Yet seen from a helicopter Friday carrying Associated Press journalists, there are few signs of rebuilding eight months after the March 11 disaster, triggered by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake off the tsunami-prone coast.

What remains — the stark, gray emptiness where bustling towns once stood — is a sobering reminder of how much work still lies ahead.

On the ground, people living in the tidy rows of temporary houses that dot the surrounding areas say they are frustrated that authorities aren’t moving ahead more quickly with reconstruction plans. They are anxious to rebuild their lives, yet remain uncertain of how to proceed.

“I want to leave this place as soon as possible and move into our own house, but the feeling I’m getting from the banks and government is that’s going to be hard,” said Yuki Numakura, 36, from Natori, near Sendai, who shares a unit with her mother, brother, grandmother and pet dog Seven.

“The future looks really murky,” she said.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government plans to spend at least 18 trillion yen ($234 billion) over the next five years to fund the reconstruction, 6 trillion yen of which has been approved by parliament. So far, the government has built 51,886 temporary houses — almost all of the 52,500 needed — in seven prefectures (states) affected by the disaster.

Ultimately, decisions about reconstruction of each town fall to local town leaders, but uncertainty about the extent and speed of aid from the central government has caused some towns to move cautiously.

The towns have just begun to come out with longer-term reconstruction plans, which include input from residents and seek ways to better protect their communities from future tsunamis. Many are also reluctant to rebuild in low-lying areas for fear that another massive wave may strike again sooner or later, given that four have hit the coastline in the last 120 years.

The fishing town of Minamisanriku, which lost 70 percent of its buildings in the disaster, calls for building residential areas on higher ground, even cutting into the surrounding hills, and possibly raising the town’s commercial district slightly from the fishing docks, a key hub of activity. To help people better escape from future tsunamis, the town plans to widen evacuation routes and increase the number of elevated shelters.

Minamisanriku’s reconstruction plan extends 10 years into the future. Facing a shrinking and aging population, it seeks to revive its local economy through promoting tourism and drawing new business.

The biggest challenge facing town leaders at this point is balancing residents’ demands to restore homes and jobs quickly while coming up with a viable long-term plan, said Tsuneaki Fukui, a civil engineering professor at the University of Tokyo who is helping the major fishing port of Kesennuma, further up the coast, draw up its reconstruction plans.

“The scale of this — the entire coastline — makes it all so overwhelming,” he said. “It’s something even we professionals haven’t ever encountered.”

The disaster left 15,839 dead and 3,647 missing, according to the official toll. The high number of missing is because the dead are only counted when a body is identified.

Further south, the tsunami also touched off a nuclear crisis when it slammed into the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, forcing about 100,000 people to flee their homes. They still have no idea when they can return.

Disposing of all the debris — an estimated 23 million tons — is another huge headache. While most has been removed from town centers, completely disposing of it will likely take another 2 1/2 years, the government estimates.

A large amount of debris has wound up in Natori, a flat area near the Sendai airport, where it has been carefully divided into huge mountains of wood, metal, hazardous waste and other materials. On Friday, dozens of cranes and backhoes picked away at the stuff, dumping it into waiting trucks to be hauled off.

Some of it is recycled. Concrete, for example, is sent to cement factories for reprocessing into small pebbles for use in road construction, the Environment Ministry says. The rest is to be incinerated and used as landfill — although incinerators in the prefecture are overwhelmed by the volume and have asked for help from elsewhere.

Just a few miles (kilometers) away from the whirring construction vehicles, 75-year-old Yaeko Sai, who lost her Natori home in the tsunami, thinks anxiously about the future in the shadow of her temporary housing block.

“My friends have scattered everywhere,” she said. “I’m really not sure how I could make it if I had to leave this place.” — AP

The findings will further worry nervous consumers, already fretting over the safety of domestic produce, despite its previous solid safety reputation.

