8.9 Earthquake Hits Japan

There are days when I ponder what will happen next. Should I write about the week that was or some food. And then, life happens and with today's earthquake, Japan faces toughest crisis since WWII. The Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for unity as rescue teams struggle to reach the battered northeast and new fears emerge over a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear complex. Two reactors are in jeopardy of meltdown after the devastating earthquake and tsunami crisis.

''This is the toughest crisis in Japan's 65 years of postwar history,'' Kan said during a televised news conference late Sunday. ''I'm convinced that we can overcome the crisis.''

The prime minister's remarks came on a day when the head of police in Miyagi prefecture estimated that the death toll in his prefecture alone would exceed 10,000.
The government, in power less than two years and which had already been struggling to push policy through a deeply divided parliament, came under criticism for its handling of the disaster.

"Crisis management is incoherent," blared a headline in the Asahi newspaper, saying information and instructions to expand the evacuation area around the troubled plant were too slow.

There has been a proposal of an extra budget to help pay for the huge cost of recovery.

The Bank of Japan is expected to pledge on Monday to supply as much money as needed to prevent the disaster from destabilising markets and its banking system. It is also expected to signal its readiness to ease monetary policy further if the damage from the worst quake since records began in Japan 140 years ago threatens a fragile economic recovery.The earthquake was the fifth most powerful to hit the world in the past century. It surpassed the Great Kanto quake of September 1, 1923, which had a magnitude of 7.9 and killed more than 140,000 people in the Tokyo area.

The 1995 Kobe quake killed 6000 and caused US$100 billion in damage, the most expensive natural disaster in history. Economic damage from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was estimated at about US$10 billion.

Thank you to Reuters for news information.