause for the higher readings.

But officials and experts have noted that workers at the plant face a difficult balancing act as they struggle to keep reactors cool and prevent radioactive water from leaking into the ocean.

Water has been a key weapon in the battle to stave off a meltdown at the facility. Workers have pumped and sprayed tons of water to keep the plant’s radioactive fuel from overheating, and the plant is running out of room to store the now-contaminated liquid.

“They have a problem where the more they try to cool it down, the greater the radiation hazard as that water leaks out from the plant,” said Jim Walsh, an international security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

>Repair Work Resumes at Crippled Japanese Nuclear Plant

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Despite occasional sightings of smoke and steam billowing from damaged reactor buildings at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant in Japan, the effort has resumed to restore electricity and critical cooling functions. Radiation continues to be detected above normal

levels as far as 300 kilometers south of the facility, which was knocked out of commission by a huge quake and tsunami nearly two weeks ago.

After a break, because of concerns about smoke and radioactive steam, workers at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant on Thursday resumed the attempts to repair the cooling system at the Number 3 reactor.

That is the considered to be the most dangerous unit, because its fuel contains a mix of uranium and plutonium.

Video taken from a helicopter Thursday morning shows what appears to be steam rising from four of the nuclear facility’s six reactor buildings. However, authorities say the situation is not serious enough to continue a halt in the critical work to prevent a potentially larger catastrophe.

A re-emergence of black smoke at the Number 3 reactor halted work Wednesday.

There is also fresh concern about the damaged Number 1 reactor where pressure inside the reactor again increased.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano says crews are trying to maintain a delicate balance between spraying water on the radioactive fuel, which causes a rise in pressure, and reducing the water flow which could see temperatures increase to a dangerously high level.

Edano says experts are watching the situation closely and there is no evidence that the reactor vessel has been damaged by excessive pressure.

Since the March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which triggered a destructive tsunami, the nuclear power complex has experienced many serious problems. These include hydrogen explosions in reactor buildings, radiation leaks, exposed and overheating fuel rods, damaged reactor cores and shaking from powerful aftershocks.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant operator, has also revealed that it spotted 13 times, between March 13 and 16th, a radioactive “neutron beam” about 1.5 kilometers from the Number 1 and 2 reactors.

Some scientists say this means uranium and plutonium might have leaked from the plant’s nuclear reactors and the exposed used nuclear fuel rods have discharged a small amount of neutron beams via fission.

James Symons, the director of the nuclear science division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, expresses surprise and skepticism about the report.

“A neutron beam would be a beam of neutrons, which are a neutral particle. They are certainly produced in a fission reaction inside a reactor. But if neutrons escape and were to come out of the reactor they would not be visible. So you would not see a neutron beam,” he said. “Plus Ican’t imagine a process in which neutrons would be emitted from the reactor in a beam.”

The physicist says, at this stage, the Fukushima disaster has more in common with 1979 Three Mile Island partial meltdown, in the United States, than the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe in Ukraine.

“All these things are different. But it’s closer,” said Symons. “It’s certainly very unlike what happened at Chernobyl where the entire reactor exploded basically. It’s certainly very serious, but – as far as we can tell – it’s also coming under control.”

Radiation continues to be detected in the surrounding air, soil and sea water.

Japan’s government is now advising people beyond the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant to remain indoors. Officials say that, since the explosions, some infants theoretically may have accumulated 100 millisieverts of radiation in their thyroids.

Some scientists say those exposed to that total radiation dose should take potassium iodide, because an annual dose of 100 millisieverts is believed to be associated with an increased risk of cancer.

Japan’s science ministry says radiation levels detected in Tokyo have tripled, compared to those detected earlier in the week.

The Tokyo metropolitan government, as well of those of the adjacent prefectures of Chiba and Saitama, have announced levels of radioactive iodine considered unsafe for infants were detected this week in tap water.

That has prompted panic buying of bottled water.

Vegetable shipments have been stopped out of areas adjacent to the crippled nuclear power plant after some leafy greens were found to be contaminated with radioactive iodine and cesium exceeding government standards.

>Light winds, snow forecast near Japan nuclear plant(Video)

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Rain or snow are forecast for the area around Japan’s crippled nuclear reactor, over which a light wind is expected to blow from the southeast and out over parts of the country’s northern region, the weather agency said on Tuesday.