Authorities in Fukushima prefecture say rice produced near the stricken atomic power plant contained caesium they measured at 630 becquerels per kilogram (2.2 pounds). The government safety limit is 500 becquerels.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura ordered Fukushima Governor Yuhei Sato to restrict shipments of rice from Onami — from where the samples were sourced — according to an agricultural ministry official.

“This restriction won’t be lifted until safety of the rice produced in the area can be confirmed,” the official said, adding that the ban will affect 154 farms that produced 192 tonnes of rice this year.

It is the first ban on rice shipments since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was damaged by a massive quake and tsunami on March 11, when cooling systems failed and radiation was spewed into the air, oceans and food chain.

While the natural disaster claimed 20,000 lives, the nuclear emergency has recorded no direct casualties, but it has badly dented the reputation of a technology on which Japan previously depended for a third of its electricity.

Bans on food following the crisis are nothing new but rice — eaten three times a day in many homes — holds a special place in the Japanese heart.

Japanese-grown grain is widely held to be superior to imports, and is heavily protected by massive tariffs aimed partially at propping up the nation’s ageing farmers.

The polluted samples were taken at a farm in Onami, 57 kilometres (35 miles) northwest of the troubled plant.

None of the 840 kilogrammes of rice produced at the farm this year has been shipped to markets, local officials said.

The price of rice produced before the disaster temporarily shot up in the summer as people rushed to stock up over fears this year’s harvest would be contaminated. Prices have since stabilised.

A team of international researchers this week said elevated levels of caesium in soil in the region would “severely impair” food production in eastern Fukushima.

The study, published in the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, suggested farming in neighbouring areas could also suffer because of radiation.

Shipments of a number of farm products from affected regions were halted as the crisis unfolded and even those that were not subject to official controls have found little favour with Japanese consumers wary of the potential health effects.

Environmental campaign group Greenpeace said Thursday it had detected radiation in fish sold at Japanese supermarkets, although radiation levels were still well below the government safety limit of 500 becquerels.

According to its own research carried out between October 12 and November 8 in eastern Japan, 47.3 becquerels of cesium per kilogramme were discovered in cod while traces of radiation were also found in other fish, including tuna. — Relaxnews 

A sluggish home market and energy shortages following the widespread nuclear power shutdown sparked by the March 11 earthquake and ensuing atomic crisis are also tipping the balance toward investment abroad.

Panasonic is planning its first solar factory outside Japan, sources said on Friday, while Suzuki Motor Corp said it was seeking to double auto production at its joint venture in China by 2015.

Rival automakers Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan also said on Thursday that exchange rates were forcing them to consider changes in their own production plans.

“I think we are reaching the limit for manufacturing in Japan,” said Yuuki Sakurai, president of Fukoku Asset Management in Tokyo.

“In future, companies may be registered in Japan and have their head office here, but it could be that most people they employ are not Japanese and most of their production doesn’t take place in Japan.”

The Japanese currency was trading at about 77 yen to the dollar on Friday, compared with levels around 90 yen two years ago.

The euro has tumbled to about 104 yen, compared with about 134 yen in November 2009, slashing the value of overseas revenues brought home to Japan by export-reliant firms. Manufacturers say there is little prospect of increasing procurement in euros to offset the pain.

Panasonic, for example, has said the strong yen will cut annual operating profit by 28 billion yen ($363 million) this year.

Panasonic’s new solar plant in Malaysia is set to cost 40-50 billion yen, according to sources, with news of the investment coming just weeks after the firm revealed it was dropping a plan to convert a TV panel plant in Japan for solar panel production.

Shares in Panasonic fell 0.9 percent to 686 yen on Friday, compared with a 1.2 percent fall in the Nikkei average.

“We were considering increasing solar production capacity by converting our No. 3 panel plant,” Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo told a news conference last month.

“But there was no reason for an aggressive expansion at this plant, given that the exchange rate situation is completely different from two years ago, and that we have grave concerns about power shortages,” he added. “All things considered, there is more merit to manufacturing overseas than in Japan.”

