TOKYO – Rescue workers from more than a dozen countries searched ravaged northeastern coastal cities on Monday for survivors of a massive earthquake and tsunami, as an international effort to help Japan cope with its multiple disasters gathered pace. Some 70 countries have offered assistance in an outpouring of solidarity with Japan, with help coming not only from allies like the United States but also countries with more strained relations like China, and even from the Afghan city of Kandahar.
“We have offered our Japanese friends whatever assistance is needed, as America will stand with Japan as they recover and rebuild,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. He said two U.S. urban search and rescue teams, with 144 staff and 12 dogs, had begun work at first light on Monday looking for people trapped in the rubble in buildings flattened by the tsunami that followed Friday’s 8.9-magnitude quake. A 15-member Chinese rescue team was also at work in the main quake zone after landing in Tokyo on a special chartered flight on Sunday, Chinese state news agency Xinhua said.
Setting aside the acrimony over Japan’s wartime atrocities that underpins widespread Chinese public distrust of Japan more than six decades after the end of World War Two, Beijing has wasted no time in expressing sympathy for the disaster. Even China’s defence ministry, which frequently reminds people of past heroics in fighting the Japanese, has offered to assist, via a rare telephone call from China’s Defence Minister Liang Guanglie to his Japanese counterpart. “China will not decline to shoulder its burdens as a neighbour,” Chinese academic Liu Jiangyong wrote in a front page commentary in Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily. South Korea said a 102-member rescue team departed for Japan on Monday aboard three air force C-130 planes.
They were destined for Fukushima, where authorities are desperately trying to prevent a catastrophe at two crippled nuclear plants. An advance team of five South Korean rescue workers and two search dogs have been in Japan since Saturday. Indonesia, hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami in 2004 that killed hundreds of thousands, said it was committed to send aid to Japan and was awaiting a go-ahead from Tokyo. “We are ready to help, and we have offered them. We are discussing what Japan needs now and ways to send it, but our aid, including medical and relief team are at the ready,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Kusuma Habir. The US is also sharing its expertise in dealing with Japan’s nuclear emergency. C
arney said a U.S. disaster response team sent to Tokyo included “people with nuclear expertise from the Departments of Energy and Health and Human Services as well the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)”. “The NRC members are experts in boiling water nuclear reactors and are available to assist their Japanese counterparts,” he said. The southern Afghan city of Kandahar announced it was donating $50,000 to the “brothers and sisters” of Japan.