The weather is important for gauging if traces of radiation leaking from the plant will reach heavily populated areas, enter the food chain, or blow out over the ocean.

The damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), is about 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo.

Some 3-8 mm (0.1-0.3 inch) of rain or snow are forecast to fall over the area in the next 24 hours.

Three hundred engineers, in addition to military, police and fire department personnel, have been battling inside the danger zone to try to cool down the reactors.

Winds near the plant will blow at a speed as fast as 4 meters (13 feet) per second, the Meteorological Agency in Fukushima said, forecasting that the wind could begin blowing from the west from the evening.

Traces of radiation exceeding national safety standards have so far been found in milk and vegetables from areas around the plant.

Tiny levels of radioactive iodine have also been found in tap water in Tokyo, one of the world’s largest cities, and the plant’s operator said on Tuesday traces of radioactive substances had been found in the Pacific Ocean.

Many tourists and expatriates have already left Japan and many residents are staying indoors.

>U.S. Begins Airlift as Japan Battles Nuclear Reactor Leaks

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The U.S. began airlifting citizens from Japan along with military and diplomatic families as authorities struggled to contain leaks from the quake-stricken Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant.

The U.S., U.K. and Australia raised their alert levels, telling nationals to keep at least 50 miles (80 kilometers) away from the Dai-Ichi facility. Walt Disney Co. suspended operations in Tokyo, while British Airways became the latest carrier to pull crews out of the city, which lies about 135 miles to the south of the reactors.

Shortages of fuel, water and food assailed Fukushima, a city of 290,000 in the shadow of an unfolding nuclear crisis. Helicopters doused 30 metric tons of water on pools used to cool spent fuel rods yesterday. A bid to spray water onto the No. 3 reactor may have worked, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. official said at a briefing. The company is also trying to connect a power cable to the plant.

“New challenges are crashing down on us one after another,” Prime Minister Naoto Kan said yesterday in Tokyo. “We will overcome these difficulties through extreme effort and meet the expectations of our people, who are remaining calm.”

The magnitude-9 earthquake that hit March 11 sparked a 7- meter (23-foot) tsunami that engulfed Japan’s northeast coast and knocked out cooling systems at the Dai-Ichi plant. There were 6,406 confirmed dead, with 10,259 missing as of 11 a.m. Tokyo time, the National Police Agency said.

Hong Kong Flights

Hong Kong’s government urged its residents living in Tokyo to return home or move to southern Japan “due to the evolving situation.” The city is arranging for additional flights to leave from Tokyo’s Narita airport, its government said in a statement posted on its website yesterday evening.

The U.S. government evacuated 97 citizens, including family members of employees, to Taiwan from Japan, according to Sheila Paskman, a spokeswoman for the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto embassy on the island. Another flight of evacuees will leave later today to Taiwan or Seoul, Paskman said by telephone from Taipei today.

Societe Generale SA, France’s second-largest bank, said it was assisting foreign employees and their families to leave Japan if they wished to do so, while allowing local staff to work from home or relocate. Blackstone Group LP and BNP Paribas SA were among companies that shifted operations from Tokyo.

Aftershocks, Blackouts

“There are still aftershocks, we have the rolling blackouts in our area and concern about the radiation,” Keith Cash, a preschool teacher at the U.S. Atsugi air base, said as he prepared to put his wife and four children on a plane back to the U.S. “All of those things put together have really forced us to decide that we want to have them go back.”

The Group of Seven agreed to jointly intervene in the foreign exchange market for the first time in more than a decade after Japan’s currency soared, according to a joint statement today following a conference call of the nations’ finance ministers and central bank chiefs. The quake triggered a drop in global stocks and drove the yen to a post-World War II high.

Japan’s benchmark Topix index rose 2.1 percent at 2:24 p.m., curtailing its loss since the disaster to 10 percent. In the U.S., investor speculation that Japan will contain the nuclear crisis contributed to a stock rally that broke a three-day losing streak for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The iShares MSCI Japan Index Fund tracking 323 securities rose 4.6 percent, following a 14 percent slump over the previous five days.

Obama Assures U.S.

President Barack Obama said he’s “confident” that Japan will rebuild and recover. At the White House later in the day, Obama said that the U.S. faces no danger of “harmful levels of radiation” reaching the country or its Pacific territories and that he has ordered a “comprehensive review” of safety at domestic nuclear plants.