NEW POWER GENERATION

Mandatory peak usage cuts this summer on large customers of power companies Tokyo Electric Power Co, the operator of the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima, and Tohoku Electric Power Co forced many companies to invest in their own power generation equipment and adjust working shifts.

The government has said power should suffice for the winter, despite the lack of active nuclear capacity, but admits a bigger challenge looms in summer next year.

Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn called for fixed exchange rates in a speech in New York, at which he also said the company may be forced to shift more of its manufacturing overseas.

“We need just one thing,” Ghosn told the Japan Society in New York. “Fix the exchange rate. Fix it.”

The yen’s strength has raised questions about the rationale of rival Toyota’s commitment to producing at least 3 million cars in Japan each year and President Akio Toyoda said on Thursday the company may need to “deepen alliances” to tackle the problem.

Fukoku’s Sakurai said even Toyota could find it itself struggling to fulfill what it has long seen as an obligation to maintain employment in Japan.

“Rival companies are spreading their production, and in this day and age, how far can they stick to an obligation like that?” he said.

Shares in Nissan fell 2.5 percent, Toyota closed down 2.3 percent and Suzuki dropped 2.7 percent on Friday.

Camera and printer-maker Canon Inc is among the few major Japanese firms saying it will not change its production strategy drastically because of the high yen, instead relying on increased automation to cut costs at its domestic plants.

But chief financial officer Toshizo Tanaka said in an interview last month he had changed his earlier view that the yen’s strength would be short-lived.

“I think rates may stay as they are for quite a while against both the euro and the dollar,” he said. “What is happening in Europe is not a cyclical downturn but structural, a financial crisis, so it will take a long time to recover.” ($1 = 76.985 Japanese Yen) — Reuters

In their shadow, plumbers, electricians and truck drivers, sometimes numbering in the thousands, go dutifully about their work, all clad from head to toe in white hazmat suits. Their job — cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl — will take decades to complete.

Reporters, also in radiation suits, visited the ravaged facility Saturday for the first time since Japan’s worst tsunami in centuries swamped the plant March 11, causing reactor explosions and meltdowns and turning hundreds of square miles (kilometers) of countryside into a no man’s land.

Eight months later, the plant remains a shambles. Mangled trucks, flipped over by the power of the wave, still clutter its access roads. Rubble remains strewn where it fell. Pools of water cover parts of the once immaculate campus.

Tens of thousands of the plant’s former neighbors may never be able to go home. And just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki become icons of the horrors of nuclear weapons, Fukushima has become the new rallying cry of the global anti-nuclear energy movement.

Yet this picture is one of progress, Japanese officials say. It has taken this long to make the plant stable enough to allow Saturday’s tour, which included representatives of the Japanese and international media — including The Associated Press. Officials expect to complete an early but important step toward cleaning up the accident by the end of the year.

“I think it’s remarkable that we’ve come this far,” Environment Minister Goshi Hosono, Japan’s chief nuclear crisis response official, said before leading the tour. “The situation at the beginning was extremely severe. At least we can say we have overcome the worst.”

The group was taken through the center of the facility, a once-neat row of reactor buildings that are now shells of shattered walls and steel frames. Journalists were then briefed inside the plant’s emergency operations center, a spacious, bunker-like structure where it is safe to remove the heavy protective gear required outdoors.

Woefully unprepared for the wave that swept over its breakwater, the plant just 140 miles (225 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo was doomed almost from the start.

“During the first week of the accident, I thought several times that we were all going to die,” plant chief Masao Yoshida said.

At the height of the crisis, all but a few dozen workers — dubbed the “Fukushima 50″ — were evacuated. Officials boast that number is now up to as many as 3,000 a day, compared with the pre-crisis work force of 6,400.

Evidence of the tremendous man-hours already invested in the cleanup is piling up in the workers’ staging area, on the edge of the 12-mile (20-kilometer) no-go zone around the plant. More than 480,000 sets of used protective gear — which can be worn only once — lie in crates or plastic bags at the complex, which before the tsunami was a training facility for national-level soccer teams.

