Japan one year on: A journey through a world shaken to the core
First the earthquake, then the tsunami, and a nuclear crisis. But as David McNeill found, millions of people are still struggling with the hardest part of all: picking up the pieces. - It began with the huge quake that struck off the coast of the city of 71,000 at 2:46pm. Less than an hour later, Mr Sakurai was on the roof of the city office, squinting toward the sea about six miles away. "We could see this huge cloud of dust rising into the air from the Pacific. I asked someone, 'Is that a fire?' Then we realised it was the tsunami." Even as he spoke, the deluge was inundating homes, drowning old people and children alike, sometimes whole families. By evening, bodies were being brought to a makeshift morgue in a local college. [...] "I don't know if we will ever recover to what we were before 11 March but we are certainly improving," he says, pointing to the flashing red dosimeter outside, which reads 0.2 microsieverts. Last March the radiation was 10 times as high, a level that exceeded the government's annual guidelines of 1 millisievert. In response, the government controversially hiked the limit to 20 millisieverts, sparking protests. Many children have since reported low immunity and other health problems, though no one has proved a link to the nuclear plant. [...] The number of people who took their own lives in Japan spiked in the months following last year's devastating earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, new government figures show. For the fourteenth year in a row, more than 30,000 people committed suicide, according to the 2011 survey.