Power may be restored to one of the crippled reactors at Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant by this afternoon, improving the odds that workers can prevent a meltdown and further radiation leaks.

In Fukushima city, the capital of the prefecture that is home to the plant, long lines formed at gas stations, most restaurants and supermarkets were shut and there was no running water. Radiation levels have declined to safe levels for workers, Japanese government spokesman Yukio Edano said.

May Take Weeks

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said yesterday there is a possibility of no water at the No. 4 reactor’s spent- fuel cooling pool. If exposed to air, the fuel rods could decay, catch fire and spew radioactive materials into the air. The plant has six reactors, three of which have been damaged by explosions following the quake.

The situation “will take some time, possibly weeks” to resolve, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko told reporters in Washington yesterday. “There clearly appears to be a challenge keeping that spent fuel filled with sufficient water.” Based on the NRC’s advice, the U.S. urged Americans within a 50-mile radius of the plant to leave.

The U.S. chartered 14 buses that are en route to the Sendai area for U.S. residents and tourists who wish to leave, Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy said. Those buses will take U.S. citizens to Tokyo for flights out of Japan.

There are an estimated 350,000 U.S. citizens in Japan, including about 90,000 in the Tokyo area, Kennedy said.

Consider Departing

U.S. nationals “in Japan should consider departing,” the State Department said in an e-mailed statement.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said it has intensified efforts to detect radiation on flights arriving from Japan and has found no dangerous levels for passengers or cargo.

The U.K. government is also hiring planes to take its nationals to Hong Kong, the Foreign Office said on its website.

Australia recommended that its citizens stay away from the northern part of Honshu island and Tokyo unless their presence is essential. France, Germany and China were among countries that urged nationals to leave Japan.

In 2009, the latest data available, there were 66,876 U.S. and Canadian citizens registered with Japan’s Justice Ministry, along with 16,597 Britons and 14,179 from Australia and New Zealand. China had 680,518 residents and the Philippines 211,716.

Fear that radiation would spread through the region sparked panic-buying in China. Shoppers cleared shelves of salt, viewed as a defense against radiation exposure.

–With assistance from Takahiko Hyuga, Yukiko Hagiwara, Takashi Hirokawa and Anna Kitanaka in Tokyo, Naoko Fujimura and Makiko Kitamura in Osaka, Michael Forsythe in Beijing, Bomi Lim in Seoul, Nicholas Johnston and Roger Runningen in Washington, and Ben Richardson in Hong Kong. Editors: Chitra Somayaji, Russell Ward