Kazuo Okawa, 56, who worked at Fukushima for 20 years, was called back to join an emergency crew for several days in April. His team wore three layers of gloves, full-face masks, double-layer Tyvek protective coveralls, rubber boots with plastic covers and plastic head covers. They carried personal Geiger counters.

“Obviously, it was very dangerous at that time,” he recalled during a recent visit to Tokyo. “Luckily, we got out without experiencing any life-threatening situations.”

Workers like Okawa — in Chernobyl they were called “liquidators” — have restored the plant’s supply of electricity, set up elaborate cooling and drainage systems, rebuilt crumbled walls and erected a huge tent to cover one of the worst-hit reactors, cutting the amount of radioactivity leaking into the surrounding environment.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the plant, says it will achieve a “cold shutdown” by the end of the year — a first step toward creating a stable enough environment for work to proceed on removing the reactors’ nuclear fuel and closing the plant altogether.

But that is by no means the end of the story.

A preliminary government report released this month predicted it will take 30 years or more to safely decommission Fukushima Dai-ichi. Like Chernobyl, it will probably be encased in a concrete and steel “sarcophagus.”

Hiroaki Koide, a nuclear physicist at Kyoto University, said he doubts the decommissioning process will go as smoothly as the government hopes. He said pools for spent fuel remain highly volatile, and cleaning up the three reactor cores that melted through their innermost chambers will be a massive challenge.

“Nobody knows where exactly the fuel is, or in what condition,” he said. “The reactors will have to be entombed in a sarcophagus, with metal plates inserted underneath to keep it watertight. But within 25 to 30 years, when the cement starts decaying, that will have to be entombed in another layer of cement. It’s just like Russian Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other.”

The no-go zone around the plant will likely be in effect for years, if not decades, to come. Officials reluctantly admit that tens of thousands of evacuated residents may never be able to return home.

Recent studies suggest that Japan continues to significantly underestimate the scale of the disaster — which could have health and safety implications far into the future.

According to a study led by Andreas Stohl the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, twice as much radioactive cesium-137 — a cancer-causing agent — was pumped into the atmosphere than Japan had announced, reaching 40 percent of the total from Chernobyl. The French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety found that 30 times more cesium-137 was released into the Pacific than the plant’s owner has owned up to.

“We have not studied the content of their research, and are not in a position to respond,” said Hiroki Kawamata, a TEPCO spokesman. “We have no plans at this point to modify our estimates.”

Before the crisis, resource-poor Japan relied on nuclear power for about one-third of its electricity. It was planning to boost that share to 50 percent by 2030.

Without nuclear, Japan will have to import more fossil fuels, cutting its potential GDP by 1.2 percent and costing 7.2 trillion yen ($94 billion) annually, according to an estimate by the Japan Center for Economic Research.

But public support for nuclear power — and the trust that the industry is built on — has plummeted.

Tens of thousands of Japanese have turned out in protest. Suspicious of government and TEPCO reassurances, grassroots groups are scouring the country with radiation detectors. Several “hot spots” in and around Tokyo are now being investigated by the authorities.

Because of the outcry, Japan has essentially abandoned its long-term goal of expanding nuclear energy production. The status of even its existing plants is murky.

Currently, 43 of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are shut down, either because of mechanical problems or routine inspections, which must be conducted every 13 months. Local approval is required to restart nuclear power plants, even after routine inspections, and local leaders fearing repercussions at the polls have been loath to provide it.

TEPCO announced two weeks ago there will be enough power to see the country through the winter, but after that, the effect of the nuclear crisis on electricity production could become even more acute. If political resistance remains as high as it is now, every nuclear reactor in Japan could be offline by May. — AP

Representatives of the Japanese and international media, including The Associated Press, were allowed into the plant with the government’s chief official in charge of the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986. The tour was intended to demonstrate how much the situation at the plant has stabilized since the March 11 tsunami, though reporters had to wear full-body protective gear and submit to radiation scans afterward.

Mangled trucks, flipped over by the wave, remain along the roads inside the complex. Piles of rubble stand where the walls of the plant’s reactor structures crumbled, and large pools of water still cover parts of the sprawling campus.

