Hirokazu Hayashi / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
HIGASHI-MATSUSHIMA, Miyagi--A once scenic area in Higashi-Matsushima, where cherry trees should normally bloom, is engulfed in floodwater now. No reconstruction can start until the water recedes.
Water along the coast of Miyagi Prefecture is frustrating the efforts of people desperately searching for missing kin.
A two-square-kilometer area in Higashi-Matsushima remains submerged in murky water.
Third-year high school student Ryosuke Nakae, 18, has been staying with relatives in the neighboring city of Ishinomaki since the disaster. But he visits his half-submerged home in the Omagari district of Higashi-Matsushima almost daily to search for his missing mother Emiko, 46.
First, he visited temporary morgues in nearby areas, but her body had not turned up in any of them. Then he began searching for her in the flooded Omagari district, which before the quake-spawned tsunami had been characterized by beautiful rice paddies and residential areas.
Ryosuke has spent a lot of time wading through the dark water that has blurred the boundaries between land and sea. He might find a refrigerator or a deflated soccer ball, but for a long time he came across no clues to his mother's whereabouts or fate. Sometimes, he would stop to look at a spot far away in the sea as if recalling the day the tsunami hit the region.
One day, he spotted part of his mother's white car protruding from the dirty water some distance away.
However, the floodwater so far has prevented him from approaching it.
"I want to check inside the car," Ryosuke said. "If there wasn't water here..." He bit his lower lip.
A road running through the district is submerged when the tide comes in, surfacing again at low tide. Cars and bicycles moved slowly through it, raising sprays of water.
"It'll soon be the time when cherry blossoms bloom," said Yoshimitsu Aizawa, another resident of the district. His house also was flooded by the tsunami.
"It was such a beautiful place here, with rice paddies extending all around," he lamented.
Shichigahamamachi, which faces Matsushima Bay, has four areas still underwater because a coastal levee keeps the floodwater from draining back into the bay.
A pumper truck has started to remove water in just one of the areas.
"There might be some bodies still left under the water," an official of the town office's antidisaster headquarters said. "But we can't search for them without draining the water. Restoration of roads and electricity will be possible only after those areas are drained."
The prefecture has 45 areas still submerged, in municipalities including Ishinomaki, Higashi-Matsushima, Sendai, Natori and Iwanuma. Drainage work has started at 33 of them, but 12 areas so far have been left unattended.
"This is a disaster much bigger than I'd imagined. I'll start with what I can do," said an official of the Sendaigawa river office of the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry, who was dispatched by the ministry from Kagoshima Prefecture to help the drainage work in Higashi-Matsushima.
(Mar. 31, 2011)
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