>In Tsunami’s Wake, Much Searching but Few Are Rescued

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The tsunami that barreled into northeast Japan on Friday was so murderous and efficient that not much was left when search-and-rescue teams finally reached Natori on Monday. There was searching, but not much rescuing. There was, essentially, nobody left to rescue.
The mournful scene here in Natori, a farm and fishing town that has been reduced to a vast muddy plain, was similar to rescue efforts in other communities along the coast as police, military and foreign assistance teams poked through splintered houses and piles of wreckage.The death toll from the 8.9-magnitude quake — the strongest in Japan’s seismically turbulent history — continued to climb, inexorably so, as officials uncovered more bodies. By Monday afternoon, the toll stood at 2,800 but many thousands of people remained unaccounted for and were presumed dead. Police officials said it was certain that more than 10,000 had died.
Police teams, for example, found about 1,000 bodies that had washed ashore on a scenic peninsula in Miyagi Prefecture, close to the epicenter of the quake that unleashed the tsunami. The bodies washed out as the tsunami retreated. Now they are washing back in.
A string of crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima also continued to bedevil engineers who were desperately trying to cool them down. The most urgent worries concerned the failures of two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where workers were still struggling to avert meltdowns and where some radiation had already leaked.
The building housing Reactor No. 1 exploded on Saturday, and a hydrogen buildup blew the roof off the No. 3 reactor facility on Monday morning. The blast did not appear to have harmed the reactor itself, government and utility officials said, but six workers were injured in the blasts.
Later Monday, a company official said Reactor No. 2 was losing cooling function and workers were pumping in water, according to Yukio Edano, the chief government spokesman.
The collective anxiety about Japan caused a rout in the Japanese stock market, and the main Nikkei index fell 6.2 percent in Monday’s trading, the worst drop in three years. The broader Topix, or Tokyo Stock Price index, dropped 7.4 percent. Worried about the severe strains on banking and financial systems, the Bank of Japan pumped about $180 billion into the economy on Monday, and the government was discussing an emergency tax increase to help finance relief and recovery work.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the country’s crippled nuclear power grid, announced plans for rotating blackouts across the region to conserve electricity — the first controlled power cuts in Japan in 60 years. Tokyo residents worriedly followed a series of confusing and apparently contradictory statements about the location and duration of the power cuts. Public conservation of electricity was significant enough, the company said, that the more drastic blackout scenarios were being scaled back.
Monday’s explosion at the Daiichi plant was the latest development in what Japan’s prime minister has called the nation’s worst crisis since World War II.
Japan’s $5 trillion economy, the third largest in the world, was threatened with severe disruptions and partial paralysis as many industries shut down and the armed forces and volunteers mobilized for the far more urgent effort of finding survivors, evacuating residents near the stricken power plants and caring for the victims of the 8.9 magnitude quake that struck on Friday.
The disaster has left more than 10,000 people dead, many thousands homeless and millions without water, power, heat or transportation.
The death toll was certain to climb as searchers began to reach coastal villages that essentially vanished under the first muddy surge of the tsunami, which struck the nation’s northern Pacific coast near the port city of Sendai. In one town alone, the port of Minamisanriku, a senior police official said the number of dead would “certainly be more than 10,000.” That is more than half the town’s population of 17,000.
Prime Minister Naoto Kan told a news conference in Tokyo late Sunday: “I think that the earthquake, tsunami and the situation at our nuclear reactors makes up the worst crisis in the 65 years since the war. If the nation works together, we will overcome.”
The government ordered 100,000 troops — nearly half the country’s active military force and the largest mobilization in postwar Japan — to take part in the relief effort. An American naval strike group led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan also arrived off Japan on Sunday to help with refueling, supply and rescue duties.
The quake and tsunami did not reach Japan’s industrial heartland, although economists said the power blackouts could affect industrial production — notably carmakers, electronics manufacturers and steel plants — and interrupt the nation’s famously efficient supply chain. Tourism was also bound to plummet, as the United States, France and other nations urged citizens to avoid traveling to Japan.
AIR Worldwide, a risk consultant in Boston, said its disaster models estimated property damage to be as high as $35 billion. The company said 70 percent of residential construction in Japan was wood, and earthquake insurance was not widely used.
Amid the despair and the worry over an unrelenting series of strong aftershocks, there was one bright moment when the Japanese Navy rescued a 60-year-old man who had been floating at sea for two days.
The man, Hiromitsu Arakawa, clung to the roof of his tiny home in the town of Minamisoma after it was torn from its foundations by the first wave of the tsunami, the Defense Ministry said. He saw his wife slip away in the deluge, but he hung on as the house drifted away. He was discovered late Sunday morning, still on his roof, nine miles south of the town and nine miles out to sea.
The quake was the strongest to hit Japan, which sits astride the “ring of fire” that designates the most violent seismic activity in the Pacific Basin.
About 80,000 people were ordered to evacuate danger zones around the two compromised atomic facilities in Fukushima Prefecture. Japanese officials reported that 22 people showed signs of radiation exposure and as many as 170 were feared to have been exposed, including some who had been outside one of the plants waiting to be evacuated. Three workers were suffering what officials described as full-blown radiation sickness.
In a televised address the trade minister, Banri Kaieda, asked businesses to limit power use as they returned to operation on Monday. He asked specifically for nighttime cutbacks of lights and heating. The power company said the blackouts would affect three million customers, including homes and factories.
The Japan Railways Group cut operations at six of its commuters lines and two bullet trains to 20 percent of normal to conserve electricity.
Tokyo and central Japan continued to be struck by aftershocks off the eastern coast of Honshu Island. A long tremor registering 6.2 caused buildings in central Tokyo to sway dramatically on Sunday morning.
Search teams from more than a dozen nations were bound for Japan, including a unit from New Zealand, which suffered a devastating quake last month in Christchurch. A Japanese team that had been working in New Zealand was called home.
A combined search squad from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Va., arrived from the United States with 150 people and a dozen dogs that would help in the search for bodies.
Assistance teams were also expected from China and South Korea, two of Japan’s most bitter rivals.
Tokyo’s acceptance of help — along with a parade of senior officials who offered updates at televised news conferences on Sunday — was in marked contrast to the government’s policies after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,000 people. Japan refused most offers of aid at the time, restricted foreign aid operations and offered little information about the disaster.
In Sendai, a city of roughly a million people near the center of the catastrophe, many buildings cracked but none had collapsed. Still, city officials said that more than 500,000 households and businesses were without water, and many more lacked electricity as well.
Soldiers surrounded Sendai’s city hall, where officials were using two floors to shelter evacuees and treat the injured, using power drawn from a generator. Thousands of residents sought refuge inside and waited anxiously for word from their relatives. A line of people waited outside with plastic bottles and buckets in hand to collect water from a pump.
Masaki Kokubum, 35, has been living at the city hall since the quake. He had worked at a supermarket, and his neighborhood lost power and water. He said he had not slept in three days.
“I can’t sleep,” he said as he sat in a chair in a hallway. “I just sit here and wait.”