Officials said the situation at the plant, which suffered meltdowns and explosions after it was deluged by the tsunami, has improved enough to allow the visit.

For weeks after the tsunami, the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, about 140 miles (225 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, spewed large amounts of radioactive materials onto the surrounding countryside, much of which remains off-limits.

The media, including an AP photographer and APTN producer, were allowed to view the grounds of the seaside facility and the outside of several of the damaged reactor units before being taken into the emergency operations center. Environment Minister Goshi Hosono, who heads the government’s nuclear response efforts, addressed workers inside the center.

Japan’s government and the utility that runs the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., say radiation leaks are far less of a danger than in the early days of the crisis. They say work is on track toward achieving a “cold shutdown” — in which the temperatures of the reactors are cool and under control.

But the government has predicted that it will take another 30 years at least to safely remove the nuclear fuel and decomission the plant. It could also be decades before tens of thousands of residents forced to flee the 12-mile (20-kilometer) exclusion zone around the plant will be able to return. Some experts say even that estimate is optimistic. — AP

The Japanese camera and medical device maker said the move was to take responsibility for the troubles caused to customers, business partners and investors over recent media reports that have sent Olympus stock plunging.

Olympus shares, which have lost half their value in the last two weeks, fell 7.6 percent Wednesday.

The drop followed Kikukawa’s firing of Chief Executive Michael Woodford after he questioned a $687 million payment to financial advisers as part of Olympus’ purchase of the U.K.’s Gyrus Group Plc. as too high.

The payment represented more than a third of the $2 billion purchase. Fees for advisers are normally 1 to 2 percent of the deal value.

Shuichi Takayama, who was tapped as president, apologized for the latest woes, including the sliding stock price, and promised to do his utmost to investigate what had happened.

“We will work day by day with sincerity and with all our hearts to resolve the problem, regain social trust and allay the worries of our customers, business partners and investors as soon as possible,” he said in a statement.

Last week, the company said it would establish an independent task force to review past acquisitions, seeking to ease mounting shareholder pressure.

Kikukawa was a no-show at a hastily called news conference at a Tokyo hotel, baffling reporters who had expected him to address Woodford’s allegations. Typically, when a corporate leadership change takes place in Japan, the outgoing executive meets the press to introduce his successor.

Instead, the company released a seven-sentence statement from Kikukawa that was read out loud.

“The past acquisitions that have been reported in the media were made after proper assessment and procedures,” Kikukawa said. “There was absolutely no wrongdoing, but we are setting up an independent committee and are preparing once again for an impartial investigation.”

Takayama then appeared alone and evaded the bulk of intense questioning from journalists. He confirmed the independent task force would be established “as soon as possible” but did not give a specific time frame. He defended the advisory payments as “proper,” but declined to go into any details, deferring to the task force.

He expressed confidence that Olympus shares would bounce back.

“It’s not as if the value of our business has been damaged,” he said. “Our operations have been progressing smoothly.”

He said Woodford had been dismissed because of his unilateral decision-making and intimidating managerial style. The Briton also spent much of his time outside of Japan, Takayama said.

The clash between Kikukawa and Woodford, one of a handful of foreigners to head a major Japanese company, was widely viewed here as raising questions about whether old-style Japanese management was up-to-date on global standards.

Woodford had also questioned the lofty prices Olympus paid for three other money-losing Japanese companies that appear to have little strategic value.

He commissioned Pricewaterhouse Coopers to analyze the deals and distributed the results to the board of directors.

The findings compelled Woodford to call for Olympus executives to resign.

“In putting the company first, the honorable way forward would be for you and Mori-san to face the consequences of what has taken place, which is a shameful saga by any stretch of the imagination,” he said in an Oct. 11 letter to Kikukawa, referring to Hisashi Mori, a group president at Olympus.

“It is clear that the current situation is now untenable and to move forward positively the necessary course of action is for you both to tender your resignations from the board.” — AP