>Another 200 bodies found in quake-hit coastal areas (Photos)

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Police in Japan said Sunday they have found another 200 bodies in the quake-ravaged coastal areas of the north.
Police officials in Miyagi told the Associated Press that authorities were recovering the bodies, but did not provide further details and declined to be identified, citing departmental policy.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Meteorological Agency has upgraded the magnitude of Friday’s quake to 9.0 after analyzing seismic waves. The agency earlier measured it at 8.8 magnitude.
The quake was the biggest to hit Japan since record-keeping began in the late 1800s. The agency warned Sunday of more strong aftershocks after Friday’s quake which unleashed massive tsunamis and killed at least 763 people — with estimates nearing the 1,700 mark.
The U.S. Geological Survey has measured the quake at magnitude 8.9, and that number remained unchanged Sunday.
Rescue and recovery
The Japanese government increased the number of troops dedicated to rescue and recovery operations from 51,000 to about 100,000.
Around 10,000 people are still unaccounted for in the Japanese port town of Minamisanriku which was virtually obliterated after the quake and tsunami. Large areas of the countryside were surrounded by water and unreachable.
Rescue teams searched for missing people along hundreds of kilometres of the Japanese coast. At least a million households are still without water and some 2.5 million households don’t have electricity.
Meanwhile, strong aftershocks continued Sunday, including one with a magnitude of 6.2 that originated in the sea, about 179 kilometres east of Tokyo.

>Japan Central Bank Pledges to Ensure Stability After Quake, Tsunami Strike

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Prime Minister Naoto Kan mobilized Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and the central bank pledged to ensure financial stability after a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai, a city of 1 million, causing damage across the east coast of Japan. “I call on citizens to act calmly,” Kan told reporters in Tokyo after convening his emergency disaster response team. “The Self-Defense Forces are already mobilized in various places. The government is making its utmost effort to minimize the damage,” he said, saying later in a news conference that the impact was widespread.
The Ministry of Finance said it’s too soon to gauge the economic impact of the temblor, the world’s biggest in more than six years. Japan’s central bank set up an emergency task force and said it will do everything it can to provide ample liquidity. The BOJ, which has already cut its benchmark rate to zero in an effort to end deflation, had last month said the economy was poised to recover from a contraction in the fourth quarter.
“It’s early days but the horrific events in Japan bear very close watching from a financial perspective, given the bloated problems in Japan’s public sector,” Stephen Gallo, head of market analysis at Schneider Foreign Exchange in London, said in an e-mailed note. Kan, 64, had been in the midst of a political battle to approve financing for his budget as credit- rating companies warn the nation’s government to rein in the world’s biggest public debt.
Stocks Slide
Japan’s stocks slid 1.7 percent in Tokyo today as the earthquake struck less than half an hour before the market closed. The yen advanced 0.2 percent to 82.77 per dollar as of 5:07 p.m. in Tokyo. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 1.4 percent as of 5:22 p.m. in Tokyo, with losses accelerating after the quake. Futures on the Euro Stoxx 50 Index fell 1 percent.
The central bank said in a statement that its settlement system was working and that it was able to settle all accounts today without disruption.
Televised footage showed a tsunami striking northeast Japan. Outside of Tokyo, Narita airport, the area’s main international gateway, closed, Kyodo News reported. Haneda, the main domestic airport, was reopened after closing earlier, according to Kyodo.
“Major damage occurred in the Tohoku area,” Kan said in a nationally televised address, referring to the northern region of Honshu, Japan’s biggest island. “We will work with all our might to ensure people’s safety and minimize the damage. I ask everyone to pay attention to TV and radio reports and act calmly. Some nuclear power plants automatically shut down, but so far we haven’t confirmed any leakage of radioactive material.”
The quake struck at 2:46 p.m. local time 130 kilometers (81 miles) off the coast of Sendai, north of Tokyo, at a depth of 24 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Service said. It was followed by a 7.1-magnitude aftershock at 4:25 p.m., the service said. Aftershocks continued to affect office buildings in Tokyo as recently as 5:21 p.m. local time.

>Asian markets creep higher despite nerves

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Asian markets were mixed on Tuesday, with Tokyo and Hong Kong edging higher due to an easing of oil price pressures, while traders in mainland China went into sell-off mode.

Tokyo’s Nikkei ended the session up 0.19 percent, or 20.17 points, at 10,525.19 and Sydney rose 0.21 percent, or 10.30 points, to 4,808.20, while Hong Kong was up 0.35 percent in the afternoon.

However Shanghai was down 0.15 percent after surging 1.83 percent on Monday, when Chinese officials moved to allay fears of an imminent interest rate hike.

Crude prices slipped after the United States refused to rule out tapping its oil reserves to ease the impact of high oil prices.

The Financial Times also reported that OPEC members Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria were joining Saudi Arabia in raising output to allay fears of a supply crunch.

Their efforts come as markets grow increasingly worried about the possibility that unrest across a swathe of North Africa and the Middle East could start to destabilise oil giant Saudi Arabia.

New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for April delivery, fell 70 cents to $104.74 per barrel in Asian trade, while Brent North Sea crude for April dropped 64 cents to $114.40.

“Risk aversion is likely to be the dominant theme until there is reasonable certainty that oil prices can retreat to $90 or below,” Ric Spooner, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in Sydney, told Dow Jones Newswires.

“The threat of a permanent rise in oil prices has hit at a time when equity markets were priced on the assumption of solid earnings growth over the next 12 to 18 months.

“Oil at over $100 per barrel for any length of time is likely to lead to reduced expectations for consumer discretionary spending and corporate profitability.”

Markets got a weak lead from the United States, where the volatility in Libya and the Middle East spooked Wall Street.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.66 percent, the S&P 500 index fell 0.83 percent and the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite lost 1.40 percent.

Gold prices eased slightly after hitting a new all-time record high of $1,440.32 in London on Monday.

Gold opened at $1,430.80-$1,431.80 an ounce in Hong Kong down from Monday’s close of $1,437.00-$1,438.00.

On currency markets, the dollar moved narrowly against the yen, with trading lacklustre.

The euro was supported by anticipation of a likely interest rate rise by the European Central Bank, despite renewed worries about European sovereign debt after Moody’s downgraded Greece and yields on Portugal’s 10-year bonds hit a euro-era high of 7.5 percent.

The dollar fetched 82.23 yen in Tokyo afternoon trade, little changed from 82.25 yen in New York late Monday.

The euro bought $1.3986 compared with $1.3971. The single European currency was marginally higher at 115.02 yen compared to 114.82 yen.

In other markets:

— Seoul rose 0.81 percent, or 16.05 points, to 1,996.32.

— Taipei rose 0.39 percent, or 33.96 points, to 8,747.75.

Leading smartphone maker HTC was 1.38 percent higher at Tw$1,100, while Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co rose 0.85 percent to Tw$71.5.

— Manila rose 0.32 percent, or 12.39 points, to 3,898.87 thanks to strong corporate results.

Aboitiz Equity Ventures rose 0.71 percent to 42.75 pesos. DMCI Holdings surged 4.79 percent to 37.20 pesos. Semirara Mining jumped 5.10 percent to 214.20 pesos.

— Wellington fell 0.30 percent, or 10.28 points, to 3,419.78.

Telecom fell 2.3 percent to NZ$2.10 after a setback in its efforts to lead the country’s broadband Internet roll-out.

Mainfreight rose 2.7 percent to NZ$8.82 after it announced it would buy Netherlands-based Wim Bosman Group. Fletcher Building was unchanged at NZ$8.84.